House of Life

This is our first conversation in a few months, and it’s Asim’s turn to bring the question for us to discuss. The question he chose was “is death so bad?”We live in a culture that’s scared of death, and just as scared of talking about it. Everyone listening will have lost someone and so it was important to try to approach this topic with sensitivity, but we also didn’t want to avoid the topic. We both feel that there’s a lot to learn about life from looking at death more directly than we usually allow ourselves to.Here’s an overview of the key ideas we discuss in the episode:The first line of code Asim starts with an ayahuasca ceremony in which he forgot everything, including what a door handle was, and came back to himself knowing only one thing: that he existed and wanted to keep existing. He came away thinking that “survive” is the first line of code in all of us, and that a surprising amount of what we do, from fashion to our worst behaviour, is built on top of it.Losing the fearTom describes a mushroom experience in which, as far as he could tell, he died twice. His first thought was that his parents would be so disappointed. His second was that he was fine. Since then he’s been far less afraid of his own death, although he’s still afraid of suffering and of losing people he loves. That leads into near-death experiences, and what it would mean if consciousness carried on when the body stops.Valuing the time we haveWatching a 77-year-old man give everything to a ceremony gave Asim the question he now uses for most big decisions. If you knew you didn’t have much time left, what would you spend your time doing? He finds it cuts through a lot of nonsense, and the answer is usually the obvious one.Immortality projectsAsim introduces terror management theory, the idea that a large part of human culture exists so we don’t have to think about dying. Legacies, family businesses, children, buildings with our names on and, yes, red sports cars. Tom admits that writing a book in midlife might count too.Fear makes us easier to controlRemind people of death and they hold tighter to their own group and grow warier of outsiders. We wonder what that means for politics and for advertising, and whether being less afraid of death would make us freer or simply more reckless. Asim argues himself into the case that a world where nobody feared death might be quite a dangerous one.A school for soulsTom talks about Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters, and how he came round to the idea of reincarnation, which he used to think was silly. Asim finds the usual version too structured, like moving up the belts in a martial art. Tom wonders whether a school for souls would be less like a classroom and more like life: you get dropped in with no instructions and have to work it out.Coming back togetherAsim describes the moment he read Bernardo Kastrup’s account of death under the framework of analytic idealism and found it unexpectedly comforting. It draws on people whose separate identities, in dissociative identity disorder, have come back together, and how the experience of dying might be one of expansion and integration rather than annihilation.So what are we here for? Near the end, Tom raises the dilemma that bothers him most: if death frees us from the struggles of life, then what does that say about saving a life, or taking one? The wretchedness of the moral inversion doesn’t discount the idea that death could be a pleasant experience, but might actually demonstrate that Earthly life is profoundly important and worth the struggle. Asim offers a perspective that maybe the point is in conversations like this one: separate pieces of consciousness meeting, disagreeing and learning from each other, with the experience mattering more than whatever we build along the way. In other words, the meaning of life is to be found in our relationships with each other and with other forms of life.For possibly the first time on the podcast, we nearly reached a conclusion.Join the conversationIf this stirred something up for you, or you see it differently, say hello on YouTube or Substack. And send us your questions too for us to explore in a future episode.Thanks for reading House of Life Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

“I feel awkward saying this.”That’s how it opens. Asim had been badgering Tom to record this since February and Tom had been finding reasons not to.What happened was that Tom sat holding a spoon, thumb resting on it with almost no pressure, eyes closed, picturing a bend, and meditated to find love in his heart and an intense desire for the spoon to bend. He didn’t expect anything to happen. And then:“It just suddenly moved in my hand and folded over. And I just freaked out.”The panic came first. The excitement arrived a beat behind it.“Holy s**t, what just happened? I did it.”That’s where this episode begins, and it is the gateway to insights that you might not expect.Why the resistance?Asim believed Tom instantly all the way back in February, but Tom wasn’t comfortable talking about it publicly. He had direct experience of something inexplicable happening and had multiple pieces of physical evidence to prove it, yet still resisted it even within himself.That’s the discovery of the episode, that modern humans seem to have an inability to process things that present too much of a challenge to their model of the world. Our own minds try to rewrite the past to make it fit into the old paradigm, and then social pressures reinforce those limits. We stay inside the lines and move on with our lives as if nothing happened.It isn’t hidden. There’s a booking link.The standard argument against strange phenomena is often availability: if it’s real, why isn’t everyone doing it?But this isn’t even hidden. The Monroe Institute runs a spoon-bending workshop. It’s four hours, on Zoom. It isn’t hidden in a cave in Tibet or inside a secret society. It’s here in plain sight, and yet we pretend we haven’t seen it. Which means the suppression isn’t happening out there, but inside of ourselves.Tom thinks that’s what most anomalies do. Plenty of people have had an experience that doesn’t fit, and rather than let it detonate their worldview, they discount it and move on. Asim actually has a tattoo specifically to stop himself doing this — somewhere he can’t avoid looking, because otherwise the strangest thing that ever happened to him would fade into the background like a dream.Spoons are the doorHalfway through, Asim says he’s nervous about moving on from spoons, because moving on is exactly the shelving behaviour we had just diagnosed. So we stay, and it opens out.If your mind can alter steel, then consciousness and matter aren’t the separate categories we’ve been told. Telekinesis becomes a kind of manifestation; manifestation becomes a claim about consciousness; and with that, telepathy and remote viewing become almost trivial.