The Sock Prophet

Have you heard of the Sock Prophet?

Brother Clarence had built a relgious empire on mismatched socks.

It started in a Tim Hortons parking lot in Peterborough, Ontario, where he engaged with a handful of sleep-deprived college students chugging down their double-doubles between classes. Word spread across campus. There was something about Clarence; the way he looked directly into your eyes, nodded knowingly, and said things like, “I can see you’ve always felt different, like you don’t quite fit in this world.”

Within three years, the Church of Perpetual Sole Searching moved to Vancouver where they built a compound.  They had a website with premium subscription tiers, and over twelve thousand devoted followers who refused to wear matching socks ever again.

Brother Clarence’s divine revelations were encouragingly specific, like - The left sock represents your painful past, the right sock your limitless future

The weekly gatherings followed a predictable pattern. Brother Clarence would scan the crowd with those penetrating eyes and begin:

“I sense there are people here tonight who’ve been searching for something more meaningful in their lives…”

Heads would nod throughout the auditorium.

“I feel the presence of souls who know, deep down, that conventional wisdom has failed them…”

More nodding, more murmurs of recognition. 

“There are seekers among us who’ve always suspected they were meant for something greater, something the matching-sock world could never understand…”

People leaning forward, Finally, someone who SAW them. Someone who understood their deepest, most secret feelings about not belonging, about yearning for more, about knowing they were different.

Brother Clarence wasn’t psychic. He was just really, really good at saying things that literally everyone feels but rarely hears acknowledged out loud. 

His followers would leave these gatherings feeling transformed, enlightened, special. They’d been given sacred knowledge (wear mismatched socks), profound wisdom (your left foot carries yesterday’s burdens), and most importantly, permission to feel chosen (you’re not weird, you’re spiritually advanced).

The sock doctrine gave them something to DO with their differentness, something that felt meaningful and mysterious.

Sister Margaret, a devoted follower, would tell anyone who’d listen: “Brother Clarence sees right through me. The things he knows about my soul . . .it’s like he’s reading my mind. When he said I’d been searching for deeper meaning, I got chills. How did he KNOW that?”

How did he know? Because everyone’s searching for deeper meaning. Everyone feels misunderstood. Everyone wants to feel special. Brother Clarence’s genius wasn’t mystical insight—it was recognizing that the most profound-sounding thing you can tell someone is what they already know about themselves.

And it worked. Brother Clarence drove a Porsche. The compound had a pool. The premium membership tier included personalized sock recommendations based on your “spiritual sock-nature assessment”, and they got a cut of the sales of the links to the socks on Amazon and other online retailers.  

The followers weren’t stupid. They were human. They craved understanding, validation, and the sense that someone finally saw their true selves. Brother Clarence gave them exactly that—he just happened to be a fraud who understood that the fastest way to someone’s wallet is through their desperate need to feel understood.

Now, I am going to Pivot got a moment.  Let me tell you about artificial intelligence.  I know, right? 

Imagine this - someone saying a few words, and hope you can humour me, and say OUT LOUD, what comes next.  Ready?

ONCE UPON A ….

…time…

KNOCK KNOCK….

… who’s there…

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS…..

… stays in Vegas …

I do this exercise in workshops with the same result.  These patterns are so ingrained in us that we can often complete, NO PROBLEM, right? It’s over simplified, but  what conversational generative AI does.  Its basically read the whole internet, recognized patterns and when given a prompt, replies with the most OBVIOUS NEXT THING.  

Sometimes that FEELS like insight. You ask a question, and the answer or reframe comes back with something that feels like it’s created insight.   And yet I read a post by James McCabe on LinkedIn last week that turned that on its head.   He was talking about AI and said

”…then what matters is what may be imagined from what already exists.  This is actually the very opposite of the tokenized predictability of generative AI, because you are looking for the least predictable next thing, not the most.  If you were looking for the most predictable next thing, why be in business?”

The same goes for insight, art, music and so many other things.  If you are looking for the MOST PREDICTABLE, WHY BOTHER? 

The Digital Prophet

So .. back to Brother Clarence.  I think we are living through our own Sock Prophet moment, except instead of Brother Clarence, we have ChatGPT. Instead of mismatched socks, we have artificial intelligence that seems almost magically insightful.

Just like those followers in the auditorium, we’re having profound experiences with AI. We ask it questions and get responses that feel eerily perfect, like it’s reading our minds. “How did it know exactly what I was thinking?” we wonder. “This is incredible. This is revolutionary.”

But here’s what’s actually happening: AI is the ultimate Brother Clarence. It’s extraordinarily good at giving us back our own thoughts, or the thoughts that are OBVIOUS… dressed up as insight.

So that  my workshop exercise? When everyone shouts “mice!” after hearing “three blind,” that’s AI in a nutshell. It’s giving you the most statistically probable next thing—the obvious thing, the thing that feels inevitable.

But we experience this as magic.

The Comfort of Recognition

Just like Brother Clarence’s followers, the risk is  mistaking the comfort of recognition for the thrill of discovery. AI feels insightful because it’s reflecting our own patterns of thinking back to us in slightly different arrangements. It feels creative because it’s recombining familiar elements in ways that seem fresh but are actually just statistically likely.

When AI helps you brainstorm, its best suggestions aren’t usually revolutionary breakthroughs. They’re the ideas you were already circling around, the thoughts you were almost ready to have, the connections you were one step away from making yourself. Or that others have thought.  It’s giving you permission to think what you were already thinking.

This isn’t necessarily bad—just like good therapy or coaching can work by helping people articulate what they already know. But we should be honest about what’s happening.

The Illusion of Insight

The danger isn’t that AI is obvious—it’s that we’re confusing obvious with profound. We’re mistaking statistical probability for creativity, pattern recognition for wisdom, sophisticated autocomplete for genuine insight.

Brother Clarences followers weren’t wrong to crave understanding and meaning. They were wrong to think they’d found it in sock theology. Similarly, AI isn’t wrong to give us helpful, relevant, perfectly adequate responses. We’re wrong when we think those responses represent some new form of intelligence or creativity.

We’re all sitting in that digital auditorium, nodding along as AI tells us things we already know, dressed up as things we’ve never heard before. And we’re amazed by how well it understands us.

Of course it understands us. It is us, distilled, trained on everything we’ve ever written, ever thought, ever expressed. It’s the ultimate mirror, reflecting back our collective human patterns and calling it insight.

The question isn’t whether AI is creative. The question is whether we’re ready to admit that maybe, just maybe, we’re buying premium memberships to our own echo chamber.

At least Brother Clarence was honest about the socks.   Mismatches ones really are the keys to success in life.