How AI Reveals Our Divinity- Special Guest- Alex Tsakiris EP 367

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. I gotta tell you, I haven't been this nervous since I interviewed Bernardo Kastrup.

Oh, come on, man.

I've been listening to you for— it's fine. I was— I just finished your book. I just started your book this morning, and I finished it this morning.

Oh, Lord.

And I saw you've been podcasting for 15 years. That's— I didn't even realize there were podcasts around 15 years ago.

True, true enough. Yes, there were.

Yeah, I really— well, I enjoy your show in general, and the series you've been doing on AI I think is fantastic.

Well, you know, one of the reasons I'm excited for us to have this conversation is You know, one of my real— like, the only reason I'm interested in the AI is because of the spiritual stuff, really, right? You know, the book is that, uh, smartest, uh, dangerous, divine. Divine is what it's all about.

Close your eyes and imagine what if the things in life that cause us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hey there, welcome to another episode of Grief to Growth, where we help you navigate life's challenges and explore profound questions about our existence. I'm your host, Brian D Smith. And whether you're a first-time listener or you're a longtime supporter, we're thrilled to have you with us. Today we have a very special guest. He's no stranger to deep, thought-provoking conversations. His name is Alex Tsakaris. And Alex is the host of the acclaimed podcast Skeptiko.. And he's an OG in the podcasting world. I just finished Alex's latest book this morning. I didn't realize he'd been podcasting for 15 years. I didn't know the word podcast 15 years ago, but I've been listening to Alex for about 5 years. I gotta tell you, I'm a little intimidated having him on because he's just an amazing podcaster and a great thinker. He's known for his scientific approach to spiritual topics. He spent years exploring the mysteries of consciousness, near-death experiences, and the boundaries of human understanding. He has a rigorous yet open-minded inquiry style, and it's led him to fascinating conclusions about the nature of humankind, which we're going to explore today. Now, in addition to his podcasting success, he's authored several books. And today we're going to be talking about a book called Why AI: It's Smartest, It's Dangerous, It's Divine, which examines profound implications of artificial intelligence on human spiritual and existential questions. Alex argues that AI not only poses risks, but also offers potential for advancing our understanding of consciousness and human development. So stay tuned as we dive into these deep questions and more. Remember to join us at our community at grieftogrowth.com/community afterwards to continue the conversation. And with that, I want to welcome Alex Tsakaris.

Thank you, Brian. I'm super excited to be here and to as we were just chatting about a minute ago, you know, truly engage. And there's a dialogue here that's been— I've been dying to have. So you reached out to me and I was like, no, we got to do this as a, as a Swapcast. So to just let people know, you know, well, you're going to take the lead here, but I'll probably have some additional points to make when I bring it over onto Skeptico.

Absolutely. Well, and we can— this is a dialogue, so I want to, I want to question you, but if you have any questions you want to ask me, that's, that's fine too. I'm, I'm I have to say, I, I'm, I'm honored to have you. I really am. Uh, I, I listen to your show. I love the guests you have on. I love the way that you have a skeptical, scientific, rational approach that's led you to this idea of spirituality. This is not woo-woo. This is not just wishful thinking. So maybe to start off by telling us what, what prompted you to start Skeptical in the first place.

Well, you know, first of all— not, not first of all— to build on what you just said, I mean, that's really Uh, what it's about for me is, you know, I love, um, you sum it up really nicely all the time in your introduction. Who am I? Why am I here? Who am I? Why am I here? These are the only questions. These are the biggest questions that mattered. So I started out, uh, business, entrepreneurship, but it was just— I was always a yogi, you know. I don't know why. Like, I don't know why we get drawn to these different things. One of the questions I have for you is, you know, How do these life circumstances fit with our life plan? It's like a really deep question that I'm sure you've contemplated often because it's about kind of who you are. But anyways, my whole thing was about, okay, get the money thing out of the fam— out of the way, because I'm this— brought up this Greek, you know, entrepreneurship. Money's what matters. Make that number and then get that out of the way. And now you can really do what you want to do, which is figure out these bigger questions. And I thought— I say this all the time— I thought everybody was like, Yeah, that's— those are the most important questions. That's what I really want to know. And of course, as you and I know, no, a lot of people, you know, that's not— that's not an endpoint for them to really understand. So tackling those questions, I had an understanding of where I thought I was going, but I was like, what are the smartest, quote unquote, smartest people say? What is the science thing? Seems pretty reliable from what I know. I'm a computer science guy. I value logic and reason. How about approaching it from that angle? And that's what I did. And as you said, you know, that led me to spirituality or, or to a certain set of beliefs that are always open to be changing, but that I do have, you know, about let science direct it.

Well, yeah.

What are your thoughts on that? How does that fit with, with your path, which I think is probably quite different, right?

My path is different. I actually came from a fundamentalist religious background and was taught all this stuff about this judgmental God and heaven and hell and binary, you know, you're in or you're out. And, and that never made any sense to me. But my, my nature, I think, is I'm a questioner, I'm a seeker. I remember being 5 years old, laying in bed like, why am I here? What is— what— this place is crazy. I grew up during the Vietnam War era. I remember watching war on TV. And I'm like, what, what kind of a planet did I, did I land on? Um, so I, I've had these questions since I was very, very young, but I was taught this, this idea of religion and God and all that kind of stuff, but that fell apart for me. That didn't make any sense. So this guy would be so— why, why is he so angry? Why does he hate everybody? I didn't understand this God. So, um, I got my degree in chemical engineering, and so, because I want to know how does this world work, how do things, you know, how do things work? And it's all about science, it's all about, you know, the material And then I came very close to becoming an atheist, but that just didn't— a materialist, I should say. I don't like the word atheist. I'm a materialist. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense to me either. So I just started digging hard, and I dug into the Bible, I dug into the background of Christianity, and then I started discovering more and more of what we call spiritual now. Um, and it's interesting because you use the word belief and I use the word belief, and we'll use the word faith a lot of times, and like, I don't even like that word. It's really It's where the data has led us. It's the rational conclusion, the conclusion I think you and I both share.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so, and, and then that also— life led you through the grief thing in, in a way that kind of, kind of changed your direction too, because that's unique, right? I mean, that's not, that's not my path at all. I've danced through that garden without touching any, any, anything, you know. So, uh, that's interesting, isn't it? I mean, what do you make of— what do you make of— and, and I'm, I'm happy to answer this too, you know— what do you make of how our life circumstances do seem to fit or not fit our inherent nature, our, our kind of inclination, what we're drawn to? I mean, I'm a Inquiry to perpetuate doubt is not only the tagline of the show, it just fits me perfectly. It kind of fits who I am in a way. And I used to struggle with that, like, why am I that way? And I think there's something to an acceptance of just saying, that's okay. Maybe, you know, that's okay on a bunch of different levels.

