The AI freakout. Are concerns overblown?

  

Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic converses with Anil Dash.

44 minutes very well spent.

The Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality

February 18th, 2026: Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is appearing in a Los Angeles courtroom today to testify in defense of his company regarding litigation asserting that his social media applications pose significant risk of harms (inclusive of suicide) to many users, from pre- and teenagers to psychologically vulnerable adults across all ages. The financial liability stakes could scarcely be higher (not only for Zuck's companies). Reporting has it that some 1,500 liability lawsuits are awaiting trial, with more in the wings.

The legal liability principle that finally caught up with Big Tobacco (in the wake of some 80 years of litigative and regulatory effort) was that of the 'Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality." In short, the product, used as intended and directed, inexorably leads to excessive customer harms—up to lethal outcomes. Social media companies' ad-based revenue/profitability models require maximization of user engagement. The impolite word is "addiction."

I would Quixotically favor expanding the analogy to firearms, notwithstanding it being admittedly a bit of a stretch (particularly in light of our 2nd Amendment**).

** Which, according to the most fervent "gun enthusiasts," also connects inseparably to the 1st Amendment, i.e., in that prancing around open-carry, dressed in Army-Navy surplus store cosplay coture is constitutional "free speech" emblematic of one's fealty to the shall-not-be-infringed 2nd.

 

The very purpose of a firearm is to launch metal projectiles at high speed in order to damage or destroy objects of users' focus—from paper targets to beer bottles or soup cans, to squirrels, rabbits, deer, birds, elephants, etc, to other humans.

And, yes, they can be used lawfully and "safely." C'mon.

Interesting legal times draw nigh in the digital space. That's for sure.

 

 

WHAT ABOUT OTHER ONLINE ADDICTIONS?

 

 

Casino Capitalism...

Polymarket? Online sports gambling?

UPDATE

 

 

Just added a 3rd Sean Carroll book to my stash. A Series of Fortunate Events. Awesome writer and thinker. 

…I have shown how we know that we are all here, both collectively and individually, through a series of accidents—cosmological, geological, and biological accidents. I have also shown how and why some of us will depart via accident. 

Our chance-driven world is a profound revelation. It is astonishing that blind chance is the source of all novelty, diversity, and beauty in the biosphere. I hope that you are wonderstruck at what an asteroid, sliding tectonic plates, and a fibrillating polymer of just four bases have wrought. 

But our chance-driven existence also poses the unsettling quandary that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but a world as novelist Christian Jungerson put it of “unmerciful randomness, immense chaos, and constant biological vulnerability.” This view, of course, shatters traditional beliefs about humanity’s place in the larger scheme. 

As Monod’s critics decried, chance puts God out of a job, or at least many of the jobs we have traditionally assigned to Him or Her. God is not in the conception business choosing the winning sperm and egg, nor the genetic engineering business designing creatures’ DNA and traits, nor the weather-making business, nor the cancer business, nor the pandemic business. 

One recourse in the face of such claims is simply to deny chance. But should we have the courage to accept the pervasive role of chance, some challenging questions arise about the meaning and purpose of our lives: If we are here by accident, not by Design, what are we supposed to do? How might we live in the face of this knowledge? 

My first impulse is to pull a Dr. McCoy (“Bones” from Star Trek) and plead, “Dammit, Jim, I’m a scientist, not a philosopher.” I think that these questions are for each of us to decide for ourselves…

Carroll, Sean B.. A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (pp. 164-165). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

BACK TO THE HEADLINE TOPIC

 

Two veteran tech journalists. One hour. No easy answers.
Jacob Ward (The Rip Current, NBC News, Al Jazeera) and Taylor Lorenz (User Mag, The New York Times, The Washington Post) go head-to-head on the biggest question in tech policy right now: Is the social media addiction crisis a genuine public health emergency — or is it a moral panic being weaponized by the same reactionary forces that came for rock and roll, comic books, and the telephone?

They agree on more than you'd expect. They disagree where it counts.