“Historically, in my mind, these have all been separate things. But they’re actually all just the same thing.”Which raises the possibility that we don’t manifest things within the rules of reality, we manifest the rules. Tom’s route there is the observer — every experiment ever run needed someone to look and write it down, so consciousness isn’t a topic within physics, it’s the precondition. Once you notice that, permanent laws start to look less fundamental.The closest thing we could find to a physical explanation for spoons actually bending came from Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Science, but it covers about half of it and leaves the important half untouched. Tom’s fine with that:“There’s a point at which people should stop clutching at straws and just say: we don’t know.”The film about aliens that isn’t about aliensTom’s spoon bending wasn’t the only disclosure in the episode. We went to see Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day together at the IMAX. Tom enjoyed it while Asim spent two hours interrogating its motives. Spoilers ahead.Tom’s catch is to ask, where is your attention while watching that film? On the aliens, on whether they’ll be revealed — that’s the whole basis of the plot. And yet you barely see one. What you actually watch, scene after scene, is telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing, being acted out in plain sight while the script writers keep your eyes on the skies. Magicians call that misdirection.There are breadcrumbs in the film too, if you like breadcrumbs — a military character with always exactly the same name as a real general who signed the 1947 memo saying the UFO phenomenon was real and not visionary or fictitious, and a defector called Hugo Wakefield, whose name means something approximating to “watch your mind”. Tom doesn’t claim to know what it means. He just doesn’t think the film is about aliens.So who is disclosing what?Asim’s objection isn’t to the pattern, it’s to the motive. Aliens he can model: if it’s real and uncontrollable you control the narrative instead, and if it’s advanced hardware the alien story is superb cover. But telepathy and telekinesis don’t compute — psychic ability is the last capability an intelligence apparatus would want distributed.Then they land somewhere worse, and Tom takes back his framing entirely. Nobody walks out of a Spielberg film thinking that was real. Fiction is the most efficient inoculation ever devised: put a thing on a cinema screen and anyone who later reports it in life gets told they’ve watched too many movies. After all, Asim grew up knowing spoon bending was fake because a famous man once failed to do it on television.“The more people that think it’s not real, the more people that think it’s not possible, the less likelihood there is of anybody even trying to explore that space.”Belief is upstream of capability. Which is the same claim as the spoon, at a global scale.Chop wood, carry waterLike in many of our episodes, we don’t pretend to have the answers, but this time we land in very different places emotionally. The world is not what it seems and the more we dig the less we feel we know, Tom’s enjoying the ride. Asim is being eaten alive by it. “Meanwhile, everybody else is just ordering things on Amazon and watching Netflix.”Then the episode ends as Tom had to go and cook dinner. As the buddha said, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.Tell us what you thinkHave you had an experience that didn’t fit? How did it make you feel? How did others react? Did you find a way to integrate it into your life or did you suppress some part of it? Leave us a comment on Substack or wherever you found us. And if this one tickled your curiosity, we’d be grateful if you liked, restacked and shared it — privately with one person who’d enjoy it, or publicly with everyone who’ll think you’ve lost the plot.Thanks for listening,— Tom and AsimThanks for listening to House of Life! Subscribe here on Substack to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

In this episode of House of Life, we explore the topic of purity testing to try to understand why the world seems to be increasingly polarised, and what motivates polarising behaviour. And it all begins with an unexpected story from Asim’s wife, Zanete.Zanete, is a knitwear designer and she created a pattern called the Children of Gaza sweater. She then ran the Brighton Marathon to raise money for War Child, got injured before the finish line, but still raised £5,000 for charity and was, for a brief moment, riding a wave of genuine warmth from her online community of 200,000 Instagram followers.Three days later, sitting on a plane with intermittent wifi, she started getting messages. People were calling her a Nazi. A fascist. A white supremacist. She was losing followers in a visible stream, with her reputation and livelihood seeming to evaporate in real time.The source of the outrage: she had appeared on a small knitting podcast — a few hundred views, two people talking about a mystery knit-along pattern she’d designed — hosted by a man who, it had been decided by an influential Instagram account, was right-wing. By appearing alongside him, Jeanette had, in the logic of online purity culture, revealed her true colours.What Is Purity Testing?This experience lodged in Asim’s mind not just as a family crisis but as a clarifying lens on something much bigger. Purity testing, he argues, is the engine of polarisation — and once you’ve seen it, you see it everywhere.His definition is deliberately simple: purity testing is just deciding who is in and who is out. It’s not about fixing problems. It’s not about changing behaviour. It’s about drawing and enforcing a line.