Andrew and Joel trade summer reading, seven books that shaped how they build. Range and kind vs wicked worlds, The Lean Startup on testing a hypothesis instead of debating it, Culture Making on why creating beats critiquing, and the evolutionary neuroscience the frontier labs are mining for the next breakthrough.
Nathan Sutherland of Gospel Tech rejoins all three hosts to talk parenting and video games. Why some games are engineered to overstimulate, how to tell whether a game is the cause of a problem or just a symptom, and a RESET framework (relationships, emotions, sleep, enjoyment, time) for discerning when play forms a child well and when it quietly pulls them away.
Andrew and Joel sit down with Scott Hurst, a self-described 'average' Toronto pastor, to hear how the AI conversation actually sounds between pastors. Less 'should AI write your sermon' (nobody is) and more rental agreements, meeting minutes, the capacity for mystery, and the pain points a shepherd should never automate away.
SEO is dead, so Andrew reframes the whole question: communication is how we love our neighbor, which means choosing the right medium. The hosts work through email, group texts, church apps like Planning Center, a Google Voice text ministry, and the new robots.txt era of search.
Wyatt Graham returns to read Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — not the Pope “coming out against AI” but Catholic social teaching applied to the new thing. Technology is never neutral under the condition of the conditioners, the few oppress the many through its instruments, and prudential reasoning is the one thing AI cannot do.
A year after his ChatGPT prayer went viral, John Piper revisits AI on David Platt's Radical podcast. Austin and Joel hear less of a reversal than a sharpening. AI is a real kind of intelligence, and what makes us human is the spirit, not the feeling.