Topics covered:

• The 2012 collapse in adolescent mental health — correlation or causation?
• Jonathan Haidt's data and its critics
• Section 230, FOSTA-SESTA, and who really wins when tech gets "regulated"
• Why Meta is quietly funding the groups suing Meta
• Social casino games, behavioral harm, and the limits of US regulation
• What data privacy law could actually fix — and why we're not doing it
• The authoritarian endgame nobody's talking about

CODA

 

This came in the mail today. 80th birthday gift from my dear sister. I did not know til last weekend that she was a Scott Galloway fangirl. Cool.

 

For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence.

An LLM’s words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them.

 

I ran across this compelling essay in The Atlantic today while watching the Winter Olympics. I had to shut the TV off and attend closely. Highly. highly recommended. Goes straight to a number of my long-standing sociopolitical concerns (inextricably enmeshed with digitech). 

 

Dr. Roy cut right to the chase from word one.

For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively—deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises—while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives. An LLM’s words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them.

This dynamic is already familiar in everyday use. A chatbot gets something wrong. When corrected, it apologizes and changes its answer. When corrected again, it apologizes again—sometimes reversing its position entirely. What unsettles users is not just that the system lacks beliefs but that it keeps apologizing as if it had any. The words sound responsible, yet they are empty.

This interaction exposes the conditions that make it possible to hold one another to our words. When language that sounds intentional, personal, and binding can be produced at scale by a speaker who bears no consequence, the expectations listeners are entitled to hold of a speaker begin to erode. Promises lose force. Apologies become performative. Advice carries authority without liability. Over time, we are trained—quietly but pervasively—to accept words without ownership and meaning without accountability. When fluent speech without responsibility becomes normal, it does not merely change how language is produced; it changes what it means to be human.

This is not just a technical novelty but a shift in the moral structure of language. People have always used words to deceive, manipulate, and harm. What is new is the routine production of speech that carries the form of intention and commitment without any corresponding agent who can be held to account...

"Any corresponding agent who can be held to account?"

Increasingly quaint civic notion, that, given our chronic slide in recent years toward a bifurcated culture comprised of one large, dispersed cohort bound by laws and norms but not protected by them, chafing against a smaller but more powerful socioeconomic/political demographic protected by authority while increasingly rarely bound by it.

Language has always been more than the transmission of information. When humans speak, our words commit us in an implicit social contract. They expose us to judgment, retaliation, shame, and responsibility. To mean what we say is to risk something.

Trumpian "conservatives" in particular never forego an opportunity to passively-aggressively warn their political critics that "free speech is not free."

You might get Primaried. Perhaps doxxed. You might lose your job, your scholarship, your visa...

That has always been a liability going to speaking one's mind, yeah, we get it. But, Dr. Roy's lament focuses on a significant new elevated level.

The AI researcher Andrej Karpathy has likened LLMs to human ghosts. They are software that can be copied, forked, merged, and deleted. They are not individuated. The ordinary forces that tether speech to consequence—social sanction, legal penalty, reputational loss—presuppose a continuous agent whose future can be made worse by what they say. With LLMs, there is no such locus. No body that can be confined or restrained; no social or institutional standing to revoke; no reputation to damage. They cannot, in any meaningful sense, bear loss for their words. When the speaker is an LLM, the human stakes that ordinarily anchor speech have nowhere to attach. 

There is no Communications Act Section 230 Subsection LLM to rail against. Advocacy aimed at repealing Section 230 per se has yet to get significant traction, beyond a bit of rather ad hoc sound & fury.

 

But...

Speech without enforceable consequence undermines the social contract. Trust, cooperation, and democratic deliberation all rely on the assumption that speakers are bound by what they say.

The response cannot be to abandon these tools. They are powerful and genuinely valuable when used with care. Nor can the response be to pursue ever greater machine capability alone. We need structures that reanchor responsibility: constraints that limit the use of AI in various contexts such as schools and workplaces, and preserve authorship, traceability, and clear liability. Efficiency must be constrained where it corrodes dignity.