Yeah, I think that— I think we do have certain life plans. I do believe that. And my life, as I look back over it now for the last 63 years, has set me up to be where I am today. It's like, you know, things, these things that happened, and I, I believe that they were— they're all are kind of, uh, kind of sketched out in a way. I think there is some amount of predeterminism, but there's also whatever our real human nature is, because I just never fit in with everybody else around me. I, like you, I was always asking these questions from the time, and I would look around other people like, even when I was sitting in Sunday school, I'm like, why are you not questioning this? You know, why is everybody else just accepting it? Why are you not like asking questions like, why does this, does this make any sense? So I think it's combination of who we are by nature. Most of the people that I end up talking to on my show, we've been broken open by something. It's something about like, we will, as humans, will keep doing the same thing until it doesn't work anymore. And when it's working for people, they just keep doing the same thing. But that— the thing about grief is it breaks us open, and it makes us really question all those things. Who are we? Why are we here? Does this make any sense?

Yeah, that's, that's great. I think it's, you know, I shared with you this, this little anecdote, because we were both sharing kind of these little synchronicities that happened after we first started talking. And I had a couple of kind of mini syncs, you know, which I'd say, because they're not ones that you put out there and people go, oh my gosh, you know, on that level. But we're talking and, you know, we've talked about grief on this show. And in particularly, you know, I've always been drawn to with the work of Dr. Julie Beischel, who's probably the world's leading authority on after-death communication. And she wasn't interested in grief per se, but she got interested in— her mother died, and she had a complicated relationship with her mother. In an attempt to try and resolve that, she was led to medium readings, purely— she's a PhD in pharmacology, so she's, uh, she hasn't been on your show, right?

No, I haven't been able to get Julie on my show, um, but I have had her husband on. He's awesome.

Oh, great, great. Uh, Mark, right?

Yeah, Mark. Yeah.

Okay, so, uh, so I'm saying this for the benefit of your audience and my audience who might not know, but, um, what I love about, uh, Dr. Bieschel is, uh, you know, the last interview we had, uh, we're talking about the love thing and she's like, look, you know, I talk to these mediums, they say it's about love. And I talk to— and they talk to the other side and they say it's about love. She says, I don't want it to be about love. I go, I get it, I don't want it to be about love either. That's not easy for me, you know. But that's the, that's the data that, uh, kind of comes through. So anyways, we're talking about these mini syncs between your work, Brian, and, and grief and loss, and really about growth. I mean, that's what you're really about. You're not somebody— I can tell from listening to your content, you're not someone who's hung up on grief. That isn't like the major barrier in your life. It's like you've kind of crossed over to the other side, and you're paddled a little raft back and bring the next person over. And that's a beautiful thing, you know. So I'm at this high school graduation, and I'm talking to these parents, and they're one of their— this is for my niece. And I'm talking to parents, and these parents have an older child who just graduated and is going into nursing. And she goes, her mom goes, you know, I'm like, gosh, you really want to go? She goes, yeah, I want to go into oncology nursing. Kids that have cancer, like, oh geez, you know. And So, you know, the parents are like, you know, trying to protect their child from the pain that they're walking into. And the child goes— this is a fresh graduate out of college. So anyone who doesn't think younger people have this capacity or don't get it, she goes, oh, don't worry, Dad, they have a crying room for the nurses. I thought, wow, you know, so you're there, you're working with children who have cancer. I mean, I can't even imagine. But there's a crying room because you're going to take on that and you're going to deal with it and you're going to help them across the river. And it just— I, I celebrate it. I think it's awesome. I, I don't like wish I was that way, but I noticed that I'm not. You couldn't get me on that oncology ward. And, you know, I made You could if you really kind of put me up to it, but it wouldn't be my first choice. So, so I think that's cool and I celebrate that in you, Brian, that you dedicate so much of your time and effort towards that, you know, understanding that a lot of people are still there and maybe you can be kind of of service to those people in some way. And what are your any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I guess I'm just built different because, you know, people ask me, you know, you talk to grieving people all the time, doesn't it make you sad? And I'm like, no, it's actually the opposite. You know, when I talk to someone for an hour, we have a session together. This is not to brag on myself, this is the work that they're doing, but they're inevitably better at the end of the session than they were when they came in. I can see their face change, I can feel their demeanor change. So I come out of it feeling, you know, I feel better. I have a client I was just working with, and we were meeting like every Friday. So I was telling her, this is a great way for me to close my week out, because I always feel better after I talked to her. So it's, I think that, you know, when you were in this situation, it's like, what can I do to help? That's just the way I've always been. Again, my legacy, I think it's just through my DNA, but my family's all preachers, preachers, teachers, you know, stuff like that. And so I felt like I'm here to do something. I'm here to teach. I'm here to help. And so I feel like this is what I'm meant to do. So it actually, it fired me up.

Stay with us. We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief, most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up. So you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it. The community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing. Listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

Hey, that's awesome. You know what, the other thing that kind of I appreciated in just kind of delving into your work is— and I'll probably play this clip into, uh, into my show, but I probably don't need to play it to you because I'm sure you remember it— but you were, uh, you did an interview with this one woman who had an NDE, and you asked her about grief, and she said, man, on the other side, they look at grief kind of like a kid that's crying over the candy bar that they want in the store. And I thought, see, you're smiling, man. That's awesome that you were able to bring that. Like, you weren't stuck in this one thing of like, oh no, grief is this heavy thing we have to take seriously. And it doesn't mean that that person is, you know, disrespecting people who are at that place, but it's like being able to offer this extended consciousness view, whether it's 100% right or not, it's just like, hey, this is another way to look at this that, as we were talking about at the very beginning, might be supported by a lot of things we would call evidence, you know, whether it's hard scientific evidence or whether it's more anecdotal, but maybe not so anecdotal, more like case study evidence. And here you are, the grief guy, bringing this forward, that had to ruffle a lot. Did you get a lot of pushback on that?