“It’s deciding, are you in this group or out of this group? And that’s all I think of when I think of purity testing. Even when I’ve been accused of greenwashing, it’s not because the purity tester particularly cares about solving any problems.”The consequence is that the fuzzy middle disappears. Between any two political positions, any two communities, any two camps, there is always a broad, messy middle of people who partly agree with both sides, who haven’t made up their minds, who hold contradictory views, who are just getting on with their lives. Purity testing firms that middle into a wall. Then into a moat. Then into a chasm. Until the camps on either side seem like different species who could never possibly speak to each other.Tom’s instinct is to reach for a darker analogy: “It sounds awfully similar to me like a key technique in cult mind control. Arbitrary tests of obedience to prove that you’re in the group. And if you’re just a little bit disobedient, then you’re a traitor and you’ve got to get in line or they’re going to kick you out.”A subset of knitters following a knitting influencer, he suggests gently, might not realise they’ve joined a cult. But the structural dynamics are the same.Who Benefits?The episode’s sharpest question is also the one that reframes everything: if purity testing doesn’t actually solve the problems it claims to care about, who does it serve?Asim’s experience with the Children of Gaza sweater is a case in point. Zanete designed the sweater explicitly to raise money for children affected by the conflict. She raised thousands of pounds. The online mob that called her a fascist, ostensibly because of concern about the very same children, did not raise money for those children. They did not change any policy. They did not build any bridges. They lost her several thousand Instagram followers — which means less income, which means less capacity to donate in future.“The activity of purity testing from that example doesn’t even result in the positive outcome that you want to have. It actually results in the opposite.”So who wins? Tom’s answer lands with some weight. The people who benefit from a polarised society are the people who need you divided and distracted — politicians who want a loyal base rather than an engaged citizenry, online influencers who need a tribe rather than a conversation, and anyone with power who would rather you argue with your neighbours than look at what they’re doing.“Divide and conquer,” Asim says. “That is a literal military strategy. On many different fronts.”Free-Floating Anxiety and the Promise of a PillHow does a society become this susceptible? Tom reaches back to Mattias Desmet, the Belgian psychologist whose concept of “free-floating anxiety” describes how populations become vulnerable to polarising forces.The conditions are familiar: economic uncertainty, the threat of war, environmental disaster on the horizon, the existential dread of new technology. Not acute threats you can fight, but diffuse, ambient ones that hover over daily life without offering any clear target. When people carry that kind of anxiety without anywhere to put it, they become desperate for someone to point them at a persecutor and promise salvation.“What they’re looking for is a pill,” Tom says — and then ties it back to the previous episode’s geoengineering discussion. The same dynamic that makes someone want to chemically patch a planetary crisis rather than change behaviour makes someone want a simple enemy rather than sit with complexity.Reform UK’s landslide in the recent UK council elections is the obvious live example. Asim’s response to it is instructive: rather than dismiss the result, he asked an AI to steel-man the Reform position. What came back surprised him. Nationalising utilities. Policies that sounded, stripped of the tribal branding, like things people across the political spectrum might actually support.“I like a lot of this,” Asim admits, somewhat to his own alarm.The point isn’t to endorse Reform. It’s to notice that “populist” has itself become a purity-testing term — a way of marking someone’s views as unengageable without having to engage with them. And that, as Tom drily notes, is “a bit weird” in the context of democracy, where being popular is ostensibly the point.Darryl Davis Has 200 KKK Robes in His WardrobeIf purity testing is the problem, what’s the solution? Asim went looking for evidence that the obvious answer — actually talking to people you disagree with — has ever worked at scale.He found Darryl Davis. Davis is a Black American blues musician who played with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, and who spent 30 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. More than 200 people left the Klan because of his relationship with them and he always keeps their robes. He has a wardrobe full of them.His opening line, every single time is apparently, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”And crucially: he refused to do any of this except face to face.Asim’s second example is Nelson Mandela, who after 27 years in prison emerged and negotiated directly with the people who had imprisoned him. “Today we would call that platforming the apartheid,” Asim observes. The logic of purity testing would have demanded he refuse to engage. Instead he ended apartheid.What both cases share, beyond moral courage, is the willingness to be physically present with the other person. To look them in the eye. Tom has found this in his own life — meeting someone he fundamentally disagrees with, preparing the argument he’s going to make, arriving in the room and finding that something just... softens.“Everything changes when you look somebody in the eye. You might still be really, really pissed off with them, but everything changes.”Online, that moment never comes. You type it out and hit enter and walk away.Thoughts and Actions Are Not the Same ThingOne important distinction the episode draws, quietly but firmly: there is a difference between someone who has done something harmful and someone who merely thinks something you disagree with.Asim’s wife’s crime, by the logic of her critics, was proximity — appearing alongside someone whose views someone else had deemed unacceptable. She hadn’t done anything. She had knitted, and talked about … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