As the idea of AI “avatars” enters the public imagination, it is often cast as a democratic advance: systems that know us well enough to speak in our voice, deliberate on our behalf, and spare us the burdens of constant participation. It is easy to imagine this hardening into what might be called an “avatar state”—a polity in which artificial representatives debate, negotiate, and decide for us, efficiently and at scale. But what such a vision forgets is that democracy is not merely the aggregation of preferences. It is a practice of speaking in the open. To speak politically is to risk being wrong, to be answerable, to live with the consequences of what one has said. An avatar state—fluent, tireless, and perfectly malleable—would simulate deliberation but without consequence. It would look, from a distance, like self-government. Up close, it would be something else entirely: responsibility rendered optional, and with it, the dignity of having to stand behind one's words made obsolete.

Wiener understood that the whirlwind would come not from malevolent machines but from human abdication. Capability displaces responsibility. Efficiency erodes dignity. If we fail to recognize that shift in time, responsibility will return to us only after the damage is done—seated, as Wiener warned, on the whirlwind.

"AI AVATARS?" "THE AVATAR STATE?" 

 

Cue up "Agentic AI." LLMs may be peaking, relatively.

 

"Artificial Generative Intelligence" (LLM based) is apparently rapidly becoming passe. to wit: "Open Claw," anybody? "Agentic AI" sounds hipper than "AI Assistants."

 

Will Musk jump quickly to trademark "AgentiX.ai™" (or sue whomever else might get there first?) 

UPDATE: Someone's already on it. 

Again, a great (relatively lengthy, appropriately detailed) Deb Roy essay. The implications go well beyond simply "democracy."

________

 

DR. DEB ROY

 

Gotta cop. I was not hip to this scholar. My Bad. Impressive.

Deb Roy is a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, based at the MIT Media Lab. He is also the cofounder and chair of Cortico, a non-profit dedicated to building stronger civic networks. 

 

Couple of Priors for now:

Raising AI

AI Fluency?

Artificial General Intelligence

Idiocracy?

"Artificial Intelligence" broadly (back 10-12 years). link rot & all. "Persuasion." "Deliberatiom Science."

 

ERRATUM: ELITE ACADEMIA UPDATE

1. American University
2. Boston College
3. Boston University
4. Brown university
5. Carnegie Mellon University
6. Case Western Reserve University
7. Columbia University
8. College of William and Mary
9. Cornell University
10. Duke University
11. Emory University
12. Florida Institute of Technology
13. Fordham University
14. Georgetown University
15. George Washington University
16. Harvard University
17. Hawaii Pacific University
18. Johns Hopkins University
19. London School of Economics
20. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
21. Northeastern University
22. Northwestern University
23. New York University
24. Pepperdine University
25. Princeton University
26. Stanford University
27. Tufts University
28. University of Miami
29. University of Pennsylvania
30. University of Southern California
31. Vanderbilt University
32. Wake Forest University
33. Washington University in St. Louis
34. Yale University

The foregoing is a list of post-secondary institutions found by Trump's "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth to be unacceptably "Woke/Humanistic" and hence off-limits for tuition-reimbursements of military members (mostly grad school level officers), effectively banning their enrollment and attendance. This was leaked the other day. 

 

UPDATE: I just saw a clip on MSNOW featuring Secretary Hegseth saying "we produce Warriors, not Wokesters. Harvard, good riddance."

 

UPDATE: DEB ROY

 

 

AND, FRANK BRUNI FANBOY HERE

…What is arguably the defining trait of the second Trump administration, a bearing and a bullying that cast a noxious haze over all public discourse, which was already plenty polluted. This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, President Trump himself — don’t want to win opponents’ favor. They don’t even want to win the argument. Why sweat the delicate art of persuasion when you can use the brute force of condemnation? Comity and conciliation are a slog. They’re for suckers. Contempt is victors’ ready, heady prerogative.

