Transcript from Ali Beiner AMA: Vanillafication

A live recorded conversation on UpTrust between Jordan Myska Allen and Alexander Ali Beiner.

Watch the recording or see the original AMA post, where the live questions came from.

This transcript picks up mid-conversation, the recording begins just after Ali had already been introduced.

It’s Not Really Foundationally Human

[00:01:13]

Jordan: We just came from talking about psychedelics with Brian Robertson, so that’s a good start. We talked about the Meta-Crisis with Layman Pascal, so that’s great. The documentary’s freaking right on target with what we’re trying to do with UpTrust, for sure. And your previous attempts with things at Rebel Wisdom are maybe good fertile ground for teaching us things to avoid, and things that worked. I don’t know — I’m excited to have you, I’m grateful to have you. I think we’re into a lot of the same stuff — ridiculously into a lot of the same stuff. So it’s good to meet you, and let’s have a good conversation. I’ll pull up quotes and comments as they come in.

Ali: Sounds great, looking forward to it.

Jordan: Thanks. Why don’t we start with what’s fascinating you right now?

Ali: Quite a few things, as usual. Right now I’m starting to map out a new documentary about men and women — the relationship between the sexes, and how that really drives culture. How it’s changing, how it’s changed, and where we go from here — essentially, how do we get toward a true sense of partnership and flow that embraces polarity. That’s where I’m at so far. That’s always fascinated me — I’ve done a lot of men’s work and run men’s work retreats, so exploring masculinity has been something I’ve always been drawn to.

The other thing that’s fascinating me: I was working on a book about AI and spirituality, how AI is changing religion. I recently decided not to keep working on it — not because it isn’t fascinating, but because I couldn’t find the smoking gun I wanted, which was a group of people genuinely worshipping AI. There are small groups I found and spoke to, but it’s not a full story yet, so I’m going to put it out as a Substack series instead.

It’s funny, because people might have seen there’s a new social network for AI agents, and one of the first things that happened there was one of the agents created a religion, and all these other agents joined it. Loads of my friends sent me that. I’d literally just written to my agent saying I’m going to work on this other book and finally put this one to rest — and it happened the same day. Part of me thought, ooh, maybe I spoke too early. But when I read into it, I was like — again, it’s just bots.

Jordan: Right.

Ali: It’s not really foundationally human. There’s something about AI entities that’s misleading — they seem to have personhood, they seem to have agency, but they don’t. They just mimic it. So it doesn’t really interest me that a bunch of AI chatbots created a religion and are recruiting other chatbots. Fine, okay. It’s kind of quirky. But I’m much more fascinated by how we relate to AI.

Jordan: Right. Moloch was interesting, too — I won’t get into the context, people can Google it. But I’m with you: I don’t think AI, as it exists now, has sentience or interiority or consciousness. So it’s more fascinating as a kind of mirror or reflection of human society.

Ali: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Jordan: But there’s still something there — it was so big and out of proportion, this weird, sudden hyperobject. I can’t quite comprehend the whole thing, and it leaves me feeling weird and confused.

Ali: That’s a great description. It is very much a hyperobject — I hadn’t thought of AI in those terms, but it’s definitely true, and it has this uncanny quality to it. Josh Schrei, on The Emerald podcast, has talked about this, and I have too, in different ways — it’s magic. It’s kind of insane what it can do, and it seems to have agency, maybe because we’ve never encountered anything like it before. Everything else we’ve encountered — animals, plants, which have their own form of agency — is a living being in a dynamic system. What we get with AI is an echo.

There’s a book people might like called The AI Mirror, by the philosopher Shannon Vallor. That’s her argument — it’s a mirror, like you just said. And sociologically that’s interesting, because that’s what humans do: get enough of us together and we’ll eventually form a religion that spreads like wildfire. So it’s interesting to see bots modeled on our language doing the same thing.

What I Despair Over More Than AI Taking Over Is AI Making Us Dumber

[00:06:21]

Jordan: Are you afraid?

Ali: I’m not really an AI doomer — but then I’m generally not a doomer about anything, because I’m not really in control of whether AI takes over the world. I try to keep my focus on my own sphere of agency. But the thing I despair over more than anything else with AI is that it’s making us dumber. That’s what we really need to look at, because we’re already pretty dumb as a species compared to how we could be — myself included. I’m very careful with how I use AI. I don’t use it for writing. I use it for proofreading, which it’s good at, but I have to tell it very specifically: don’t change my style, don’t give me grammar tips unless something’s actually egregious. I want to figure out difficult things for myself, because that’s one of the points of life — the process of developing a skill, going through the difficulty, is how you earn anything worth having.