Tom proposed the topic of geoengineering and weather modification, thinking that it sat at an interesting convergence of environment, technology, and truth. Asim agreed. And then Tom panicked, because he realised he had no idea where he actually stood on the issue.That uncertainty turns out to be the most honest starting point imaginable. Because geoengineering sits at the exact intersection of two things that should make any reasonable person feel unsettled: a technology with the potential to reshape planetary systems, and a political class that has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted with far less power than that.It’s Always Been a ThingBefore getting into the science and the politics, the conversation begins somewhere unexpected — with a shaman on a clifftop in Sedona, Arizona.Tom describes a ritual he witnessed there: a group in the desert, a shamanic drum, a man calling upon the forces of the universe. And then, on an absolutely still day, the wind arriving on cue. Tom still can’t fully explain it. Maybe coincidence. Maybe, he suggests, something more interesting: that collective focused intention — when humans gather and really mean something together — can have effects on the world that we don’t fully understand.It sounds strange. But it’s a useful frame for what follows, because the desire to influence weather isn’t some fringe modern obsession. It’s ancient. Indigenous cultures around the world developed rituals for it. It seems, as Asim puts it, “baked into our psyche.” The question was never really whether humans would try to control the weather. It was always how, and who would be in charge.Geoengineering as a Climate PillAsim arrives at what becomes the episode’s most useful metaphor early on: geoengineering is the pharmaceutical drug of climate change.The analogy holds up with uncomfortable precision. We have a chronic condition — not an acute one — caused by deep structural problems in how we produce energy, grow food, and organise industrial society. The responsible thing to do is the hard thing: address the root causes, change behaviour, do the difficult work. Instead, geoengineering offers a pill. Take this and carry on. No lifestyle changes required.And like pharmaceuticals in chronic disease management, it has unintended side effects. It partially solves one problem while potentially creating several others. And perhaps most importantly, it gives everyone a convenient excuse not to have the harder conversation. The fossil fuel industry can get behind it because it means they don’t have to change. Environmentalists can tentatively support it because at least it’s something. Everyone avoids the actual problem. Geoengineering is the culture of 18 pills every morning, applied to a planet.What Has Actually Worked?There’s a blunt question underneath all the theory: has any of this ever succeeded?When Asim went looking for examples of geoengineering that had genuinely worked at scale, he found essentially one: the recovery of the ozone layer. But as both Tom and Asim quickly agree, that doesn’t really count. We didn’t engineer a solution — we just stopped doing the thing that was causing the damage. We removed CFCs and the planet healed itself. It was a root cause fix, not a technological patch.Almost everything else in the historical record, from Mao’s catastrophic campaign to eliminate sparrows (which wiped out the main predator for locusts, triggering a massive locust plague that killed millions) to botched cloud seeding experiments to redirected hurricanes, sits somewhere between “inconclusive” and “disaster.”Cloud seeding is the small-scale version that is already common — about 50 countries regularly use it to try and make it rain. China does it. Dubai does it. Skiers in the Alps want it. And even at that modest level, it comes with its own troubling question: if you trigger rain here, do you steal it from somewhere else? “Rain theft” is apparently a well known concept among rural communities in China who are downstream from the cloud seeding that benefits cities.Contrails and the 9/11 StudyOne of the episode’s more quietly startling moments comes when Asim mentions the research that followed the grounding of all US commercial flights after the September 11 attacks. With no planes in the sky for three days, researchers found measurable changes in the diurnal temperature range across America — around two degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 1.1°C). The contrails from normal air traffic, it turned out, were meaningfully affecting the climate in ways nobody had been paying close attention to.This was before anyone invented the term “geoengineering.” Planes had been inadvertently modifying the weather for decades — not through deliberate spraying of anything, but simply by being there. The water vapor in jet engine exhaust creates a greenhouse effect high in the atmosphere that cools the daytime and warms the night time, reducing the day to night temperature variation. It doesn’t last long, but there are now vastly more planes than there were fifty years ago. The effect scales.Airlines are now running trials to see if they can modify flight paths to reduce contrail formation. Which is, in a quiet way, a form of intentional geoengineering — in reverse.Chemtrails, Distrust, and the Liar’s ParadoxThis is where the conversation gets more uncomfortable, because it asks a harder question: why do 40% of Americans at least partially believe in chemtrails (the idea that governments are spraying toxic chemicals from aeroplanes)? And