In this crossover episode of The Living Conversation and The Way Between Podcast, co-hosts Anthony Wright and Adam Dietz continue their conversation with Dr. Nick Egan, exploring what AI means from Buddhist and philosophical perspectives. Starting from the very contemporary anxiety around “AI as threat or opportunity,” they return to a classic theme: how human beings have always had to integrate new technologies—from fire and the wheel to radio, TV, and the internet—through something like a middle way.

Adam brings in Confucian and Buddhist language to ask how we might “harmonize” AI rather than demonize or worship it, suggesting that our real task is to cultivate ourselves so we use the tool without letting it use us. Nick takes up Anthony’s koan-like question—“Does AI have Buddha nature?”—and responds from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy: why inanimate systems, however powerful, still lack sentience and will, and why consciousness arises from a stream of previous moments of consciousness rather than from mere complexity of code. Along the way they touch on nature spirits, projection (does the tree really “speak” to us?), and the limits of the human mind in grasping exponential change.

From there, the conversation widens into the nature of mind itself. Adam describes the danger of attaching even to “non-attachment,” and the need to let desires, ambitions, and identities settle so that the “true self” can emerge and be integrated in everyday life. Nick contrasts Zen’s stripped-down focus on realizing the nature of mind with Tibetan Buddhism’s vast toolbox of tantric cycles and practices, warning about spiritual materialism and the reification of emptiness itself. The episode closes with Adam introducing The Way Between Podcast as a space for deeper, longer-form explorations of philosophy East and West, and with all three sharing how listeners can stay connected to their work.