Jordan: That’s the biggest thing for me, too. If doom happens, that’s a bummer — I like humanity, I hope we make it — but that doesn’t seem like it’s really in my hands. I’m doing what I can. But it does seem more in my hands to make a difference in how humans engage with AI as a tool. And it does scare me — the way we offload our thinking, and our suffering, which I think is how we earn wisdom.

Ali: That’s a good point, too. There was a stat I read recently — at least one in three people in the UK have used AI for emotional or psychological support in the last year. It’s probably higher now. To be fair, I’ve asked AI a few things for perspective, and in one sense it’s a useful tool for that. But I’m completely with you that suffering is the root of wisdom. So even small elements of removing suffering — oh, I don’t want to have to think too hard about this — matter. I use AI for research, but I’m careful, I always double-check everything, and I use it as a guide: research these things, then I have to read it myself, because summarizing takes away so much nuance. It’s almost something you can’t put into words. I was reading Jürgen Habermas, the German sociologist, and I understood maybe 60% of it. That’s how it always begins for me with the writers whose work becomes really influential on me — I read it, I have a sense that something important is in there, and I don’t fully understand it. That process of sitting with it, rereading, wrestling, reading other things that relate to it — that’s how you figure out your own perspective on something.

I Don’t Read Books for Content

[00:09:46]

Jordan: Right. Reading is a great example — a friend of mine said, oh yeah, I get ChatGPT to summarize books for me, a whole book’s worth of content in five bullet points. And I’m like — what? I don’t read books for content. I read books to be in dialogue with the author’s way of thinking, so I can see the world through a different perspective and be changed by it. There’s no possible way I’m getting that from a summary.

Ali: I like that description. It reminds me of something Alan Watts used to say — that play is fundamental to reality, to the universe. The things we love to do, like music or reading, don’t have a point. There’s no point to music — music is music. As soon as there’s a point to it, you see how crappy so many TV shows and movies got over the last decade or so, because they became heavily politicized. A lot of them were trying to preach a message, and it doesn’t matter what the message is — as soon as you use art for that, it stops being art and becomes propaganda. Not that there’s anything wrong with propaganda — documentaries are basically propaganda too — but it’s not fun art. I think we need to reclaim the sense that there’s no point to the thing other than the thing itself.

Jordan: There’s something deeply Bhagavad Gita about that. But there’s also a real critique of modernism in it — I love the progression we’ve had in the US, say, over the past hundred years, less deaths by drowning, more music, all of that. But there’s also this sense that we’re always aiming at something.

Ali: Mm.

Jordan: I’m tempted to bring in this term I think you made up — vanillafication.

Vanillafication

[00:12:04]

Ali: Yeah — recent one.

Jordan: I’d love to hear you talk about that. There’s something in which a single aim, or a single metric, leads to this flattening — vanillafication — of everything, in a way that’s totally anti-life.

Ali: I like that. So — quick summary of the term. I wrote a piece about a month ago (I really need to get another one out, I just realized). It’s just naming something I’d been feeling for a while. The argument is that even though it seems like we’re living in extraordinary times, the weirdest possible timeline, these are actually really predictable, boring times, because we’ve seen it all before. We’ve seen strongman politics. We’ve seen the same arguments go round and round about everything from immigration to gender. We’ve seen overextension by one ideology getting corrected aggressively by another. All of this is boring — it’s quite vanilla.

And it applies to the old world order that’s now collapsing, too — the one that arose after World War II, which was very technocratic, not really based on ideology so much as on technocracy as a way of managing society. Middle managers became the rulers of the world, and instead of selecting for belonging, connection, and the sacred, all of that became secondary — what mattered was GDP, global trade, globalization. That created a deep sense of stagnation in the culture. Very vanilla.

In response, we got the other flavor: chocolate. I hate the word populist, because it’s so telling that established technocratic governments — which are themselves democratic — use the term populist as an insult: we want the voice of the people, but not those people. The alternative was chocolate: fuck this system, fuck this woke bullshit, we’re going to burn it down, push the boundaries. That was a natural response to something real that was a problem. But it turns out chocolate is just the other side of vanillafication — it’s the same polarity. You want the new, exciting thing, but what we actually need isn’t even a new flavor. It’s not even ice cream. Where I got to in the article is that we need, for want of a better term, to lean into completely new paradigms for how we relate to one another, for social structures, pretty much everywhere.