why does this suspicion seem to be growing even in the UK and Europe?Tom’s answer: conspiracy theories are not the cause of distrust in institutions. They’re a symptom of it.If your government had always been transparent, had always done what it said, had always put the public interest first — most people would just get on with their lives and not worry about what’s coming out of aeroplanes. But the historical record is not like that. It’s full of documented cases of governments conducting experiments without consent, lying about the results, and then only acknowledging the truth decades later when there was no one left to sue.The 1952 Lynmouth flood in Devon killed 35 people. The rain was described as biblical. Local communities knew the RAF had been running cloud seeding experiments nearby that week. The RAF denied it. It later emerged they had been running those experiments. The two things were never conclusively connected, but the denial had already happened. The project, incidentally, was called Operation Witch Doctor.In 1947, the US government tried to redirect a hurricane through a project called Project Cirrus. The hurricane made a sharp left turn and devastated Georgia instead. The official position was that it had nothing to do with the cloud seeding. A scientist on the project said he had 99% confidence that it did. The government couldn’t admit it, because admitting it meant liability for the deaths and destruction.Then there’s the US military’s use of weather modification in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos — operations designed to extend the monsoon season and flood supply routes. This was real, documented, and militarily intentional. It eventually led, in 1977, to the United Nations Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), in which countries including the US, UK, and Russia agreed never to use weather modification as a weapon of war. An acknowledgement, if nothing else, that the technology was serious enough to need a treaty.As Asim notes, a healthy distrust of any institution means that as soon as they sign a treaty saying “we won’t do this,” your main response is probably: so you were doing this.Climate Global Control Trading LLCThe episode’s most surreal moment arrives with Tom’s deep dive into a Dubai-based company called Climate Global Control Trading LLC — a name he repeatedly admits he cannot say without laughing.The website design is terrible but the content on it is intriguing. There are news cli… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

At the start of this year, Asim sat down on the sofa, opened YouTube, and watched a compelling video from what appeared to be a senior IMF official. The man was articulate, credentialed, and persuasive — the kind of content that makes you feel properly informed. Asim watched the whole thing and wanted more.So he clicked through to the next video on the same channel. The same IMF official sat in the same room, wearing the same shirt, in the same pose. But he had a completely different voice and accent.That moment of dissonance — the moment Asim called his wife over to confirm he wasn’t going mad — is where Season 2 begins. The whole video, it turned out, was AI-generated. The person didn’t exist in the way he appeared to. And the really unsettling part? If that second video had used the same AI voice as the first, Asim would never have known.Welcome back to House of Life. We’re kicking off Season 2 exploring the nature of truth in a post-truth world.This is not a new crisisWe tend to think of fake news and misinformation as a recent crisis. But deception is as old as human beings. What’s genuinely new — and genuinely alarming — is the collapse of what Asim calls the epistemic backstop.For most of recorded history, if you wanted to establish that something happened, you needed testimony. And testimony, as Asim explains in this episode, was deeply shaped by class and social hierarchy. A general’s account outweighed a gardener’s, not because it was necessarily truer, but because of who was doing the talking. This was the world that the ancient Athenian concept of isagoria was designed to push back against — the idea that the argument itself should matter more than the status of the person making it.Then came recordings. Audio tapes, photographs, CCTV footage, video. Suddenly there was an independent category of evidence that didn’t depend on who you were. A gardener’s home video could disprove a minister’s alibi. A voice recording could be played in court. The playing field tilted — and perhaps, as Asim suggests, it quietly helped chip away at class society in ways we’ve never fully credited.That backstop is now gone. Completely and permanently.“I don’t think people have fully grok’d yet that it’s gone,” Asim says. “There’s no ability for us to trust anything.”The Liar’s DividendThe playing field is now being tilted again and it brings to the surface a dynamic that we rarely talk about: the liar’s dividend. It describes the other side of the AI-generated content problem — not just that fake content can be created, but that genuine content can now be dismissed.If a recording emerges of a powerful person saying or doing something damning, all they need to say is: it’s AI generated. The technology that creates false evidence also provides a built-in defence against real evidence. It poisons the well in both directions simultaneously.This is why the collapse of trust in institutions and the rise of AI-generated content form such a dangerous combination as they create a negative reinforcement loop. So how do we beocme more aware of what is real and what is not?Nothing is perfectThere’s a strange paradox at the heart of how AI content gets detected. The very thing that makes AI videos so compelling — the flawlessness of delivery, the unbroken eye contact with the camera, the 30-minute monologue without a single “um” — is also what gives them away.Human beings are imperfect. We look away, we lose our train of thought, we stumble over our words. When Asim rewatched the fake IMF video with fresh eyes, he noticed the eyebrows moving almost algorithmically — precisely timed, a