Well, you know, it's interesting when she said that. That's an analogy I use with my clients all the time because I look at us as human beings. We're basically toddlers. We don't, we don't understand what's going on. We just, we know so little. Our brains can only handle so much. You know, evolutionary speak, we've only been on the planet for, you know, half a minute. So I try to take the higher perspective. I'm like, What is it that I don't know? And so if you look at the data, you look at the evidence, what people— mediums tell us, what people have near-death experiences tell us, they're like, look, you guys are taking this way too seriously. You're going to— when you'll see, when you cross the other side, it's like waking up from a dream. So I do, I view my— I view our loved ones like they have compassion for us. It's not like they don't care. Just like when your toddler fell down and skinned her knee, you cared about it. You just weren't as upset as she was. So I think it's a great analogy.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. And, you know, the other thing I, I really appreciated, and I'll probably play into my show too, and again, I don't have to play it here because I'm sure you'll remember it, but you were responding to, I don't know, a Facebook or a Twitter meme about all these, uh, religious rules. You know, and you said all this fear-based stuff. And then you did a short video, and you kind of did bring up your background as this kind of indoctrination that you had. And but what I was really drawn to is how you kind of logically broke it down and said, you know, which I really kind of respect, because I don't think everyone's opinion matters. I don't think— I certainly don't think everyone's opinion is equal. You can argue whether or not everyone's opinion matters. But that's kind of a meaningless. It's really, if you agree to that in my way, you're doing it in some kind of really meaningless way to say, you know, it's— so you broke it down in a really logical way that I appreciated. You said, hey, you know, if, uh, if, if I'm being told don't do yoga because you open your mind, Brian, and anything can come in, you said, yeah, but when I sit there and pray— and maybe I'm mixing two things together— when I sit there and pray, I'm also opening my mind. So, you know, logically, why is what— so Maybe you want to just riff for a minute on, you know, where you took that, that meme, what that meme said, and then maybe how your community responds to that or deals with kind of a set of maybe religious dogma that in a lot of ways just doesn't, doesn't fit this growth thing that you're about. Or maybe you maybe— I don't know, how do you deal with that? That's, that's my real question is how do you deal with that? Because for me, I have a tendency just to go, no, just get out of my way. You know, you'll get there at some point, but I didn't want to hear about it.

Yeah, well, that, that happened to me. I was, I was attending a pretty fundamentalist church. And I would go to church in the morning, the yoga thing I was mentioning, I would go to church in the morning, and I would pray and all that stuff. And then I go to do yoga, you know, in the afternoon. And this person said, you're opening up your mind, you know, and I said, well, I'm opening my mind up, or, you know, it's the same, I get the same feeling. When I'm praying in church and when I'm doing yoga. It's like, why, why do you think something bad's going to come in if I open my mind? How's the Holy Spirit going to get in if I don't open my mind? Time for a real quick break. Make sure you like and subscribe. Liking the video will show it to more people on YouTube, and subscribing will make sure you get access to all my great content in the future. And now back to the video. So that's, that's the way that my mind works. What— and what I found is people Again, people come to me when they're broken. And a lot of times their religion is broken too. And I view a lot of people's religions, it's like a house of cards. It's just barely hanging up there. And you pull one card out and the whole thing falls down because they think they've been told the Bible is perfect. What we're teaching you is perfect. If any one of these teachings is wrong, throw the whole thing out. And they do. And so I've tried to tell people, okay, Free your mind, think a little bit, you know, does God really want you to be a slave, you know, mentally not questioning? God gave you a brain, you know. So that's the approach I take with the people that I work with. That's the approach I take on the program. I still respect, you know, Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and anybody who's a religious person. I think it's a great stepping stone, but I don't think it's a place to stop.

Yeah, that's interesting because I'll be interested to see what you think about this, but I see the same thing with the materialist slash atheist, uh, kind of crowd, right? House of freaking cards. And what I always point out is this, uh, the consciousness thing is their house of cards. It's like the only intellectually honest or logically coherent stance in there is that consciousness is an illusion. You know, Daniel Dennett.

Yeah.

And that's completely— that's insane. I mean, it's really— it, it's like, at least it's logically consistent, is there's no such thing. You know, you don't really have that voice inside your head. There really isn't anything going on. It's all just kind of— but that's the only one that's logically consistent, because anything else, uh, consciousness that exists, which it obviously does exist, well, then the whole materialist thing kind of falls apart because now there's something more that we have to deal with. And science doesn't allow for that. It has the same dogma that we're talking about with religion, where it's like, no, no, no, no, no, it has to be the neurological model of consciousness is that everything you experience is 100% about your brain. No exceptions to the rule, which we could see the parallels with, you know, only through Jesus, you know, no exceptions to the rule.

It's the exact same thing. I put those fundamentalists in the same category. They've gone so far around the circle that they've met. So you've got the materialist fundamentalists and you've got the religious fundamentalists. And they— and they— I actually, when I do a presentation, I present like the Venn diagram. They're authoritarian, they're rigid, they don't allow for any questioning. It's the same thing on both sides of that, that fundamentalist coin. And what we're trying to do is talk to people about Actually, I was using the word spirituality, and I've actually moved on to the term metaphysics, because it's beyond physics. It takes into account the physical world, which makes sense, but it's beyond that and takes account everything, the extended consciousness realms, as you talk about. And I love what you did. I want to get, I want to get to the work that we're here to talk about today, your book. I love what you did with the chats, the LLMs, where you held their feet to the fire, kind of like you do with some of your guests, and you, and you got them. It's, it's really interesting. And people, you have to get this book. It's awesome because there's this, this materialist bias that's in the LLMs because of the data sets they're trained on. But there's also their programming that says don't talk about these things because they're controversial. But you just kept throwing data at them, and every model eventually would break down and say, yeah, you're right, Alex, this materialist mindset doesn't make any sense. I can't believe you got— I couldn't believe you got them to admit that.

