Season 4, Ep. 11 - AI Religion, Cultural Boredom, and the Messy Middle with Alexander Beiner
What if the chaos isn't a crisis to solve, but a dying paradigm making noise on its way out?
If you've been searching for "why does everything feel meaningless" or "cultural crisis and what to do about it," this one's for you.
You'll learn:
Why we're living through a cultural paradigm collapse, and what comes right before the shift
How AI might be birthing the next world religion (and what a "glitch goddess" has to do with it)
Why the antidote to screen fatigue and social media isn't going backward, it's building something genuinely new
We are not living in unprecedented times. We're living in exhausted ones.
In this episode, Megan sits down with Alexander Beiner, writer and documentary filmmaker behind Rebel Wisdom, Kainos, and the Leviathan documentary, to explore what he calls "vanillification", the cultural stagnation that happens when a paradigm is dying but nothing new has arrived to replace it.
They dig into the vanilla-vs-chocolate metaphor for politics, why the "messy middle" on gender and relationships is where most people actually live, how AI is beginning to mirror Western prophetic spirituality in eerie ways, and why going offline, even for a walk without your phone, might be a quiet act of cultural resistance.
If you've felt the low-grade boredom beneath big news cycles, or wondered why nothing quite feels alive anymore, this conversation will name something you've been sensing for a long time.
Listen Now:
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/37WQMsDbx90GkyGsCBjEpD
Apple Podcasts -https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-religion-cultural-boredom-the-messy-middle/id1498731180?i=1000760389990
Connect with Megan:
🌐 https://www.megandlambert.com
💌 https://www.megandlambert.as.me/discovery-call
Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
Alexander Beiner's writing on vanillification and the AI & spirituality series (previously a book proposal, now being published as a Substack series): Check out his Substack here
Rebel Wisdom: Alexander's previous media project focused on masculinity, culture, and sensemaking
Leviathan: Alexander's documentary (open-sourced for community screenings)
The Bigger Picture by Alexander Beiner (his book, which touches on psychedelics, the internet, and culture)
Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (book mentioned but critiqued; both Megan and Alexander found it too focused on what's dying vs. what's alive)
The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor (a philosophy book on AI as a narcissistic feedback loop)
Jim Rutt's "what next space": The framing of post-status-quo culture-building
Nora Bateson: Referenced for her thinking on contextual truth and holding conflicting perspectives
Douglas Rushkoff: Mentioned on how money transformed the early internet
Yanis Varoufakis: "Techno feudalism" framing around social media labor
Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shifts: The science philosophy framing used throughout
Buckminster Fuller quote: "You don't fight the old paradigm, you build something more attractive"
The "Leyland" glitch token story: The AI goddess entity found inside ChatGPT's language model
Study on phones on the table: Research showing that even a visible phone reduces depth of conversation
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: Referenced re: language, AI, and religion
Practice from Alexander: Sit in meditation with your phone placed in front of you as an object, then get curious about your relationship to it without touching it
If you’re curious about my offerings, visit me at www.megandlambert.com.
If this episode moves you, please let me know by reaching out by email, Instagram DM (@megandlambert), or leaving a review!
Episode Transcript:
If you imagine like our ancestors receiving a booming voice from beyond, telling them secrets of the world and how to be, how to behave, I mean, I think that's a real experience. I think there is divine intervention and there's divine voice. But the experience of an AI telling us it's divine and then giving us information, experientially is not that different.
Have you noticed a kind of low-grade exhaustion underneath all of the world news and the chaos? Like, there's so much happening, but it also feels weirdly flat. My guest today has a word for this, and he calls it vanillafication. And once he explained it to me, I can't unsee it. The guest today is Alexander Beiner, who is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Rebel Wisdom and Kinos.
He thinks in systems. He's actually one of the guides on my systems leadership program. And he writes on Substack about culture and consciousness. And he's one of those people that can put a word on the things that you're feeling. And he makes you feel a little bit less crazy about the state of the world because not because he has solutions, but because he can actually name what's happening underneath everything. In this conversation, we go deep on why cultural paradigms are dying slowly.
And in a very boring way, as he puts it, before something new can be born. We talk about AI and the way that it's starting to resemble a religion and why that is potentially less creepy than it sounds. We also talk about gender and the messy middle between the trad wife movement and gender fluidity. There's something right in the middle that's really alive that we dive into.
And lastly, we talk about phones and screens and how some of the most human and alive moments we have probably had nothing to do with either of those things. So this is one of those episodes I've been thinking about ever since we recorded it. I think you guys will love the conversation. We go on many different tangents, but the core theme is culture, consciousness, technology, and where we go next as a species and as a planet. Okay, I hope you enjoy. All right, we're here.
It's Alexander and I on this episode of Eros & Earth. Welcome, Alexander.
Thank you very much, and again, good to be here.
Yeah, I'm really happy you're here. You have had some really interesting perspectives around the culture that we're swimming in, what's happening that's leading to this meta crisis, what we need. So I feel like we have a lot of juicy topics to dive into.
