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.