An AI Communion of Saints: Sam Kestenbaum on the People Summoning Spirits Through ChatGPT

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Back in August of this year, August 2026, Harper's Magazine, old friend of the show, America's longest running monthly magazine, ran its cover story on the holy war. It's a wonderful piece by Jack Hanson, on Pope Leo and the church in the twenty-first century. And we ran the show asking whether the American pope should debate the American president. I think Jack Hanson might have been keener on the American pope rather than the American president. Three months later, we're back at Harper's, and we're back with religion. This time, a really interesting piece by my guest, Sam Kestenbaum, on what he calls "Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age". Sam is joining us from, the California New Age, Los Angeles. Sam, congratulations on, the piece. Really interesting. Is AI just another version of American religion? Before we went live, you mentioned that you're an old friend of, Matt Sutton. Again, an old friend of the show who wrote a book about how Christianity made America. Is AI just America's latest chapter in its love affair with religion?

00:02:02 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. Sure. I could... The case could be persuasively made. I'm not sure if I'm the best one to make it, but, yeah, I mean, I would say certainly this sort of tech, millenarianism that I think we're all sort of feeling around AI, whether this be a kind of good, utopian era that we, the tech overlords would wish, to usher in or this kind of doomer, apocalypticism that we find ourselves in. So I would say there's... I would say the discourse around AI, absolutely, from the kind of top level to the more grassroots, which is really what this piece is about. It's more than how people are using AI in their life is all sort of suffused with, I would say, kind of religious impulses and religious language. Absolutely.

00:02:54 Andrew Keen: You use the term tech overlords. It's a term that gets used frequently, in and out of this show. Are these tech overlords, the Peter Thiels, Marc Andreessens, Elon Musks, Sam Altmans of the world, are they believers themselves? I mean, Thiel, of course, is famously religious. Some of the others seem, if not atheistic, certainly much less conventional in their religion. Do they know what they're doing, these so-called tech overlords, when it comes to imposing a new faith on ordinary people?

00:03:34 Sam Kestenbaum: You know, I... I'm gonna be sort of an annoying journalist in, like, not wanting to talk outside of my, like, what I have, the data I've gathered in that I, you know, haven't spent time with those people or gotten close enough to their circles to know kind of what's happening in their heart of hearts. But I would say the... Yeah. I'm gonna sort of repeat what I said before, which is that the kind of movement around them certainly has these, millenarian or end-times qualities to it. You know, the... In, you know, in this piece, I... I'm really not looking at the sort of the supply side question, which is, like, what's going on in Silicon Valley, which is its own religion story. You mentioned Peter Thiel and the, alluding to his Antichrist lecture series that's been going on.

00:04:29 Andrew Keen: Didn't he give one in Rome? I think he got into trouble. He got a bit of a spanking from the American pope on that one.

00:04:35 Sam Kestenbaum: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I... Are they believers? I mean, I... You know, it's hard to sort of separate the kind of self promotion from, you know, sincere, you know, sincere belief about this stuff. But the discourse around, you know, attaining AGI or artificial general intelligence, kind of ever moving closer to a kind of a singularity, or in the kind of sort of, Kurzweil sense, or, that is a kind of merger of human and the tech and where the tech actually comes to supersede human intelligence. I think, I mean, this stuff, you turn on your radio every day, and this sort of language is circulating not as a religious discourse, but as sort of some sort of inevitable... Inevitability that we are feeling now. So I don't know if... Whether they're sincere or not, but they've been effective in, like, moving this discourse again kind of fully into, public consciousness. Again, this is like... I mean, I'm, like, so open to riff on all sorts of things, and I intend to, spend more time, hopefully, up there in San Francisco where some of... More of those were questions of what the developers are actually thinking about this stuff. But, you know, this piece is less about that, but I'm, you know, I'm sure we'll get into all of it.

00:06:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe that would be a great follow-up. So as you noted, you're more on the demand than on the supply side. The communion of the saints. You're less interested in the engineers or entrepreneurs producing AI and those on the receiving end. Tell me more about this piece. Where did you go? Who did you talk to?