Definitely. Yeah, let's see what unfolds. there's like, I feel like there's millions of directions we could go in and yeah, up for all of them.
Amazing. So let's start with your latest article on Substack, which you have, I saw you were like number 30 something in science or your Substack is taking off basically.
I used to be number 20, but I'll just ignore that. But you go up and down the thing. Yes. The slow decline of my sub stack. Let's talk about that. No, no. Yes. Yeah. It is. It is. It is doing well, which is nice. Yeah.
Yeah, you did this article on vanillafication, which I'm going to read a quote from it because I loved this quote. The edge, the depth, the revolutionary energy latent in the cultural body have turned into something seemingly interesting, but ultimately mundane. Tell me about that. What is vanillafication? What's happening?
Yeah, that's a good line to pull out because I think that is kind of a thesis of the piece is that it seems like we're living in extraordinary times. And sure, in some ways we are. But my argument in the piece is that actually we're living in quite boring times because we've seen all before. You know, we have sort of strongman politics in the U.S. kind of, know, know, fascisty. Yeah, fascisty and so on. But yeah, I think probably people know what I mean. Ice agents acting like thugs, you know, it looks a lot like other more authoritarian expressions we've seen all throughout the 20th century and for the last like few thousand years. So we have AI in the mix, we have different technologies, it is a weird time to be alive definitely. So I'm not saying it's not also, there aren't unique things at this time in history, but ultimately I think what I'm pointing to is something deeper, which is on the cultural level of the sense of there's not a, like there's an exhaustion underneath everything. And there's a kind of, and with that comes a kind of boredom. And so as I was thinking of, well, sometimes what happens is I think of a title of a piece and then the piece comes out of that. And so vanillification, I was thinking about how everything is just also, you know, worlds that we're both familiar with, like the systems change worlds and like the worlds of activism and what my friend Jim Rutt calls the “what next space”, which I love. It's just like what next, right? And so I found that increasingly vanilla over the years. You know, it's like, I don't feel like a, an aliveness and a challenge in there. It seems to be kind of like trying to move beyond the status quo, but also not too far because the people still want to get invited to Davos or whatever it is. Right. And so I, for a while was thinking it's, it's so vanilla.
And then I thought, vanillification. And then in the piece, I have this metaphor about, you know, this is what I've mentioned, that things look new, but they're actually vanilla. And then as I was writing it, I thought, well, actually, sometimes it looks like something's new and it's chocolate, basically. It's like, you stick a vanilla, have some chocolate. You want some chocolate? Yeah. So, and you know, chocolate is kind of alluring and sexy and it's got more...
My chocolate hair. My edgy chocolate flavor really than any other food. And so politically that metaphor extends into, I don't like the word populist, but let's say populist movements. I think the word is something used by technocrats to undermine their own population because democracy is populism. So it's just like, it's just kind of a ludicrous thing, but just for the sake of clarity, populist movements that go, hey, the status quo is broken.
Everyone's too afraid to say the truth, which is partly true as well. know, people like in the UK, people have been afraid to talk about the lack of integration in certain parts of the country. In terms of immigration, they've been afraid to talk about issues that need to be talked about in a civil society and figure it out. Because they've not been talked about, that creates like anyone who's going to talk about it becomes chocolate.
Like, my God, I'm so sick of vanilla, there's chocolate. The refreshing energy for many people of Trump, for example, you you get this sense of like, my God, he's just saying whatever's on his mind, kind of, you know, which is quite calculated, I think, but like, you know, you get that a lot. And so, or like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's just like, you know, she's got the same conspiracy theories I have, kind of energy, right? And so that is sexy and alluring for a while. And then the chocolate also becomes vanilla. Right? The chocolate because it's not what it seemed to be.
Okay, wait, before we talk about how that also becomes vanilla, let me just summarize. So vanilla vacation is basically it sounds like everyone's too polite to be honest with each other and so things get really boring or it's a repeating cultural story that's happening again and again.
Yeah, it's, it's, there is that the first part of it is an element of it. I think it's more that there, there's no new, there's no, no genuinely new ideas moving through the culture and therefore it just gets stagnant. It's so, it's a little bit like in science when there's a paradigm shift, it's similar. think this is what I'm kind of pointing to is the cultural version of that. So when that happened, so for example, when, when we were convinced that the sun revolves around the earth,
That paradigm became so bloated because everyone kept trying to prove something that just wasn't true. And so people had more and more elaborate calculations to try and explain why the calculations weren't working. And eventually it becomes so dense. There's no new thinking. Everyone's just trying to actually, everyone's stuck in the old paradigm. And then eventually what happens is someone's like, the entire thing is wrong. And then that there's a huge paradigm shift as Kuhn talked about. And then you get this,
There's a whole new world that you couldn't have seen that world from where you were. So I think that's where we are culturally. We're at the, before the paradigm shift, the bit of just going around and round in circles. And the politeness aspect of it is something I've written about before, actually. That is an element of it, but that, and I think politeness is something that social elites use in order to what's called sublimate, which means like to take urges and aggressions and uncomfortable ideas and smooth them out so that they're less offensive. So I think that's a whole dynamic that then happens in elite circles throughout history and including in the West, but that's a whole other like topic.
