Latest / Crisis Point / The Age of Algorithms, AI, and Aliens

Transcript

The Age of Algorithms, AI, and Aliens · Crisis Point

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign. To have you on the program. Thanks so much for being here today.
• 0:16
  Speaker B: A pleasure. It's long overdue. You know, we've interacted with each other over the years and I know we've got a bunch of mutual friends and you know, I love your work at Crisis. So thank you for having me on. Honestly, it's a pleasure.
• 0:26
  Speaker A: Yeah, I do feel like it's. I do feel like it's long overdue because I don't even know how we first started being in each other's orbit. Maybe it's through Steve. I probably like that. I think you run the one Peter five podcast with him, right?
• 0:40
  Speaker B: I did, I did an episode with Steve. Actually we were joking beforehand that you know, when Steve and I get on, when we, when we hit the record button, we stick around for north of three hours. And you know, the first time I was on his podcast when he was running 1 Peter 5, we did like a 2 hour episode and he never, he was always like a kind of a 45 minute out sort of guy. And so I should have understood that what was passed is prologue. So yeah, I've been on there and that's probably where we started interacting. You know, I got a kind of got active on then Twitter at about that time. You know, up until that, up until around 2019. I know more like 2017, 2018, I was really more of a lurker. I've had a. I've had my Twitter account for over almost 20 years now. And really for that first decade I was just largely just watching stuff, monitoring quietly as it were. But yeah, I started to sort of come out of the lurk at that point. And so yeah, I think that's where we started interacting.
• 1:44
  Speaker A: Yeah. And it's been great. I always appreciate kind of your takes and stuff. Honestly, I don't even know. I kind of gathered from listening to your podcast that you're a teacher. I don't know what you do. I assume you're a teacher, right?
• 1:54
  Speaker B: Yes, so I am between classes right now. So fortunately this time slot works. Works well. So I appreciate you making that accommodation for me. But yes, I am a longtime high school teacher. I think all told, I've been teaching high school for 25 years now. I had a five year interlude where I didn't teach but kind of came back and so I've been here. I teach at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. It's the work, it's the work of Benedictine Monastery and it's a 9 through 12 co ed Catholic boarding school in the great State of Rhode Island. I am not from Rhode Island. I'm from Louisiana originally. But I've lived all over the place. So. Yeah, so that's what I do. I, I teach English and humanities. Prim or really humanities. And in English I coach a variety of different sports. I've been a house parent. I drive minivan buses to outings and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, so I'm, I'm kind of all in as it were here.
• 2:53
  Speaker A: That's great. So I want to start by just shamelessly plugging your new podcast. So for those who don't know who I'm talking about when I said Steve, I'm talking about Steve Schocheck who's the founder and former editor of 1 Peter 5. And I think most people who listen to my audience know who Steve is and kind of know his whole journey as they call it. And we're not gonna obviously go that here, but you and Steve have a podcast and it's relatively new. I don't think you've been doing it for very long. You're like in 20 something episodes and
• 3:19
  Speaker B: yeah, we're about 20, 24 in I think right now. We've, we've been doing once a week so that you know, it's basically releases on Thursday. So.
• 3:27
  Speaker A: Right. It's a, it's called Monitoring the situation. Check it out. I'll put, make sure I put a link to. In the show notes. Check it out. I, I really enjoy. I. Okay. I have somewhat of a confession to make here. I don't listen very much to Catholic podcasts. Of course you're pocket. You're Catholic and former Catholic. He's got a lot of Catholic ethos in him, I'm sure he would admit.
• 3:46
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 3:48
  Speaker A: But like I, I really, I really liked your guys podcast. So why don't you just kind of tell us how it came about. Like I, I know came out because you're one Peter 5 interview from years ago. But like how it came about and what are you guys talking about on the.