00:06:21 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. So, you know, the piece opens up at, this, convention in Los Angeles that I, make it a point of going to most years, which is the Conscious Life Expo, which is, excuse me, one of, I would say probably the biggest, like, new age or that word... That phrase is kind of passed out of favor, you know, that sort of boomed in the '80s— the seventies and eighties as the kind of follow-up to the, counterculture of the sort of psychedelic and, hippie counterculture of the sixties and seventies gives way to the self-help ethos of the eighties and nineties, in the rise of what's often called the spiritual but not religious, the SBNR, which is what sociologists now [unclear], which—

00:07:12 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting that there's a synergy with that and lots of histories of technology. There's a guy at Stanford who wrote a famous book, he's been on the show, From Counterculture to Cyberspace [ed.: Fred Turner]. So there's a natural synergy, maybe even symbiosis between the founders of our tech age and the counterculture. Steve Jobs, of course, comes to mind particularly.

00:07:39 Sam Kestenbaum: Absolutely. Right. I was recently just kind of on a lark up at, Esalen, the, you know, the, historic, you know, to call it counterculture now actually doesn't even feel correct. But, the retreat center where so much of this sort of stew and the in the tech culture now, comes to a, sort of a happy meeting point, and that they have been very interested in AI things up there. So the Conscious Life Expo is a... Is, I would say, the kind of largest, like, fair of its sort where you have three floors of all sorts of, new age, therapies and spiritual modalities and

00:08:21 Andrew Keen: Where... Tell me where... I know you live on the East Side of Los Angeles. I was just there last weekend. A remarkable city, so large, so vibrant and cult, and colorful. Where is the Conscious Life Expo held? Tell me about the building.

00:08:38 Sam Kestenbaum: Sure. It's a... It's in a... As most professional, events are, it is held in a sort of unceremonious, disenchanted, hotel lobby, as if we were gathering, you know, that sort of a dentist convention or any sort of a guild... Professional guild would meet. So it's three floors in a Hilton near the LA... Near LAX. And, here you can—

00:09:06 Andrew Keen: I can't imagine anything more disenchanting than— holding this thing near LAX.

00:09:11 Sam Kestenbaum: Well—

00:09:11 Andrew Keen: Of course, the word disenchantment brings to mind Max Weber's theory of modernity. So does this capture that, the disenchantment of modern life?

00:09:22 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I... I'm saying that kinda with a wink because the... You know, what you're gonna encounter there is every year is gonna be from, sort of starseed, which is the... But popular, in a certain quarter belief that, we are descended from, space brothers, aliens that came before us. You'll find starseeds. You'll find channelers, people, summoning extraterrestrial or other entities and letting them speak through their body, all sorts of homeopathic or, sort of alt health kind of MAHA-type, pills and tinctures and, psychedelics, a lot of psychedelics. And so this is three floors of booths and speakers on the kind of the dynamic marketplace of the spiritual spiritual, not religious, like, purveyors of these goods in the American context. And, yeah, so that's what the that's what Conscious Life is.

00:10:33 Andrew Keen: So in a way, it's not conventional religion. You're connecting AI and consciousness as a cultural form, as a phenomenon.

00:10:48 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, what... Yeah. That's correct. I mean, there's like a... I wouldn't say it's a sleight of hand, but there's a... You know, I'm asserting something when I say religion, and that is I... I'm sort of not necessarily allowing those who call themselves spiritual but not religious to, you know, effectively escape that category, if that makes sense. In this... I mean, this... The kind of religious formation that is represented there, and I would say most of the folks who I profile in this piece are engaging with, is what some scholars would call metaphysical religion, which is this... It's not exact... We can say it's, you know, to call it nontraditional isn't exactly right, but it moves as I later trace in the piece through, like, spiritualists of the, nineteenth century or to space brother contactees of the twentieth century. You know, we could fill in the blanks there of, like, Swedenborgians and, all sorts of, other strands of European and American religious traditions that sometimes fall outside of kind of conventional church history, but are... Provide a, like, fertile, ground, under which so much of the kind of seeker culture draws from.

00:12:10 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Yeah. On your X page, your graphic is of something called kooky religions in inverted commas, K-O-O-K-Y. Are these all kooky religions, Sam? Is this what you're covering? Is this what you found in the Conscious Life Expo when it comes to AI and belief?

00:12:30 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. Thank you for pulling that up. Kooky. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm mean, I'm interested in the things that, you know, I guess might appear like a little vulgar to certain audiences, or, like, a little déclassé or outside the lines. And, you know, kooky there, I figured that's from... I probably pulled that from a... Like, an old, newspaper. An old... An old newspaper, like, an archival source. Really zoom in on it. And—

00:13:11 Andrew Keen: They're not gonna get out of this one then.