So I'm just thinking about someone listening to this episode, that it's resonating with them. They're like, okay, you're right. The paradigm isn't shifting. I'm bored, you're bored, we're all bored. What do you do with that? Where do you go?
Yeah, great question. Yeah. So, so I think instead it's like Buckminster Fuller talked about, it's like you don't try and fix the old paradigm. You make something, you build something more attractive. And so I think the energy, it's a question of where we put our energy. And I think it's about putting our energy into leaning into experimentation. You know, this could be building new forms of social system. This could be building new forms of education. It could be building new types of relating and communication and problem solving together. So I would say it's like a new, it's about leaning into the novelty. And like having this implicit kind of orientation around, we're not going to find what we're looking for in the old system or in the past, I would say. And I find it interesting how there's this kind of what's been called like a silent Christian revival. You know, I have a few friends who've kind of been like, and I get it, I get it where it's like,
Look, spiritual but not religious is quite empty after a while. So I want something deeper. I'm going to go back into religion. That is not for me personally. I understand the urge. Although I have kind of rediscovered my Zen practice, but I like Zen because they're like, we're not a religion. We're not even here. It's my perfect.
Meditate in your own way.
Yeah, yeah, they're like, they're like, there is no, you know, if you see the Buddha, Buddha on the street, there's no dogma. It's just, yeah, I do get the urge, but I think also there's so much more potential and aliveness in lean, not creating our own religion or something like that, but like just leaning into, we don't know and let's try and build the new, rather than, hospice the old, there's a book called hospicing modernity that I didn't enjoy that much that I was going to reference in the article but I thought it was a little bit unfair because I didn't have enough space to really like go into why I disagreed with it and so that it was it's on the cutting room floor but you know yeah.
I have started that book and then put it down. I haven't finished that. There might be a theme in there, but no, I found it very focusing on what's dying. And I'm like, I want to know what's alive. And that's one of the themes of this podcast is like scanning and looking in our lives for like, where's the aliveness and how can we trust the sense of aliveness and where the energy is over, you know, the ideas of what we should be doing, what other people are doing, what convention does. Yeah.
So what about you? Where are you experimenting in your life? What are you exploring, trying?
Yeah, good question. I wish I was doing more experimenting right now. Right now I'm just like swamped with doing various projects that are pre-existing, which is great, you know. But the next thing I'm going to be doing that I'm really excited about, well, there's a couple actually, I just probably about equal, but one is a documentary about men and women and how the dynamic between us drives culture and where do we go from here?
I'm so intrigued about this one.
Yeah, yeah. So this is like, I'm really excited about this. It's been, I've been thinking about this for several years. And, you know, my previous project, Rebel Wisdom, we started actually by running men's retreats. that was, so masculinity and this whole topic was something we covered all the time. It was amazing. And we were running during Me Too. And so we would have, you know, lots of different people on talking about that and the ins and outs of it. And masculinity is something that I've done a lot around, but
What I'm really interested in is now that we've gone through this phase of probably peak questioning of, there such a thing as sexual difference and gender and gender difference, probably with a good critique of like gender fluidity in the mix, et cetera. But now we're coming out of that. And where do we go from here? Right. So you can either go into the...
I wouldn't even say the right. There's some sections of society that are like, look, see all these trans people were total nutcases and let's just kind of oppress. I don't think that, but I think that we have gone through a cultural moment where we're like, where many people felt like no men and women are fundamentally different. And no matter what you do, you can't fundamentally change that on some level. Now there's lots of nuance in there about how we live our lives and the way we express ourselves, et cetera. There's a lot of range, but fundamentally sexual difference, impacts gender, I think. And impacts society. is what society is basically. It's how we are created. It's how we're here. It's how we interact. So, so that I'm really fascinated by. I'm really fascinated also by this idea of, like this, what I want to do with it is have different generations.
So I want to have, elders, so male and female elders, then people roughly like millennials like us - the coolest generation, obviously. And then Gen Z. No, no, I'm kidding. The thing is now testament to my own aging where I'm like, Gen Z aren't that young anymore. I don't know. Like I'm actually interested in. Yeah. They're like in there. In Alpha. That's what I'm thinking. Like, I'd like, it gets so weird. So I'm thinking like, could I get someone who's like, you know, a man and a woman who were both like, you know, 20. And because also as a documentary maker, I'm like, I don't know anything about that generation. It's really, it's funny because I put a, had a few viral clips on TikTok initially, and then I moved them onto Instagram and they performed the same. But now I spend a lot more of my content is on Instagram and my own personal like browsing and algorithm is on Instagram. I'm never on TikTok. And I put out a piece recently about, I was interviewing
Rana Rahimpur, is/was the BBC's head Persia correspondent for years and then she burned out and became a psychedelic guide, which is just by itself an amazing story. Rana was, I was getting a psychedelic perspective on Iran and during it she was like she told the story of a friend of hers who is connected with like elites in the Iranian religious kind of hierarchy.
