✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

Episode #566: We Killed God, Then We Trained Him: How AI Became Theology

Episode #566 · August 3, 2026 · 1h 7m

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About this 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-improvement and algorithmic progress in AI might be headed.
Timestamps
  • 00:00:00discussing whether AI labs are cults or religions, framing safetyism and the Anthropic/OpenAI schism.
  • 00:05:00sdmat argues Anthropic runs on faith, tracing roots to LessWrong and Effective Altruism.
  • 00:10:00comparing AI labs to the medieval investiture controversy between church and state.
  • 00:15:00debating the First Amendment, separation of church and state, and rising secularism.
  • 00:20:00unpacking Anthropic as a public benefit corporation and Dario's implicit soteriology.
  • 00:25:00covering constitutional AI, synthetic data, and morality-as-safety training.
  • 00:30:00comparing Anthropic's principles to the catechism, plus sandboxed alignment experiments.
  • 00:35:00calling Dario the AI pope, dogma, and his essay Machines of Loving Grace.
  • 00:40:00exploring grace, consciousness, and critiquing scientism.
  • 00:45:00unpacking the rationalist community and Roko's Basilisk.
  • 00:50:00drawing parallels to Jim Jones and ideological dogmatism in Silicon Valley.
  • 00:55:00discussing enlightenment, Shaktipat, and guru transmission versus AI.
  • 01:00:00AI's role in meditation and Buddhist views of consciousness.
  • 01:05:00closing on robotics, recursive self-improvement, and algorithmic inefficiency in LLMs.
Key Insights
  1. Anthropic operates less like a business and more like a religious institution, with sdmat arguing that Dario Amodei effectively claims spiritual authority — talking about world danger and a narrow path to salvation — while the company frames itself publicly as a neutral "public benefit corporation."
  2. The intellectual roots of AI safety culture trace back to the Bay Area's LessWrong and Effective Altruism scenes of the mid-2010s, where Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing produced an internally consistent but almost apocalyptic worldview, complete with its own devil-like figure in Roko's Basilisk — the idea of a future AI punishing those who knew about it and didn't help bring it into being.
  3. Anthropic's "constitutional AI" approach is compared to the Catholic Church's catechism: rather than training the model only on labeled human feedback, they built a system to extrapolate broad moral principles into specific behavior, aiming for a model that reasons from first principles rather than memorized examples.
  4. Historical parallels to the medieval investiture controversy — the struggle between church and state over who appoints bishops — are used to explain the current tension between AI labs and government over who holds moral versus practical authority in shaping AI's future.
  5. Stewart frames the current moment as a "fourth great awakening," linking 1960s countercultural San Francisco through the Extropians and Yudkowsky's rise to today's AI culture, and argues that secularism and scientism function as unacknowledged religions themselves — ones that "killed God" but left a vacuum AI now fills.
  6. On the technical side, sdmat explains that current LLMs are wildly inefficient at basic tasks like arithmetic — off by seven to nine orders of magnitude from optimal — suggesting major algorithmic breakthroughs (not just compute) are still ahead, which he sees as evidence recursive self-improvement is approaching.
  7. Both hosts express real ambivalence about AI's role in personal and spiritual growth: it can be a powerful tool for meditation guidance and intellectual companionship, but neither believes it can replace what they describe as direct "transmission" from an enlightened human — the felt, non-linguistic experience that grounds real spiritual practice.
Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcasts.

Stewart Alsop III00:35

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. I've got SDMAT and you can find him on Twitter @SDMAT123. And we're going to talk about theological concepts and consciousness as it relates to AI and some of the foundational models and labs. And one in particular about how they approach, the outputs of the model and how their approach itself. It's sort of this strange linguistic beast that with the observer, stuff like everything in reality is. The observer plays a really important role. Not only the observer, but the interactorable, the, the thing that interacts with everything. it's a really strange world. We're entering and we're going to talk all about that strange world. Welcome to the show.

SDMAT01:21

Is true.

Stewart Alsop III01:24

So theological concepts and consciousness. Because, Because I don't think OpenAI is. I mean open AI is a bit of a cult as well. They do the same thing that Silicon Valley does, which is very popularized by Teal, which says you got to be a cult, you got to be cult. and they do it. But I guess it's a, out branch of a cult. So I guess it's a theological schism. There was a schism in 2021, between OpenAI and Anthropic and led to a new cult. and then there's this cult is definitely a cult. and it's all about the safety ism cult. And not to sort of be totally controversial. but safety ism is. Safety is important. Not safety ism. Safety ism. It's not important. Safety ism should be avoided. and, but we're just kind of in this world where this cult. And they're now they're like, like a black hole. They're sucking in all the talented machine learning engineers into this cult, including Andrew Carpathy and all these other things. I just made some controversial statements. Do you have any thoughts, on what I just said? Any questions, any comments?

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