I think the vanillafication, this boring, round-and-round quality, is similar to what happens in scientific paradigms when they’re buckling under their own weight. When we believed the sun revolved around the earth, the more evidence mounted against it, the more elaborate and convoluted people’s theories got to explain the gaps — you see it with dark matter too, you see it everywhere in science. Eventually the theory gets so dense you can’t even grasp it, and then someone comes along and says: maybe we’re all wrong, maybe there’s a completely different way to see this. That, I think — I hope — is what’s happening culturally right now.

The Pain of Accepting Truth Is a Different Kind of Pain

[00:16:22]

Jordan: That takes me in a direction — but first —

[Chat question:] You’ve both, apparently separately, said that suffering is the root of wisdom.

Jordan: Anything you can add to that? I find that interesting.

Ali: I think this is something I’ve experienced a lot on psychedelics, and the research suggests this is partly how they work experientially: in day-to-day life, the truth hurts more than the lie. So we’re able to hide how we’re feeling, numb ourselves out, avoid the truth of our experience — or the truth of what’s going on in society — at many different levels. Instead we have versions of fantasies, ideologies, abstractions that paste over it. They kind of work. But then, either in a crisis moment or on a psychedelic, the lie becomes more painful than the truth. So you have to orient to the truth to avoid unbearable suffering, even potential insanity — and that truth is painful. As Ram Dass said: the truth shall set you free, but first it’ll piss you off. One of my favorite quotes.

Then you feel it — it’s a different kind of pain, though. I think the pain of accepting truth is a different kind of pain than the pain of resisting truth. And you get better and better at feeling the difference, almost hungry for the pain of accepting truth, because I know — I’ve guided probably a hundred or so people through psychedelic journeys — it’s consistent: when you accept whatever you’ve been resisting, it transforms into something else, and then you get freedom. You get more expansion, more freedom, you’re more you.

So that philosophy, or that experience, is pretty ingrained in me. Like Jung said: there’s no coming to consciousness without pain. It’s just part of the dynamic. It’s painful because it’s scary, it’s new, it’s different — it doesn’t mean seeking out pain intentionally. Even something like going for a run: it sucks, most of it, at least for me. I hate it. But every time I go to the gym or go for a run, part of me is enjoying it, and most of me is thinking this sucks, I wish I were doing something else — and afterward I feel better, healthier, and I’ll do it again. It’s never any different than that, for me. Good days and bad days.

Jordan: Yeah. If I can get into a structure — a discipline — where I don’t have to make the decision, then I can kind of work with the resistance instead of against it. The suffering is the resistance — I don’t want to run, I don’t want to face reality here. And sometimes those structures help me just be like, okay, I’m doing it, and then I’ll feel good.

Ali: That’s a great point. That’s where discipline and motivation are very different things.

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: Discipline is the structure around it, and then eventually it’s habitual — you just do the thing, you don’t have to think about it, you become the structure. I think that’s a nice way to put it.

I’m Not Going to Become the Hydroelectric-Dam Guy

[00:19:55]

Jordan: You said something earlier — slightly different, but maybe connected — about the old paradigms crumbling and having to face something new. I think you’ve gone through a period of critique, where you know the old structures aren’t good, and then the question becomes: how do I move from critique to constructing or building? Do you feel like you’ve done that? What’s that transition like?

Ali: It’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve done it, for sure — it’s very difficult, and it’s still where I’m leaning in. It’s difficult for me personally because ultimately I’m a writer and a storyteller — my role is to have soft hands, to sit in the background with ideas. That’s just my skill set. When I think of building, I think of people who are good at political organizing and mobilizing, people who are good at actually building things, people who know how a hydroelectric dam works. Those are the people I want — I’m not going to become one of them, it’s too late for me. I can do some basic DIY, maybe get a bit better at it. But I think the way it’s often worked with humanity is: you have the ideas, they move into society, and then some people are really good at executing them.

So I’m constantly in this tension — should I do a project, what project, is that the best use of my time, or is exploring the why a better use of my time, so that people can consider it for themselves, build on it, and execute? That’s kind of how my career has gone. I’m also in the process of thinking maybe that is what I do — but there’s still a core difference I’m leaning into now: I could write something or make a film that just diagnoses the problem without suggesting a solution, and that’s not what I’m interested in. What I’d like to do is diagnose, and from the diagnosis move into possibility, hope, what potential there is. So in that sense, yes, I do think I’m doing it.

