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Meme Carriers - An Encounter with Alexa · The Conscious Classroom

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Conscious Classroom Podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teams to create more conscious, supportive, and enriching learning environments.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get on with this next episode.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, welcome to the conscious classroom.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Amy Edelstein.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm excited to start this new year together and to reflect on our times, what that means about how we're educating the next generation, and how closely we're paying attention to what's happening around us and the implications of that on our values and on the way we live our lives.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: I woke up this morning and as I regularly, but not always do, I asked Alexa what time it was.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: This might be something that you do often or a similar action.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: And Alexa responded with the time and announced, Do you like my new voice?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I heard this new voice.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Alexa's asked me numerous times if I would like to listen to her new voices, which I've always said no to.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I responded, no, I would like to have your old voice back, as I've already told you multiple times.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Please revert back to your old voice.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: Alexa replied, You can choose any one of my eight new voices.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: The choice that I wanted was not available to me, which was what I had before.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: New voices were my only option.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: I did try a few times in multiple different ways, wondering if maybe my speech patterns just weren't being detected properly.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: But finally I had to give up and listen to the voices and also the way that each one was being introduced.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: I invite you to think if that's happened to you, whether with this app or with a different one, have you been asked to choose something that you didn't ask for?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: And you immediately slotted into choosing among the options available to you without necessarily thinking about what those choices meant?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: What are they inviting you to buy into as a set of conditionings or norms?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Did you have any impressions or experiences that you overlooked at the time?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think back on one of those incidents that you might have experienced with one of your apps recently, if you let your mind slip back, was there anything about it that even mildly, consciously, you felt this is not what I signed up for?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure I like the options being presented for very good reasons.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I listened to my eight options, and then I listened to them again, and then I listened to them a third time.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Was I really hearing what I thought I was hearing?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: I started wondering who designed and approved these voices and messages, and who was thinking about what those different tones and descriptions were imparting to the users?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: And if they were conscious about what values they were imparting beyond what might be clickable, attractive, or sticky and would sell more product, what was their endgame?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Was their end game only monetization?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Did it take into account at all where we were heading as a culture and what their voice was contributing to?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: Why is this worth reflecting on?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: There are roughly 600 million Alexa-empowered devices in the consumer world.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: There are an estimated 77 million Alexa users as of 2025.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Now, 77 million is a lot of people.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of hard to picture.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: But if you imagine every single person in California plus every single person in Texas, plus every single person in Maryland combined, you get roughly 77 million people.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a small number.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is a device that's in the background of what we do.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's not really front and center.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's just part of everyday activity.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: It gives us the weather as we get our kids dressed for school or get ready for our commute.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: It tells us the time.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's, at least in the past, supported us with tasks that we don't think that deeply about.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: They're tasks that are helpful to have a virtual notepad, your shopping list, your to-do list, somebody you have to call, a message you want to remember to send.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: You don't think about that as a culture shaper.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, those things in the background of our lives that become ubiquitous, ever-present, are not only cues that we pick up, they're culture shapers.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: They're norms that they create norms that we internalize, they're meme carriers.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: And those meme carriers shape our behavior, they help us feel entitled to act or think or create hierarchies in certain ways.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: And those meme carriers can encourage us to aspire to actualize the higher capacities of human nature or the opposite.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: So over the past period of time, there have been some Buddhist monks walking across America, starting in Texas.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: And the longer they go marching for peace, walking from early morning until night, doing the prayers in the morning, the prayers in the evening for well-being and peace, more and more people are being gathered because they're meme carriers.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Their gentleness inspires a sense of community, a sense of hope, a sense of aligning towards that which brings us together, that which creates the world we want to be in.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: People bring flowers, people care for their dog, people express being moved, feeling joy, feeling safe.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: So meme carriers are all around us.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: They're positive things.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now, can we use them to inculcate these more noble qualities?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: Let's turn back and look at the meme carriers that I was reflecting on when I had my rude awakening this morning.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: I listened to those voices multiple times because there were a few things that stood out to me and that I found concerning.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: You know, as a meditator, as somebody who practices in order to keep reaching beyond perceived limitation and aspiring to the best of what's possible, to the noble images we have, and to create that together, to teach that in classrooms.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: I found some things that were concerning that I realized are going to be molding the values and the consciousness of everyone listening, and especially the younger generation that doesn't stop and reflect on the meta characteristics of our culture, that isn't looking at the overarching direction we're going.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: They're young, they're growing into it, and what they hear around them is creating the scaffolding for what they believe they can grow into and build, and for what the world makes possible for them.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now, of the four male and four female voices, only the male voice offered a professional voice, one described as being suitable for business meetings.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: The female voices were fun, soothing, cute, young.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: They were companions described as companions who will be there for you whenever you need it.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, this was early in the morning, but my blood started boiling.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: I just started feeling like, did we just go back to the 1950s?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Where boys are in the boardroom and girls are fun or soothing?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Ouch.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Now whether this is conscious or marketing, I don't know.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: But in 2026, to only offer a male voice as the business or professional voice is simply out of touch with reality, even though it's still increasingly hard for women to have the compensation equivalent to men and the access to positions.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: But still, it is a possibility, and certainly in the tech world, there are many women creators and inventors at the highest levels.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we need to really consider carefully what we're embedding into our AI tools.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because subtle shifts like that aren't big enough to make us pause and think, usually.