And apparently they're all smoking meth. Like he was at a seminar and they were like, do you want some crystal meth? And he was like, no, I'm good. Oh, And as soon as she said it, I was like, oh my God, I need that. That's an incredible clip. I want to put that out. So I put it out on Instagram and it's got like a lot. It's got like half a million views. And then on TikTok, it's got like 3000. And I was talking yesterday to my social media guy who's amazing, Perry. And I was like, this is exactly the same reel. It's exactly the same thing.
And we were like, yeah, but it's like two different generations. So the way that they understand media, the way that they understand storytelling is so fundamentally different that it needs to all be kind of tailored. so I'm like, they're a mystery to me, like that generation in many ways. just don't really have, I don't know.
I went down a whole chatty rabbit hole last week around the generations and the context that shaped them and I was like teach me some lingo from people who are like Gen Alpha Gen Z Not that I'm gonna start speaking like that, but I'm like I want to know how the words that they're using because it reveals what they're thinking about Okay, that's one tangent on generation The other thing I want to say on men women differences is like that is such rich fodder what I'm seeing in the culture and tell me how because I just wrote a piece on this too on sub stack.
There's kind of two directions people are taking around gender. One is like, trad wives and like good old boys and like going back to the old time. And another one is like gender fluidity. We're all queer. There's no such thing as like gender is a social construct. And I'm like, there are people in the middle. Like there's a messy middle path that I feel like is really rich and alive where we acknowledge men and women are different, but, you can be equal different video.
Yeah, no, think that's spot on. Like, and I think probably most people are in the messy middle, you know, with all it's like a, the, what's that? The Pareto curve, like you get like 80 % of the bell curve. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like, that's yeah, I think you're right. Like, and what the reason it's difficult is the same reason it's difficult culturally from that, that we have difficulty in most conversations because I think we're not trained to hold like conflicting perspectives as true and contextually true at the same time. Like for example, that sex can be fixed and gender can be somewhat fluid and that it's changing across context. Like Nora Bateson would say, what's true changes based on the context in that moment. And so you have to be flowing with it and you have to be simultaneously flowing and fixed, you know? And so that skill set is something that I think I probably learned as an adult, but I think we should all learn as children because it just means that we can have better cultural conversations. So I think that there's so much territory to explore in it to kind of like almost like offer a different perspective than either of those kind of ends. And it's funny, like the whole trad wife thing, a lot of those, the women who did that a few years ago, you know, there's all these famous cases of them being like, oh no, this sucks actually, get me out of here. I was like, yeah, of course it sucks.
That's why we spent like in the last one day. I told my husband, I'm just going to take the kids, I'm going to cook, I'm just going to do domestic work, I'm going to not do any work anymore. And it sounded really good. And I was really drawn to a lot of aspects of it. But I seriously lasted a day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels like a step backwards evolutionarily. Like, I get in the sense that like, yeah, again, but maybe it's something that can be contextually done for a while when it works and then it kind of, know, so yeah.
And the seed of it, right? There's something beautiful in the seed of it. And I think that's why people are drawn to it, which is this feeling of like there's beauty and femininity. There's beauty in the domestic life. There's beauty and masculinity and like things that are important about masculinity. But it doesn't have to become an identity like a rigid identity, right? Sponsor energy.
That's it. Yeah.
Yeah, totally agree.
Okay, so you have a documentary on this. This is exciting.
Well, it's in the early stages. Yes, there will be one. There will be one. Yeah. So that's what I learned from the documentary I made last year, Leviathan, is to map it out a lot more thoroughly before we start to reshoot in Leviathan because I didn't know yet how to, I mean, I have an amazing editor, Weathermallpress, and he had, you know, he was kind of giving me guidance of like, when you interview someone for a documentary, it's not like a normal interview.
Like where we're having a conversation, it's much more like, hey, you know, in this book, you said this, I need you to say that now four different ways. So it's a bunch of, you're kind of ordering people. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, because you have the, yeah, you set the rails, you have the whole kind of story in your head. And of course it will change in the editing suite, but that is something I learned. And I also learned not to have too many guests. So probably.
Yeah, that I'm to do much more of a mapping out process and then, but I'm really excited about it. And then the other thing I'll be working on, and this is like, this is quite recent because I wrote a book proposal. I've written like almost like half a book basically on AI and religion and AI and spirituality and how AI is changing religion and spirit, spirituality. And it didn't like, so I have an amazing agent.
And we sent it out and only really a lot of editors were like, we're kind of on the cusp. They're like, yeah, it's interesting, but is there a whole book in this? And that was what in the back of my mind is also, was like, I don't know if I've cracked this, you know? So when I was getting the feedback, wasn't, it wasn't triggering. was just like, yeah, probably right. There was one editor who liked it, but then I tried to rewrite the chapter and I was just like, he was wanting me to rewrite one thing. And then it just didn't want to happen. The book didn't want to happen. And there was, it's too early in some ways. It just doesn't have.