It’s also what the MAGA movement was supposed to be rebelling against. Many people who flocked to Trump in all his spite and willful destructiveness were protesting the condescension and derision of the Democratic elite, who, they felt, held them in contempt. They were responding to Barack Obama’s lament about embittered Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” They were reacting to Hillary Clinton’s gibe about the “basket of deplorables.”

At least that’s one origin theory, one narrative thread.

But Trump, his aides and many of his supporters haven’t purged contempt from our politics. They’ve mainstreamed it. Purified it. Industrialized it. It’s their push-a-button pushback against everyone who challenges them and any circumstances that threaten to undermine them, an all-purpose way to pivot from the substance of a situation to an evasive and obfuscating ill will. Envelop everything in indiscriminate animosity and nothing real survives.

That’s what Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Miller, the impresario of ugliness, did when federal agents killed protesters in Minneapolis. Smear first, ask questions later (or, better yet, never)...

See The Age of Grievance. 

 

More to come...

Stephen Miller

 They devoted the entire episode to Miller. Read his lengthy Wiki piece.

“We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”—Stephen Miller, to CNN's Jake Tapper, Jan 5th, 2026

See my Sept 2025 post discussing Miller at Charlie Kirk's memorial.

Legally Bondi

Emptywheel has a good take, here.

 

UPDATE

 

Donald Trump reportedly said on Thursday that Bondi's congressional committee performance was "fantastic."

 

THE PIVOT

 

 

Addictive. Substantively so. These two, geez...

_____

 

ERRATUM: MORE BOOKS ON DECK

 

   

Ten patterns that explain the universe
Brian Clegg, MIT Press, 2021

Introduction
We understand the world around us through patterns. These are not necessarily patterns in the visual sense, but rather occurrences that have some sort of regularity, distributed, according to consistent rules. It would be impossible to cope with the world if we didn’t have patterns. It would mean that every time we encountered an object, we would need to learn how to use it a new period instead, we build up patterns—mental models of reality—that inform us of how to deal with, say, an apple or a light switch, so that we don’t have to start from scratch each and every time. 

I am never gonna get caught up...

 

ERRATUM

OK, this is funny. From The New Yorker

 

Anthropic’s headquarters, in downtown San Francisco, sits in the shadow of the Salesforce tower. There is no exterior signage. The lobby radiates the personality, warmth, and candor of a Swiss bank. A couple of years ago, the company outgrew its old space and took over a turnkey lease from the messaging company Slack. It spruced up the place through the comprehensive removal of anything interesting to look at. Even this blankness is doled out grudgingly: all but two of the ten floors that the company occupies are off limits to outsiders. Access to the dark heart of the models is limited even further. Any unwitting move across the wrong transom, I quickly discovered, is instantly neutralized by sentinels in black. When I first visited, this past May, I was whisked to the tenth floor, where an airy, Scandinavian-style café is technically outside the cordon sanitaire. Even there, I was chaperoned to the bathroom.

Tech employees generally see corporate swag as their birthright. New Anthropic hires, however, quickly learn that the company’s paranoia extends to a near-total ban on branded merch. Such extreme operational security is probably warranted: people sometimes skulk around outside the office with telephoto lenses. A placard at the office’s exit reminds employees to conceal their badges when they leave. It is as if Anthropic’s core mission were to not exist. The business was initially started as a research institute, and its president, Daniela Amodei, has said that none of the founders wanted to start a company. We can take these claims at face value and at the same time observe that they seem a little silly in retrospect. Anthropic was recently valued at three hundred and fifty billion dollars… 

Back when I was stll covering SF/Silicon Valley Health IT, I would see pre-AI sprinkles of this kind of stuff going on.

Pivot to Kara and Scott

 

1:09:13 of howlingly, painfully witty current events analytic sanity.

 

PS: I've been remiss. I've now placed a permanent right hand column link to The Pivot. This stuff is just too good. Been a Kara Fanboy for years. This podcast featuring Kara and Scott is just fabulous. I've cited Scott Galloway before.