• 4:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, so we've been friends for a long time. I mean I, you know, like I said, I've kind of been an online guy for a really long time. I really started being an online guy back in the late 90s when. I don't know if you remember this, but the national nro, National Review Online had with this thing called the Corner and it was a collection, it was an, it was a blog. Right. But it was an early version where all of the contributors on National Review Would basically just microblog. It was sort of like a kind of pre Twitter thing. And so I would, was there on there quite a quite a bit. And so I've always kind of been engaged in these kind of online things. I'm a likes to know kind of a guy and so I've always had that. But I have, I have cold emailed one person in my entire life and it was Steve and he wrote a blog. Blog. Well, sorry. He wrote a post on 1 Peter 5 that Rod Dreier had picked up. And I've been friends with Rod since I was in my 20s and we're both from Louisiana. And whenever he's in town or I was in town, we would get together and have a drink and got to eat and that kind of thing. And so I, I read the piece that Rod had linked to in his Then the American Conservative blog and it just really resonated with me. I think it was one of the, I want to say it was sort of after Amoris Letizia something. It was one of those things and you know, I'm kind of watching it and like I said, I was, I did not really participate in online stuff, but it just resonated with me. I cold emailed him and at the time I had been reading and listening to things like Jordan Peterson and I was sort of struck. I, I, you know, obviously Rod Drear, I've been a longtime Rod reader. He and I did a show together for about three years during COVID And so any rate, I cold email Steve and I said, hey man, I hear you, I feel you. I wonder if you've ever like looked into these other things. And so that was the beginning, number one, the piece that I published on 1 Peter 5. And then it just developed into a friendship. And so we started calling each other on the phone and we would have these link the phone conversations, like, you know, we should probably just record one of these. So we did a recording and that's been the beginning of our relationship and our friendship and it's sort of been the core sort of what we've done. So monitoring the situation, I, I have, I have been poking at him. It was a funny thing, Eric, when, when I, when I emailed Steve and we corresponded back and forth together and I, you know, he commissioned the piece and I wrote it. And you know, as you know, when you're working with a writer, there's, there's some back and forth and you know, I just have a tremendous amount of respect for his intellect and he's a great writer himself. And so it was a. It was a fun experience for me because I never really worked with an editor before. And so I just really took to it, like, this is. This is great stuff. And so I was going to say, talking about 1 Peter 5. Oh, so. So we just really hit it off intellectually. You know, we were kind of fellow travelers of a sort. And so as he sort of went through this stuff, he was just looking for a. For a conversation partner. And, you know, I, you know, I have said this before. This is nothing new, but I'll say it again. You know, I am, you know, I grew up. I was born in 1973. So the first, the one of my early, early memories is sitting in the living room watching my mom watch the announcement of Carol Wotiwa as Pope John Paul ii. You know, so really like my entire sort of early formation was. Was growing up in. In that church. My mom is a. Is an orthodox, you know, sorry. My mom is a. A faithful Catholic woman, a woman of deep prayer, and she's also a deep reader. She's deeply immersed in Scripture. She was. She was involved and has been involved for my entire life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. And so that was just sort of part of my world. And so, so that's what I came out of. I have, you know, I, I don't think the trads would ever accept me as a full trad. And no beef. No, no, no. No concern there. I always call myself kind of trad adjacent. You know, I am, you know, I'm. I, I do my best to be a faithful son of the Church and think and pray along with the Church. And so that's sort of been my, my thing. But with Steve, you know, I, I found someone that I could sort of intellectually spar with in a kind of generative fashion. And that's been the basis of our friendship. And we've, of course, been able to get together in real life on a number of occasions. And so that's been the kind of the ongoing thing. And so finally I said, look, Steve, we should just do a show. I mean, you know, we're interested in a bunch of different things and, you know, with monitoring the situation. You know, obviously, I'm a Catholic. He's. He's a former Catholic. I wouldn't call it a Catholic show exactly. You know, we're not running through sort of the latest things coming out of Rome. We're not running through the various documents. Although, you know, Steve has a remarkable memory for those things. Like, it's incredible. I mean he can just sort of spit it off at the top of his head. But I've never had that kind of mind. My background is poetry and literature. I went to Thomas Moore College of Liberal Arts as for my undergraduate degree and I have a master's degree in English. And so I come at it from sort of a poetry, poetry, imaginative side of things. And he has this sort of, this deep kind of sense. And so, you know, we are enough of foil in that regard that I'll say something kind of cryptic and intuitive and he's like, well, what is that? And he'll like sort of force me to articulate and then he'll articulate something that's sort of very, you know, kind of left brained, so to speak. And, and I'll be like, I'll push back. Well, what about this? And what if we reframe it this way? And so that's sort of, I think, the way the conversations work. But what we're paying attention to, you know, what we're monitoring, I suppose is just sort of what, what's going on because I think we're in a remarkable moment of a, of a, both an epistemological breakdown of a kind of old order of things and we're watching something unfold that is incredibly noisy. And so the tagline of the show is looking for signal in the midst of all this noise. And I think that's kind of the, the, the, the, that's a pretty good elevator pitch, I'll say.