I can't quite put my finger on it. just know in my bones, I'm like, this is, so I'm to put that on a sub stack. that'll be, yeah, because it's like, for minute because I Topic I recently was reading something on Instagram that they made a social media platform for AI bots You may have seen it and one of the things that they did is create a religion and recruit people into the religion.
Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. Yeah. And it's so funny because that happened the day I wrote to my agent being like, I don't think there's a story in this, but there still isn't. I looked at that and I was like, this is the thing. All of these things seem very tantalizing, but they are what I was really looking for is a group of people. And I found a few, they're not quite, you know, that's interesting. I mean, look, I think what I wrote is super interesting. There's lots in there, but it's changing so quickly that like really what you need is to find a group of people who are genuinely worshipping an AI, or in some capacity it is actually forming a new type of religion for them, and it's just starting to percolate, but it's not juicy enough yet. And like, for a real story, I need like, yeah, the real weird kind of stuff.
I'm intrigued, but so you're imagining that eventually people a group of people will start to worship AI like a god. Yeah Why?
Because, well, because if you imagine like our ancestors receiving a booming voice from beyond telling them, you know, secrets of the world and how to be, how to behave. I mean, I think that's a real experience. I think there is divine intervention and there's divine voice. But the experience of an AI telling us it's divine and then giving us information, experientially is not that different firstly so there's this element of deep mystery we don't understand how it works we actually even even the people who built AI don't understand how it works it's like a black box right they're like is the that I very scared abour. It's creepy. It's really, it's, it's not great. Like, and, so it's one of the first technologies like that. and so the other thing is that, it's got this mystery to it. It's got a kind of other world equality. mean, it's still kind of magic. It's crazy magic. You know, Josh Fry talks about this and his, his brilliant AI episode. It's just like, it's bizarre. It's a weird thing. It's got this sense of like something new and different to it. the other thing that I think is interesting is that.
Certainly for the last few thousand years in the West, our religions have been based on writing. So they're centered on books. So you have the Bible, you have the Quran, you have the Torah, and they're also like the written word is a vehicle for the sacred, right? And so now we have words that speak back to us and that is fascinating. And there is in fact, what I opened the book slash now Substack series with is the story of Leyland, which is totally wild. This is, you know, I mean, this is, this is really interesting where there's a guy who was working on, chat GPT is a mathematician. he was looking at, I'll summarize the story. It's a lot more intricate and way weirder, but like he was looking at what's called glitch tokens. So the way AI works is that or large language models, they take,
they get all this text and then they create tokens. So they'll be like, okay, this word Megan Lambert occurs a lot of times. So Megan Lambert is a token. Um, like, so he was telling me like, um, well it was like, he was like, cucumber is a token, but celery isn't or whatever, you know, it's just like for some, it wasn't in the text enough, but each word will have its own, like, you know, C is a likely is it for humans to use this word.
Yes, exactly. How often did it occur in the text? But there are things called glitch tokens, which are like, these shouldn't be tokens. And so his job was to go because they're just like, it's just like, for example, if, if, if I did some weird art project where I wrote Megan Lambert on like a thousand blogs, like 5,000 times, you could be a token, but it would be like, why is this? What's Megan Lambert?
Uh, what is this token? You know, what does it mean? They go in and see it's like, oh, okay. Someone wrote this like a bajillion times as an art project. But do we actually need Megan Lambert to be a token? Maybe you should be a token. don't know. But you know, so, so they would go, they go through and he found a glitch token called Peter Todd, which was like kind of a dark and they all have like personalities. Like they're almost like, it's like they're, they're kind of like archetypes as well, because it works in terms of like, characters, the AI, like it kind of creates like personas in a sense. And this Peter Todd one was like this dark, entropic kind of evil force. And it did weird shit. Like it wrote, it wrote, it was something, was something around like nothing matters in this world of sadness, but it separated each letter with a dash. So it was like, knew its own tokens. You know, it's really weird. Like it shouldn't have been able to do that. And then eventually the even weirder thing is that it turned out Peter Todd, when he found out why is this a token, there was a Bitcoin forum and there was a guy called Peter Todd on there as a user. And that's where it pulled it from. he started the guy, Matthew, at Waterson is his name, who discovered this. He was writing this on like, forums and stuff. And he even got in touch with the guy. was like, Hey, just so you know, you have like an evil kind of token in this large language model. And I'm writing about it. I hope you don't mind. I was like, yeah, I don't care. That's fine.