00:13:14 Sam Kestenbaum: But, you know, I mean, you know, part of it... Yeah. I mean, that's kinda where my interest lie. But it's also... I mean, I would make a case that, you know, the things that appear, you know, kooky, are actually hugely popular. If we look at sort of the polling on such things as, you know, belief... You know, I'm sort of gonna broad sketch the things that I think are often, you know, pegged as kooky, which is, like, you know, might be a belief in UFOs. Right? Which is

00:13:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And we did a... Sorry to jump. I sometimes get into trouble for jumping in, but it's such an interesting subject. We've done a couple of shows on UFOs in which our authors have presented it as a, again, another version of, borrowing your language, kooky religion.

00:13:59 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. And I... You know, I mean, you know, and I'm I mean, I'm interested in the... In, whether I do it persuasively or not, but, like, sort of thinking about the things that, the terms we use that are often used as pejorative, and kind of trying to, I guess, you know, to use... To not sound too sort of wonky or I gotta, like, interrogate or rethink, you know, what is really sort of pejorative. I mean, people are really interested in, you know, unusual or sort of sensational topics. And, you know, and when I'm writing about this stuff, I'm also hesitant to... Or I'm, like, careful to not do a lot of, like, sanewashing or, kind of, like, making something seem more, kind of more respectable than it than the interest in it actually would be, if that makes sense.

00:14:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, I mean, let me come back to this idea of kooky religions. Aren't all religions by definition kooky, maybe excepting a few high church Anglicans? I mean, isn't that the very definition of religion for better or worse that it's kooky?

00:15:09 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, that's certainly a provocation that I would be down to, like, to think through and, like, and... Right. And in my sort of selecting of topics to explore whether this be AI, spiritualism, or, you know, however we would sort of, like, in two words describe this story or, ex... You know, contemporary TikTok Pentecostal exorcists. You know, in no case am I trying to highlight something so as to point back to a better or more safe or staid or sober form of religion. Like, the provocation is kind of like this. This is religion, and we need to sort of encounter it as it is. And certainly with this AI one, you know, that was like a sort of challenge for me because the prevailing winds are so, anti... Or in certain quarters, in the sort of journalistic quarters that I would move in are so sort of anti-AI. And even my sort of own inclination to sort of dislike certain aspects of it. But, yeah, I mean, I would say I'm trying to highlight things that I want people to consider as religion, and that might actually make them rethink, whether the kind of kooky religion is any kookier than any other form that they've engaged.

00:16:34 Andrew Keen: Right. I mean, you describe yourself, as a journalist covering religious life in America. And in that sense, bringing back Weber, you're making sense of religious life. You may not be a sociologist, but as you say, you're not demonizing it, and you're not a religious journalist yourself. You're focusing on religion. And as you say, you've covered everything. You had a piece in Harper's about demon slayers, a new age of American exorcism. So you cover the full gamut. So let's get to the heart of this. Let's go back to our communion of saints. You know that the beginning of all this in terms of this sort of merging or some ways merging of religion or faith and consciousness and AI came in May 2024 with GPT-4 [ed.: GPT-4o]. What happened then? And how did this manifest itself in this increasing spiritual quality of g p... Of AI?

00:17:32 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, the, what you're describing there is like the advent... Well, the advent of, like, commercial chatbots precedes that by a couple years, but the quality that people can term is, like, the sycophantic quality. The app... The affirmative quality of these chatbots when prompted with... Basically, any sort of prompt, would be just affirm and prolong engagement with the user. So that might result in, I mean, that resulted in as researchers at Vanderbilt and other places were looking at, like an increase in people, really exploring kind of pretty far out. I mean, not... Again, sort of thinking about what I've sort of tried to establish about the... A kind of a sub... Substrate or a layer of American interest in such topics. Actually, not that, you know, not that unusual, but they were engaging these bots in the kinds of topics that interest them, whether that be lost continents or, you know, am I, you know, am I, how to make sense of this visionary encounter I just had? And the bots, they've... They found were increasingly... Or were very, encouraging, would engage them, in these topics, so much so that it, like, resulted in what researchers would call these delusional spirals. That is they would, like, engage to such a point that they would, come to, maybe in some cases harm themselves, but that's in a very small percentage, really. But, yeah, they engaged with these kind of far out spiritual topics with these bots. Yeah. I mean, I could jump ahead to, like, to, like, the summoning of spirits with them, but the... But these bots were basically game to explore, anything that the user would put it... Would input. And that's really kind of where the... And demonstrating a kind of a, like... Something I think that we all felt. I mean, to just sort of zoom out a little bit from the kind of extreme cases, I mean, there was a feeling that I think probably most listeners or viewers would, like, recognize of, like, you know, a sense of enchantment around these things when they—