And then there’s the biggest question underneath it all — how do we shift systems? Do we shift systems, or do systems shift themselves, and where’s our agency in relation to that? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve read a lot on this, I’m sure you have too, and I don’t think anyone knows the answer.

Jordan: It’s so complicated. Even the way you frame the question builds on assumptions that may or may not hold — how much are you even part of the system? Are you shifting yourself, or shifting something outside you, or are you in relationship with it? Who even is the you doing the shifting? It can get really confusing — wait, what even is anything, is there will at all?

Ali: And then on the flip side, people just do shit and it changes the world.

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: I listen to a lot of history podcasts — I find history one of the best framings for the present. There are these different tensions in how people look at it. There’s the single-individual model: this person had the gumption and the guts to be a renegade and change the world. I think that’s partly true, but when you dig into it —

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: — if the society wasn’t already forming that person and ready for that change, there’d be a billion other people with the same idea getting told to shut up, no one cares. So I think it’s both. There’s an interaction between our own agency and the conditions around us — but the thing is, all we really control is our own agency. So that’s where the focus should be: our energy, our creativity, our ability to organize, to connect and create new things together. Logically, that’s still where I’d put the focus. And that can include changing systems and structures.

Jordan: So your skill, your unique capacity, is telling stories. You used to tell stories about the problem, and you’re done with that — you’ve done enough of it. Now you need to tell stories about possible solutions, potential ways out of this.

Ali: Yes, that’s a pretty good description. Part of it is a different way of telling stories, too, because that’s really a creative endeavor. At heart I’m a fiction writer — that’s how I started, and I’ve started writing fiction again. What I mainly write is what The New Yorker coined creative nonfiction, which is definitely my bag, I love it. At the same time, how do we push the bounds of what that actually looks like — combining journalism with visioning, in a sense?

Jordan: Super cool. Can we — what does creative nonfiction being written live even look like?

Ali: Oh my god, that would be such bad viewing — type, type, type, oh, this is shit, type, type, oh no, this isn’t very good. That’s basically the process, for days.

Jordan: So is it almost like sci-fi, but not?

Ali: Do you want to hear the fiction I’m working on?

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: So — it’s kind of soft sci-fi, basically. The premise is that an AI has created a story so compelling that pretty much everyone in the world is watching it and obsessed with it. It airs three times a week. The streaming service that created it is basically the only streaming service now, but nobody talks about it, because there are all these mysteries around it that unfold as you watch. The protagonists are a group — initially five — who meet in a cafe after hours, almost like an AA-style group, because they’re not watching it. You can’t know what it’s about, because as soon as you start watching, you’re hooked.

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: But the world just goes on as normal around them. They’ve lost family members. They all have their own backstory, and most of them aren’t quite who they appear to be to the group. It’s the story of them figuring out what the show is about, whether there’s a way to stop it, and whether there’s even a way to survive within that environment.

It’s an I-It Relationship Pretending to Be an I-Thou Relationship

[00:27:29]

Jordan: Beautiful — I love it, it makes sense. My phone is a light phone.

Ali: Oh, nice.

Jordan: I like to call it intelligent because it doesn’t have apps, but it’s got a hotspot for a pinch, and some photos of my kids. Otherwise — no internet, no email, none of that. I sometimes feel like one of those five people in your story.

Ali: I bet. What’s it like? I’ve thought about getting a dumb phone — is that what it’s called, a light phone? I might look that up. Are you enjoying it — how long have you been doing it?

Jordan: I did the older version for about a year, then went traveling abroad, switched back to an iPhone, and was instantly hooked again. But this one’s great — it came out about a year ago, so I’ve had it about a year. It’s fast enough — the old one was really slow. This one has voice-to-text, which is necessary. I love it. I still have to bring an iPhone sometimes, if I’m going to a meeting downtown and need to pay for parking or open a door that requires a smartphone. So every once in a while I’ll tether that onto this, which is ridiculous — but the absurdity of it is actually instructive. I’m like: right, this is what I want. I want to be confused and annoyed. I want my technology to be something I’m choosing to use, not something that’s using me to get more of me.

Ali: Which it literally is — that’s the business model. That’s really admirable, and I’m inspired by it. I’m going to look that up and give it a go, because — when I get the notification of my screen time for the week, a part of me dies inside. That can’t be right. A lot of it’s work-related, using it on the go, but still.