• 10:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I'm, and like I said, I'm a fan of the podcast. I, I listen to it. Yeah. And I, what I like about, first of all, it's just a great YouTube clearly have a chemistry of being able just have a conversation, chat with each other and, and it's like just listen. Two guys, you know, drinking beers and having a conversation. Which is a, I think one of the best types of podcasts there is. And I also, I just, I'm interested in the subjects you guys talk about. You talk about aliens and AI a lot and people who know me know I'm interested in aliens and AI a lot. And so that ends up being something I, I appreciate. And so I kind of want. And the funny thing is, is like when I do these podcast interviews with people, I typically have a very clear idea what we're going to talk about. I don't, I have notes, I'm like, okay, I'm, I mean not that I try to let go, but like with you I was like, I Don't know what I'm gonna title this episode when it comes out. I don't know what my tag is going to be for. I have no, because you guys do kind of COVID a lot of stuff and, and I like the take I wanted though. I mean, we might as well just start off. I do want to talk about AI some or is it SI?
• 11:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's funny because yesterday we recorded a three and I think it was a three hour and 20 minute marathon. And we, we, we steered right into that question, you know, this, this, you know, what is, what is, what is going on with the sort of the rebrand, you know, the renaming of A AI or AGI or asi, you know, going, you know, scrapping that and now it has to be called Super Intelligence. And I think, well, you know, you know, I won't bother you with, with all those details, but I think, you know, one of the things that I enjoy with talking to Steve about is that, you know, he is, you know, if you, if you've ever encountered sort of the so called big five personality tests, I think what Steve has and I think what he is finding out how to reintegrate into how he sees the world is he's somebody who would score high in openness. And I am too, which makes me a little bit of an odd conservative, right? Because most conservatives are not high in openness. People who are not high in openness tend to sort of lock things down and kind of have very clear lines. And I just, by my temperament and also by my formation in poetry and novels and plays and stor and the imagination, I think I just gravitate toward those kinds of things. So when you talk about somebody like Trump, for instance, you know, immediately, like I just said the word right, it just sort of popped out. It's there, it's floating between the two of us and our audience right now. And immediately people sort into priors. And the problem with that is that you don't really get anywhere if you just sort of retreat back into your priors. And so if I'm looking at Donald Trump not as I hate orange man or orange man can do no wrong, you know, you know, sort of to put on the red hat or to put on, you know, I won't say the name hat, you know, it, you don't go anywhere. So part of what we're trying to do with monitoring the situation and, and, and part of what I hope, you know, we can do is like to look at the phenomena of the thing itself rather than simply Retreat into I hate that guy or I love that guy. And so if I am sort of playing that role as sort of not entirely disinterested observer, but if I'm going to play that sort of observer role, well, what exactly is going on? And if I think you look at, you know, him and what he does is that he is almost has a sort of a. An intuitive knack for branding. And, yeah, it. His branding is obnoxious, and it is all those things that, that his critics are correct in pointing out the guy has a knack for it. Right. And so I. And look, whether or not super intelligence takes. Yeah. Remains to be seen, but I think that that's what he's doing, right? I think he looks at the word, you know, artificial intelligence, AI, and right away you're dealing with a bad word. Artificial is bad, right? You want real things, right? So. So I think by calling it super intelligence, independent of what you think of AI, Right? And you and I can talk about that. I think what he's doing is he's trying to reframe it in a way that will automatically put it in a position of a winner. Right. And as we all know, Trump likes winners and he doesn't like losers. Right. I mean, that's kind of his shtick, but we'll see. I think it's a. It's a. It's a. It's an attempt on his part to rebrand something that he knows has become poisonous in the public imagination.