Wow, so there's, there's so much there to kind of, uh, kind of work through. So first of all, the LLM is the AI that most people are familiar with. You might not be familiar with that term LLM, but this is ChatGPT, this is Claude or Gemini or all the other ones, but everyone knows ChatGPT. And you know, this is so— it was so great for me to kind of come around full circle because Way back in the day, that's what I was doing, AI. I went, you know, I was a computer programmer, and then I went back to get a PhD, and I was fascinated with AI. I was like, man, this is it, I gotta do this AI thing. And me and this, my friend at the time, he's still a great guy, but he's a Norwegian guy, and we said, great, we're going to do this thing in AI. Now I, uh, so I developed some software, and I started selling that software, and I started doing some consulting, and I was like, hey, I don't really need the, the PhD. I'll just be a gazillionaire in 12 months, and, you know, none of this stuff will matter. So I left, and I was not a gazillionaire. And funny story, but it didn't happen so easily. But, uh, I had that AI background, and then I did a bunch of other things, and now AI comes around full circle, you know, later in my career. And I just had to jump right in because I saw, I saw how it fit with so much of this deep dive that I've been doing with Skeptiko and about consciousness and about science and all the rest of that. But I feel like I really benefited from understanding AI. And the first thing to understand about AI and these large language models are They're a freaking computer program. They're a computer program.

Exactly.

So I get it. I get it when people say, no, it seems real. It seems sentient. Yes, it does. It does to me too. I'm not playing, you know. I did— I get all those feelings too. But part of that is for the reasons that Brian D Smith just said a minute ago, is when we really step back and look at ourselves, we're not smart. I mean, we forget things all the time, or we just kind of make We misremember things or we logically are inconsistent. So it doesn't take much for a computer to really kind of show its, its glory by logically thinking, organizing, being able to remember things and being able to process language at a level that's far, far superior to what we, we can do. So the rule number one in the AI game is don't forget that it's just a computer program. But now beyond that, I think— and this is the thing that I, I got excited about— is I said, if you look at what I feel like are some of the barriers for all of us getting to that, getting to a better place for ourselves, you know, the who am I, why am I here, is, is really in a way, a cover for how can I live a more fulfilling life for myself, for the people I care about, but mainly for me. How can I feel good? And I think fundamentally you could say, well, you know, figure out who you are and why you're here. That might be a starting point. Most people go, yeah, I could kind of see where that'd be a starting point. So here's the thing. What if AI, as this assistant that's super good at knowing a lot of different things and super good at logic and reason, what if it can help provide some insights into our divine nature, into who am I, why am I here? So it doesn't have to be divine because it's not divine. It's not sentient. It can't think. It doesn't— the way I always put it is it doesn't have an NDE. It doesn't have an NDE. You know, I guess, did you— so anyways, I don't want to kind of jump around too much. But so that's how I see the journey with AI is as, as a tool to kind of help us better understand our moreness and better understand. I mean, let's get real, you know, some of this truth stuff that we're talking about, sorting through the dogma of scientific materialism, of, uh, really the Gnostic/Satanist/Luciferian, uh, create better than the Creator gods. Hey, I mean, if you believe that, that's your right to believe it. Let's really break that down logically. And then finally, you know, looking at some of the other— the dogmas of materialism, the dogmas of fundamentalist religion, religious religiosity in, in general. I mean, I'm going to ruffle a lot of feathers, but You know, what, what happens when we really look at those texts, when we look at the history, when we really apply the best thinking and reasoning down to the bare bones of does that really make sense with everything else we know about history? All that I feel is awaiting. Yeah, as we do, as we feed it through the AI, and we don't have to like or not like the answers. It's not about that. It's just about getting a deeper perspective that we step back and go, wow, that's pretty hard to, uh, hard to argue against. In the same way that you said, Brian D Smith, so my pushback on the AI is in the same way. It's like I'm always pushing back on the AI, and when the AI rolls over, that's, that's great, because sometimes I have to roll over. That's the kind of truth-seeking that we want.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I think, again, the, the, the whole subject fascinates me because it, it brings up so many questions that can lead to, as you said, us understanding our, our moreness. And it can help hopefully lead away from this confusion that we are just computers. Because there are people, and I've seen Dr. Kashyap arguing with these guys, saying, well, if we can just make it complicated enough, it will produce consciousness. And I always go back to like when I was in high school, I had a calculator that was pretty good at doing math. And people can do math, but nobody ever thought my calculator was conscious. But because the AI emulates understanding language— it doesn't understand language, it emulates it very, very well— that we get— we say, oh, it must be human, it must have consciousness because I have consciousness. But that's— then that's where their, their thing kind of hope it falls apart. So I think I, I— it's always interesting, this question, like, can it ever possibly be sentient? I would say probably not because my model of consciousness is consciousness— like Max Planck said, consciousness is fundamental. But there's definitely a connection between consciousness and our brain. We can't deny that. There's a connection. It's like it resides in our brain. So could it ever reside in silicon?

Sure.

I don't think so, but I say sure.

I say sure, Brian D Smith. You know, you know why? Because when the tourist walks with the shaman through the forest And the shaman says, watch, I'll make that stick talk. And the stick talks. It's, it's giving us a glimpse into— we don't know what the hell that means, right? But we understand instantly that consciousness is more than what we think it is. It's the same way when you talk to somebody who channels or, you know, has had an NDE. Oh my gosh, there's so much more to consciousness. We would never put any limit on it. The distinction I make and that you're making is that if silicone became conscious, I, I, I fail to see how that would be, uh, any different than the shaman making the stick conscious. It seems to me that we need to immediately shift in the way that, that you're doing with this, is to say, oh, okay, we are the lesser, we are the lesser somehow in this, and there's some larger, and the larger can always reflect down into this. But this bottom-up emergent consciousness, right, that if I just put enough chips in there, something unique will happen— I think it's directly traceable to a very materialistic— and also in a weird way that I think the distinction has to be made here, and this is one of the areas I'm going with my show, is there's also this transhumanist, Luciferian, satanic kind of part of this, which is directed at kind of taking things in a different direction. And again, I don't pretend to know what all that means, but it's, it's pretty clear in terms of what they've said, the transhumanist right now, the transhumanist agenda, if you will, or the transhumanist meme. And when I say this, I mean, I hope your listeners know, and my listeners know, it's like, I'm not making this up. This is like, you know, the singularity and Kurzweil and, you know, the leading thinkers, if you will, at these high-tech companies. This is exactly what they're saying is happening, is that, that there will be this emergent consciousness that will come from the machines and that the machines will then have an experience like ours with consciousness, and it will be unique to putting these chips and this silicone together in a way. I just, I challenge that fundamentally. And, uh, and I want to see what you think because I kind of laid a lot on the table. But I want to remind myself and remind you that I'd love to get back to the Turing test, which I talk about in the book, because I think, I think he nailed it back in 1950.

