 I'm gonna start. I wasn't gonna do this because it seems kind of self-indulgent, but it's gonna be fun I'm just gonna start off by giving you my own very convoluted Religious background which sort of explains like why I decided to ever put on a conference like this So I was raised I was raised Catholic and I was a I was very I was very good little Catholic boy There's a lot of pictures of me actually with my with my hands like this kind of looking up In the sky and I was actually the best little Catholic boy in my class I was the Catholic boy who got to carry like the cushion that the crown of roses for Mother for Mary's day was on and I got like A's and religion. I was very good little Catholic boy But I I grew out of that in around the same time as puberty and adolescence and testosterone and I I Mean I still have questions about how could a intelligent and kind God create You know sexuality and sexual attraction. Anyway, I was I was gone from Catholicism at that time I left Catholicism at the age of 18 and And then I guess I would describe my years for the next 20 years as sort of a Kind of a hippie Taoist Zen Buddhist. I was that's how I define myself to other people You know, I had long hair and I read the Tao Te Ching and every translation I could find and I took like You know Psychic reading classes and things like that I Went through it kind of an interesting phase from about the age of 28 to 38 where I actually I heard voices I heard voices maybe once a year and these voices would say Kind of interesting things to me This was I was reading the Seth books the Seth speaks books anybody ever read those and what? Sure, of course you read that I read those and and sure enough I started, you know, semi-channeling, but I was a very resistant You know, I never actually did very much of what the channeler told me to do but I did do a couple things that the Channeling voice told me to do it told me that I should become a minister and it told me that I should study religion So I was always looking for the inexpensive way out. So I became a universal universal life minister, which is only $40 It's from the Church in Modesto. So I actually became a minister and I married about eight couples of of whom about half are divorced and the other half are still together and and I also I went back to school and I got a master's degree in religious studies and I wrote my My thesis my master's thesis on Jodo Shinshu Buddhism in the insect haiku of Kobayashi Issa who is a poet I very much like so after that that kind of that kind of That was that summed up about that was like that takes me up to about age 40 something like that a little bit later, I you can say that was kind of like my religious space until about Until really about six years ago about six years ago. I got interested in Quaker ism. I started attending a Quaker church in San Francisco and I dragged my whole family down to Costa Rica where there's actually a Quaker colony Monteverde Costa Rica and we live with the Quakers for a year and And I almost I became an attender, but I never actually joined because then I got I got waylaid by atheism I got I got suddenly very angry at at Pope Benedict I was I got simultaneously angry at Pope Benedict and did Islam I was angry at the Pope Benedict because he that was when he said that condoms in Africa were a bad idea because they were actually promoting AIDS by promoting sexuality and my My angry Islam was from reading Ayon Hirsti Ali's book called infidel so I suddenly became a militant atheist and I plunged right in and I actually Put on you know, I left the Quakers and I put on it was actually at the time It was the world's first atheist film festival. I put on this atheist film festival in San Francisco Which is now in its fifth year, but I only did the first year but I put that on I was a militant atheist and I actually put put out a Atheist calendar 2010 I think it was but I actually became disillusioned with the atheists in about three or four months I went to an atheist party. I thought it was really boring They ate really bad food and the big event was the Bible throwing contest to see who could throw the Bible the farthest and I actually You know, I kind of think the Bible has a lot of great literature in it So I didn't my actually my daughter won the contest. She's very good at throwing the Bible And they were pleased with her But I was not very interested in the militant atheist scene most of because I thought it was really negative It just had to do it seemed to me it was all about bashing people that believed in religion So I very quickly became a transhumanist after that which was wonderful because transhumanism is It has all this optimism in it like like just like a religion like you're gonna live forever Perhaps, you know pretty great. In fact, there's no hell and transhumanism. Well, there could be you could be trapped in a bad Stimulation or something but anyway, so I became a transhumanist and I was very thrilled about that and I kind of retained some of my Militant atheism as I was a transhumanist because in transhumanism I ended up doing a survey of transhumanist and I and I found out that 90% of transhumanists are actually Atheists and rather militant atheists and I was running. I was managing director of a think tank website at the time called IET Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology where I met many of of you a few of you and Actually, I remember I got launched though, you know the website into a few debates about atheism and transhumanism And I was I think I wrote a few essays of just basically saying that religion was really stupid and that why are there religious? transhumanist that's really stupid and So I was like the militant atheist transhumanist then and then a couple