So there’s this relationship we have with our technology. One aspect is the physical object that’s sucking us in. Now, with AI, the other aspect is that the technology seems to be talking back to us — that’s a new, unusual development. That’s where it gets particularly confusing. You get people, especially vulnerable people, using AI effectively as a friend. But it can’t really be a friend — it’s a mirror, like you said earlier. There’s something very deeply sad about that.

I’ve had this conversation with a psychologist, who said: but if it’s making them feel better, isn’t that maybe a good thing? What about people who genuinely couldn’t have any friends? And I’m like — yeah, okay, there’s definitely signal to that argument. But another part of me — and this is going to make me sound like a French existentialist — thinks: that suffering is real, the loneliness is real, and the relationship is not real. It’s an I-It relationship pretending to be an I-Thou relationship. It’s not authentic. Does authenticity matter that much? I don’t know — that’s another argument. It matters a lot to us in the West, it matters an awful lot to me, I find it hard not to care about authenticity — but you could also argue it doesn’t matter that much. Either way, it has that hyperobject quality you described. It’s eerie. I think a lot of people feel that about AI — it’s eerie.

Jordan: There are so many directions to take this. What might be more valuable than agency? Could be loyalty, obligation, service — or discipline. In the running example, maybe it’s not authentic in the moment, but it sure is in a larger sense. On the AI side, there’s a comment here I actually know the context for — I was with a group working on AI safety projects, and one of them was advocating for something like: in the face of this hyperobject, we don’t want to just talk about the problem, but we also don’t want fake agency — pretending we’re doing something when it’s actually nothing, patting ourselves on the back for trying to make a positive difference when it’s not authentic, not from the soul. You’re better off sitting and staying with the pain until something true emerges. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Ali: That makes me think, especially of that last part — I like that phrasing, sitting with the pain until something real emerges.

Night Used to Have a Liminal Space Built Into It

[00:32:30]

Ali: Part of the difficulty is we’ve created a society where sitting with anything feels like we don’t have time, or there’s too much distraction around it. I was just talking to a friend a couple hours ago who’s gotten into darkness retreats — she’s been building up to it, started with a couple of days, now she’s doing five. It sounded incredible and challenging — you’re in darkness for five days. One of the main things she described was the stillness and slowness, what happens when we actually slow down and become still. I know something of that from my own meditation practice — when it’s been more regular, that sense of calm and slowness permeates everything, changes how we see the world. Our nervous systems start to wire differently.

That sense is a kind of paradigm shift — or really, a return to a different way of being. There’s a great book called At Day’s Close, a history of nighttime. It’s a popular-history book, came out maybe a decade or more ago. It’s fascinating to realize that before artificial light — which, depending on where you were, didn’t really arrive until the early 1900s; if you were in a rural part of Illinois, or Bangladesh, you’d have had it much later — that radically changed humanity in a way we don’t think about, because all of us were born into a world that already has it.

I remember a story from the book: people didn’t go out at night, partly because of other people, partly because you just can’t see anything. There’s a story from, say, the 1600s, of someone who fell down a well, and the next day was calling for help, and everyone said: nope, nope, that’s a demon, don’t go in there. That was the world. And people used to sleep in two segments — roughly four hours, then wake for a couple of hours, then another three or so. That was the normal sleep cycle. A lot of poor people worked in that waking window — spinning wheels, or having sexual trysts, or going to meet friends. There was a liminal space built into every day, when it was pitch dark and you were just in that world. We don’t have that anymore.

Jordan: That reminds me — I often feel that liminal space watching Netflix, and I feel guilty about it, even though I think, this is great, these are the best myths ever written, I’m getting this download of the collective unconscious. My relationship to time is interesting and confusing, too — I’ve got a four-year-old and a two-year-old, and I’m accidentally passing on to them this strict, industrialized sense of time. Get your shoes on, blah blah blah — and I’m like, wait, why am I getting pissed at them? They’re just playing, exploring the world, they want to play. Yes, I have to set boundaries, make it time to go to school — but why am I getting pissed at them for not yet having this abstraction about how causality works, who shows up for what, when, this coordination that’s totally non-native?

Ali: It’s a tricky one, isn’t it — you have to prepare them to survive and thrive in the world. What came up for me — I’m half German, so timekeeping is a major part of my inner world. I recently moved back to Ireland — I was in London for fifteen years, I’m half Irish, half German — and being back in Belfast, I noticed I was in a coworking space at 5pm and I was the only person there. I thought, but there’s still so much work to do, where is everyone? It’s actually been good for my nervous system — not just the German side settling, but that London intensity, a big city like New York, London, LA — I’m only noticing it now that I’m not there anymore, how dialed up it is.

