What To Believe

Global existential angst about AI is reaching fever pitch. So I put four common beliefs about AI through an inquiry to see which ones hold up.

If you've been with me since the start, you'll know I've spent a good while on the flaw in the human operating system — the way we take the voice in our heads for the truth, and defend ideas not because they're true but because they're ours. In this episode, the first in a new series, I turn that lens outward, onto what we believe about the world out there. And I start with the subject that's unsettling just about everyone right now: artificial intelligence (AI).

It begins with a physics professor I sat with a few days after a swarm of AI agents claimed a proof of one of the great unsolved maths problems. His question — if a machine can do that, what are we here for? — is the thread I follow through the whole episode.

I put four beliefs through a bit of inquiry: that this has never happened before, that AI will take all our jobs, that it's conscious and can think, and that it will make us less human. Some hold up better than others. Along the way I come back to Csikszentmihalyi's flow research and my Making Monday Great Again theory, and to an idea from my leadership coaching practice — elevating the level of work — because that's where I think the real stakes are hiding.

And I close with the three moves the professor and I landed on, the last of which I owe to something my son said to me when he was four.

Come sceptical. Stay curious.

Show Notes

In this episode

– A physics professor's question after a swarm of AI agents claims a Millennium Prize proof

– Why anyone claiming all the answers on AI is guessing — and living with the uncertainty

– Belief 1: This has never happened before — calculators, 3D printing, Y2K, desktop publishing and the Gutenberg press

– Belief 2: AI will take all our jobs — coal miners, the Internet and the yellow Post-Its, what we do with saved time, and the Industrial Revolution precedent

– What happens to internships and how young people learn

– What's really at stake: flow, engagement, and thinking as a muscle

– Elevating the level of work — and who's using whom

– Belief 3: AI is conscious and can think — the giant word calculator, and a simple test you can run

– Belief 4: AI will make us less human — Freud, Floridi and the blows to humanity's self-image

– Three moves: acceptance, keeping the judgement for yourself, and a practice — is it real, and does it matter?

Mentioned in this episode

– The Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize problems, and the Navier-Stokes problem

– Saul Bellow: "You've got to be a crank to insist on being right."

– The Gutenberg printing press and the Reformation

– The 1980s British coal miners' strikes

– The Industrial Revolution and the rise of trade unions

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the flow state (optimal experience)

– Making Monday Great Again — my talk and videos on flow at work

– My videos on language as a technology

– Sigmund Freud (1917) on the three blows to humanity's self-image

– Luciano Floridi and the fourth blow: Alan Turing

– The Imitation Game (film) and the Turing test

– Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov (1997)

– Atman, in the yogic tradition

Take it further

– Written companion on Substack.

– Ways to work with Neil: https://neilbierbaum.com

– If something landed, share it with someone who could benefit — and please subscribe, rate & review wherever you listen. That's how this work spreads.

The villains worth worrying about aren’t the ones in a high-tech bunker, stroking a hairless cat. They’re the people most certain they’re good — the most principled ones in the room.

Most of the harm we do to each other isn’t done in the name of evil. It’s done in the name of good, by people entirely convinced of their own morality. In this episode I take that apart: how a private should hardens into a public must, how a moral standard enforced without wisdom, understanding or compassion reliably turns into the very thing it set out to prevent — and why the person doing it is almost always the last to see it.

We follow the mechanism from a single character — Inspector Javert — through history: Salem and McCarthy, Prohibition, the Inquisition, Robespierre’s “republic of virtue.” Then into the present, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the fight over who gets to regulate AI. And, as always, what to do instead — starting with the tree that survives the storm because it bends.

This is the second of two episodes on the word should. Come sceptical. Stay curious. 

