Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

Adam Kirsch. He's an editor at the Wall Street Journal's weekend review section. He's a poet,

literary critic, and author of several books, and he's written a number of times for City Journal.

Today, though, we're going to be discussing his latest book. It's called

The Revolt Against Humanity, Imagining a Future Without Us. In the book, Adam describes the

development and increasingly mainstream embrace of the idea that humans are going to lose their

preeminence on Earth, and that we should welcome this and even

our species demise or fundamental transformation. So Adam, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Brian. You know, greater numbers of people are now espousing some form or another of this idea

that the downfall of the human species is imminent and well-deserved.

You know, you describe this as the revolt against humanity.

You write that two seemingly conflicting strains of thought are driving this.

The Anthropocene anti-humanism is one of these, and the other is the more recent development of the idea of transhumanism.

So both of these trends or intellectual currents, imagine a world absent humanity, at least in its

current form, but they have different visions of what this future will look like.

So I wonder if you could describe these two themes, the Anthropocene, anti-humanism, and transhumanism,

how they differ, how they converge?

Sure. Well, first, I want to make clear that when I'm writing about these ideas and about

the revolt against humanity, I'm not arguing for it. And I'm actually not even arguing against it.

The idea of the book is to sort of explore these ideas,

look at some of the thinkers and writers who are advancing them.

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