• 15:17
  Speaker A: Right. I mean, and I don't dispute the fact that the guy is a genius. He's like, genius level on these things, on this. This intuitive sense of just what people are thinking and how to brand things. I mean, I just, I published an article this morning at Crisis saying, no, it's not super intelligence, and that there's real problems with calling it superintelligence. And I was like, just thinking. I'm not thinking when I wrote that. I'm not thinking Trump. I'm just simply saying the name itself has real, like, I think philosophical problems. I think it's because it. It assumes that it's a real intelligence. Because you're calling super intelligence. It means it's real and it's even better than ours. Whereas artificial does say it's fake intelligence, which is what it is. It mimics intelligence. And so that I always thought artificial intelligence is actually a good term for it. And super intelligence actually has some real problems, and it can lead to real philosophical problems. I don't think, obviously, Trump thinks all that out. He just Thinks like, okay, it, like you said, branding, things like that. But already I saw. I got a couple comments already on the article Crisis. One of them was, here's Eric with his aunt, with his tds. Again, here's Eric. You know, he's just like, right. He just can't help it. You know, he doesn't know anything. And he just, you know, he just. I'm not gonna any. The guy. I guess he says he was a donor. And so I'm not going to donate any more to Crisis because, you know, I like your stuff on Catholicism, but, you know, you just hate Trump. And I'm just like, I know with 100 certainty. 100 certainty. If Kamala Harris did the exact same thing, rename it Super Intelligence, and I wrote that exact same article, just switched out Trump, that the person would have been 100 for it.
• 16:51
  Speaker B: Right.
• 16:51
  Speaker A: And would have just been like, this is the, you know, this is awful. This is terrible. And so, like, I like the fact what you're saying, like, you and Steve do this, but just general, just kind of take a step back and try to actually look at it a little bit more objectively and not just be in this kind of box of. Okay, right. Well, Trump, did I have to be for it or even Trump, didn't I have to be against it? Exactly. I'm actually. I actually like the fact that Trump is pretty. Is kind of allowing AI to go because I think I'm a little bit more pro AI than you are. But like, I like to say, I'm not pro AI as much as I'm anti. Anti AI.
• 17:27
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, it's interesting. I, I have. I've been pretty fluid about my attitudes toward artificial intelligence. You know, as a technology, it's clearly very powerful. And you and I, I think, can both intuit and. And see real use cases for it being a positive. Um, I don't disagree with that. I, um. Where I come in here is probably similar to you, that, number one, it's important to, like, I do think that the philosophical question matters. Right. You know, so in that I would agree with you in terms of, you know, AI is a better name for what it is, whereas super intelligence sort of already kind of gives the lie to what they're trying to do. So. So I have been all over the place now. So if I put my, my, my, my. My teacher hat on for a minute, I'm deeply concerned about AI. I'm deeply concerned about AI in the classroom. I'm deeply concerned about AI in terms of its Potential powers of disruption so that, you know, we already are living in a time which is precarious from an economic standpoint. You know, I'm worried about my kids. My own children are, I have a daughter in college, I have a son and my other daughter is in high, there, in high school here with me here at the abbey. And you know, I'm really worried about what it's going to do to, you know, them professionally, you know, so that, that, that's one point. But even more concerning to me is that I think we are hurtling toward a period of kind of a new and radical form of illiteracy. And insofar as outsourcing our thinking and our reading and our sense making to a machine because it's faster and more efficient is going to be potentially catastrophic. And if we hope at any sense to have a kind of broad and general educated population. And I am very concerned about that. And I see it like, I see it every day and the temptations are real. So, you know, I am, you know, I was formed in the analog world. You know, I'm a, I'm a classic Gen Xer. And so, you know, all of my formal education took place prior to. I got an email address the very same month I got my first email address the very same month that I turned in my master's thesis. Right. And so, you know, and in many respects I thank God for that because I don't know how I would sit down and read 20 pages of Aristotle if I had my phone next to me. I don't know if I would have wrestled with the politics or the metaphysics or. And I'm just using Aristotle as an example, you know, if I could just, you know, go on Grok or, or Claude and you know, give me a, a summary of Aristotle using the voice of Eric Salmons. Right. And you can do those kinds of things. Right. And, and, and it's, and I have to say, as someone who's played around with it a decent amount, it's pretty good. It's pretty good now. Yes, it hallucinates and it can make all kinds of problems. And you know, the more, you know about a topic, I think the more you can see how it, it can play fast and loose because as you said, it's not thinking. It's, it's, it's, it's bringing a bunch of different things together. So I would, so I would agree with you about the tag and that by, by changing it there. So, so I don't, but as you've already mentioned, I don't think that's the game Trump is playing. I don't think he sits around thinking about these things. I don't think he cares about those kinds of things. So as a dad, as a teacher, I care deeply about those kinds of things. But, but I, you know, again, I. But I'm not a. But I have a kind of an apocalyptic imagination. And so, you know, you know, I was one of those kids when I was 19 years old and I read, you