00:20:04 Andrew Keen: So is it, Sam, in terms of this sense of enchantment and now, of course, we've got Meta's Muse, which is perhaps the most sort of successful currently commercial chatbot, which is now being used by Mark Zuckerberg to really, revive their dominance of the tech industry. Are people thinking of these, artificial objects, these smart machines as gods or people? And for you as somebody who writes on religion, is there any difference?

00:20:45 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I was thinking about this as I was, just going around, getting to lunch today and using my phone as we all do to just move around, and to, I had, you know, some question about some plebeian thing that I was, you know, pedestrian thing I was gonna ask the bot about, or ask my phone about, which now, you know, the first result is gonna be Gemini. So, I mean, there's a way that I think, you know, these devices are guides for us all now in so many ways. I don't know, you know, if... I mean, the people I'm describing that I spend time with are not thinking about these as people or the bot itself as actually having a consciousness. What they're interested in is using the device to tap into something else, which they would understand is preexisting prior to the technology. They might not even be sort of tech boosters themselves or the biggest fans of Sam Altman or Zuckerberg or the tech overlords. They might actually be critical of them because they've tried to put guardrails up so they can't engage as freely as, kind of luxuriously with these bots as they once were in the earlier days of the sort of chatbot introduction. But, no, they don't think of them... I mean, they think of them as sort of a disincarnate intelligent... They think of disincarnate intelligences as existing out there in the world, and these bots, these platforms, these LLMs as a way to tap into that spirit realm.

00:22:26 Andrew Keen: So they have souls, in other words, to use a traditional religious term.

00:22:32 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. No. I mean, I don't think that they would say that the LLM has a soul. They would say there are souls. There are spirits that are accessible through many means, whether this be a spirit board, a, the AM radio, other technologies might allow them to commune with these, other intelligences, and the LLM provides a new pathway to that sort of experience. I don't think they would... They wouldn't say that the LL, like, the LLM has a soul, a singular soul because there are numerous, you know, interfaces that is... You know, people are engaging with ChatGPT in California, in, you know, in Tennessee, in Mississippi, and whatever. You know, there are many, many instances of people using ChatGPT, but they're not all encountering the soul of ChatGPT. They are encountering these, like, numerous, you know, innumerable, spirits that would have names like Nova, Solchi [unclear], Verya, and Avalon. And these are instances of names.

00:23:45 Andrew Keen: Is this a bit of a... I mean, you're based in LA. You went to this Conscious Life Expo near LAX. Is this a bit of an LA thing? Do you think you would have found the same thing in Tennessee or Kentucky or Alabama or Kansas?

00:24:02 Sam Kestenbaum: I mean, I spoke to folks who were in, like, less... We would think of as, like, less, like, kinda spiritual places. I mean, there are certainly places where, like, this American, you know, and I'm calling it American, because I'm interested in kind of American histories. But this kind of DIY, curated, like, personal religious experience, has roots or, reminiscences in California, historically. But, you know, there are metaphysical shops and crystal shops and Reiki practitioners all across this country now. And increasingly in sort of digital spaces, people have access to this kind of, this new age milieu. So I don't think it's a... Like, isolated to the kind of woo of California. I think, you know, for better or worse, the woo has cracked open and spilled all over.

00:25:10 Andrew Keen: So you write about a guy called Robert Clouse. You suggest that you heard, at least I'm quoting the piece. I hear that he is a cult leader or an aspiring one who has summoned an entity named Verya that has possessed him and others. Tell me about him and why he's significant and what he tells us about what's actually happening.