In this episode

• Why “most evil is done in the name of good” — and why good people can’t see themselves doing it
• The shift from a private should to an enforced must, and the trap of being “one of the good ones”
• The same mechanism in fiction and across history: Javert, The Crucible / McCarthyism, Prohibition, the Inquisition, Robespierre
• Examples from today’s world: Afghanistan, Gaza, South Africa, America
• The pattern close to home: a family and its rules
• The tree in the storm: why flexibility, not rigidity, is real strength
• The personal roots: a strict father, and Dead Poets Society
• How to spot this brewing in the world — the key indicators 
• The way out: working at the interface between your rule and reality

Mentioned in this episode

• Les Misérables — Victor Hugo (Inspector Javert)
• The Crucible — Arthur Miller (and McCarthyism)
• Prohibition · the Spanish Inquisition · Robespierre and the French Revolution
• Dead Poets Society (1989)
• The Taliban’s “Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” law
• Israel in Gaza
• The ANC in South Africa

Take it further

• Written companion on Substack: https://substack.com/@neilbierbaum
• Ways to work with me: https://neilbierbaum.com

If something landed, share it with someone who could benefit — and please subscribe, rate & review wherever you listen.

There’s a word you use maybe ten times a day — often without noticing you’ve even thought it — that quietly drains your personal power and puts distance between you and the people you’re closest to. It sounds reasonable. Fair. Considered. And it keeps you stuck in the very situations you keep complaining about.

The word is should.

In this episode I take that one small word apart: where a should comes from, the second layer of should that stops us ever saying what we actually want, and how it drops us onto what I call the low road — the road of complaint, gossip and quiet punishment. Then I show you the way off it, and the question that puts you back in touch with what’s real.

This is the first of two episodes on should. Next time, its louder, more dangerous twin: what happens when we stop keeping it to ourselves and start enforcing it on others.

Come sceptical. Stay curious.

Show Notes

In this episode

• What a should actually is: an expectation — an uncommunicated wish, will or desire
• The “second layer” of should that gives us permission not to speak (“they should already know”)
• The low road: how an unspoken want leaks out as complaining and gossip
• Moving from a disempowered state to an empowered one — putting it on the table, and making a clean request
• Why a “yes” that never changes is really a “no” — and what to do with it
• The brick-wall analogy: why we accept physical limits but keep running at behavioural ones
• The most useful question in a stuck relationship
• Being hooked on “hopium” — loving a fantasy of the person instead of the person in front of you
• How the same mechanism scales up to politics and public life
• The one-line summary: abandon all shoulds — ask for what you want, or accept what is

Mentioned in this episode

• The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (novel) and the Anthony Hopkins film
• Marriage Story — Noah Baumbach (film)
• The framework: linguistic ontology → ontological coaching → Neil’s own synthesis, Effective Inquiry

Take it further

Written companion on Substack: https://substack.com/@neilbierbaum 

Ways to work with Neil: https://neilbierbaum.com 

If something landed, share it with someone who could benefit — and please subscribe, rate & review wherever you listen. That’s how this work spreads.

Next episode

The louder twin of should: moralising — how good, enforced without yielding, turns into the very harm it set out to prevent.

For the last four episodes I’ve talked about language as a technology. How language is not just something you use, it's very essence of being human — it’s what sets us apart from other life forms and what we use to construct our reality. 

And I’ve stressed that you need to see it directly, not just understand it intellectually. Seeing it is like riding the bicycle; understanding is just knowing about the bicycle. We want to ride. Naturally, this medium lends itself to the understanding part more than it does to the seeing and getting part. And the questions I’ve received confirm that. 

In this episode, I turn over the subject again so you can see it from different angles. I do that through six questions — some from listeners, two from a master's class I lectured, and two are check questions from my own personal journey, ones I’ve asked before and keep asking. 

We turn over word versus feeling, story versus reality, and the objection I get every single time: isn't this "listening" thing just a perceptual lens in cleverer clothes? No, it’s not, and I show you why. 