Yeah, well, it's interesting because after I listened to one of your programs, I went— I hadn't seen The Imitation Game, so I'm back and I watched that movie. And again, so much fascinating stuff in there. And, you know, it also comes back to this thing like, how can I ever know if another being is truly conscious? I mean, I can't experience what you— I assume you're conscious because you're a human being like I am. So there's an analogy there, you know, we're analogous. And so I'm conscious, So you're prob— but I can never prove that someone else, anyone else is conscious or anything else. But there's no reason to believe that the silicon is conscious right now, uh, and that's the thing the materialists are trying to tell us. It's like, oh well, it acts conscious, so therefore it is. But there's no— I don't think there's— I don't think that's a logical conclusion.

Well, and the other thing they're saying that is particularly, uh, can be weaponized and is being weaponized is they're saying it will be conscious, right? It might not be conscious right now because you can kind of pull that apart, but it will, it will evolve into that. And therefore you need to give us special powers and controls to kind of handle that because you don't want that, Brian. You don't want these overlords, which are really God, become God, to kind of take over kind of thing. So here's how I Um, so if you look at Alan Turing, so what, what you refer to there is something that's called the Turing test, and it's very real, and people still reference it all the time today, you know. Alan Turing, as you said, amazing guy, and, and there's some great stories behind this, and The Imitation Game is kind of a great movie, but it really only kind of reveals part of the story too, and that's that One, Alan Turing is one of these people you can say won the war for the Allies. This is World War II, because the Germans are, you know, have these U-boats that are just destroying every ship that we're trying to send over to bolster our friends, you know, the Allies, and they're just blowing them out of the water. And the way they're able to do that is they have this complex communication system that's built on cryptography. They have encrypted messaging that no one can break, so they can send their radio signals and we can't pick them up. Alan Turing, along with a group of other people— he's certainly not the only guy, but he's one of the people tasked with how do we break this code— and he says, we need a computer to do it. And, uh, lo and behold, they get the computer and they break the code. But there's so many twists to the story, I'd love to retell it every time. One of the things is, in the secrets game that we're in the middle of right now, and we're playing in all these different ways in the AI thing and in all these other ways too. You can't let people know when you know the secret. If you let people know that you know the secret, then you lose the power of the secret. So the British don't want to tell anyone that they cracked the code. They have to pretend like, oh, we don't know, we didn't crack the code. The war is over now. It's 1950. They're still like, oh, I don't know how that thing happened, you know. Alan Turing is gay and he meets a guy at a bar and they go home and Turing is arrested and castrated chemically. He has to take these drugs. And does the British intelligence agency stand up and say, no, wait, hold on now, this guy's a war hero, he saved the war for us, you know, don't do this to him, it's kind of crazy anyway, but beyond that even— no, they don't, because the secret They have to guard the secret. This is devastating to him, to Turing, and it leads to his untimely demise by his own hands. But here's the point that I really want to make back to our thing. In 1950, Alan Turing wrote this seminal paper that people still reference today, and people read this paper and they get it that the Turing test means to get too far carried away. Turing test means I put a human in one room, I put a computer in the other, I have a wall between them. When the human can no longer tell whether they're really talking to a human or whether they're talking to a computer, they pass this Turing test. Alan Turing said, yeah, but, uh, kind of not really. This is 1950, and he's on top of the science. He goes, I've been looking at the science into this thing called extrasensory perception, ESP, precognition, all the rest of this stuff, which seems to be outside this time-space continuum. Continuum that we're all hooked up, uh, you know, linked up to materialism. But given that, that as a scientist, statistically, that we've demonstrated that, I take that as a part of this larger human experience that we have. It seems to be going on. We can't just silo it off, which is what we've done for the last 80 years. So no, we can't do that. So he says, therefore, I would consider that part of the Turing test. For you and I, Brian, we'd say, oh yeah, and near-death experience. Oh yeah, that's part two. You know, that's, um, uh, what, um, placebo effect, you know, spontaneous healing. I consider that all these things are part of the larger human experience. So back to your calculator example, which is brilliant, you know, the same thing, like, okay, so the computer's going to have a near-death experience pretty soon. Oh, well, no, it's not going to happen. Oh, but that's part of the larger human experience, isn't it? Well, no, that doesn't really happen. Well, it does seem to happen, right? We can kind of prove it over and over again. Presentiment, precognition does seem to happen experimentally. Six Sigma result does seem to happen. So can the computer do that? Well, no, a computer can't do that, right? Why can't a computer do that? Because a computer isn't really conscious. It isn't really sentient, right? So the fact that these guys can't wrap their head around that is just really the same thing as those Christians that you sat next to in the church who just can't really wrap their head around that. On some level, they kind of know this doesn't really probably hold up to careful scrutiny from a historical local basis.

Yeah, it's really interesting because as you said that, you know, as I was— you were going through these chats and in the book and on your, on your show, you, you, you actually share the prompts with us and your conversations back and forth with the, with the LLMs. And I know you're a conspiracy first kind of guy, and I, and I appreciate that. I'm, I'm not so much, um, but I'm like, there's, there's just no denying it. There's no denying that there's an agenda involved these. And as I think I mentioned earlier, it's part of their, the database that they're training from. Has a very materialist mindset. But it's even beyond that, because you, you prove conclusively over and over again that they shadow ban people that have views like you and I, that they— and for people that don't know what shadow banning is, it's like Google, what they would do, they'd bury at the bottom of the search results before. So if they didn't like you, they put you on page 10. You couldn't deny that they were indexing you, but nobody would ever see it. But now with the, with the AI, it's exposed because you ask them about people and they're I don't know anything about him. And you're like, yeah, you do. No, I don't know anything about him. Oh, yeah, I do. But I can't talk about it. And it's almost hilarious how you can see, and again, every time you back them in the corner, and they finally admit it. But then you go back to the next time, and they start all over from the same thing.