know, you know, the Marian apparition stuff. I did a deep dive into the Marine apparition stuff. You know, I was like, all in. And I was just like, you know, kind of obsessed with it and like, oh my gosh, is this sort of this secret knowledge that we need to kind of figure in? And at a certain point I just had to kind of back up a little bit, like, okay, you know, you know, there's a way in which it can function. Like, I believe in, you know, the many of the apparition events, but. But there's a way in which it can turn into a kind of gnostic sort of secret knowledge that, that, that is potentially destructive to the sort of the way you approach the world. And ultimately, you know, look, you and I are both believers in Christ Jesus and we believe in the good news. And I believe in the end, you know, our destiny is to be with him forever in the next. And so whatever chaos is going on down here and warnings and these bad things that are bound to happen, I maintain that everything's going to hell in a handbasket, but in the end it's going to be fine, you know, so, but, but, but for me personally, I have to fight against that kind of apocalyptic mentality. So therefore, when I first sort of hurt started hearing about these waves of sort of AI doomerism, I have to admit that I was very much sort of like, oh, I gotta pay attention to this, right? And you know, if we build it, we all die. And like, I was like, oh my goodness. And I remember, I don't know if you were familiar with AI. The AI, it was first called the AI 2027 project and I think it's been rebranded. But it's one of these guys who's. Who worked at OpenAI, I believe he worked with, under Sam Altman's outfit who run ChatGPT. And he was interviewed on Ross Douth, it's podcast. And I remember listening to this, I went on the website and I was just like, whoa, whoa. And you know, it makes a certain amount of sense And I certainly can't zero it out as a possibility for all these predictions. And the predictions have been pretty good. But in terms of ultimate doomerism, I have changed my opinion about that.
• 23:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. Essentially I kind of have a, I have an almost an anti apocalyptic kind of ethos. I really, I don't, I just react very kind of viscerally when, when people talk into the, I mean, the funny thing is I'm friends with Joshua Charles. I think he's great.
• 23:52
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:53
  Speaker A: But I, you know, and I've had discussions on this podcast about like kind of into the world stuff and he, he tends to be more like, yeah, we might be in the last days. And he's got these good. And when he talks about like, okay, I understand how he comes to these conclusions and I'm not saying he's wrong even. I just have a more kind of emotional like. No, I think things because to me it's like when I've read, read history, there are so many times and places where it was like the end of the world to those people.
• 24:20
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 24:20
  Speaker A: Like if you were living, if you were like. I've used this example before. If you're living in the 1920s Russia and you're a Christian, it's the end of the world.
• 24:27
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:27
  Speaker A: Into the world.
• 24:28
  Speaker B: And it was. Right, it was, it was. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:31
  Speaker A: Not the end of the world. Capital T, you know, for everybody. And so that's why I kind of resist that. And so like I mentioned in my, in my, I'll plug in my upcoming book on artificial intelligence. I talk about the 2027, you know, website and you know, the predictions and I, and I basically almost mock it a little bit.
• 24:50
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 24:50
  Speaker A: And I, my frustration is in the whole AI discussion is I think there are real serious dangers that could really harm humanity. And they're. None of them are the ones being talked about. What's being talked about is Terminator and you know, the Matrix and things like that, which I really don't think is going to happen because I think people make a philosophical mistake when they think that because they, they are, they, they ascribe intention to the machine that it does not have.
• 25:22
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 25:22
  Speaker A: And, and like, and desires and emotions it does not have and you know, it basically anthropomorphize it.
• 25:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 25:28
  Speaker A: Whereas the real dangers, I mean some of you've already touched on, like, I think the two biggest ones for me, and I think the Pope has mentioned this too, is one is the, the harm it can do to human relationships.
• 25:41
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 25:41
  Speaker A: And two is the harm it can do to our cognitive abilities.
• 25:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
• 25:46
  Speaker A: And, and that's why, for example, I recommend the book and I do this in my own life, is like, I don't think any kids should be using AI at all. Like, and by kids, I mean at least until high school. And I think in high school, if they use it, it should be super, super controlling. I almost like my, my own view about smartphones. I think the same thing about smartphones, and for the same reasons. In a lot of ways, I think AI can be even more dangerous than smartphones, but some smartphones are bad enough. And so I think that like, the, the inability to like, like, I think, I think it becomes a generational thing. Like, you and I, we're the same basic. I'm a couple years older than you, but growth. Gen X, we have kind of. The reason I think our generation is more positive in general by AI is because we have a background where we know we learned how to think, we learned how to read, we know all this stuff, and now we just have this tool that can make things a lot more efficient for us, make it a lot better. Whereas like my kid, my, my kids who are adults who are out of the house, but they're in their twenties.
