Podcast Episode

In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with sdmat (@sdmat123 on Twitter/X) for a wide-ranging conversation that treats the major AI labs—especially Anthropic—as religious institutions rather than businesses, tracing a lineage from the Bay Area's LessWrong and Effective Altruism scenes through Eliezer Yudkowsky's influence, Roko's Basilisk, and the medieval investiture controversy between church and state, before landing on Anthropic's constitution as a kind of modern catechism, Dario Amodei's essay "Machines of Loving Grace," the tension between secularism and scientism, and closing with a look at consciousness, meditation, Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta ideas of enlightenment, and where recursive self...