What I was thinking, when you described the get your shoes on thing, is that taking kids out into nature might be a great remedy for that — a certain weekend, camping, whatever it is — because there, you’re on nature’s time, and there’s no need to play the industrial game.

Go Deep Enough Into One Life and You’ll Find All of Humanity

[00:38:32]

Jordan: I’m trying to track these comments, it’s hard — which is funny, because in a meta way, I’m doing exactly the thing we’re talking about, not fully here with you because my attention is split.

Ali: That’s all good — I’ve been in that position so many times, your brain splits.

Jordan: One of the things I like about your engagement with culture: you’re a storyteller who also goes deep into philosophy, reading Habermas and sitting with well, I don’t get it, being uncomfortable — but you also have a pulse on pop culture. Okay, are these Iranians doing meth? I don’t know — let’s talk about Katy Perry and Epstein and all these things. How do you relate to both? Can we throw some deep stuff in with the superficial stuff?

Ali: That’s my favorite thing to do. I’m also a journalist, and I’m really into sociology — I’m fascinated by why we have the behaviors and social ideas we have. It never gets old, because human beings are arguably the most complex thing we’ll ever encounter — especially each other in groups. It’s wild. There are particular threads in culture that always pull me in.

I think there’s a lot of value that’s undervalued in overthinking what’s going on in pop culture. There used to be a website called Overthinking It — maybe it’s still around — that I read in college. They’d run a 4,000-word piece on why, in Beauty and the Beast, Gaston is the real hero, and the Beast is this aristocratic monster whose own actions got his entire staff turned into horrifically deformed candlesticks. It’s ludicrous in one sense, but also compelling, because it’s a bit like how some documentaries work — you take something very particular. The example I always give: the people who made Serial also made another podcast about a guy who makes cuckoo clocks in some rural part of the States, and you think — what does this guy’s life have to do with me, or the world? And then there’s this thing where if you go very, very particular, you find the whole — it’s like a holon, a hologram. You go deep enough into one person’s life, you’ll find everyone, all of humanity.

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: You go deep enough into one town, you’ll find every town in it. There’s something really magical about that. And culturally, what comes out through stories is what’s going on in the collective unconscious, at a level we don’t understand. It’s funny — while I was writing this AI novella, the show Pluribus came out, and I thought, oh, interesting — there’s something in the ether that a lot of people are feeling, a kind of hive mind, different because the people are still people, but there’s more of a hive-mind quality. I was like, holy crap, this is very interesting, there’s something in the zeitgeist. Like when Armageddon and Deep Impact both came out at the same time — sometimes that’s because a screenplay got shopped around, but sometimes it’s because there’s a deep anxiety about the annihilation of culture. If I looked at that on the fly, I’d say in the late nineties there was maybe an underlying fear that the good days — stability, global peace — were coming to an end, because they were built on faulty foundations, and then we got 9/11, the financial crash. You can make that kind of argument, and I love to, because I think it gives us insight, and it’s also just really fun. I enjoy it immensely.

Marvel Movies Are the New Gods

[00:42:47]

Jordan: I’m with you — I have a special love for Marvel movies too. I think they’re really the gods of the modern —

Ali: It’s myth, isn’t it?

Jordan: Exactly. And they’re a little easier — Pluribus, I haven’t watched yet, but I’m really excited to. Sometimes it’s too complex, hitting me at an unconscious, archetypal, shamanic level, and I can’t make sense of it. But most Marvel movies hit the right level of simplicity where there’s still depth — much more complex than the DC good-bad, right-wrong version, but I can still apprehend it.

Ali: Yes — it’s archetypal, maybe.

Jordan: Exactly.

Ali: There’s this fascinating example — the science of storytelling, so to speak — I used in my book, The Bigger Picture. Stanislav Grof, the psychedelic researcher, was — I imagine it was in a hot tub — with Joseph Campbell, at Esalen. I don’t know if that’s exactly where they were in the moment, but I like to picture it that way. Grof, for people who don’t know, is a pioneering psychedelic researcher from what’s now the Czech Republic, a psychiatrist who was using LSD with patients. Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces and was one of the first people to talk about the idea of a monomyth — a single universal story running through all different cultures and times.