• 26:44
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 26:45
  Speaker A: Generally they are way more anti AI than I am.
• 26:48
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's my experience with my own students and my own children.
• 26:53
  Speaker A: And it's weird because I think it's because they didn't. They kind of see like what's doing to their, their peers and you know, and they're not in a position. A lot of. It's frankly is kind of like you're, you're, you're positioning your job. So I got, like, for me, I'm not getting replaced by AI because. But what it is doing is, it's letting me do my work a lot better. I can actually use AI. In fact, just. You know, the funny thing is every month I send out a report and I to. To my writers. I see who the top 10 authors were, articles were. And I also, I then also had to compile for payment. I had to send to accounting all the people how many articles are, how much you get paid and stuff like that.
• 27:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right, right.
• 27:35
  Speaker A: And it was always been a tedious process I hate doing, but it's like, I don't, I don't have. We don't have the funds to like be hiring people.
• 27:42
  Speaker B: Sure, of course. You. You got to do it then.
• 27:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I got to do it. Well, I figured out how to hook in my AI, my clanker. I got it running and it just did it for me today. I just did it. Two prompts for me, perfectly formatted the way I wanted to. It saved me at least an hour or something like that of work I hate. So I think of it like when I hear AI think of something like that. When my kids, my adult kids hear AI, they're thinking about the fact that, like, all their peers are becoming stupid and, or they're like, totally ingrained in having a relationship with an AI. And so it's a completely different thing. We're looking at, I think, Perspective.
• 28:18
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So the other day I was thinking about this because I'm tracking along with you. And I'm following along with you. We have spent the last six months to a year wringing our hands about AI, but we ignore the fact that we've let, you know, the algorithm, right? Capital T, capital A. We've allowed the algorithm to run roughshod through our lives. And to me, the, the much more consequential technology has been the social media algorithms, much more so than the clankers. And, you know, because you, you mentioned relationships, right? And the more and more that we outsource our relationships to the digital world, the more and more complicated and confusing and frankly, depressing relationships become. And so I see that, you know, with, with my own students, you know, they, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll carry on, you know, their relationships, such as they are, you know, through, you know, you know, Snapchat and, you know, they will scroll on Instagram and, you know, within minutes, if not seconds, they feel bad about themselves because how can they compare? Right? And so the algorithm has a way of programming us in a way that the chat doesn't right now. It, it can too. I, you know, I mean, ultimately this is a little bit of an artificial demarcation that I'm drawing, but I just think it's important to recognize the way in which Tick Tock, you know, the Tick Tock algorithm is, is a perfect example. You know, I, you know, I remember a couple of years ago, I had a student and she was very, she was very much a kind of social justice. Were great kid, I loved her to death, but she was a TikTok fiend, and I'm using that word. You know, we typically think of like a drug addict as a kind of fiend. And if she came into class and I always taught a class that this particular class always met just after lunch, which meant that, you know, she could go to the dining hall, get her food and then go back to her dorm room and she would doom scroll on TikTok, you know, for a solid half an hour before she came into class. And I didn't, you know, I don't do the tick tock thing really, but I, I knew that she had just gotten all warped up and wound up for 30 minutes and she'd come into my class and she'd want to talk about, I don't know, like Israel or, or, or Gaza or, or whatever it is she was worked up about that day. And it was as if I was watching someone had, who had just gone through a kind of 30 minute possession session. And you know, that is deeply consequential, you know, to, to mental health, to how you form ideas about what you think you know or what you don't know about the world. And to me, much bigger deal, you know, you bring up relationships and then just the idea of formation. I think you're right. So if that is, you know, if for the purposes of this conversation, let's say that I agree with you that those are sort of the two main ones. I certainly agree that they are, they are two main of the ones. Right. Then we should be much more deeply concerned about the, about the creep of the, the social media algorithms and how they shape and form our affective experience of the world on a daily basis. Way more consequential than going to ChatGPT and saying, you know, what are the dates of such and such an event?