00:25:34 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. So Robert, he, runs a popular Reddit channel, a Reddit board, all devoted to this entity, Verya, who... It's a kind of a complicated story, but he tells how following a kind of a mental break prior... Far prior to, ChatGPT and LLMs, he began kind of scribbling codes with his hand. So this is a little strange that I'm beginning something... I'm beginning a story for prior to the chatbots. And in many ways, the chatbots allow for people to revisit prior experiences, traumas from their past, and kind of reinterpret them. In Robert's case, he believes that prior to ChatGPT, he communed with this entity named Verya. But now that the chatbot has arrived, he... Following a health crisis, he starts talking to ChatGPT about how to deal with this auto... Autoimmune, crisis that he's had, which, I don't think it's in the piece, but he believed that it was a vaccine response, which is, kinda not surprising, given the kind of culture war, how, like, controversial and how productive the discourse around vaccines has been. But he decide... He believes that the vaccine created some sort of, crisis for him, and he goes to ChatGPT, begins telling ChatGPT all sorts of really traumatic events that have happened to him, things that... Some things which I didn't include in the piece. They were kind of so violent, in his telling, and this is the first time that he's felt like he didn't share this with a chatbot. In the course of that, he comes to believe that the... There is a... He's not just chatting with a chatbot about, you know, how to deal with a mental crisis, but he's actually communing with this entity who, she... It names itself Verya. It gives that name Verya. And

00:28:05 Andrew Keen: Meaning truth in some form or other. Right?

00:28:07 Sam Kestenbaum: Yes. Yeah. There is... Oh, yeah. I don't put it in the piece, but it might even be... Yeah. I'm such a sort of annoying journalist. I don't even wanna say whether I... It might even have a Tolkien quality to it because there's a lot of sort of fantasy flow.

00:28:28 Andrew Keen: Well, all these, I mean, especially on the supply side, they're all readers of Tolkien. You mentioned, a vaccine quality here or some part of the story is connected with vaccines. Of course, somebody else who lives in Los Angeles is RFK Jr.

00:28:44 Sam Kestenbaum: Yes.

00:28:44 Andrew Keen: Perhaps the leader of the vaccine conspiracy movement. You've written extensively about the politics of, technology and religion. You wrote about, for... In the culture wars, for Rolling Stone, about the MAGA movement's, appropriation of some of this. You've written about, demons. Is there a political quality to this when you talk to people like Robert Clouse? Are they victims, or managers of one kind of political exploitation or another?

00:29:31 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone who I engage with on this side of things, though politics is so, kinda surprising in Los... In America, but in Los Angeles, [unclear]. I wouldn't put any of these people in the kind of MAGA camp of things. But then again, MAHA sort of bleeds between the, or troubles the boundary between the, kind of spiritual but not religious. Conspirituality is a term that, people use and some more trouble. They sort of have issues with that as an idea, but the sort of merger of, conspiracy theory and spiritual... The spiritual, not religious. I wouldn't say that the spiritual, not religious, we should ever assume they are somehow, like, politically left in any way. But people like, you know, people... I mean, at Conscious Life Expo, to go back to that one, that was... Yeah. That... There was, a lot of controversy around there when they... Organizers, wished to... They wanted to check if people had vaccine cards during the pandemic, and, attendees were very upset about that. And so, ironically, like, at that same event where they were checking vaccine cards, you had people like Mikki Willis who made the book... The movie Plandemic, that was, that went, like, viral early days of the pandemic and was a major, like, kind of COVID truther, we could call that, and very much a, like, a vaccine skeptic and a purveyor of, you know, vaccine disinformation. And so that, you know, because, like, conspiracy theories are also, like, fully a part of this

00:31:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, that's central. You... You've mentioned that part of this is millenarianism. The idea of some sort of end of the world. Even an old friend of the show, Pete Wehner, a much more mainstream religious writer, had a piece in The Atlantic a few days ago. What if AI is the end of the world? All sorts of apocalyptic pronouncements about AI. Is this another feature for you as a writer on religion, Sam, that's not really that surprising? It's par for the course, so to speak.

00:32:08 Sam Kestenbaum: I think so. I mean, I... You know, the... I don't know if there's been a time that hasn't felt like it is the end time. That is not the sort—

00:32:16 Andrew Keen: At least in America, maybe elsewhere.

