Jeffrey Epstein Funded Transhumanism, Anthropic's Fight with Pete Hegseth, and a Lovely Sojourn in La Pineda

(1,200 words)

1. Epstein’s Transhumanism

I have a new article in Truthdig on Jeffrey Epstein’s extensive connections with the transhumanist movement. Here are the opening paragraphs:

It’s well known that Jeffrey Epstein was a super-wealthy pedophile with an extraordinary network of powerful friends: tech billionaires, politicians and academics. But few people know that he was also a transhumanist — someone who believes that we should use advanced technologies to reengineer the human organism, thus creating a new “posthuman” species to rule the world.

Transhumanism, despite the idealistic ring that “humanism” brings to its name, is a radical version of eugenics. In the 20th century, eugenicists argued that if selective breeding can create new subspecies of domesticated animals, like the many varieties of dogs that roam our houses, then it can also create new varieties of optimized human beings. Transhumanism goes a step further, by aiming to create an entirely new species — posthumans, whom transhumanists imagine as being superior to humanity as we know it.

…

It turns out that, in addition to the transhumanist project being mostly pseudoscientific, this movement also has far more extensive connections to Epstein than previously known. Some prominent transhumanists appeared to be close friends with Epstein, even defending him in private emails against the media reporting on his pedophilia. Epstein funded transhumanist organizations like Humanity+ and the Singularity Institute, and discussed “designer babies” with other transhumanists like bitcoin investor Bryan Bishop. He claims to have known Ray Kurzweil, and was buddies with Kurzweil’s close associate, Peter Diamandis, his fellow co-founder of the Singularity University. Emails also show correspondences between Epstein and leading transhumanists like Aubrey de Grey and Ben Goertzel, as well as meetings with Bryan Johnson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Some of these men, such as de Grey and Johnson, have themselves been accused of sexual misconduct.

One area where Epstein’s transhumanist predilections were apparent is in cryonics, an unproven technique that aims to resurrect dead people who’ve been cryogenically frozen after death. It is very popular among transhumanists, many of whom have signed up with the cryonics company Alcor to have their corpses frozen, including Peter Thiel and Goertzel.

Epstein reportedly spoke with fellow transhumanists about cryogenically freezing his body — specifically his head and penis. When the technology becomes available in the future, as cryonics enthusiasts expect it will, companies like Alcor will unfreeze the cryogenized corpses in their warehouse to either be joined with new physical bodies or to be scanned and “uploaded” to a computer, where one could then live forever as a disembodied digital mind.

To read the rest of the piece, click here. I also have an article forthcoming in The Nation, which discusses how the Silicon Valley pro-extinctionist goal of transitioning to a digital world is already underway. I’ll share that as soon as it’s out.

2. Sam Altman Is a Lying Liar

In a previous newsletter article, I provided copious evidence that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is a sociopath whose only superpower is acquiring power through underhanded tactics like manipulation and duplicity. Here’s an update:

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the Pentagon that his company wouldn’t allow it to use Claude, Anthropic’s large-language model chatbot, to engage in the mass surveillance of American citizens or to autonomously control lethal weapons. The Trump administration lashed out, with Trump writing: “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War.”

Altman then went on TV and said this:

I don’t personally think the Pentagon should be threatening DPA against these companies … For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company and I think they really do care about safety.

That resulted in people who are otherwise quite critical of Altman saying stuff like:

From here.

And:

From here.

I responded to both tweets as follows:

From here.

And (to Marcus):

From here.

Welp, it turns out that, as Marcus wrote just today:

The whole thing was a scam. The fix was in from the start.

Per @nytimes, Sam was negotiating with the Pentagon Wednesday

- before he announced his support for Dario
- before Trump had denounced Anthropic
- but after Brockman had donated 25M to Trump’s PAC

Dario never had a chance.

Marcus followed that with this excerpt from the New York Times:

From here.

Marcus also wrote this:

From here.

Altman is a god damn liar. He says whatever the hell he needs to say to retain and acquire power. He has absolutely zero allegiance to the truth. I know this, which is why I didn’t believe a word Altman said when he expressed support for Anthropic in its battle with the Pentagon.

Rubbing it in, another cofounder of OpenAI (along with Altman), Greg Brockman, posted this yesterday:

From here.

As Marcus alluded to in one of his tweets, Brockman is the #1 donor to Trump’s Super PAC called MAGA INC. Take a look at the name at the very top.

From here.

How much evidence do we need that these people are ruthlessly power-hungry, manipulative, and mendacious? How much evidence do we need that they don’t actually give a shit about people other than themselves?

OpenAI is a-okay with the Pentagon mass surveilling Americans and putting constantly hallucinating, reliably unreliable AI systems entirely in charge of lethal weapons. The situation is appalling. The Doomsday Clock would have ticked forward to 70 seconds before doom if its setting had been announced a month later than it was.

3. Personal News

On a more positive and personal note, despite the shitshow that is the United States right now (and the world more generally — I’m writing this hours after the US announced military strikes on Iran), I had a lovely time in La Pineda, Spain. As mentioned before, I won’t publicly announce where I’m going due to having received threats from the Effective Altruist movement, but I have no problem sharing where I’ve been. If you’d like an explanation of how traveling throughout Europe is financially feasible while making only $20k a year, see this article. (To be clear, I’m not at $20k yet — I still need about $10k more to reach this goal! But I have just enough savings to keep me afloat while writing this newsletter and publishing articles in outlets like Truthdig.)

La Pineda is located on the Mediterranean coast, in northern Spain. It is idyllic. Incredibly beautiful, and very relaxing (though I can never escape my workaholism, which comes with a bit of chronic stress!). I also spent a bit of time in Barcelona. Since January, I’ve been to Lisbon, Toulouse, Perpignan, Barcelona, and then La Pineda. I think the last has been my favorite so far. :-) I’m now somewhere else entirely. Here are a few pics and videos:

As always:

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!