 

THE BUBBLE  

 

Excess of private unregulated "credit"—recursively, circularly/repeatedly "loaned" between the Big AI players, most of whom are chronically running balance sheet red, staying afloat in part by one stock issuance round after another. Deluded by the prospect of endlessly growing end-user market demand. I sniff tangential aroma wafts of Enron subsidiaries' fake intracompany "sales" that were nothing more than ping-pong flipping phony "trades," carrying the repeated transactions as "revenue." In the current AI circumstance, it’s principally about inflating “market cap valuations.“

 

Yeah, I know, "This Time Is Different." I guess we will see.

 

ERRATUM 

Arlo & Pop today

Yet another Tropical Storm

At the edges of AI

Sandra Matz, Laurie Segall, & Moran Cerf

 

TRANSCRIPT

I urge you all to watch/listen to this intently, inclusive of the transcript.

 

I've cited Laurie Segall before. Had not encountered Sandra Matz until now. Nor Moran Cerf. I would love to see Laurie Segall do a cross-interview with Jacob Ward.

____

 

Then follow that video up with this one.

 

 

More shortly...

Zombie Mortgages

 

This pisses me off hugely. Just saw this on PBS News Hour. Watch all of it. For some initial BobbyG background financial risk context, start here:

 

TRANCHE WARFARE

    

 

OK, A LITTLE TEASE

 

Where might this be headed?

From NPR. Click here.

I'd not intended to do any blogging tonight. They finally fixed our furnace after 33 days of freezing our butts off. We're tired. But than I saw the PBS piece. What might be nefariously afoot in TrumplGriftLand?

 

Feasible answers don't require all that much rationally speculative imagination.

 

Red my above-linked Tranche Warfare piece. Good place to start. More ASAP... 

 

UPDATE

 

My wife and i were renters from 1974 to 1992 (Seaatle, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Knoxville TN). After Cheryl was promoted by her company and transferred from Tennessee to Las Vegas in 1992 (QA Mgr, Nevada Test Site DOE nuke cleanup project), we bought our first home, a new one we watched being built across the summer out near Summerlin. 30 yr. fixed rate conventional mortgage. Eleven years later (2003), we sold and moved across town. A great property, on the near- south side, close to the Strip, 10 minutes from McCarran Airport. We did a fixed rate 15 yr note.

 

Vegas Valley residential was heating up rapidly. Our 2nd house doubled in comps value within 3 yrs.

 

Then things started going seriously south. Subprime had metastasized to the housing market, and by 2008 the financial crisis was in Code Red. Had we not done a 15 yr, we'd have been underwater when it came time to leave Vegas in 2013 and relocate to the SF Bay Area. We'd never messed with any 2nd mortgage / "HELOC" paper, and had very little consumer debt. We both maxed out our 401k contributions every year

 

We were lucky. Our second Vegas house sold in one week post-listing—for a good bit more than our Ask. We banked a good bit of dough.

 

After 6 yrs in the Bay Area (again renters), we moved to Baltimore in 2019 to be close to our Son. Last Kid Standing. We'd sat on our Vegas realty profits, so we put 50% down on our Baltimore house and, again, a 15 yr fixed note (@ 4%). We've toyed recently with doing a HELOC for some big-ticket house improvement work, avoiding too large (and taxable) IRA distribution at a time when the IRA remains very profitable. Our home equity is growing rapidly. Borrow against some of it?

 

After seeing this PBS video segment, though...

 

NAHHH...

 

 

This stuff may well be a material adverse component of the next financial crash ("AI Bubble?” “Crypto Custerfluck?”). See some of my prior Andrew Ross Sorkin posts.

 

_____

 

So, Trump wants to re-privatize Fanny Mae & Freddie Mac, wants to get the Treasury Dept into crypto, has recently been touting 50 yr residential mortgages and 15 yr car loans. What could possibly go wrong?