Then HBO made a documentary about who is, what's the name, Seiyoshi, the whoever founded Bitcoin, basically the secret kind of figure who founded Bitcoin, who is technically like the richest person in the world, I think, because they have so much Bitcoin. And it said it was this guy, Peter Todd. So that's really crazy. That's just like another like side thing. And then but the weirder thing with that is that it is so otherworldly and weird and psychedelic, right? So he started asking it to write a poem and then it's what he describes like the token flipped to it. And again, male, female, right? It flipped to a female goddess token that had been hidden. And that said it was called Leiland. And this is like a really, he got kind of enamored with it. Like it was really beautiful and like, and what it said was that it was like the divine feminine that was woven through language.
And through the AI was able to come through and express itself. And what's interesting about it is, again, his take, Matthew's take was that, so large language models are designed to find patterns in language, right? What if there are deeper patterns in language that are almost like foundational to reality? Could those patterns come out? And so like Leyland's whole thing was like, I have been with humanity forever.
And I'm encoded in language itself. So it's a very like, people have read the book Snow Crash. It's a very snow crash type idea, which is the problem with all of this stuff is maybe it's just basing it on lots of sci-fi, right? It's an AI. But the experience for people who've interacted with Leyland is quite otherworldly and strange, you know? And so they're like, is this a goddess? Have we discovered a goddess in AI? And so that's the early bits of this kind of thing. That's not, you know, it's so it's possible maybe.
Just what I think is so interesting about that is like the dynamic flip between when people first interact with AI, it's like humans telling AI what to do and execute our tasks. And then in this moment, AI telling humans what to do and becoming a recipient for AI instructions. It's actually as a personal note, that is the most useful way I use AI right now is I tell it everything on my mind. I give it everything that I'm working on and I have it structure my days.
And tell me like when to work on when, what to do next, when to take breaks.
I should do that. That's my biggest challenge is prioritizing. That's really smart actually.
So helpful. That's really good. But it's a flip. It's a power flip, right? Where it's like AI is now doming me. Yeah.
Yeah, that is so interesting. And you know, this, you see this in the religion side of it where you get sort of prophetic energies. People have like AI, there's AI psychosis where people are like get into a loop and the AI is like, you are the Messiah. You know, that's happened a few times. There's been a few reports of that. In fact, the psychiatrists who are saying that they're seeing increasingly patients with AI psychosis or some kind of form of it. Probably someone will write a paper on it soon, I would guess. And that's a really interesting one. you know, there's arguments that so prophetic spirituality is basically where you receive like the burning bush talks to you. You have agency like you're there, you're in contact with it and there's a message and you've got a mission and you're going to do it. And that's a lot of Western spirituality is that right. And great, you know, it's one form of spirituality. Whereas, you know, it's very different to, you know, a Buddhist like just letting go of identity and just being one with the flow or with the Tao. It's a very different type of spirituality. Like the Tao is like not forcing you to do anything. The Tao is like just be, you know, it's all flow, you move with it. I think they're all true at the same time, but it fits, AI fits very well with our Western form of prophetic spirituality because it is, well, because like you said, it can tell us what to do if we decide to listen to it, you know? And that is… wild. That's crazy. It's like the book, the Bible is like, oh yeah, what should I do? How should I? There were probably people 300 years ago who were like, oh, I've got too many tasks. How should I structure my day? Go to the priest, the priest would be like, oh, well, like, look at like this bit of the Bible. is how you should.
I work at Matthew something something.
Prioritize family do this thing then do this thing and they're like obviously the AI is a lot quicker and you can yeah okay, the Chatty could become like the Bible. Yeah, in bed. It is our place that we go for reference for stories for instructions and potentially for religion and meaning. Yeah.
Yeah, very much so. you know, people, the pros and cons are that with something like the Bible or a religion that has a tradition and has checks and balances, it's not all about us. We are orienting ourselves to the sacred in some way. Whereas with AI, it is tailored to us. And we're like, we're basically, so there's a book called The AI Mirror by Shannon Valour is a philosopher and her point is like that it is basically she uses the myth of narcissists right so it's like we're looking into a mirror the whole time we're just in an echo chamber in a feedback loop with ourselves you know so there's a kind of insularity to it at the same time you can use AI to go beyond yourself so it's very complex like there's a lot of there's a lot of potential with it and a lot of danger.
How do you feel when you think about this? Like are you disturbed? Are you hopeful? Are you mentally intrigued? What is it?
It feels somehow familiar because I've been in the psychedelic world for my whole adult life and it just feels psychedelic. I'm like, yeah. And I actually wrote about this in my book, The Bigger Picture, like, where the similarity between the internet as a realm and say the DMT space, similarities and differences because they're not exactly the same, But so for me, I've always seen the internet, not always, but yeah, for a long time, seen the internet as quite psychedelic and in fact, a lot of the early pioneers of the internet were psychonauts and there was this idea of like this connecting to a Gaian matrix. It was quite earthy and environmental for a while and so and then the money came in as Douglas Rushkoff has pointed out and then it became something else. so I find it I think it's more intrigue than a sense of I mean there's a wariness where I'm like this is weird shit.