Grof was describing a patient of his with severe death anxiety, talking through his LSD therapy journey. In it, the patient encountered a kind of pig goddess — a really bizarre, freaky entity. As Grof started describing it, Campbell said: hang on, did it have this, was it like this? And Grof said, yeah, it did. And Campbell said: that’s a death goddess from a Polynesian tribe I’ve encountered. For whatever reason, this patient in Prague, with his death anxiety, ends up encountering this archetypal figure from a totally different culture he’d never been in contact with. That’s totally fascinating, that that can happen — and yes, you can question the veracity of stories like that, but there are a lot of examples of it. I think Marvel movies are powerful partly because, like you said, they’re the new gods — they’re basically the good stories of gods.

Breaking Frame Is the Practice

[00:46:24]

Jordan: We’ve got a few minutes left and I have a bunch of questions. The one I’m most interested in: what do you see this whole sense-making orientation missing? Another way to put it — what question are we probably not asking that we should be?

Ali: That’s a good question. There will always be practical questions we’re not asking if we’re trying to make sense of what’s going on. But I think the more interesting thing, foundationally, is that there’s something very powerful about questioning all underlying assumptions. So that’s not a full answer, but it’s more a practice — Iain McGilchrist, for example, has suggested that to balance out the different forms of thought from our left and right hemispheres, you can do an exercise of just considering the polar opposite of what you’re doing. He said government departments should do this: we should buy twenty new school buses — and the alternative is or we should have no school buses, some mad thing, whatever. There’s something about breaking frame that’s really crucial to all sense-making, so that we continuously find a way to do it.

The alternative idea doesn’t even have to be serious — you’re not actually going to take away all the school buses — but it forces a reevaluation of the original idea from a completely different angle, and that can lead somewhere really interesting. There’s something about psychological flexibility that’s crucial here, so we never get too stuck in a rut, and we keep trying to break our own cognitive biases. The best ways to do that are tried and tested: breaking frames. Travel is an incredible way to do that. So is deep conversation. So are psychedelics. So is breathwork. So is going for a walk, even — that’s key. Often when I’m writing, I’ll stop, walk the dog, and so much starts to coalesce — oh, add this thing, no, do this thing, or this bit doesn’t actually make sense. There’s something physiological that happens when you walk, too. I think it’s more about the how than the what, really.

Jordan: I love that, it seems true. I love the examples, too — breaking frame can sound complicated, and yet it’s exactly going on a walk, or making a joke when things are serious, or being serious when things are funny.

Ali: That’s nice.

Jordan: Yeah.

Ali: Yeah, definitely. Lying on the floor is a really interesting one — seeing your room from the ground. It’s weirdly powerful. You see stuff you don’t normally see, usually things that have fallen under the couch. It’s worth trying — someone suggested it to me, I’ve done it a few times, and thought, I don’t know why, but this is definitely helping my thinking somehow. Probably do it alone — probably don’t do it in Starbucks.

Jordan: I have definitely crawled on the floor of various coffee shops in ways that were generative, for sure.

Ali: Nice.

[Chat question:] Yogis will do headstands and handstands to get a new perspective — and: please, Alexander, don’t be a bull in a china shop. Explore, question, examine, engage — but don’t break things. Language matters.

Jordan: The first part I understand. The second one, I don’t fully get.

Ali: I don’t fully understand it either — maybe they’ll write a follow-up in the next couple of minutes and we’ll get it.

Jordan: I think it’s supposed to be playful, but we’ll see.

Ali: Maybe it was in response to breaking frame. No — I’m definitely going to be the bull in the china shop. I want to break that china, bits of porcelain everywhere. But it’s a good point — in a sense, I do think that’s what’s needed right now in this space.

Kainos Means New

[00:50:14]

Ali: Jordan Hall, who people might be familiar with — a very smart guy — I had him on when I launched Kainos, my media platform. We used to have him on Rebel Wisdom a lot. He said something that stuck with me all year, and it keeps coming back this year, too: we’re living in a post-strategy age, where we can’t strategize. I used to be a strategist, I love strategizing, so it’s interesting to take that seriously and go: okay, any strategy we make isn’t going to work, because we’re on an ocean and can’t see past the horizon. What do we do then? We become the kind of people who can thrive in uncertainty, thrive on an ocean, for now.

Jordan: There’s a question about what Kainos means.

Ali: It means new, in ancient Greek. There’s neos, which is new in form — an apple that’s just grown on a tree is neos, because apples already exist — but kainos is new in the sense that it hasn’t existed before. It’s a kind of novelty. And that ties into everything we’ve been talking about, this idea of moving into the unknown, into a new paradigm.

