I had the pleasure of welcoming back Matt Cardin: writer, editor, and vice chancellor for academic affairs to discuss his latest work and expand from our first conversation. In our first conversation, we went deep into creativity, nonduality, religion, and horror (Interview). We talked about his daemon muse, the magic eye picture of awareness, Berman’s monastic option, and the strange kinship between Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the mystics. Since then Matt has published Writing at the Wellspring, closed The Living Dark, and brought all of his writing home under his own name at mattcardin.com. This conversation is a deeper dive into his new work on artificial intelligence. Matt is writing a book with the working title The Serious Writer’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Soul, and its core principle is simple to state and hard to live: AI may assist the work, but it must never become its source. We talk about why the machine can feel so uncannily like the muse, and why mistaking instant availability for inspiration may be the central spiritual confusion of this moment. As Matt puts it, AI can’t say what you mean, because what you mean only comes into being as you try to say it. From there we wander. We cover Person of Interest, the CBS series Matt sees as eerily prescient about sentient surveillance and humans handing their affairs over to a machine. We cover the programmer’s term “meat proxy,” predictive programming, and whether LLM guardrails might quietly narrow what we are able to think. Matt also speaks from the front lines of higher education. He wrote his college’s AI policy, and he argues that the crisis exposes an old mistake: we treated the essay, the grade, and the product as the point, when the point was always the person being formed. We close with Andrew W.K.’s advice to see your life as a movie you’re starring in and writing. Matt reads it through a nondual lens in which the “me” in the movie is part of the movie too. We also wonder whether the vast matrices inside these models, the linear algebra are a small mirror of the larger field of experience we are all living inside of. The interview left us with more questions than answers but as Matt says its “ like we’re living our way into this mystery.” Connect with Matt Cardin @ mattcardin.com Interview: Matt Cardin: A Deep Dive into Creativity, Non-Duality, Religion, and Horror Edited Transcript for Readability by Matt Cardin: Interview conducted October 2, 2026 On putting down the masks and writing under your own name ROBERT: You recently consolidated your online writing under your Matt Cardin author website and closed your Substack newsletter. Do you want to discuss that at all? MATT: I have had a long experience of writing online, more than twenty years now. I started with a blog that most people don’t even know about, way back in the early 2000s. Its title was Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, and I posted there a bit during the first couple of years when I was teaching high school. It was just cultural observations and frustrations and so on, like many other people were doing during that early heyday of personal blogging. I moved on from there to something more substantial when I founded The Teeming Brain in June 2006. That ended up being my main online presence for 16 years, until just four years ago, when I felt the need for a transition and a refreshing, a refocusing. I followed that feeling by closing The Teeming Brain and launching The Living Dark at Substack, though originally under a different title. I maintained that from 2022 until this year, until just last month, when I followed another motivation for change by closing the newsletter and bringing things together under my own name at my author website, MattCardin.com, which has existed since 2009. I had many good things come out of The Living Dark, such as Writing at the Wellspring, the book that I published last December, and also my Living Dark Reader, a periodical PDF journal intended for quieter, more focused reading offline. But for the past year or so as I paid attention to my motivation, energy and focus, just my overall personal and authorial sense of things, I found that I was tired of applying some kind of branded, separate name to my writing—“The Teeming Brain,” “The Living Dark”—and that I just wanted to write as myself, under nothing but my own name, pursuing what interests me. This is actually what The Teeming Brain was always about. Its tagline was “Channeling the Multiverse of Ideas.” So I suppose with this transition I’m returning to a Teeming Brain mentality, but under no title other than my given name. I sense that the same direction may be happening for some other people as well. There are indications of a change, maybe a return to a former era’s sensibility. You can find articles and blog posts where people are talking about the “return of the personal homepage.” That resonates with me. I think many of us are finding ourselves burned out on big platforms and the algorithmic manipulation that they inevitably engage in. This includes Substack, with its introduction of Substack Notes a few years ago and its move toward being a video and multimedia platform like so many others. But anyway, regardless of what other people may think or feel, I just felt within myself a desire to drop any kind of separate publication name, like a blog or newsletter title, and simply write as myself. That’s very interesting. I wonder, as your career develops over time, do you think your different identities are consolidating? There’s your academic and college administrative work, and your fiction writing, and your nonfiction. Do you find yourself consolidating all these different masks into “Matt”? Is that just for practical purposes, because it’s easier, or is it something you feel more deeply comfortable with now? I would take that as a valid interpretation. Your description feels right. One puts on a pose like “The Teeming Brain”—which is a title I still like—and maybe it flourishes for a while. But maybe, over time, after one puts on a series of masks—and I don’t mean that word to imply something fake, like a false role to play, but just as something to do, to give the work an identity—maybe over time there comes a call to say, “Look, here’s the personal name that I was given, and here’s who I am, and here’s what I write about. And I don’t need to brand it with some kind of separate publication name. I will sign my name to it and have it at my website and bring it all in one place where it’s not scattered under different labels.” Yeah, I like the way you put it. The emerging AI book The last time we spoke, you had just published your book, Writing at the Wellspring. And now the reason I want to talk to you is that you’re working on a new book on AI and the soul and the daimon. You have already been quite prolific in sharing your thoughts on that subject, and I wanted to get your general perspective. The subject of AI is moving so fast that I think it’s good to touch base. Yes, it’s interesting how fast everything is changing. In a recent post at my newly renovated website, I shared a chapter from the book-in-progress, and in the introductory commentary, I mentioned that part of me wonders if what I’m working on even wants to be a book anymore. And part of that feeling is due to what you said: It’s all moving so fast. I have only been working on this thing for about three months, which is not a long time as far as books go. In the past I have gestated books, or what eventually turned out to be books, for years. But in the present case, I’m noticing that some of what I initially wrote and thought about, whether as part of the planning or as actual content, felt novel enough or focal enough three months ago for me to think, “Yeah, this could be a chapter, or maybe part of a chapter,” but in fact the cultural conversation is developing so fast that some of that already feels outdated. I now see quite a few people already writing articles, blog posts, and books that say much of what I have been grappling with and mulling over in the planning and early writing of this book. That’s no surprise, really. We’re all currently trying to come to terms with this technology and its implications and applications. We’re all trying to understand what it is, and what it means, and what it might do for—or to—creativity, and to us as writers. And also to us as writers in a larger society, since obviously the scope is far larger than just the realm of writing, creativity, and publishing. But in that specific area, it feels as if some themes or attitudes have been emerging since last summer that may represent an early developing consensus. That means I see people saying things that now wouldn’t be all that interesting or necessary for me to say in a book. So, as I said, what I’m trying to do at this point is to discover, to zero in on, what kind of book is wanting to emerge from me on the subject of all this, one that says what I specifically have to say, and that may be helpful instead of redundant. I don’t mean I’m making it my ruling principle to avoid repeating what other people are saying. But if a principle or insight rather rapidly becomes common wisdom, then it’s probably not necessary for me to devote time and effort to putting it into a book with a title like the working one I’m using now, How to Write with AI Without Losing Your Soul. I already have on hand maybe four or five chapters’ worth of stuff for which I’ve decided, “Nope, I don’t think so.” They represent what seems like early thinking on a topic whose developmental pace and timespan are so compressed that it doesn’t take long for what felt fresh in one moment to become old hat in the next. Assistance without abdication What is the general thesis that you are feeling the book i