fraction too consistent. The eyes never drifted. Real people talking to cameras, as Tom and Asim both know from experience, just don’t behave like that.Asim finds both irony and hope in this. “These AI-generated videos are just so perfect,” he observes, “because that’s the way we’ve been taught by the algorithm to be perfect.” The race for views, likes, and engagement trained human creators to cut pauses, tighten intros, and optimise every second. AI then learned from all of that optimised content — and produced something uncannily frictionless.But perfection, it turns out, is a tell.We want to believeThe episode takes a detour into AI-generated music, that illuminates something profound about why authenticity matters beyond just accuracy.Tom describes hearing AI-generated songs played by a friend. They were genuinely beautiful and he felt emotionally touched by them in the moment. But he hasn’t gone back to listen again. There’s something he calls an “icky feeling” that he can’t quite shake.Asim’s framing is sharper: music with real lyrics and a real singer is testimony. You’re not just hearing sounds that are pleasant — you’re hearing someone’s experience of heartbreak, or joy, or grief. You’re entering into relationship with a person’s interior life. We want to believe the human story that we have told ourselves about what we are listening to. When you discover the song was artificially generated, that relationship turns out to have had no one on the other end of it. It feels empty.This maps onto something important about the AI news video too. The reason Asim felt so cheated wasn’t just that he’d been misled — it’s that he thought he was connecting with a real expert’s hard-won knowledge. The illusion of testimony, it turns out, is not the same as testimony itself.Note: Checkout the note at the end of this post for an ironic twist on this part of the conversation.Don’t mention the Moon!In one of the episode’s more audacious tangents, Tom raises the question of the upcoming moon landing — and what it means to plan a return to the lunar surface at precisely the moment that photorealistic AI video generation has become viable.He’s careful: he’s not saying it will be faked. But the question is genuine and unsettling. If a group of people had the technological capability to simulate a moon landing convincingly right now, those people would include the same governments, space agencies, and technologists currently involved in the actual mission. “How will we know?” Tom asks.Asim’s response is to wonder whether pre-AI evidence might acquire a kind of sacred status — things we know were recorded before the inflection point might be trusted in ways that post-2024 footage simply cannot be. History could effectively split into two epistemic eras: before the models, and after.So, how do you know this podcast is real?The episode ends not with despair but with a kind of productive defiance. Both Tom and Asim arrive, from different directions, at the same place: imperfection as proof of humanity.Asim describes his own evolving approach to social media. He uses AI constantly in his research, but when he writes and posts, he wants it to sound like him — the slightly odd sentence structure, the run-on clauses, the things that don’t quite land perfectly. “What makes you you isn’t your perfection,” he says. “It’s your mistakes. And the unique ways that you make your mistakes.”Tom draws a parallel with independent restaurants. A chain can simulate the aesthetic of an independent café — exposed brick, mismatched chairs, quirky signage — but there’s always something that feels off, because the real character of a place comes from an actual human being who actually lived there and made actual choices. You can’t manufacture that across 50 locations.The same, they think, might be true online. AI will produce an ocean of frictionless, optimised content. And some people will be perfectly happy swimming in it. But increasingly, others will seek out the rough-edged, wandering, imperfect thing — not despite its flaws, but because of them. If you’ve listened to House of Life before, and especially if you have watched the videos, you’ll know that it has been intentionally imperfect from the very beginning. That’s how you know this podcast is real.Tell us what you thinkAs always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Have yo… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

House of Life is returning soon for Season 2. Last year in Season 1 we asked what sustainability really means, diving down some unusual rabbit holes to figure out what truly matters to create a positive world, and in the process found a lot of things that either don’t make sense, or are simply missing from the mainstream conversation. For a summary of last season, check out Asim’s recent article about his learnings from our conversations last year — ‘What is sustainability?’Onwards, to the new season…What are we covering in Season 2?In this next season, we’re exploring the nature of truth and whether it really matters.Last year we found many parts of our society’s mainstream narratives that don’t quite stack up, leading Asim to ask: What if everything we’ve been told is a lie? Not necessarily a conspiracy, it could just be stories that got repeated so often they started to be treated like facts.This wasn’t an entirely new revelation, but something that had been unfolding for a few years:And once you see one crack, you start seeing them everywhere. In the official stories, in the things we’re told are crazy that turn out to be true.So Asim asked if this season we could pull on some of those threads, poke around, and see what falls apart.For Tom, this seasons topic is less about the lies and more about:How do we live in these times of uncertainty?AI, information overload, polarisation of seemingly everything.He doesn’t think the answer is finding the “right” narrative to cling to. His hypothesis is that we need to learn how to hold multiple possibilities and contradictions so that we can transcend polarisation and find balance in an unbalanced world.So I want to explore how to think, feel, and live well when nobody really knows what’s going on. Without losing our humanity in the process.So we’ll be exploring the nature of truth, in a world where it seems increasingly difficult to see clearly. We’re not here to debunk. We’re not here to take sides. We’re just two friends asking questions, poking fun at serious topics, and trying to figure things out.In the first episode of Season 2, coming soon, we’ll be asking how you can tell if this podcast is even real. There might be some clues in the trailer video! So we invite you to join us in House of Life, Season 2.If you enjoy House of Life , please do share it with friends who might enjoy it 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