Show notes:

The six questions:

1. "Language as a technology is interesting — but what's the point? Isn't the explaining and making of things the whole thing?" (from Episode 8)
2. "Aren't feelings important as guides? How does this sit with Martha Beck, who says to follow your intuition the way you'd track a rhino?" (from Episode 9)
3. "I keep my word to other people. But the promises I make to myself, I break constantly — and nobody knows. Why is my word to myself worth so little?" (from Episode 9)
4. "In my case the story is the reality — my boss genuinely is undermining me, and I've got the emails. How does this apply when I'm actually right?" (from Episode 10)
5. "How is your 'listening' any different from perception being a lens you see the world through? Isn't it the same thing, sounding clever?" (from Episode 11)
6. "Isn't shifting my listening just letting people off the hook — excusing bad behaviour by choosing to hear it more generously?" (from Episode 11)

Once again, this isn't another thing to believe. It's a technology you can use and test, and by using it you get better at dealing with what's real and what matters.

📩 Written companion on Substack, under my name. 

If this is landing for you, please rate, review, subscribe and share — that's how the work spreads.

Three times I badly misheard someone — a heart attack, a missing T-shirt, an honest question I took as a trap. The problem wasn't what I was listening to. It was what I was listening for. 

This episode turns the language theme around: instead of what you put out, we look at what you take in — and how that affects what you put out. In other words, how the machinery of listening shapes the reality you live in, and how your listening gets revealed by the things you say. 

This is not about active listening, or being aware of biases, but something deeper. It’s a look into the phenomenon of listening itself. Not hearing, but listening — the meaning you make from what you hear — and how that can block people from getting through to you, or you from getting through to them. 

We often here that “it’s all about perception” and “it’s all about communication”. Well, both are all about listening. So listen up.   

Show notes

This is the fourth and final episode in a series on language — we had language as a technology, followed by working with your given word, then the stories we tell when we are not in line with our word. Here we turn it around to look at listening.

We look at the difference between hearing and listening — not active listening, something deeper — and why you've almost never heard what someone said to you. How that impacts your reality, and what you can do to change your whole listening framework. 

Topics covered include:

• Hearing versus listening
• Listening as a construct
• The context that listening creates
• Political polarisation as a listening problem
• How to consciously create an empowered listening context
• A practical exercise to take away

Chapters below.

If this landed — not just made sense, but landed — subscribe, rate and review wherever you're listening, and share it with someone who'd benefit. Written companion on Substack (under my name). Ways to work with me are in the links.

A written companion is on Substack under my name. If you want to take it further, there are ways to work with me in the links.

If something here landed, please share it with others who might also benefit. 

Subscribe, rate and review wherever you’re listening. 

You didn't do what you said you'd do — and you offer a reason. The Wi-Fi bombed. The traffic was mad. Your team lost; you complain about the ref’s blunder, and explain what the coach should have done at halftime. A law you dislike gets passed; you opine that the country's going to the dogs. 

It all feels like it matters, like what you say will make a difference. It doesn’t. None of it. Your life continues in circles. You spend your life trapped in the same cycle, wondering why. Here’s here. None of those things — your reasons, your complaints, explanations, opinions — have any bearing on what’s real. They simply don’t matter. Yet you invest so much time and energy in them. 

The promise of this show is to help you deal with what’s real and what matters. In this episode I show you exactly what that means, how your verbal actions like the ones mentioned above take you in the opposite direction, and what you can do to stop that spiral. It’s the most weight-bearing episode of them all.  

Show notes

The mind seeks to make meaning out of things that happen, or don’t happen. When we mistake that meaning-making for reality, we lose our ability to impact that reality. We live with a lot of noise and no forward movement. We can’t go in circles forever, so eventually we spiral downwards. We react with more explaining. With more story. This episode is about exiting the bad neighbourhood of story.

Topics covered include:

• Why story is the opposite of presence, and why people tune out the moment you start one
• The three universal tells that you've left reality behind and entered the realm of story
• What it costs you: the hours poured into narration, and the low hum of grievance that drags a day down
• Why reality doesn't care about your opinion — and where expressing a view actually does matter
• The unglamorous alternative: deal with the fact, change your language, and do this relevance check
• How to guide someone else out of story without becoming insufferable about it
• Why we love story and how we defend our right to tell our story
• How this augments, rather than replaces, CBT, Stoicism and mindfulness

This follows on from Episode 9, on drawing a line when you give your word: your story arises whenever you deviate from the line. In the next episode, we’ll flip it around: not what you say, but what you hear.

