Bill Gates recently uploaded a very important memo in the AI space. He discussed his optimism about AI and also his potential concerns. In this episode, we tackle both and explore how to navigate these changes as Christians and followers of Jesus. We hope you enjoy this episode!
The three hosts are back at the end of the summer, and the news has piled up. Meta settled with forty-seven state attorneys general for up to $17 billion, and Austin walks through what the company actually conceded, why those concessions leave the core product intact, and how Meta turned its own loss into a strike at Snap, TikTok, and YouTube. Andrew noticed that Claude’s memory feature excludes religious beliefs, which leaves a secular default sitting underneath everything else it personalizes, and Joel explains what really happened when models “escaped the sandbox,” whether a VPN is worth paying for, and why an ordinary church is an easy target.
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.
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.
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.