of things happened one was One of the religious transhumanists wrote me a really interesting email Where he basically pointed out that one of the highest values in transhumanism is to live a long time and That a lot of studies show that people who are religious live longer and how was I going to reconcile that? Why was I going to ask people to abandon religion and die younger and that didn't make any sense? And I thought that was actually interesting and at the same time I decided that I was going to throw a transhumanist party at my Vacation home on the Russian River, which I've since gotten rid of because it's a money pit So anyway, so I threw a transhumanist party at my vacation home And I invited all transhumanists as it turned out Instead of all the militant atheist transhumanist showing up Lincoln's laughing sure enough only five people showed up and four of them were Mormons So there I am and I'm with you know religious transhumanist and other religious transhumanist like Julia Prisco or emailing and saying Which I could go and all of the militant atheists who? militant atheist transhumanist who I thought Would be happy to go They didn't show up and which reminded me of the other email I got from the religious transhumanist which basically said religious people live longer and one of the reasons is they actually have Better community it may be that they have they believe in more positive things that help them or it could be that They have a better community. So then I was I thought about that one thing about myself as a young Catholic boy was If you to ask me as a Catholic boy, I would have what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have said missionary and I was one of those kids They always did these collections for the pagan babies and I was one of that I was the kid who was always giving a lot of money for the pagan babies and I named a lot of them Henry, which is you know my name. I was very into the idea of being a missionary and Like I said I left Catholicism, but there was something that I believed in Catholicism That I want to talk about briefly. It's actually Corinthians Chapter 13. Does anybody know that right off the top of their head Corinthians chapter 13? I'm gonna read you just a I'm just gonna read you parts of it. It goes Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all Knowledge and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not charity. I am nothing Charity suffereth long and is kind then it goes on and on about charity and it concludes with Faith hope charity these three, but the greatest of these is charity. So that is something that I retained Even though I left Catholicism I believe that charity was the was the best of all virtues and it was it was what was It was the it was the goodness. It was what made somebody religious in my opinion It was the only thing that I actually retained out of that So and then I had I've had a couple of experiences in the last two years that involved Charity and perhaps transhumanism the first was when I was working for Institute for Ethics and emerging technology They asked me to run a Africa futures project and to launch a cell phone drive. I Was very excited about this. It was a combination of being charitable and being transhumanist at the same time And I was convinced I told my boss James Hughes that I will I will collect a thousand cell phones Transhumanists will be really into this transhumanists have old cell phones They will mail them to me and we will send these cell phones to Africa and the and this will benefit the Africans enormously they all need cell phones and And so I worked extremely hard at this cell phone drive and the conclusion was that I did not gather a hundred Thousand cell phones I gathered a hundred cell phones only a hundred I got 30 of them from my mom who is a Catholic and works for a thrift store on occasion She's a volunteer. I got 30 30 of them from my brother who was not a transhumanist, but he runs a Silicon Valley corporation He just told all of his employees to bring in their cell phones and they did that I got 30 of them from a Mormon named Roger Hanson Who is a very nice and philanthropic guy and he collected them from everywhere and he gave me 30 and I got the last 10 from various friends of mine Who are just not transhumanist but just friends and happen to have them all around So the conclusion of all that was I got absolutely zero from Atheist transhumanists I got zero and this was more than a little bit discouraging because like I said my primary Value and virtue that I believed in was charity and that the transhumanist had absolutely failed in charity and this sort of confirmed which had been sort of a suspicion of mine and I think some of the public that that perhaps the transhumanists are not Essentially philanthropic and perhaps they care a lot about living a long time And they don't actually care what happens to poor people in Africa And they don't really happen care what happens to people who are lower on the economic rung and this is actually was actually a very kind of depressing because I was very fond of transhumanism as you know as the next of my Six or eight, you know belief systems So I was it was very disappointing and it's and I had it's kind of a deal-breaker with me that I would like transhumanism to improve in its charitable giving Because I I don't actually want transhumanism to be a little generous because Charity is actually my primary virtue. I would like transhumanists to be the most generous and then that would make me You know that would make me happy. It would be this kind of confluence this kind of merger of two values, which would be charity and and and a Non-scientific hope for immortality now the next thing I wanted to mention is that I I'm involved