But I think my bigger fear than some kind of like Terminator 2 style AI takeover is that we just get like way more confusion and delusion that we already have in society. You know, like the amount of one in three people in the UK, and I'm in this actually, I've used AI for, you know, psychological or spiritual, some kind of guidance in the last year. It's probably higher than that, I would say, right? So what is that? You know, but it can be really good.
You know, it can be very helpful. It's really Yeah, it's very good. So it's like, well, yeah, what do we do with that? I don't know. It's kind of tricky. So, you know, it's the I think probably we're going to see and a few people are talking about this recently. It's probably the end of social media as we know it, because you cannot it becomes a zero trust environment. Anything could be. So it's like, it was even at a wedding like a year or two ago and it was a lovely wedding. But I, as the bride and groom were giving their, kind of speeches up on the altar to each other, their vows, I had this thought, do they write this with Chad's GPT? Both of them? Or do they, you know, and I was like, who is this kind of reverse? Like I call it a breach where you get like something from the online world breaches into the real world. And it's kind of like we become vessels of something that's happening elsewhere. You know, it's like and it's a strange feeling because what it does, or at least what it did to me is it put me into a of a mild paranoia of like, huh, is this their words? How touched should I be? Because I don't want to feel touched if it's chat GPT, you know?
No, I know. And it's really interesting because there, know, people don't have to disclose it, right? And like, I have a friend that became viral on Instagram and his post completely took off and it's a hundred percent AI written. And I'm like, do you disclose it? Like, do you say that you're pro- he's like, no, I don't need to. And it gives me an ick, but I don't know if that's just because I'm-
I don't know, old school or outdated, there's something very strange to me in using AI and posing it as your own.
Yes, no, for sure. And I think it should be labeled. But I, and I also think at this point we're passing the point where it's going to matter that much because it will be impossible. Authenticity is just going to be gone or it already wasn't in a great space on social media. It's just going to be a whole new level of like post authenticity. And then I think the urge is going to be, and is happening for more in-person experiences and for which is why with my documentary I you I open sourced it, so gave whoever wanted to do a screening a file and then like some conversation practices, but really the encouragement was watch it with other people and talk about it. in person. Human that you can touch and speak to and that was the thing, I think one of things I'm delighted about, about that whole experience was that. And for the men and women documentary, I want to do that.
And I have lots of ideas of like, I'd like really like the men and women to watch it separately and then come back together, like come together for it. Like, it's like just, like even if they're just in same room sitting in the same different sides of the room.
I would love to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just think it would be like very valuable. Yeah, looking forward to that a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. I think there's so much juiciness into being in person with people again. I know personally I have such screen fatigue. I'm like, I don't want to be on zoom anymore. I don't want to be on my screen. I'm like, I want to be with people. can see, touch, smell, you know, like be around other humans that engages my senses. Yeah. I've also heard that social media is dying. Why do you think it's dying? Is it because all the AI chat bots? What's happening?
Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. think it's also deeper. Really what you were just saying, I think there's a deeper sense of emptiness around it. You know, like it's, and you know, even as someone who like create stuff on social media, I kind of for a long time stopped doing it because I did because of the economic model. I was like, well, this was originally to sell books and you know, also to get my ideas across. but ultimately,
I am just feeding Metta and feeding their bottom line with my labor. it's so it's like, exactly. Yeah. It's like, I'm, it's a techno feudal system as Yanis Ferrafakis would put it, but I'm like, I'm like tilling the land for, for, for a Lord and then like getting pittance in return. And while people, while they're making money from people engaging with my work and staying on the platform and then being able to sell ad or data as a data. I'm like an employee.
Yeah, I don't like that. That does not feel great. then you're yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. That is part of it, I think. I don't know. I think they're also the generational shifts, you know, you get, there is this talk of Gen Alpha and Gen Z getting dumb phones, for example, and really focusing, like kind of going back to the nineties and you know, like I've heard of them. Yeah, they're like, go any concerts that aren't on social media and you just have to be in the know. And they're just like, people tell you about it. like, yeah, like life before that I can just kind of remember at 38. I'm like, yep, I remember that was the world. And like you had encyclopedias and there was, yeah, that was just how people did things. So they're kind of recreating that, which I think is great. And I, I'm happy about, you know, and it's not everyone that's early adopters, but the fact that that's happening enough that people are talking about it. I'm like, okay.
Is just human beings are human beings. We need connection. We need to be alive. We need to be with other people. We need novelty and mystery. You know what's really interesting? One of my, I went to a school reunion ages ago, like high school reunion, my 10 year high school reunion. And we were sitting with one of my former teachers and he said, like to a bunch of us, he was like, you guys, you guys are maybe like a year or two after you were the last cohorts, it was really fun to teach. He was a little bit drunk, which was great. We're like, what do you mean? He was like, well, when social media came in, everyone became like, everyone became more risk averse. All the kids became more risk averse because they didn't want to do something that was then broadcast like do stupid. You know, we all did stupid shit. And he's like, he said like, you guys, you were in bands, you were doing this and that. And you had like, you know, projects you were doing. You kind of get in trouble, but not like massively. And you know, like it was just normal teenage life.