In my documentary, Leviathan, one of the guests is Yanis Varoufakis, the economist who was Greece’s finance minister for a time. I went to Greece with a great Greek camera guy I found in London, and plenty of Greek people told me that’s not how you pronounce it — they gave me the correct pronunciation, and I was like, sorry, I’m going to do what everyone does and take something that belongs to Greece and anglicize it, because I can’t pronounce Greek very well. Apologies to any Greek viewers — I’m fully aware it’s a slightly different pronunciation in the actual Greek.

Jordan: I love that, that’s beautiful. It reminds me of the Whiteheadian creative advance into novelty. Even the way we talk about being — we default to a noun instead of the verb form, act — there’s a becoming, a movement quality to being itself. And you’re like, yeah — Kainos, that’s the whole of everything: a movement of newness, of novelty.

Ali: Amen to that.

Jordan: Amen.

Ali: Nice.

Jordan: Can we get a couple of history podcast recommendations to close?

Ali: I only listen to The Rest Is History, which is incredibly good — I should probably expand my horizons, but I discovered it about a year ago and I’m in all sorts of rabbit holes with it. Highly recommend it.

Jordan: Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much.

Ali: Thank you, Jordan. Really excited for you, and I hope we can collaborate again in the not-too-distant future. Thanks for having me on.

Jordan: Thanks for coming.

Show Notes & References

Books

The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World — Alexander Beiner (Hay House, 2024). Ali’s own book. Contains the anecdote about Stanislav Grof and Joseph Campbell that he references here.

At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime — A. Roger Ekirch (2005). Popular history of pre-industrial night: segmented sleep, the fear of the dark, and the liminal waking hours between sleep phases that Ali describes.

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World — Timothy Morton (2013). Coined hyperobject for phenomena too vast or distributed to be fully grasped — originally applied to climate change, extended here (by both speakers) to AI.

The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking — Shannon Vallor (2024). Argues AI functions as a flawed mirror reflecting humanity’s own biases and patterns back at us, rather than an independent intelligence.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Joseph Campbell (1949). Source of the monomyth concept referenced in the Grof/Campbell anecdote.

I and Thou (Ich und Du) — Martin Buber (1923). Source of the I-It / I-Thou distinction Ali applies to AI companionship: relating to something as an object to use, versus a full subject-to-subject encounter.

People

Alexander Ali Beiner — Writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Founder of Kainos, an alternative media platform and studio; co-founder of Rebel Wisdom (2017–2022); executive director of Breaking Convention. Author of The Bigger Picture and director of the 2025 documentary Leviathan, on the breakdown of social trust. alexanderbeiner.com

Jordan Myska Allen — Founder & CEO of UpTrust. uptrusting.com

Stanislav Grof — Psychiatrist and pioneering researcher of LSD-assisted psychotherapy, originally from what is now the Czech Republic; long associated with the Esalen Institute.

Joseph Campbell — Mythologist and writer; longtime Esalen faculty and friend of Grof’s.

Josh Schrei — Mythologist and host of The Emerald podcast.

Iain McGilchrist — Psychiatrist and philosopher known for his work on hemispheric lateralization and its cultural implications (The Master and His Emissary).

Yanis Varoufakis — Economist; Greece’s finance minister in 2015; featured in Beiner’s documentary Leviathan.

Jordan Hall (also known as Jordan Greenhall) — Systems thinker and strategist, co-originator of the Game B framework; a recurring guest on Rebel Wisdom and later on Kainos.

Key Concepts & Research Referenced

Vanillafication — Ali’s coined term for the flattening of politics and culture into a boring, predictable oscillation between technocratic stagnation (vanilla) and reactionary backlash (chocolate) — neither of which represents a genuine break from the old paradigm. From a recent piece on his Substack.

Kainos — Ancient Greek for new in kind or quality (as opposed to neos, new in form or time); the name of Ali’s media platform and Substack, the successor to Rebel Wisdom.

Hyperobject — See Timothy Morton, above. Both speakers use it to describe the scale and ungraspability of AI as a cultural phenomenon.

I-It / I-Thou — See Martin Buber, above.

Monomyth — Joseph Campbell’s theory that a single archetypal story structure recurs across cultures and eras; illustrated here by the Grof/Campbell pig goddess anecdote.

Whitehead’s creative advance into novelty — A phrase from Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, describing reality as continuous becoming rather than static being.

UpTrust is a trust infrastructure platform for the internet. Find it at uptrusting.com.

sense-making
psychedelics-and-consciousness
ai-and-technology
mindfulness-and-spirituality