 

"BAD PAPER"

 

The "Zombie mortgage" is an insidious form of "Bad Paper." From "Tranche Warfare," which recounts my tenure in subprime credit risk management:

"Bad Paper" companies traffick in debt that has been deemed uncollectible by its current owners and is written off their balance sheets -- hence "charged off." You may default on a loan, but down in the fine print is the staple loan contract provision that the account still represents an "asset" which can be sold to a "holder in due course" to whom you are subsequently legally accountable. Bad paper typically trades at between a fraction of a cent to several cents on the nominal dollar, depending on the buyers' assessed "quality" of its eventual collectibility.

Beyond loan defaults going to home mortgages and HELOCS (inclusive of the "Undead" ones), cars, boats, etc., Bad Paper goes all the way up. to wit, when the huge Washington Mutual bank (WaMu) went under, it was sold off for 60 Basis Points (6 tenths of a cent on the dollar). A veritable forest of Bad Paper.

More shortly...  

Washington Post:

Rest in Peace.

 

 

One hopes that Bezos's summarily RIF'd jpurnalists and staffers will get to carry on their important work elsewhere forthwith. We certainly need them.

 

And, yeah, I know that WaPo has not yet closed its doors.

 

 

I went back decades as a reader and subscriber. I cancelled after Bezos began overtly interfering with editorial decisions to curry favor with Donald Trump.

Happy Groundhog DAY?

How about 

On Friday January 2nd, 2026 we awoke to a cold house in Baltimore. Living room temperature was 54F. The Carrier HVAC system (fairly new, and still under warranty) had failed during the night.

 

One month later, it remains in disrepair. Carrier shruggingly advises our local HVAC install vendor A.J. Michaels that the requisite replacement parts are on "90+ days' backorder." 

We moved to Baltimore in April 2019 from the San Francisco area to be close to our son. In March 2020 we replaced the HVAC through a Baltimore/BGE initiative incentivizing homeowners to upgrade to more energy-efficient heating & cooling systems. Carrier was one of the participating HVAC suppliers.

Carrier is a $22B/yr corporation HQ'd in W. Palm Beach, FL. They remain unresponsive.

In the wake of this failure (the 2nd for this unit), we've now experienced a month of getting by with (episodically fuse-blowing) AC space heaters throughout this 91-yr old house, through what has been a near- all-time record period of sub-freezing cold (3rd longest on record), strong winds, and 7-8" of snow. A week after the major snowstorm blew through, we have yet to see any snowmelt. We reportedly face yet another week of sub-freezing days and nights.

 

Moreover, on January 6th, we commenced our latest episode of Pop & Meee-mo's at-home "GreyCare" service for our newborn Grandson Arlo so his Momma could return to work. Don't need this meat locker.

 

Try to imagine my anxieties, concerns, frustrations, and anger. I'm fixin' to turn 80 a week from today. I wrassle with Parkinson's, and could certainly do without this CusterFluck.

 

I've not whined about any of this online prior to just now. There're tons of people in our nation and around the planet in far more dire circumstances.

 

Nonetheless... it sux.

________________

 

ENOUGH GROUSING: OK, MOVING RIGHT ALONG

 

 JAKE WARD

 

 Y'all recall "Total Information Awareness?" The panoptic tech gumshoe initiatives endure.

 

TIMELY ERRATUM (THANKS, SALLY)

 

    

Indeed...

 

ON DECK

 

Click here.

Interesting guy. Impressive Sheet. I'm having a bit of Shannon Vallor et al reflection. And, hmmm... AGI Transhumanist Evolution, anyone?

 

FEB 3 UPDATE

I saw her encounter with ICE agents on live CNN TV coverage. Abominable.

The absolutely humbling Ken Burns

We are unreservedly—arguably undeservingly—blessed to have this man with us at this time in history.

My wife and I attended his Baltimore Speakers Series talk a week and a half ago. It was riveting, inspiring. Listen closely to every second of the 51:30 of this Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker.