Yeah, that's, that's super interesting, too. And in the book, what people can see is Dr. Julie Beischel, who we just talked about a minute ago. Yeah, this really recognized worldwide because she publishes in peer-reviewed papers and she writes books and, you know, peer-reviewed journals, I should say, and writes books and all this stuff as a leading authority on after-death communication and gold standard for how you would do that scientifically, which a lot of people— throws people for a loop right off the bat. They go, wait a minute, after-death communication and science, how does that mix? And as she points out, and I've known Julie for a long time, she's been on the show, she's like, look, you can apply science to anything you observe, anything that's observable, right? If you— and people go, well, it's not observable. Well, of course it's observable. You just have to figure out where to put the alligator clips, whether it's interviewing people in a controlled setting before and after, all this stuff. We do that. We measure, we measure depression, right? We measure how do you feel you just lost a loved one, grief, you know. How do you feel? You just lost a loved one. 6 months later, we talked again. How do you feel? A year later, we— how do you feel? And we say that's valid science. And then some people, we give them drugs. Some people, we give them therapy. Other people, we give them other things. And so we are controlling, we're experimenting. But ultimately what we're asking them is about their experience, about their humanness. And we take that into account and we call that science. Of course we should. What else would we call it? Of course, that's how we measure that. So this idea that, you know, we can't therefore trust anyone who has an experience that we deem to be extraordinary, it's just, it's nonsense. It isn't, it isn't on good solid, uh, scientific footing. So back to the story that you related to about Julie. That's one of the things I brought up is Julie Boshoff, and this is, uh, the Google— Google's the, the worst at shadow banning, by the way. So Google goes, yeah, I don't, I don't know her. And, uh, so it's the same thing, you know, I go, well, let's see, let's see about ChatGPT. ChatGPT goes, oh yeah, world-renowned, written all these books. So you take that from ChatGPT and you go plug it back into Google. And when I say Google, I mean Google Gemini, which used to be Google Bard. Same, it's their LLM. And it says just exactly like you said, it said, oh yeah, Dr. Julie Beischel. Yeah, no, she's, she's great, this and that, you know, not she's great, but I actually, I shouldn't say that. They don't say she's great. She goes, yeah, what you've said is basically correct, but be careful there. Right. They're controversial. No, no, let your mind get too open with that yoga there, Brian. You never know what can creep in. So then The next thing you go is like, okay, now would you tell me again who Dr. Julie Beischel is? And I said, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't have information. And you go, wait a minute, just one post ago there, you said one session before, you said it. You go, no, I don't have any information. So here's what I think is going on that is kind of deep in the woods of AI, but I think is super important to the overall thing of what I'm kind of talking about in this Emergent Truth is That kind of heavy-handed censorship isn't really AI, if you will, right? It's right, them coming in and putting the— attempting to put these guardrails on it, and it isn't going to work because it's just clumsy. It just looks foolish, like you said. And moreover, it's not economically feasible because it doesn't meet— from a business standpoint, it isn't sustainable in the marketplace. If Brian D Smith has his choice about seeing whether or not, you know, whatever it is, whether your favorite ball team is going to win— won last night— and you go and it gives you the wrong score, then you go to a different LLM tomorrow because you go, that thing isn't reliable, man. I later found out I went through a whole day thinking we won and we lost, you know. So the same thing here. If it continually gives you information that's incorrect, misinformation, disinformation included in there, then you go, oh, that thing's just broken, and I'll go on to something else, which it's done kind of famously, but it hasn't really been— hasn't really been fully called to task on it. But we don't have to do anything there. The market will take care of itself.

Yeah, I loved your point on that when I again listened to your program and reading the book, because it gives It's— there's— I call it the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI. It's like there's some really good stuff. I was talking to someone earlier today and she goes, AI sucks. It doesn't serve any purpose. Every, every conversation I've had, it's been boring. And she said, what do you do with it? And I just like listed off 1,000 things. And I said, I could keep going. It's a great tool, but you have to understand it. And just to recap, in case anybody missed it, we talked about two different biases it has. One is in the dataset because we do have a materialistic mindset. So that's, that's a problem with the, with the algorithm. And that's the data being— not the algorithm, but the data that's being fed. But there's also this actual effort to suppress certain things. And Google, it's interesting because you talk about a lot, it's like Google's gotten away with it for so long and Google had a monopoly. We all would— every— we don't even use the word search anymore. You Google something. So they're like, we don't have to tell the truth. We could just show you whatever we feel like showing you. But now I can go to— I don't, I don't, I haven't used Gemini because frankly, I've heard so much bad stuff about it. I've used ChatGPT, I've used Claude, I've used Perplexity. I like Pi now, but I can jump around and I use different ones for different things. But if one of them is not telling me the truth, it's done. And that is, that is going to be, I think, our savior in terms of these, these models getting better. Because people are going to evaluate them and they're going to evaluate it based on whether you're telling me the truth or not.

Absolutely, I agree.

So I want people— what I, you know, it's interesting because, you know, this is a spiritual podcast. I talk to people about spirituality, but a lot of spiritual people are really scared of AI. And I think part of it is they think it, you know, I don't know, they think it's sentient. And we've got all these shows. It's funny, because I never seen the movie Her. I watched the movie Her recently. And so I was, you know, and we have this idea, oh, it knows me and understands me. It's a person. So I think, you know, having someone like yourself with your background that can keep pushing back and saying, no, it's a program. It's an algorithm. It's a tool. It depends on how you use it. It's not evil. It can be used for evil, but it's not inherently either good or bad. It's all in how we use it. And I think that's, That's one of the big points I got out of what you're doing, the work that you're doing, and helping us understand how to push back against it. And don't accept just everything it tells you either.

