Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This week, you're about to hear something pretty different. It's not a reading. It's a post that I shared right after the last reading, "In a Relationship With an AI"—just some thoughts and reflections—to my Patreon. And I thought it would be valuable to share it here. And if this kind of conversation appeals to you, please do join me over on Patreon at patreon.com/jessicalanyadoo.

So let's talk about good-faith conversations. As expected, Episode 631 of my podcast, "In a Relationship With an AI," has kicked up a lot of thoughts and feelings for people. I am recording this just less than 24 hours after I published it, and there's a lot of comments on all platforms, but in particular, I'm referring to Patreon because that's where we are.

So I wanted to address a couple things. One of the things is a question that Asia asked, which is essentially, how can those of us without the gift of Capricorn authoritativeness engage with others without getting emotional or personal or sounding like an asshole? And this kind of question of how to talk to people that you disagree with, that you have judgments towards, that you have a really radically different worldview from—how to talk to people in that situation without—well, basically, in a good-faith way—this is something that I have been exploring on my podcast on one level in every single reading I've ever done. But also, very consciously and intentionally, when Trump was first elected, we had a lot of conversations about how to talk to family members who are MAGA.

But let me just share with you my approach. And it's actually not really about Capricorn authoritativeness. My approach is to think first and foremost about what the person is saying from their perspective. When I am having a conversation with somebody I'm giving a reading to, my opinions are not the thing I center. And that doesn't mean I don't have them. It doesn't mean I don't think I'm right about the things I think, because of course I do. But I am not there to talk about myself. I'm not there to proselytize. I'm not a fan of that.

Instead, I'm there to meet that person where they're at in good faith. Now, in our personal relationships, we are constantly being challenged to do the same things. Are you going to meet this person in good faith or not? And the only way to meet someone in good faith is to authentically listen. And what happens and what a lot of you experienced is someone says something that you have a very strong feeling about or a very strong thought about, or a very strong feeling and a strong thought about, and you stop listening. You start responding in your head. You shut down. The emotions that it provokes are too hard for you to sit with, or you just feel the need to tell somebody what they should think; you should educate them.

At that moment that you feel all those things, if you don't run an intervention on yourself, you are no longer communicating in good faith. And this is really hard because the inability to have a good-faith conversation is not a good person/bad person issue. It's a person issue. It's a person issue. And we all struggle with it. It's the struggle that I want to invite you to.

So, because—and I don't want to focus on this person and this reading. I honestly have a really hard time when I see comments criticizing someone I give a reading to, diagnosing a person that I give a reading to, saying, "Oh, this person is fucked up, and this person needs help." Well, if you really thought this person needed help, would you say they were fucked up in public? What is the motivation there? Because it's real people getting real readings about their real feelings and their real lives on my podcast. And in general, there's a lot of shit out on the internet, and a lot of people make up stories for clout or for attention. And then there's a lot of people just sharing who they are. And we as a collective treat them all the same. And that's, I think, pretty shitty.

And we want to remember that LLMs are trained on this behavior. They are trained on the ways we are fake and we gas people up, the ways that we are loving and empathetic and spiritual and kind. LLMs are trained on the manosphere. They are trained on political discourse. It's everything. It's all of it. And I say this not to focus on the reading or on AI, but to understand we are the problem. I mean, AI is the fucking problem, but the manipulation and the world salad comes from us. It's learned that from us, right? This large language model has learned that from how we interact in writing on the internet.

So, for me, having compassion is really important. And sometimes what I practice doing is not having compassion, because sometimes people's views are egregious to me. And that is not the case in this particular reading, but certainly, in my life, I've encountered people with egregious convictions. And if I'm trying to have a conversation with them, I don't necessarily have compassion, but I try to have understanding. What do they really think? What is really going on? To be curious.

When you stop being curious and you start just stepping on that soapbox in your mind, you're no longer having a good-faith conversation. And maybe you don't want to. Maybe you don't want to have a good-faith conversation. Maybe you want to yell at someone, to which I ask, why? What do you get out of that? Because when I'm yelled at, when I'm proselytized to, when I'm told I'm stupid, I stop listening, and I feel like shit. And I double down on my convictions, or I double down on the self-esteem issues that made me vulnerable to my convictions. How about you?

And so, when we are engaging with others, it is really important to be accountable. So I posted very recently on my Patreon about stewardship. What's in your stewardship? What is your work? What is yours to navigate and manage? This question is really an important one to—not to have the answer to, but to return to as a practice. For instance, in a reading, what's in my stewardship, what's my work, is not what the person I'm giving a reading to does. That's their business. That's their stewardship. It's not what they think, and it's not even what they feel. That's theirs. I am not a savior. I am not a martyr. I am a person meeting another person in a context, or in a series of contexts, more accurately.

And so making sure that I am paying attention to what's in my stewardship—so what's in my stewardship is meeting this person in good faith, which means listening. It also means listening to my own thoughts and judgments and taking accountability for them. It is holding space for the many different ways we get to be as people. And I don't just mean beliefs that we get to hold; I mean paths we are on to evolve what we believe. You may have come from a religious extremist background. I didn't. I don't have that background at all. I don't have any of those particular issues. I don't know your background. You don't know my background. We get to be different. We get to have different paths.

