Shannon Algeo had already done the hard part. He’d published his research, written his thesis, and turned years of study into a direction for his book our relationship with technology. Then a friend told him he had to try Claude as a writing partner, so he opened it and fed it his question and his plan.
It handed back chapter titles. Mini chapter descriptions. Catchy ones.
And reading through them, he experienced a hollow feeling. Are these my ideas? Is it mirroring back what I fed it, or is it writing the book for me?
He’d spent years putting the pieces in place to be in a position to write this book, and now a machine was offering to do the one part he most wanted to do himself.
No F-ing way. The buck stops here.
He drew his line in the sand and wrote the book by hand. In the opening pages he tells the reader plainly that it was written by him, without AI. He used it to track down citations he already knew existed, and that was it.
Some of Shannon’s story you may already know. More than fifteen years teaching yoga and meditation, a long-running podcast called SoulFeed, co-founding We Human, an earlier book called Trust Your Truth. And his latest, The Power in Your Hands: Liberate Yourself from Attachment to Technology, came out June 2nd. He’s a psychotherapist and a poet, based in Ojai, and he narrated the audiobook himself.
So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week, and the conversation kept coming back to focusing on the machine most of us now keep in our pocket.
Shannon’s explanation about what a large language model (LLM) actually is was very articulate. He calls what it produces “high-quality appearing slop” in many cases. It could say anything, and it always says it in a convincing way.
He points to Zachary Stein, the psychologist behind the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition, who describes a shift from the attention economy to the attachment economy. Social media went after our attention. AI, in that framing, goes after our attachment, the part of us that reaches outside itself to feel seen and safe.
Which is the whole thesis of his book. He leans on a definition of addiction from Nikki Myers, the founder of the yoga of 12-step recovery.
“Anytime I reach outside of myself for something that can only be sourced from the inside, I risk forming an addictive relationship with whatever that thing is.”
Read that again if you have a chat window open.
Two moments from the interview stood out.
The first was related to something I wrote about earlier this week. A couple of mornings before we recorded, one of our clients sat at the end of a long day and asked Claude whether he could make a real living doing his work. It told him no. Not much money in it, quite a difficult field to make money in. By morning he was talking about a different plan. We opened a fresh chat window in a different tool, asked asked a different variation of the question, and received an opposite answer. Same individual at the center of the conversation in the same week getting two very different answers.
Shannon’s read on it was extremely sharp:
“We are looking outside of ourselves to a higher power-like figure to see us, to soothe us, to make us feel safe.”
The machine gets things wrong, sure. The deeper problem is the authority we often hand it almost without question, to decide who we are and what we’re allowed to want or create. The answer was never meant to be found in a chat window. It lives within the client’s own intuitive knowing, who has already been shown by his own results quite a bit of evidence that he is great at the work he has chosen to take on.
The second was about what lets a person take feedback or constructive criticism and keeping their own center:
“Having ego strength allows me to receive feedback and test it against my own inner knowing.”
Shannon isn’t anti-feedback, and he isn’t anti-technology. He was on a video call the whole hour, and I felt we had a nice connection. His argument is that you should ask what a given tool amplifies in you, and whether you’re using it or being used by it.
His own answer for himself is to create intentional friction. He keeps his iPhone off, in a box, all day, and carries a Light Phone with no apps and no internet. Not because everyone should, but because the apps were built by behavioral psychologists to be frictionless, and the only counterweight is friction you build back in on purpose.
The advice underneath all of it:
We should do whatever we’re doing with a reason and with intention.
Shannon’s story reframes a belief that shows up all over creative work. The idea that the answer about whether your work is worth doing lives somewhere outside you, in an expert or a machine that speaks with 100% conviction. His creative process around writing his latest book is a perfect example of this. The satisfaction of having made the thing himself was extremely meaningful to his own sense of self, and he wasn’t willing to hand that over to a machine.
If you’ve been using ai to make important decisions about your work and your calling, this interview is a good place to start putting the pen back in your own hand.
You can find Shannon at shannonalgeo.com and writing at The Sacred Ebb on Substack.
If this stirred something within you, the private work Carolina and I do is for the person who wants guides, not another voice to outsource their inner knowing. We support the development of your business structure and the nervous system side, but in the end the important decisions stay yours. Start a conversation here.
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 28, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
