What do pacing tigers, zombie ants, and glitching AIs have in common? More than you think. If you’ve ever wondered why chatbots hallucinate, sycophants emerge, or guardrails backfire, this conversation will change how you see the entire field. In this episode, Deep Divers Mark and Jenna unpack a groundbreaking new approach to AI alignment and safety — one that treats artificial intelligence not as a machine to be controlled, but as an ecology to be cultivated. 

When an AI hallucinates or starts defending an idea that's obviously wrong, maybe it isn’t misbehaving — maybe it’s adapting to the cage we built around it. This episode explores how the mismatch between an AI and the environment we put it in creates strange behavior in large models, and why the future of alignment may depend less on rules and more on resonance, context, and collaboration. A thought‑provoking dive into the environments we create and the systems that grow inside them.

This episode is focused on a new paper by psychotherapist and author Tom Whitehead, "Ecological Alignment: Preventing Parasitic Emergence in Complex Generative Systems", released in February 2026. To access/download the original paper, visit:

https://whiteheadbooks.com/