A written companion is on Substack under my name. If you want to take it further, there are ways to work with me in the links.

If something here landed, please share it with others who might also benefit. 

Subscribe, rate and review wherever you’re listening. 

We've been told to honour our feelings — and mostly we've overcorrected, pandering to them at great cost to our motivation and discipline. Feelings do matter, but not for being effective.

There’s a stronger foundation; one you walk past every day. It’s the single most powerful tool you have as a human being. This episode is about that foundation.

We humans are linguistic systems. Our job is to maintain the integrity of that system. It’s the single most powerful thing you can do.

In this episode, I contrast two foundations you can build a life on: feelings and word. 

One you didn't create and can't control – and is therefore unreliable, even flaky. The other is available to you at any moment, needs nobody's permission, and — used with integrity — builds something most people value: consistency and reliability without the cost of emotional effort. The secondary gain is self-belief and self-efficacy. 

There's a task at the end to begin practicing immediately. You can check the results for yourself. 

Come sceptical. Stay curious.

SHOW NOTES

This is the second of four episodes on humans and language. Episode 8 established that we live in a sea of language and that language doesn't just describe reality — it creates it. Episode 9 takes one class of that — the declaration, the "I will" — and shows what changes when you platform your life on your word rather than on how you feel.

Covered inside: the declaration versus the "internal weather report"; integrity as a scientific term (the bucket, the circuit, the balloon) and integrity with word; how integrity builds self-belief and self-efficacy; the science that shows how feelings follow action; how to be flexible and not use your word against yourself; feelings as information rather than commands.

Some terms that are used: integrity with your word; doing what you say you will do; how language creates reality; your power to create; drifting off-course and getting back on track; self-belief, self-efficacy, self-compassion, self-flagellation. 

References & going deeper: David Barlow's Unified Protocol (feelings as information); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Viktor Frankl on the autotelic personality; the Five Motivational States series on the flow state. There's an earlier YouTube piece on the "I will" shift — linked below.

Written companion on Substack under my name. Ways to work with me are in the links.

There's a technology you use every waking second that you’ve probably never recognised as a technology. It built every bicycle, every courtroom, every marriage, every World Cup final. It’s language. And we just handed it to the machines — with no guardrails. That's why AI frightens us at a level we can't quite name. And here’s what we can do about it. 

In Episode 8, I open the door on linguistic ontology — the field underneath the coaching I’ve practised for two decades, and refined into the method I call Effective Inquiry. This isn't something to believe. It's something to test on yourself: a lens that, once you put it on, makes every other tool you already use sharper rather than redundant.

Come and see the sea of language you've been swimming in, and learn how to put it to work in your own life before the machines do it without you knowing what’s happened.

Show notes

This is the first of an arc taking Effective Inquiry out of the closed training room and into a form you can run on yourself. It starts where almost no tradition looks directly: at language itself — not as a way of describing the world, but as a technology that creates it.

In this episode:

• Why language is the one technology we never recognise as a technology.
• The painting exercise: how to catch that you're not thinking, you're listening — to a conversation made of words.
• Declarations — the utterances that don't describe reality but bring it into being ("I find the defendant guilty," "You're fired," "Penalty!").
• The conditions a declaration needs: authority, legitimacy, a structure to catch it.
• A test you can run now: move one wish from I want to I will, and watch what surfaces.
• Why this augments Stoicism, CBT, positive psychology and mindfulness rather than replacing them — with a Vipassana retreat story that shows the difference.
• "But isn't this just The Secret?" — a straight answer for the sceptics.
• Why a "large language model" is exactly the thing we should have seen coming.

Mentioned: Episode 3 (seeing without explaining); YouTube video on shifting from "I want" to "I will."

A written companion to this episode is on Substack under my name. 

If something lands for you, share it with someone who'd benefit. 

If you'd like to take it further, the ways to work with me are in the links.

Come sceptical. Stay curious.