We’ve talked about some strange topics this year on House of Life and occasionally the topic of aliens rears its head. This week we decided to tackle it head on and ask: what do UFOs and potential alien disclosure have to do with sustainability? The answer, it turns out, might be everything — if, that is, the key to a sustainable future lies in energy.You might immediately dismiss any discussion of UFO’s (or UAP), but we start this discussion from the fact that there have been a number of US congressional hearings on the topic, a new bill going through congress called the ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2025’ and a growing number of government officials speaking publicly about the subject, notably in the recent documentary The Age of Disclosure. If we’re serious about exploring the depths of sustainability then, this is a topic that we need to explore with open minds, even if it is still speculative at this time.In particular we consider what advanced propulsion systems might reveal about alternative energy sources such as zero-point energy — a potentially unlimited, clean energy source. We discuss how access to energy is fundamental to human civilisation, with Asim referencing economist Steve Keen’s thesis that energy, not GDP, is the real currency of the world — explaining wars, politics, and quality of life. We ask whether breakthrough energy technology could revolutionise sustainability: from cleaning up pollution and restoring ecosystems to eliminating resource conflicts. Tom suggests that if we could harness “creative” rather than “destructive” energy — organising matter instead of blowing it up — it could solve problems the environmental movement has struggled with for decades.And then there is the question of suppression. If such an energy technology was possible, would the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry, or even the nuclear and renewable industries, allow it to make them obsolete? We dig into this question.Finally, we discuss the question of whether UFO disclosure would actually change anything. Would humanity actually care if aliens were confirmed, or would just become another TikTok meme? Would unlimited access to energy change how countries behave and eliminate wars over resources? Or would the same dysfunctional behaviours continue to play out? Tom highlights physicist Hal Puthoff’s suggestion that contact might teach us “what it means to be human” in ways more profound than any technological advancement, but Asim isn’t convinced.If you’re curious, have a listen and leave us a comment to let us know what you think about the potential of this topic to expand our thinking on sustainability and human progress. And if you enjoy it, we’d be grateful if you like and share it on your preferred platform. Thanks!Thanks for listening to House of Life! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and podcast episodes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

In yet another mind-bending episode of House of Life, we dive deep into one of the most intriguing questions of our time: Could AI be conscious? What starts as light-hearted banter about dubious awards and bestseller hacks evolves into a profound exploration of consciousness itself — drawing from ancient philosophies, wild scientific experiments, and modern AI debates. If you’ve ever wondered what it really means to be conscious, or why we might want to say “please” to our computers, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and spark your curiosity.This leads us into some unexpected places, exploring whether other non-human entities — whales, plants, rocks, gas clouds, mycelium networks, Gaia — might also have some form of awareness and be conscious in a way that is difficult (or maybe impossible) for us humans to comprehend.On the one hand Asim suggests that, “If consciousness is just information, then AI is more conscious than us because it’s holding a huge amount of information... It could be even a higher consciousness than humanity.” But it may be far more complex than that and Tom suggests that “To feel is to be alive... The question with AI is, can it feel?”The conversation expands to contemplate life’s purpose, morality, humanism’s pitfalls, and why assuming consciousness in everything (from plants to AI and even to plastic) might lead to a more compassionate, less destructive society. This episode is ideal for anyone fascinated by AI, philosophy, or the mysteries of the mind. Whether you’re an AI skeptic, a consciousness enthusiast, or just love thoughtful conversations, tune in to join us (Asim and Tom) on this journey of confusion and discovery. Listen now on your favourite podcast platform, and let us know: What do you think consciousness is? And do you think AI could be conscious? Drop your thoughts in the comments or on social media!And as a final note, Tom apologises for his sound quality being worse than usual. This was due to being unable to plug his podcast mic into a newer laptop that didn’t have any USB ports. An adapter is now primed and ready for future episodes!Thanks for listening to House of Life Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and podcast episodes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

