Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas and their intersection in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, everyone who listens to this show, and if you're new, hello, everybody who listens to this show knows that I'm interested in the

intersection of spirituality, politics, and philosophy, like I said, at the top of the show.

But not in some sort of parapolitics or conspiracy way.

I think that those ways of looking at things generally play out shallow even if there's some truth to it

sometimes what's more interesting to me is the way that those intersections those

currents play out in our inner lives and our spiritual understandings and our

ethics and morals and activism in our desires and our drives and what what that means, of course, is that more and more I find myself contending

with conversations about tech, technology, and the scientific, materialistic worldview that accompanies all that.

It's why this episode's guest, Diana Walsh Pesolka, who is a religion and UFO scholar,

is a perfect person to talk to on the show.

But before I jump into the part where it's she and I talking, which is the show, show,

I do want to pull apart something that comes up on the episode.

And that's the topic of AI.

And at the end of that, I want to talk about UFOs a little bit,

because I think it all sort of, it all ties together, not in the way that you might think.

You know, AI has become a really over-applied buzz term.

It's used for all sorts of things.

Like someone will set up a shopping app and be like,

the AI is giving you great suggestions, you know.

But we all know that that's a far cry from the idea of AI that's, you know, like an intelligent robot,

depictions of it in sci-fi movies like her or Ex Machina or whatever.

...