*NOTE, there's an embedded transcript. I'm trying to extract it for you. (Got it, here.)

You're welcome. 

 

A priceless work recounting our story.

 

 Thank you for the gift of your son.

Flash-Bang Bondi

Vigorously protecting MAGAmerica from the irritating First Amendment Free Speech clause.

   

Loyal co-conspirator in Trump Obstruction of Justice?

Untying the knot of Self

Patience, grasshoppers...

Anyone who thinks the contemplative life amounts to a form of quietism or a retreat from the world’s suffering should spend some time shadowing Joan Halifax, the Zen priest and anthropologist. I’d been curious about Halifax for years, ever since I heard about an annual trek that she leads through the mountains of Nepal, bringing a cadre of doctors and dentists to remote mountain villages with little access to health care.

Each summer over the course of two weeks or so, this Nomads Clinic covers more than 100 miles on foot and horseback, at altitudes of nearly 18,000 feet. These “medical mountaineers,” as they’ve been called,  all volunteers, sleep in tents, often in freezing temperatures. But after some 40 annual trips to Nepal—Halifax is normally based in Santa Fe—she recently decided it was time to hang it up. She had just turned 80.

In addition to bringing medical care to remote mountain villages half a world away, Halifax has ministered to the dying in hospice, worked with the homeless in New Mexico, cared for prisoners on death row, and led countless protests for peace. I don’t know if Halifax has shed the last remnants of her ego—she would say she hasn’t—but the selflessness she manifests in the conduct of her life is something to behold, a reminder of what the exploration of human consciousness can lead a person to do and be. This, too, is a Buddhist principle—that overcoming one’s own small self should lead to greater compassion for others, and that the suffering alleviated when we transcend the ego is not only our own.

For more than 30 years, Halifax has been the abbot at Upaya Zen Center, the retreat she founded in Santa Fe in 1990. I’ve had the chance to meet her a couple of times; once, we appeared together on a panel to talk about psychedelics. Halifax was married to the pioneering Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof for several years in the 1970s. Working together, they gave transformative doses of LSD to the dying. For a period of time, Halifax regularly took large doses of LSD herself. Her first psychedelic trip, while wandering the streets of Paris in 1968, showed her “that there was beauty behind the beauty I perceived, and that mind was both in here and out there. I was dumbstruck.”

I could relate. After years of curiosity about psychoactive plants, my own experimentation with mushrooms and LSD in recent years fundamentally changed the way I understand the mysteries of consciousness and the self. So in 2024, I emailed Halifax to see if I might pay a visit to Upaya. My idea was to spend a week or so in residence, meditating with the aspiring monks, performing monkish chores, interviewing Halifax, and seeing if I could make a little more progress untying the knot of self… [Michael Pollan]

From Michael's forthcoming book (below, left).

 

  

 

On the right, above; his prior book. Tangentially apropos topic.

 

I would also recommend this awesome book for a bit of context.

 

yaje...

It is a winter’s night in Rio de Janeiro, 1987. It is raining and the boulevard in front of the Copacabana Hotel is deserted. The road is slick and shining in the light of the street-lamps. My wife, Trudie, and I are sheltering beneath an umbrella, while high above our heads two seagulls wheel recklessly in the wind; and the sea is a roaring threat in the darkness. A small car pulls up to the curbside. There are two figures silhouetted in the front seat, and an opened rear door beckons us inside. 

A series of discreet phone calls have secured us an invitation to a religious ceremony in a church somewhere in the jungles that surround the great city. Our drivers, a man and a woman, tell us only that the church is located about an hour and a half from the Copacabana, that we will be looked after, and we shouldn’t worry. The church, while nominally Christian, is the home of a syncretic religious group that uses as its core sacrament an ancient medicine derived from plant materials known as ayahuasca, and it is said to induce extraordinary and profound visions…

(Musician) Sting. Broken Music: A Memoir (pp. 1-2). (Function). Kindle Edition.

More to come...