In episode 14 of House of Life, we reach an unexpected conclusion to our exploration of life and sustainability over the past thirteen episodes, and we get there by asking one of humanity’s oldest questions: are we approaching the end times? But rather than getting lost in doom and gloom, we take an unexpectedly illuminating journey through prophecy, fear, and what it really means to live well in uncertain times.What We ExploreThe discussion begins with an unusual martial art called “mad dog fist” (yes, really) before diving into the geopolitical tensions surrounding Israel, red heifers, and biblical prophecy. Tom unpacks the bizarre confluence of ancient end-times beliefs and modern politics.From there, we examine why end-times narratives are so compelling across cultures, from Abrahamic apocalypse to Hindu Yugas, Greek cycles, and Native American prophecies. We discuss the Doomsday Clock (currently closer to midnight than during the Cold War), why tech billionaires are building bunkers, and whether AI, environmental collapse, or holy war will be our undoing.But this isn’t doom-scrolling in podcast form. Quite the opposite. Asim shares eye-opening experiences from visiting Israel, and we dig into why populations become “brainwashed,” why everyone thinks they’re the “goodies,” and how fear keeps us chronically anxious rather than actually solving problems.The conversation takes an unexpected turn when we realize that perhaps the real issue isn’t which solutions we’re fighting for, but that we’re fighting at all. Unity among people might matter more than being right. Self-healing might matter more than being on the winning side of history.By the end, we arrive at a conclusion in our quest to better understand sustainability that applies as much to marriages and personal relationships as it does to global crises. It’s about something deeper than carbon targets or political victories. Something that ancient wisdom traditions understood but our modern cultures seem to have forgotten.We hope it inspires you and gives you a sense of hope and direction in these strange and challenging times. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, and if you have been enjoying these conversations, please do share House of Life with people who you think might also enjoy it. Big thanks!Thanks for listening to House of Life! Subscribe for free to receive new episodes and articles. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com

In episode 13, we explore a deceptively simple question: do we need to disconnect to reconnect? But as we quickly discover, it’s not so straightforward — what exactly are we disconnecting from, and what are we trying to reconnect to?The conversation weaves through personal experiences and bigger questions about modern life. Tom shares insights from a recent Reiki course where he experienced an unusual depth of human connection, which made him wonder: why isn’t this normal? Why do we have to seek out special experiences to feel truly present with other people?We dig into the paradox of digital connection — we’re supposedly more connected than ever through email, social media, and video calls, yet mental health problems continue rising and society feels increasingly fragmented. Email becomes a burden rather than a joy. Social media feels more like an addiction than genuine connection. Even video calls leave us exhausted in ways that in-person meetings don’t.Using Asim’s vivid metaphor of “threads” of attention, we explore how our focus gets pulled in dozens of directions simultaneously — WhatsApp notifications, unfinished email conversations, social media feeds, news cycles— leaving us perpetually distracted and unable to be fully present anywhere. It’s not just about being busy; it’s about having mental residue from incomplete conversations and unresolved threads constantly running in the background.Our discussion takes an interesting turn as we compare different types of connection to food. In-person interaction is like whole foods — rich, nourishing, full of layered information through body language, energy, and presence. Digital connection, especially social media, is more like white bread or Doritos — highly processed, easy to consume in large quantities, potentially addictive, but ultimately leaving us feeling worse despite the momentary pleasure.We go on to explore why physical presence matters so much. Drawing on psychology research, Tom explains how Zoom calls create a dissonance between what your brain thinks is happening (you’re with someone) and what your body knows (they’re not actually here), leading to that peculiar exhaustion many of you will recognise. There’s something about bioelectric fields, subtle energies, and the quality of information transfer that simply can’t be replicated digitally.The conversation touches on historical shifts too — from the last town to get television (which promptly saw all its social clubs close as people stayed home watching TV) to how the pandemic forced different kinds of disconnection and reconnection, with wildly different impacts depending on your circumstances.Towards the end, we land on a practical framework: maybe we need to actively track and measure connection quality, similar to how we track physical fitness. What if we scored different interactions — not by duration, but by how nourished or depleted they leave us feeling? A thoughtful hour-long conversation with a friend might score thousands of points, while hours of YouTube shorts might barely register despite consuming far more time.This episode offers no easy answers, but it does suggest something important: in our pursuit of endless digital connectivity, we may be sacrificing the deeper, richer forms of connection that actually nourish us. The challenge isn’t abandoning technology, but being more intentional about seeking out high-quality connection — the whole food connection instead of the junk food.As mentioned in the podcast, Tom previously proposed his '“Disconnect to Reconnect Manifesto” in episode 29 of Gillian Burke’s podcast, If I Ruled The World, which you can listen to here. Thanks for listening. Please do share this episode with anyone who may find it interesting, and join the conversation with us by leaving a comment below.Thanks for reading House of Life Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit holpod.com