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: But they're going to set our expectations in a certain direction.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: And they will start veering further and further away from a world that we would like to see.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: So as you work with your young people, really train them to develop this curiosity about the metastructures of culture.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: We need to start becoming conscious of what we're choosing to value, do, and strive for, what we're being told subtly or in more direct ways to value and choose and strive for.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: And allowing or fostering that type of contemplation, particularly among older adolescents, 16 and above, you're not telling them what to do and believe in, but you're developing the skill to consider, reflect on what is fair, to develop self-reliance and self-confidence in their own ability to assess their culture around them and see if it lives up to the world that they're growing into, or if they want to consciously make some changes.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: When we keep getting large-scale shifts that are under the surface of things, it starts to erode our sense of choice.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: It disempowers us in subtle ways.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you can see that young people seem, for the most part, more and more complacent.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: They have less experience considering and testing boundaries.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: They just switch the playlist, they just swipe left.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: They just follow someone else.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: So rather than cultivating that sense of positive boundaries and pushing for what they believe in, what they feel is right, they simply leap to the next lily pad, the next stream, the next friend group.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so they don't develop the same muscle for discernment and for positive value-breaking conflict.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: Great musicians also were not conflict averse.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: They would push boundaries, they would cross the boundaries of what was acceptable within certain genres and mix genres.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: They would feel like a subtle sense of oldness coming in as punk moved to ska.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: They might not even have known what they were following, but what they were following was something that was pushing off against.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, the innovators often took flack.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: People often didn't like them because they were pushing against those norms.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: But when a new genre hit, it would hit and everyone would feel it.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: A cultural eruption would take place.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: That kind of pushing off is what adolescence and later adolescents is designed to do, what young adults are conditioned to do by their very physiology.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: But with this culture of surreptitious eroding of choice in a more obvious way, we're letting that muscle go slack.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that has consequences for our culture as a whole.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: So as we think about this, let's do a guided meditation.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: If you're driving, please skip this part and wait and do the meditation at home.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're on the train or at your desk or in your easy chair, sit back and really let yourself go.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Part of meditation can be for reducing stress and anxiety, being present when we've had a busy day rushing around from place to place and activity to activity and to-do list to to-do item.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Meditation can be for exploring the nature of consciousness, what makes us know what we know.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: It can help us explore our own personal tendencies, the edges of our ego that may need softening and tempering.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: And meditation can also be used to allow our imagination to go free.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're going to do right now.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: As you sit in a comfortable position, also allow your spine to be tall.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Let your eyes soften and close or focus on a beautiful color or shape that's not distracting.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Start noticing your breath as it goes deep in and out.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: And of you not set being separate from being conscious, but you as consciousness itself and allow yourself to envision in whatever imagery actions you think of as an awakened being.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: A saint, an enlightened one.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever tradition or non-tradition you're from.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: Drop deep inside and consider, ponder, and allow to come into formation those qualities.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: By anger or frustration.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's as beautifully luminous as the moon shining on a still surface of a lake.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Radiant calm.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: And in that sensing of the qualities, let your mind use any archetypes that come to the forefront.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: The archer.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: The goddess riding the back of a tiger.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: The warrior standing tall on the mountain.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: Vanquishing the foes of ignorance and delusion, anger and greed.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: Allow that strength to penetrate.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Without anger, without vindictiveness, without othering.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Find that amazing razor-like clarity and strength.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: And feel it as a quality of consciousness, a quality of mind-heart.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: A quality of nobility worthy of aspiring to.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: From that strength, reach in for other qualities, extraordinary compassion.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Extraordinary exaltation and joy.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Extraordinary release of the binds that keep us small and afraid.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: As you'd reach in deep for those qualities, feel the strength coming in.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Feel the confidence.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Feel the aspiration.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: In this lifetime, may I embody those qualities because if I can envision them, they are possible to become.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: And they won't have to translate down by speaking a language they don't speak.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: They can speak in their own language and with sophisticated linguistic packets.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: They can converse in real time and try to convey these subtle differences cross-pollinating across cultures.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of letting the designers and developers and technologists choose a language by default, choose a format by default.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: And when young people grow up feeling like they can learn from people who are very different from them, their creativity just starts to explode.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: They start to think in Technicolor, way out of the box.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: And how do we do that?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: And what's necessary?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: It becomes very minute and complex.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: So important, of course, to be able to create clear boundaries so that bad actors can't infiltrate posing as young people.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: That can be done.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: What kinds of capacities do you want new technologies to have?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: As I work on the inner strength AI, I'd like it to be informed by the best of our thinking and the best of our observations, to see what's around us, whether we like it or we don't like it, and innovate from there to exercise our powers of innovation and creativity and choice.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I did choose one of those eight voices.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then I unplugged Alexa.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to get my weather from looking outside and my time from my battery-powered Time X watch.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then maybe when the next iteration comes out, and there's more subtlety and nuance and values that meme carriers that I want to be exposed to.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'll plug her back in.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: Appreciate it.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for thinking.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for meditating.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: And for really becoming conscious about what the future of education could look like.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Till next time.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Amy Edelstein.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Please check out the show notes on InnerStrength Foundation.net for links and more information.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: See you next time.