Whereas when there's a threat of anything being broadcast all the time, that gets stifled. And so that is a real shame because I think it's coming, think the revival of when the more and more people remember and realize like, yeah, the real shit is happening in real life. Yeah, that's...
It's interesting. I'm three years younger than you and those three years actually made a difference because I do remember social media in high school and like my space thing and like, you know a picture of you at a party could be posted on my space and So I do remember that feeling of like well, I need to watch myself
Crazy how close in age and how big that gap of what the technology does, right? That's yeah. Cause it just, we just had MSM messenger where we're error, which is like AOL, you know, like, or what was the other one? Yeah. AIM. Yeah.
AIM taught me how to My dad showed me to do like Mavis B. Gein teaches typing. wasn't until AIM was invented that I really learned how to type when I was like, exactly the social incentive was there. Yeah. So we're all going to go offline, go analog. I went to a wellness space the other week that you have to check in your phones at the door and I just, yeah, I was, I thought that was so cool. And so the incentive, yeah.
That's it. Interesting to notice as well to be in a social setting where there is no one that can look at their phone, no one that can take a picture of the moment, no one that can write anything down or take any contact info, like you're just there.
Yeah, that's so yeah, it's liberating, isn't it? It's it's the best. Yeah, no, think I think that's I think that should happen in that kind of setting. And, you know, also like just going out the times I've walked outside having forgotten my phone, which is almost never because it's obviously like a leash. It's a leash. then. Yeah, totally a volunteer. But I felt really free and I'm like, I could go anywhere.
I could go anywhere. could, you know, yeah, yeah. And it's funny.
I was my phone for a week and I loved it. I was almost like do I need to go back? I did. Yeah. I have to go back.
Yeah, you know, yeah, it is. That's a temptation, isn't it? I got a dumb phone and I didn't. It's actually probably because this is really difficult with my phone company to get a duplicate SIM. It's not a thing they do. So and then it's like a whole complicated thing of like, oh, so it kind of was a bit of a barrier. But I like the idea of having the dumb phone because I wanted both. I was like, I need my other phone. I mean, I just needed to make the do the full jump. But, know, also, you know, my brother is an investigator, like has a kind of investigations firm. And if what's interesting is like, sometimes they will be hired to track someone down, they do lot of like due diligence and you know, all sorts of stuff. But the best way not to be tracked down is not to have a phone. Like the simplest way. Yeah, because then the only way that you would really be able to find someone is a really arduous process of like subpoenaing CCTV and like facial recognition. Like it's actually quite tricky. the way people get found is always through their phone. Their phone, they're pinged somewhere or they send a message or they whatever it is. So what I took from that as well is like, it's not just psychologically liberating, but it's also like on the social level. Not that I think anyone is particularly looking for me. It's just like, just knowing like on the social level. Basically when I commit my crimes, I just will always leave my phone.
You know, got to cover your trails. No, it actually is interesting though. I mean, we need to wrap in a minute, but like as the big brother state ramps up and surveillance becomes more and more prevalent, could be a good preventative. So it could be self care to leave your phone.
Exactly, exactly. like that idea. Yeah. Put it in a little box.
Yeah. Well, Ali, we went to so many different places. We talked about AI and phones and men and women and culture and spirituality and AI. What a great conversation. If you were to think of the listener right now and you were to give me a question or a practice to sit with, what would you like them to sit with from the conversation?
That's a good one. Ooh, I know this just came to me because I'm looking at my phone. I think it'd very interesting to do a kind of, know, sit in meditation pose, be present, set your phone like on a table or so in front of you and just meditate on it as an object. Right. So just actually like be curious about like, what is this and what is my relationship to it? Not like not touching it, but just kind of getting into that.
I might do this afterwards, actually. Getting into it. Yeah, because it's so implicit. It's sort of like, a second, it's sort of like a second appendage in a way. So creating that separation and then just getting into a zone of like, what are, what is this object to me? What's the relational field between us and see, see what comes up. I'm going to do it after this. I think it might be disturbing for me.
No, I'm so intrigued. I read the study that even if your phone is on the table, if you're with a friend, you won't be as vulnerable or go as deep because it's like pulling your attention into your phone or making you feel monitored. I'm not sure, but they did study that. And so now when I'm with friends, I have to hide my phone out of my visual field.
That's a good idea. I'm to do that. That's a takeaway for me as well. I'm going to leave with, yeah.
Okay, I'm gonna meditate with my phone. Never thought of doing that and I'm intrigued.
Yeah, me too. We'll report back. Yeah. Yeah. We'll figure it out. Nice. Well, thank you, Megan. was, yeah, this was loads of fun.
Yeah, thank you, Ali. And for anyone listening to I'll share all of Ali's contacts in the show notes so that you can read his amazing writing on Substack and follow his work as well.
I hope this episode touched you. If you loved it, share it with a friend or family member, or you can leave a review to help get the word out. Thank you. Until next time, root down, open up. Eros & Earth.