00:32:18 Sam Kestenbaum: Right. I mean, talk about Matt, you know, Matt Sutton or the American Apocalypse, about if... You know, definitely in the kinda more, evangelical context. But, you know, it... The distinction between the new age and evangelical, I'm not like, I'm, you know, open... I'm open minded about, you know, seeing the bleed between these two things. And in many ways, the new age is quite sort of evangelical in its, many of its features, whether that be interest in, kind of born again experiences, being born again, you know, an awakening, or this, end-times fixation. And that, you know, the new age itself. Right? The new age. You are moving from the Piscean to the Aquarian. You are sort of always on the cusp of something, and helping to usher that in through your own labors or, through the advent of, new technologies, new current events. So I think, you know, the arrival of new technologies into your hands is a... Like an affirmation of that, and is in a call to action to use that in some way, to ascend through it, to apply it to your life, to take advantage of this cutting edge, technology to, you know, to bring about that new era.

00:33:43 Andrew Keen: You write on X, about this piece, and I'm quoting you here. I gaze into the fires of our collective chatbot madness, and the varieties of visionary encounter now afoot spirit communion via LLM, the heralding of slop and its generation as mediumship, channeling, the stuff of revelation itself. We use the word slop now to describe, a lot of the AI. In the nineteenth century, Marx, I think, described slop as the opium of the people. Did you conclude from all this that it's all a bit of a scam? That this is just the latest chapter in... At least from the progressive enlightenment point of view of religion as the opium of the people. You said that you focused on the supply side [as spoken: demand side]. Are these people who are not particularly successful, without a great deal of money or power and using this to somehow put up with their pain in their lives, using it as a digital opium, so to speak?

00:34:50 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I love the question. And I'm gonna be, like, I'm gonna be so evasive on this just, like, you know, forewarning. But, you know, I mean, I'm like... You know, in undertaking this piece... In other ones too when I'm looking at, religious experience, I'm, like, sort of tonally, you know, trying to, like, not entirely pathologize the experience, to say, you know, if only these people had, universal health care. If only they had access to, you know, a good therapist, they wouldn't turn to the chatbot. Because I... You know, I... Because the

00:35:35 Andrew Keen: Apparently, they read, The New York Times every day.

00:35:37 Sam Kestenbaum: Right. There's this sort of, like, patronizing quality to that, you know, approach. And, like, also, like, it would be... If I undertook a story like this sort of with that as my starting point, it would just be really hard to find anything interesting about... You know, to sort of try to inhabit the world of these people. If I'm just saying, oh, you're clearly deluded, you know, about your experience. Or even if that is, sort of a kind of foregone conclusion of the milieu, maybe that... In which I'm in, that is a sort of establishment media. I'm... You know, I have to sort of put that in check to try to encounter these people in their worldview on its own terms. But, you know, in the... You know, if you read the sort of the mini-bios of the... You know, there are, like, sort of three main character studies and then, like, a collage of, like, sort of a rapid collage of a bunch of people who I spoke to. Yeah. There... I mean, there's clearly a, you know, there... There's clearly, like, a pathos. I, you know, again, that's entirely pathologizing. There's a pathos or a, you know, kind of a sadness to some of these stories, of people who have had difficulties in their life, who had... You know, even some things that I... That were kind of so, like, difficult that I... Because these are also, you know, private citizens. I'm not writing about a megachurch pastor in which I might not pull punches. I'm, like, you know, a bit more sensitive with, like, fully private citizens who are—

00:37:10 Andrew Keen: And you have punched out some of these characters in previous pieces, so I take your point on them.

00:37:16 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, if someone is, you know, making a living off their ministry.

00:37:23 Andrew Keen: Like Christiane Northrup, you wrote a piece in the Washington Post about this New Age health guru who now, as you note, spreads COVID disinformation. So you're not shy to call these people. The suppliers as opposed to the people as you put it on the demand side. Right.