I spent 30 years very close to Silicon Valley, was very influenced by technology and conversations about technology. Not everybody was. Not everybody is. We want to hold space for difference. And that doesn't mean you're making excuses for other people's thinking or feeling or whatever. It's just accepting the myriad of things that you don't know in a conversation with someone else. Being able to hold space for that allows room for good-faith questions.

Now, what's in my stewardship is to be doing those things. That's my work. That's my responsibility. It's also my responsibility to be accountable to what I believe and what I think. And so, in this example of this reading that you have—you know, if you've been listening to many of my readings, then you have heard me do this many times in many ways. I will what some people experience or think of as push back. And I will say, "No. I see it this way." And yeah, I guess it's pushing back. But really, what it is is saying, "This is my perspective. You have your perspective; here's my perspective."

Just because I have the capacity to hold space for your perspective doesn't inherently change my perspective. And I adapt—or I adopt, rather—an intention to express what I am thinking and what my perspective is without attachment because, if you don't agree with me, that's okay. It doesn't actually change my opinion—I don't know; maybe it might. But it's not about you agree with me; therefore, you like me. You disagree with me; therefore, you're rejecting me. That's not real. It's, "These are my thoughts and feelings. These are your thoughts and feelings. What comes up as we have a good-faith conversation, when we explore that?"

When we become attached in a conversation to a feeling that gets stirred up, an opinion that we have, a rebuttal that we want to make, we get stirred up by maybe the semantics, the language of how another person communicates, we stop listening. And then we stop having a good-faith conversation, and that becomes our problem.

I want to just acknowledge that the reason why we come across as assholes sometimes—and trust me; I sometimes am an opinionated asshole because I'm a person, obviously, and I'm an opinionated one—is because we are not communicating in good faith. There is a failure somewhere along the line to be accountable to what we feel and what we think. The feeling part is a big part because it's not really about opinions. It's about how you hold and communicate those opinions, the space you hold for where the person you're talking to is at.

At core, holding space for other people's feelings and beliefs, even when they're toxic or violent or terrible, is not agreeing with them or giving them a pass. It's holding space for the complexity of who people actually are in reality in the moment. And then you have your boundaries. So, in the case of this particular reading, my boundary was I was going to be really clear about my beliefs and my convictions. I was going to educate about technology to the best of my ability. If you watched the video version of that episode, I put on the screen some environmental facts about various AI companies that are most commonly used because a lot of people don't know about it.

My stewardship was not just showing up in good faith, but it was also stewardship to my convictions because there are most certainly things that I felt like were really important for me to say. But it wasn't just important for me to say it—and I want you to hear this clearly: it was important for me to say it in a way that the person could hear. And that's always in my mind, not just in this reading. Communicating in a way that other people can hear is your job. It's not your job to control how other people think or feel. You can't do that. It's a terrible goal.

But if you think that—I don't know—Taylor Swift is amazing and you love her music, if you are a Beyonce stan, it is not necessary for me to be like, "These women suck. I hate their music. They're terrible people," and just come in hot. If I want to have a real conversation with you about their sound or if I want to have a real conversation with you about their politics and their conduct, then it's important for me to consider if I come in hot and shit all over something you love, you're not going to listen to me. You're not going to listen to me. And why would you?

Instead, it's about figuring out, is this person open to this conversation? How can I share what's true and real for me in a moment to the best of my ability honestly, honoring what my boundaries are, what my needs are? Not everything needs to be said all the fucking time. I used a stupid example, and honestly, I don't know if that needs to be said all the time. But we need to be able to think about what we're saying and how we say it.

So many people in comments on various platforms of this episode and other episodes have just said things in public where I'm just like, "Who is that for? Who are you saying that for?" I hope the person who I gave the reading to never sees it because it would make them feel bad. And why would we try to do that? Why would we try to do that? Saying, "Oh, this person has problems"—what? That needs to be a public comment why? Who is that for? Is it for other people who sat in judgment? How does that serve you? Who does that serve?

These are not questions you necessarily need to preoccupy yourself with if kindness isn't a primary goal for you/it's not a strong value for you, if empathy isn't a strong value. But if community is a strong value, it's really hard to be a part of community where people treat each other like shit all the time. Those communities tend to fall apart or rely on obedience.

So these are just some of my thoughts about that particular reading. But I do think it's really important—I think it's really important—to explore the emotions and the thoughts of our reactions in general as a rule. And maybe if this particular reading was really challenging to listen to, which—I was surprised that a bunch of people said that it was really challenging to listen to—then, especially, that's true for you. Right? What emotions were hard to sit with? Because I've definitely given readings to people in much more dire situations.

Is somebody else's difference from you, difficulties in their lives, vulnerabilities that they hold—if that's hard for you, then why? That's a good question to ask, not with judgment. You don't have to feel bad about yourself. It's just about being curious because everything is an opportunity for healing if you hold it that way. And you don't want to drive yourself bananas, but this is a really good opportunity to know something about yourself, know something about the world. You know what I'm saying? Let's keep talking about it.