Tara Isabella Burton

speaker

213 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 26 Dec

Tara Isabella Burton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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It's Been a Minute · Am I a god?! Why "manifesting" your reality is easier than ever · 31 Mar 2025 podcast

Can you say more about that? What's really interesting is that we are seeing in a bunch of different places across the cultural spectrum, this idea that we should transcend our human limitations and try and make ourselves into another kind of maybe more divine being. And one of the ways that we see this is in the popularity of manifesting.

This ideology is often and has been since the era of New Thought bound up with this ideal of self-divinization. Like, I am divine. I am bountiful. I am abundant. Maybe I'm also not, you know, the God who created the world, but my true nature is as divinity, as part of God or God.

in a way that's slightly different from even a traditional, speaking to my own experience, Christian conception of, you know, you might become one with God through salvation or through Jesus, but like, you're not God. There is a distinction between creator and created. But another place you see the same ideal of self-divinization is the transhumanism you find in the tech world.

Recently, Brian Johnson, who's a sort of entrepreneur who went viral a little while ago with saying he could live forever.

Went once again viral for announcing his new don't die religion, which has one very obvious tenet in it. I bet you can figure out what it is. Yeah.

It's certainly unlikely. Yes. But the idea with a lot of this life extension work or anti-death work that is funded by a lot of people in the tech world, Peter Thiel's invested very heavily in life extension research. And again, there's a soft version of this, which is like, how can we make people live longer? This seems like generally a good idea.

And then there is the more intense version of it, which is develop the post-human. And one of the ways that we become post-humans faster is by getting rid of all those pesky things like sickness and death. There is a very spiritualized version that is dedicated to this idea that some people have the power to

to shape their own reality and shape the reality of those around them and transcend human limitations. And there are other people who don't. And so I think that now these ideas, which have often been sort of fringe or considered heretical or considered just out there, because of the power of the internet to amplify them, are actually becoming incredibly normalized. So we're seeing not just

the popularity of manifestation and the popularity of transhumanism as two discrete phenomena, what we're actually seeing is this overall normalization of the idea that the average person should try to become divine.

I think it's certainly the case that one of the risks is sort of overly putting responsibility on the individual for their outcomes. But I think that another danger is that it stops people from kind of reckoning meaningfully with some of the most important questions that humans have traditionally asked each other and themselves, which is...

What does it mean to be human when being human means we don't have control, when we can't determine when we get sick, when we can't determine what's going to happen to us, that life is inherently mysterious and out of our control? And some people do sort of find traditional religious faith to be one place where this question gets dealt with and grappled with a lot and some answers are provided.

Something that perhaps the transhumanists of Silicon Valley are very honest about is that this is part of the human condition. Let's get rid of it and be something that's not human. That's certainly another answer that you could have to this question. I think that what manifesting does is it kind of creates a layer of fog and like internet slop between us and this reality.

I don't think it's good for anyone to lose touch with such a kind of fundamental element of the human condition.

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