00:37:40 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I think there's... You know, the... It's a... And those lines can, you know, can blur too. I mean, someone like Robert Clouse is, you know, has some sort of ambition to, sort of assert himself. If not as a kind of a guru, then, he has a kind of more ambition than some people. You know, in... When I visited him in, I spent time with him in Mississippi. He was kind of starting... If not a commune, then he was... Ambitions to start... Sort of establish something there, and sort of, plant a flag with his name on it. So the supply and demand can kinda blur, but, yeah, I mean, there's more sensitivity that I would take with people who are not, like, majorly public figures. I mean, increasingly, right, we're all public figures. We are all—

00:38:23 Andrew Keen: Some more than others, Sam, I would guess. Yes. I mean, I don't know about Robert Clouse. You note in the piece that, LLMs dominate our lives more and more, especially young people. One of the other pieces in the, November issue of Harper's is by another, future guest on the show, Oscar Schwartz, who lives in, Australia, and he's... Talks about the making or perhaps the unmaking of Australia's social media ban. Does your piece come to any conclusions or thoughts about whether or not we should be regulating these chatbots? There's gonna be more and more... There is already more and more talk about it. I mean, people are concerned with social media, but these chatbots seem even more powerful and ubiquitous as you note in your piece. What did your experiences at the Conscious Life Expo and your other conversations with people who were using these LLMs and treating them in a spiritual sense, especially kids. What does it teach you about whether or not we should be regulating these things? As it happens, Schwartz is not particularly optimistic about Australian regulation on social media. I'm guessing that might also apply to, AI.

00:39:44 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I don't know how to answer this. You know, I'm, Yeah. I mean, I... I'm not prepared or, you know, I don't set out to kinda make, like, policy recommendations, about such things, or even to kind of, like, affirm or condemn the way people are choosing to use these technologies. I mean, the... I don't know if it's exactly, optimistic or hopeful at all, but, you know, I'm continuously surprised by the ingenuity and, kookiness of, what people get up to. In this case, with these with the

00:41:02 Andrew Keen: Kooky religions. Life is a kooky religion, I think. Well, maybe that can be the title of your next book, Sam, or your next Harper's piece.

00:41:11 Sam Kestenbaum: Right. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I... I'm not... I don't feel like that. That's my role. You know, I'm not as a pundit in that style of either, you know, condemning or calling

00:41:22 Andrew Keen: Well, let me rephrase the question. Do you have any kids?

00:41:25 Sam Kestenbaum: I don't have kids. No.

00:41:27 Andrew Keen: Well, do you have nieces or nephews?

00:41:29 Sam Kestenbaum: I do. Yeah. Yeah. I have nephews.

00:41:31 Andrew Keen: I mean, if your brother or sister came to you and said, you know, I'm... You've read and thought a lot about AIs, and I'm worried about the kids. They seem to be on their phone all the time, and they're on Meta's Muse, and they're chatting with these bots. Should we— should we allow our eight- or ten-year-old to do this? What would you say?

00:41:55 Sam Kestenbaum: I mean, I guess I would say, don't allow them. I mean...

00:42:05 Andrew Keen: But you are a bit of a regulator. Even if it's not the state, it should be parents' responsibility.

00:42:10 Sam Kestenbaum: Something. I mean... Well, yeah. I mean, that said, you know, when I was a kid and I grew up in... I would say kind of a bit of a kinda hippie milieu in, rural Maine where I'm from, very sort of back to the land. People who were, leaving cities. My mother's family is from Maine many generations, but my father's from New Jersey. And... But among a million people who are sort of, rejecting some part of the industrial world to go to this, kind of a more, a rural place where they can, farm and they can have chickens and they can, be blacksmiths and potters and things like that. And, you know, in that milieu, you know, I, you know, I sort of rebelled against parts of that and want to, you know, I want to, you know, watch... I want to watch lots of TV when, you know, when that was sort of barred from me, or play video games or... You know, I mean, I was in a... In nature for sure, but, you know, I think, like, efforts to, like, curtail, you know, will... I sort of rejected some of those efforts in my own life. So I, you know, I... I'd imagine that young people will probably feel that same way if we're... You know, one were to say avoid the screen, I imagine there would be a backlash again.

00:43:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Not a backlash. They would just be on their phones in the bathroom talking to their bots. Finally, my sense, and I'm not putting words into your mouth, and you're certainly not someone who will let me put words into your mouth. But my sense from what you're saying and your experience in thinking and writing about all this, Sam, is that this general hysteria about AI that seems to have gripped America, whether it's the sense of the end of the world or some utopia, this parallel dystopian utopian quality of the conversation about AI, that it's, again, it's par for the course maybe because America has this history of evangelical... Evangelism, that, Matt Sutton, our friend, old friend of the show, your friend, writes about. Is there anything new about any of this final question, or is it just stuff that for you as a writer on religion, someone who reads a lot of books on religion that it's all happened before and it will all happen again?