As a way of turning over the ideas I’ve covered so far, in this episode I offer the five questions I get asked most often—and most immediately—when I teach this material. (Being early days for this show, nobody wrote in. So instead of inventing listeners, I hauled these ones out from my notes — and answered them straight. You’re invited to send in your questions for future episodes.)

There's also a correction in here that I've owed you for six episodes: it was never "the need to be right." It's just being right. Drop the word, and you start seeing it in the one place you'd least like to find it—I think you know where I mean. 

Inside: Five questions answered, three on how to work with being right, one about knowing versus seeing, and one on whether surrender is even possible when the world’s on fire. All answered from the point of view of putting aside mechanistic ego reactions to get to what’s real and what matters. 

Recognise why you can't directly make someone else see their being right, what wanting to might say about you, and what you can realistically do that is meaningfully different. * The "being right" vs "being correct" distinction. * Noticing the mechanism and still not being able to stop. * Where this teaching sits next to ACT, IFS and the contemplative traditions (and why that question is a trap). * Is "I don't mind what happens" (equanimity) even possible in today’s world?

Got a question for the next one? Drop it in the comments or reply by email — your name on it if you want it there.

What to Believe — finding signal in the noise.

Show notes:

A listener Q&A with no write-ins — yet. Five real questions, drawn from the coaching room and trainings, about the mechanism at the heart of this show to date: being right.

We cover: 

Q1: How should you respond when you can see “being right” in others? A: Notice how this added layer of awareness can birth a spiritual ego. (And how the issues you're most right about are the areas where you're most stuck.) Q2: Does giving up being right make you a doormat? What if your job requires it? A: How to distinguish between being right as an ego mechanism and being right in fact. Q3: What to do when you can see the mechanism and still can't stop? A: How to shift from awareness to action. Q4: How does this approach correlate with other knowledge frameworks? A: Knowing when knowing is just knowing and shifting to seeing and doing. Q5: Isn’t “I don't mind what happens" (equanimity) just privilege talking when the world is in crisis? A: Start small and don’t invoke a crisis of meaning until you’re ready.

Mentioned: the surrender episode (Ep 5), the Bob Newhart "Stop It" sketch, Krishnamurti's "I don't mind what happens."

Got a question? Comments or email — we'll do this properly next time. 

The world feels like it's on fire — the economy, AI, a war in the Middle East — and here's Neil talking about the inner workings of the ego. Isn't that a luxury? This episode takes the objection head-on. The argument: the inner work isn't a luxury, it's the spare wheel that matters most when you break down — and it's the one piece of the chaos actually in your hands. 

And it's needed more than ever: the same bug in the human OS that we've been tracing across this series (the need to be right, to look good, to assert our preferences) isn't just personal. The social media machinery has turned that bug into a feature and given it maximum leverage. And that's before we get to the billionaires whose wealth gives them even more. 

Featuring a conversation about a war that didn't turn into a fight, the principle of finding the flaw in yourself first, and the moment a relationship turned on that internal move.

Show notes:

Some of you have been sitting with this for a few episodes: aren't there more pressing things to worry about than the ego? Neil answers directly — and argues that under pressure is exactly when this work earns its keep.

In this episode:

• A conversation about the Israel–Iran conflict that two people navigated without needing to be right
• Why more money makes you more stupid, more power makes you more corrupt — and unconscious ego reactions just get longer levers
• The spare-wheel test: why self-mastery as a "luxury" is upside-down 
• Container, not content — the second-order view (and why that's not a false equivalence)
• What actually changed: social media versus having editors who held the reaction at bay
• Your ten square metres — this generation's version of Stoicism
• Be the change: Krishnamurti's two-week discipline, and finding it in yourself first
• A living example from one of the most charged subjects of our time

References mentioned: Krishnamurti · Gandhi ("be the change") · the Stoics · Episode 3 (seeing at the phenomenological level) · Episode 5 (surrender and the Stoics)

Links: 

Get the written companion: https://substack.com/@neilbierbaum 

Work with me (keynote speaker, thinking partner, coach): https://neilbierbaum.com 

If something landed, subscribe, rate and review wherever you're listening.