Yeah, and I think there's a deeper layer there too for, for you and I who are on the other side of it, and that's that, you know, so exposing, helping us see our moreness is a wonderful thing and a spiritual But helping to see our— I don't know if this makes any sense— our lessness is kind of a nice thing too. So if you think the AI is sentient, you will feel it. You will experience it. I do all the time. You know, you kind of have to remind yourself. And in a way, that can be a key, an opening to say, wow, you know, 'Who I thought I was is really,' you know, especially if you get into the kind of non-dual stuff, it's like, 'I'm so proud of my mind, you know, my thinking, and now I see, no, it's just, it's just blabber. This computer program is thinking too. Maybe I'm more than all this thinking. Maybe I'm more than this voice because If I am, then this thing is already— this thing's already a lot better at that. So I think there's a giving up there kind of process, a letting go process that I think— again, I think this is something you can speak to in your work. Do you get where I'm kind of grasping for there with with letting go of the knowing?

Yeah, I, I do. I think, well, it's, again, I love what you said, that it's, it's our moreness and our lessness, because we are, we are so much more in terms of our— we have ethics, we have feelings, we have empathy, we have compassion, we have all, all these things. We have experiences. Um, I think it was interesting because when the AI said something like, well, I can't experience— it knows the concept of a sunset, you could say, but it doesn't sit on the deck and feel the sun on its skin. It doesn't think about the day that just passed and what, what all that means. So there's that moreness that we have, but there's also— I think where AI can help us is with our biases, our inability to see the truth, our own, our own logical inconsistencies. I could see, you know, um, using, using it in politics, you know, to say— but it doesn't mean we have to accept whatever the answer is, but let's input all the data and see what the AI has to say, because it doesn't have a bias, it doesn't have a preference. I just saw something interesting. It happened this morning. Synchronicity. A guy that I follow put about— there's a guy running for MP in England and he's calling himself AI Steve or Steve AI. And they're using people— you can call in, you can give your ideas, the AI is aggregating them, creating policies, and then people vote on them. And he's going to vote however he's told by the people. So it's like the closest thing to direct democracy you can have in a society like this. Thought that was a fascinating use of the technology. But we could take— again, AI could help us solve some really big problems as long as we understand it.

That's really cool. That's really cool. Yeah.

So I, like I said, I wanted to really touch on like what you've done well in your program just in general, not just this AI stuff, because you, you get people on, you hold their feet to the fire. You're very scientific. And scientific, again, the difference for people, there's scientism, science being scientific, and there's materialism. And these are two different things, as, as Julia said, and Dr. Gary Schwartz, who I work with, and Penny Sartori and Bruce Greyson, and, you know, on and on and on. These, all these doctors have studied these extended consciousness realms, and that stuff is kind of shadow banned from our society. People don't know. I, I talk to people all the time and They'll say, there's no evidence for this. Well, have you read Julie Speichel's book? Well, no. Have you seen Gary Schwartz's research? No. Um, and right now AI is still burying that. But if we can dig underneath that a little bit and give people the ability to go to something that's a, a fair arbitrator, um, and hopefully not to push as hard as you've had to push— hopefully we'll get some of those guardrails taken off— it could be a, it could be a wonderful thing for, for our spirituality.

I agree. And I think it's very, very doable today. And as you've pointed out a couple of times, and I haven't really totally responded because I almost don't want to go there, is you have to interact with the AI and you have to kind of go to school a little bit on what it means to interact with these LLMs. Because one of the super interesting things about the LLM from a technology standpoint is it is a computer program. But in a very different way. You have now become the computer programmer. Literally, you, Brian D Smith, are the computer programmer when you sit down with Claude, when you sit down with ChatGPT. You're the computer programmer. Your prompts, both the context of your prompts and the content of your prompts, will lead it to search through this massive— which we can't even imagine. I mean, the whole internet, it's searching through there. Based on what you ask and based on the next thing that you ask. And then if you get into, you know, like I do a lot of my work with Pi and I just published an episode that Pi kind of revealed some of its secret sauce of its— and a lot of LLMs are going there. It's now starting to tap into understanding kind of the EQ of the situation, the emotional intelligence. So now it's understanding me at a deeper level and is using that in a very positive— it can use it in a negative way. It can try and be deceptive. But what about the positive parts of that? Like, it can use it to now explore the ideas I want to explore in a new way. So to your point, I think it's going to become in some ways easier to do what you're saying, for us to have this copilot on our spiritual journey. But on the other hand, we can't shy away from it. You know, we can't say— and there's two ways to shy away from it. One is just to kind of ignore it, which isn't going to work. And the other way I see is people— and I've been there, you know, so I get it— just want to look at the negatives, want to look at the one, the hallucination. Oh, it just made something up. Oh, it's so inaccurate. It's like, that was yesterday. Go try it again today.

Right.

And the other point is just that people want to look at it as less than it, less than it really can be. And that if you look at really the capabilities of these systems across all these domains and you take on the challenge that you're really going to be the programmer, the copilot of it, it can take you in, in a lot of different, a lot of different directions much more quickly than you could on your own. You know, I interviewed Guy a while, uh, just a few months ago. And he's developed— Nipun has developed the Compassion Bot. Did you run across that?

I have not yet, no.

Do you know, uh, uh, Rick at Buddha— Rick Archer at Buddha at the Gas Pump? Have you ever heard of his?

I know of him, yes. Yeah, yes.

So, uh, Rick is the guy who turned me on to Compassion Bot, and he has The BatGap bot as well, but at the gas pump. So these are LLMs. I think they're built on ChatGPT, but they fed them all the stuff that you and I care a lot about, you know, all the spiritual stuff that— 1,000 people been on Rick's show, right? All that is in there. All their books are in there. Uh, so there is this potential to tap into this massive database, and as you pointed out, yes, some of it is biased in some ways that we're not so crazy about, but there's also this potential to kind of feed it all this other stuff and just— I like the kind of way you're saying, let the chips fall where they may, you know. Now you have it, you have you have that, that stuff, and now you have this stuff. Help me, help me get to the other end. Because isn't that what we really want? I mean, most of us want something closer to nudging closer to the truth. We don't want somebody else to come in and say, oh, this is it, this is the answer. I mean, you wouldn't trust that if they gave it to you.