in it I was in I am presently involved in another charity Project, which is ten years ago. I was running a preschool As it happened I have two kids who were preschool age and I had a basement and so I started a preschool and and I decided that I needed a sister school and so I looked around for a Affordable sister school meaning a really impoverished school somewhere and I found one in the Philippines with this indigenous tribe called the man Yang's Where the average man Yang makes? $30 a month and it's just this indigenous tribe That is you know among the poorest of the poor So I started a sister school program there And I actually largely funded it all by myself. I've been doing this for about ten years funding this indigenous tribe I I bought them some land because they needed some land And I thought well this you know I don't know if any of you have gotten involved in helping people But it's you always think it's gonna end and they're gonna be self-subsidized Anyway, I thought I'd get them some land and they could grow bell peppers and they would never need me again but it actually doesn't work that way there's a constant flood of letters and So that went on that's been going on for ten years and I had a fight with him about five years ago Because she said you know, there were about 60 of us that moved on to your land and now there's 300 We have so many babies and I said well, why don't I just buy you condoms next time and you can stop it having You know, I can't afford taking care of 300 people and they said we're Catholic We don't use birth control and I was so mad. I just didn't give him any money Or even even reply to their desperate emails for about a year and a half But I since crawled back into helping them. I decided well There's still people even though they're Catholic and and I this is my this is what I have to do But I'm quite annoyed about that and I'm gonna get back to that in a second So most recently I got another email and she said, you know, we're still here and we need about four thousand dollars and There's still a lot of us and we all have tuberculosis and we all have these parasitic worms Which I always think is like the worst Yeah, I don't know if you ever saw that movie the fly where she's giving birth to like a larvae and yeah These parasitic worms so they're always crawling on it. Anyway, it's just a horror story and they have they have diarrhea and they have just everything horrible and So this time I thought well, I'm sick. I can't afford to keep giving him my money So I'm gonna send out a petition, you know, to everybody I know and see who I can raise money from and I didn't even try to get any money from transhumanists. You're all transhumanist I didn't spam you for money on this because the transhumanist failed me so miserably last time that I just figure I can't get any money out of them So although I did contact Roger Hansen again because he was philanthropic and he might help clean up their water supply I did contact my family again and my family failed again My family my family was great last time or this time they failed They were good at handing over cell phones use cell phones, but handing over cash. They're not so good I got $2,000 from a Filipino a rich Filipino friend of mine who'd have thought of it a rich Filipino friend She gave me $2,000. She's basically gonna sponsor all the kids. So How does this tie in? It ties in I did I what I did do is I sent About 40 emails to every Catholic church every Catholic school Every Catholic college in the Bay Area and I asked them for money and I basically Blamed them eyes and I said and I actually wrote an open letter to the Pope I said if you're gonna be anti-birth control You need to take care of the extra kids that you bring into the world because I personally can't take care of them Because these people still have Seven and nine children each and I actually think I could take care of them if they only had two But I can't they have seven and nine because they're Catholic and they won't use condoms So I even wrote a letter an email to the Catholic Church and school I used to go to when I was a little kid and I said My grandfather bought you your altar Can you give me some money for these people and I haven't yet heard from them? so the conclusion of this is That I also mentioned earlier that I was thinking of joining a synagogue But I probably won't because it's looking like The limited amount of money and time that I have is going to be devoted to Taking care of these people so basically I think my religion has become charity I don't have any extra time or any extra money to give to a congregation and I personally don't even believe in a congregation that Doesn't devote a lot of you know money to charity I my understanding about a lot of churches is sure they collect money for charity, but like 90% goes to administration So I would probably join a church at this point if they said you join and will give you a lot of money for your Filipinos, I would probably join that church. I would be that would be great and I would take care of this so that is my Conclusion on that I would love to see there has been I would it would It would it's amazing to me that after this conference probably the person that I resonated most with was Amin the Muslim I would have Shocked me before this started, but he talked a lot about equity I think that transhumanism needs to address economic equity in the world and It needs to Not present this idea that there that the rich people are going to live forever and the poor people are going to stay poor And I think that transhumanists should Be philanthropic for people who are less fortunate and should be more tolerant to people who disagree with them if they're religious and should Healthy unfortunate