Voices of Esalen

Artificial intelligence has become deeply embedded in everyday life, and way too nuanced to describe as a single phenomenon. In this third installment of How We’re Really Using AI, Sam attempts to create clarity through specificity, speaking with people whose work and lives reveal distinct corners of the emerging AI landscape.

Nina and Shoshana, founders of the Aged Intelligence Society, introduce the communal and unexpectedly playful world of AI parties for women of "a certain age," where they gather in person to experiment with new tools. Eliza discusses her work developing an AI companion app for teenagers, including the difficult questions that arise when young people form relationships with artificial personalities. Seth, a longtime virtual-reality enthusiast, gives his story of what happened when he began frequenting immersive digital environments. Sam tries viewing AI through the lens of the human potential movement, asking what this turbulent technological moment may reveal about the continuing experiment of being human. Finally, AI ethicist Federico explains how he helps schools determine whether their use of AI reflects their educational goals and institutional values.

In this live conversation recorded at Esalen in the spring of 2026, author Robert Moor joins Andrew Castle, weaver of Esalen’s Treenet, to explore the ideas at the heart of Moor’s new book, In Trees. Moor describes trees as a way of being: branching outward into curiosity and experimentation, pruning what no longer works, adapting around difficulty, and remaining deeply rooted in place and relationship.

Together, Moor and Castle consider what it means to “stay branchy” in a culture that increasingly pushes people toward specialization, simplification, productivity, and extraction. Moor proposes that the trunk of a meaningful life may be found in co-flourishing—the long, slow practice of flourishing with others over time.

Robert Moor is the author of On Trails and In Trees.

https://www.robertmoor.com/

In this episode, Sam speaks with Jet Eveleth, a clown teacher, performer, writer, and integrative medicine practitioner who lives at the fertile crossroads of medicine and mischief. Jet has studied integrative medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, meditation, and psychotherapy at Harvard Medical School, while also training with legendary clown teacher Philippe Gaulier, touring with Second City, and performing in the spectacular Las Vegas show Absinthe.

Together, Sam and Jet explore clowning as a spiritual practice, the power of embarrassment, and the difference between comedy and clowning. Jet reflects on her teachers, including Philippe Gaulier, Paola Coletto, Eckhart Tolle, and Wim Hof, and discusses how improvisation, Daoism, acupuncture, meditation, and the body all inform her work.

They also talk about Clown Church, the ritual power of clown names, the importance of reading the room as a teacher, and why Esalen may be one of the most natural places to practice this kind of work.

Links:

Jet Eveleth online improv classes:
https://jeteveleth.wixsite.com/my-site-2/about-2

Instagram:
@Clownchurchla

Jet is also launching a new company, Presence in Play, which will include her classes in Los Angeles, Clown Church, retreats, and online improv workshops. The website is expected to launch around mid-July 2026.

Jet's workshop at Esalen, January 1 -3, 2027
https://www.esalen.org/workshops/sacred-clown-presence-in-play-010127

In this episode, Sam Stern speaks with Bill Drummond, a clinical consultant psychologist based in Wellington, New Zealand, where he serves as Clinical Leader for Youth Mental Health Services across the region.

Bill has spent more than a decade working with young people and families in public mental health settings, supporting adolescents facing trauma, anxiety, depression, family instability, identity confusion, and complex mental health challenges. His work spans acute care, community-based mental health, schools, hospitals, state care systems, private practice, and clinical supervision.

Together, Sam and Bill explore
-what is happening in the inner lives of young people today — especially in a world where diagnoses, social media, algorithms, and AI can offer instant explanations for pain that may still need time, relationship, and embodied attention to fully understand.
-the rise of diagnostic identity

- the difference between “I have anxiety” and “I’m feeling anxious"

- why he approaches young people with curiosity rather than correction

- the appeal of AI and social media as sources of validation, particularly for adolescents who may already be biologically primed toward threat perception, self-consciousness, and emotional intensity.

https://www.wholeself.health

Brita Ostrom is the author of the new memoir "Steeped: A Bug Sur Elixir of Sulfur and Sage," a vivid, intimate, and often wonderfully unsentimental account of her life in Big Sur and at Esalen during 1967 and 1968.

Brita arrived in California during a hinge moment in American culture: she landed in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco nine months before the Summer of Love, smack dab in the middle of the psychedelic revolution and the early flowering of the human potential movement. From there, she made her way down the coast to Big Sur, and eventually to Esalen.

During this conversation, Britt talks about sleeping outside on the land, about all the local music that seemed to appear everywhere, the early days of Gestalt and encounter, the role of psychedelics, the emergence of Esalen massage, the complicated freedoms of sexual liberation, and the ways women at Esalen began to find one another as allies in a community that was still very much shaped by male teachers, male authority, and male mythology.

Brita’s perspective neither romanticizes the period nor flattens it into critique. She remembers the beauty, the wildness, the tenderness, the bad behavior, the spiritual ambition, the confusion, and the sheer strangeness of a place where a person might dance under the stars one night, confront their childhood wounds the next morning, give massage in the baths that afternoon, and then end up in a conversation that night with someone who had just wandered in from the outer edge of American culture.