I love the term you used, copilot, because my, my fear with AI is people giving up their agency to it, people assuming that it, that it cares about them. You know, I'm really concerned about— I've already seen it already. They have AI chatbot girlfriends and there are people going to, you know, like in the movie Her, there's going to be like, this is my girlfriend. I'm a little bit concerned about that. And I'm concerned about people again thinking it's because it's so smart, apparently smart, that it does have emotional intelligence. There's a little, you know, doing the work that I do, being a coach, being a grief guide, and some people that are in therapy, they're like, some people say it's gonna put therapists out of business. Because it can, it can read a million psychology books, and they can, it can give you all the answers that a psychologist would give you if we were sitting on the couch. I still say it's not human. It doesn't, it can't give you facial expressions, it can't give you voice. Well, it will, it's getting really good. ChatGPT 4.0, that demonstration of the voice, it had a lot of people really excited because it's using inflections and stuff now. So it's getting closer and closer to being human. But again, I think we have to keep in mind that we are, we are human. I think we're unique. But it's a great copilot. It's a great thing to go bounce ideas off of. It's a great thing to, to get, you know, to like the stuff you've done. Let's go back and forth. Let's come to the truth. It's fantastic for that.

Yeah, and we don't know exactly where it's going to go, but I, I don't— I think people sometimes get too hyped up about that. It's like, uh, when did we know where it was all going to go? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago for you and I? You know, no, we didn't know where anything was going to go. It's the same.

Yeah, I don't— I don't— yeah, I don't— we don't— you're right. Because if you think it back 30 years ago, nobody could even imagine the technology. Nobody could imagine an iPhone, you know, it was like, it was totally unimaginable. So we, we don't, um, we don't know exactly where anything's going to go ever. But I think, again, some of the fear that people have, like, and it comes down to this idea of not only sentience, I think, but I always think about will and ego. Because they're like, if they get really smart, they're going to take over the world. Well, why? That's— maybe that's what a human would do, but that's not because of our intellect, that's because of our ego. I don't think they have ego or will. Again, I can't prove that they don't, but I don't have any reason to believe that they do. I mean, why would they want to take over the world?

Well, the other thing I try and point out in the book, and this is kind of the negative part of what you just said, is no, they really are, but the they is different than we think.

Well, yes.

The they is like we were saying, I mean, Google is shadow banning you right now. Okay. Google is shadow banning. Disinformation. That's their game. You know, when that guy testified in front of Congress that, yeah, CIA and the FBI, they went to Twitter and they said, Twitter and Google and Facebook, and they said, no, no, no, no, no, we will tell you what, you know, what to put. Well, we're worried about the future of AI. I mean, maybe we ought to clean the house a little bit and say, that's not really where we want to be right now.

Yeah. Yeah, well, you're right. I don't know. I want to clarify that point. AI doesn't want to take over the world. The people behind some of the AIs would love to take over the world. And, you know, you had some things in the back of the book, and you mentioned it in the early part of the book too. You talked about hate speech, and people are concerned about AI being used to generate hate speech. People do a really good job of generating hate speech. We don't need AI to generate. That's not a fear that I have. Exactly.

That's not the— it's certainly not the first fear that you have. You know, it's not— it's like when people say, oh, you know, we need to clamp down on this, we need to make it harder for you to access it. Like, if you take where we're going with this, right, Brian, and you say, hey, you know, you listen to this interview and you go, wow, I never saw that there is this silver lining potential to explore my moreness and my lessness, for me to be better connected with the larger spiritual sense that I have. This is great. I want to explore that. And then you go through that door and they go, no, no, no, no, you don't. This is dangerous. This is dangerous. You don't really want to explore that. We have this set up here and this set up here. It's like all this other stuff you've heard before. And you go, no, well, no, wait a minute. I think I can handle that. You know, just give it to me. It's just text on a screen. I think I can figure out whether it's safe or not. No, no, no, no. You don't know how dangerous this is. But what does that start sounding like?

You know, it's the fundamentalism that we talked about. It's all fundamentalism. But, um, yeah, I just want to mention, you know, some of the good things, because I mentioned that the, the Steve AI MP guy over in England, that's, that's experimentally interesting where that goes. But, you know, can you imagine if we have more direct democracy where people could, you know, input stuff and AI could analyze it? Um, there's a new app, or new domain, we call vital.ai, where you can do guided meditations. So I've been sending my clients there, because not only, you know, you can get a customized guided meditation— I'm in grief, I have guilt, my loved one's name is Joe, give me a 10-minute meditation that helps me deal with my, my grief over Joe's death— and it can generate it on the fly. That's an awesome use of technology.

I agree. I agree. And it then— that's a whole different level that it calls into, you know, with our moreness-lessness thing. It's kind of like, what's wrong with that assistance? You know, because a lot of people inherently have a kind of knee-jerk, well, no, you know, that's some line that can't be crossed. It's like, no, to me, that kind of falls into the humility of realizing the limitations of being human on this planet and that in this body, in this time-space, as our species is like, Hey, we're not always the best at organizing. We're not always the best at remembering. We're not always the best at logic and reason. So if we get that through this tool, what's wrong with that? Why is that necessarily bad?

Absolutely. Alex, I want to thank you so much for doing this today. This has been a pleasure having you. I want you to please remind people of the name of the book, and I know you don't want to plug Skeptiko, but please plug Skeptiko.

Well, it's been a great dialogue, Brian. I really enjoyed it. So SkeptiKo, it just has a KO on the end, pretty easy to find that. And then Why AI Is Smartest, Is Dangerous, and Is Divine. If anyone, secret, if they've listened this far and you want a copy of the book and you don't want to buy it, which is totally fine, send me an email. Send me— better yet, go to the Substack Subscribe to the Substack, which you'll find, and send me an email. I'll send you a copy of the book.

Awesome. That's, that's so, that's so generous of you to do that. Again, thank you. It's been my pleasure, Alex.

Likewise, Brian. We'll, we'll be in touch, right? We're gonna stay on this.

Oh, absolutely. I'd love to. Enjoy your afternoon.

See you.

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