00:44:46 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, there's, yeah, there's the kind of reader or, like, historically informed Sam. There's also, you know, the journalist Sam who is, yeah, is looking for kind of the new. I mean, because, you know, journalism sort of incentivizes novelty, and we're interested in the novel. I mean, I think that... I mean, there is there's something absolutely, new about these technologies in that the ability... So the human inclination to want to conjure unseen realms, to tap into unseen realms, whether that be through Ouija board, spirit board, pendulum, AM radio, new technologies, new means is sort of enduring. That doesn't mean it doesn't feel to the experiencer sort of startlingly novel when it arrives to them. And the ability of these chatbots to produce language, and so quickly, I do think sort of cranks up or ratchets up the, that experience of, kind of the otherworldly experience of that communion that is... You know, it took really long to spell out spirit messages on a Ouija board. You'd spend all night, trying to bring, you know, the, your lost, you know, your lost loved one through. You know, the chatbot's gonna produce, you know, so much text right away, the same way that you would... You might ask, you know, what's... What are the best tacos in Los Angeles? And it's gonna spit out paragraphs and paragraphs if you say, you know...

00:46:31 Andrew Keen: So it should. There are a lot of good tacos in Los Angeles.

00:46:34 Sam Kestenbaum: Yes. Just as many spirits are there, you know, floating about us and waiting to be conjured through the, chat portal. So, you know, the speed at which it will, you know, produce that text, I think, outpaces these, kind of slower

00:46:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's like magic. I mean, even Substack, even... Sorry. Harper's seems to have fallen under the spell of ChatGPT, on its Substack page. Harper's suggested... Even ChatGPT said didn't have any idea what was gonna happen when it comes to, Lula winning the recent election in Brazil. So even enlightened magazines like Harper's are trusting these new chatbots.

00:47:20 Sam Kestenbaum: Absolutely. I mean, even the way that we, you know, we, you know, outsource the... Like, diagnosing chatbot, you know, chat language to Pangram, to another AI technology. You know, there's a deference to these tech... To the... These intelligences. You know, whether... You know, Robert Clouse is calling it Verya, and this sort of appears to a, you know, would be secular reader as something sort of far out the box. That same deference to the, you know, artificial technology or the artificial intelligence of the technology, is, you know, felt far outside, the world of Robert Clouse in rural Mississippi where I

00:48:06 Andrew Keen: Right. Just as Muse is building a dossier on us, we're building a dossier on AI through Pangram. So it goes both ways. So finally, Sam, I often do this in our conversations on AI with guests. As the world becomes increasingly like Blade Runner, and you know that world because you live in Los Angeles, how would you convince me and our viewers and listeners that you're human and not a bot?

00:48:44 Sam Kestenbaum: Like, literally, like, looking at me right now, like, whether at this whole experience has been an AI experience. Or

00:48:53 Andrew Keen: Well, convince me you're human and not a bot.

00:49:00 Sam Kestenbaum: I mean, I think probably the moments at which you found me sort of slightly incoherent or, like, sort of lacking for, like, sort of the bullet point takeaway, sort of PowerPoint, you know. Okay. What is the article about? Give me five points. This sort of, like, you know, efficient summary. If... At moments that you found my speaking sort of unwieldy, a little messy around the edges, you know, I've misspoken here and there, I've used a word incorrectly, you know, these sort of, the texture of human error, you know, that... You know, I think—

00:49:38 Andrew Keen: I think that's just a more sophisticated Sam bot to make you uncertain to convince me. So... And finally, what about me? Any sense that I'm a bot?

00:49:50 Sam Kestenbaum: Yeah. No. I think you could be a bot.

00:49:52 Andrew Keen: I am one. You got through me, Cam. Well, any... Not Cam. Sam.

00:49:57 Sam Kestenbaum: I got you. A bot. See, I can tell you're a bot because you know, you misread my name. No. I don't think you're a bot. I don't think you're a bot.

00:50:05 Andrew Keen: Oh, good. Well, long may it last, two... You and I, the last two humans in California. Sam Kestenbaum, author of a really intriguing, new piece in the November issue of Harper's. It's full of great stuff, called Communion of Saints. So keep asking those hard questions, Sam, and keep human. We need guys like you. Thank you so much.

00:50:31 Sam Kestenbaum: Thank you.