• 31:43
  Speaker A: You know, I also think it made me think of some, what you just said many things I hadn't thought of before. If you think about the algorithm and I, I. Capital T, Capital A definitely of these social media sites, they are definitely geared towards getting you anxious, getting you angry. Those are the emotions they really try to tie into. But oddly enough, chat bots, typically they are very affirmative. Now sometimes that's bad because they'll affirm somebody to like go commit suicide.
• 32:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, they can be sycophantic a little bit.
• 32:13
  Speaker A: Yeah. But the point is like when you're finished, when you, when you scroll through social media, there's a really good chance no matter what you were there for and no matter what you've posted in the past, you will come away anxious and angry. However, if you have like a conversation.
• 32:30
  Speaker B: Right, right, right, right.
• 32:31
  Speaker A: Your chat with, you know, Claude or with, with OpenAI, and I'm not even like trying to defend these as like these that that's healthy. I'm simply saying that is it is definitely different. You don't come away with that because you might be like, hey, I got this idea for this. What do you think of that? It's not going to say, that sucks. And if you put that same idea on X, that's exactly the response you're gonna get.
• 32:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, right, right, right, right.
• 32:52
  Speaker A: I have this. I had this epiphany. You know how sometimes you have an epiphany of something that's blindly obvious?
• 32:58
  Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And all of a sudden. Oh, yeah.
• 33:00
  Speaker A: Well, I had this recently. Okay. One of my favorite baseball players is Joey Votto. He played for the Cincinnati Reds, and he was one of the greatest hitters of our time. And he is a disciple of hitting, and he' disciple of Ted Williams, who is the greatest hitter.
• 33:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Right, right, right. Yeah.
• 33:16
  Speaker A: And he knows Ted Williams. Like, he, He. I. He studied him.
• 33:19
  Speaker B: He studied him. Yeah.
• 33:20
  Speaker A: He's literally the number one person in the world because not only does he know Ted Williams, but he actually implemented it and became one of the great hitters of our time. So all this. He had something. There was a. There was a post on X where he was interviewed about Ted Williams. It was like a short little clip of him talking about Ted Williams and about hitting. And I was like, oh, this is cool. I listened to it, and then I dumbly looked at the comments on X and literally the first five or six were like, what an idiot, this guy.
• 33:46
  Speaker B: What does this guy know? Yeah, yeah.
• 33:47
  Speaker A: And it made me realize, wait a second.
• 33:49
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 33:49
  Speaker A: He's literally the number one expert in the world on this subject, and there's nobody who knows it better than him. And the first five comments are how stupid you are.
• 33:59
  Speaker B: Right. And.
• 33:59
  Speaker A: And it. It was an epiphany to be like, oh, that's right. Not that when I get criticism, they're not sometimes. Right. They are.
• 34:05
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
• 34:06
  Speaker A: I have to realize that that is the nature of the beast and that you're. It's just the way it is. But if. If Joey Voto got on Claude and said, hey, here's what I'm thinking about hitting, Claude would say, yeah, you got a great point. And you're right. Another thing was like, I remember one time, I just. I just. I was like, this is like early days, maybe last couple years, and maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I did. But I was like, can I. Give me a biography of Eric Sammons? Yeah.
• 34:31
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 34:31
  Speaker A: And it did. And it wasn't totally syncopated, but it was completely fair. Like, it was like, it mentioned, like. And it, like, including some things that were not 100 positive, because I don't deserve that. But I was like, this is actually a fair assessment of me. And like, I know if you ask on X, okay, what do you think about this person? It's always gonna have a bunch of negative stuff.
• 34:52
  Speaker B: Right.
• 34:52
  Speaker A: I'm not. And this. It's almost sound like it's a. How great AI is, but it's definitely different.
• 34:59
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's an important thing to point out. I mean, I think a lot of people, you know, I mean, look, you know, well, shock of shocks, right? People are talking about things that they don't really know what they're talking about. Right. You know, in other words, you know, you know, they, you know, you may have read a piece on. In the New York Times, you know, that's talking about. I remember there was a story two years ago now where a young kid was talking to a chat bottle. And the way that this particular interface worked is that you could talk. You could sort of create a character that you could talk to. And in this case, the kid was talking to Daenerys from Game of Thrones, and she's the sort of this dragon queen lady. And so anyway, he's sort of having this back and forth, you know, with. With this bot. And, you know, it eventually gets to the point it was one of the early chat bots, and they. They've sensed. Tightened up things quite a bit. But basically he says, look, I'm gonna, you know, kill myself. And. And the bot says something like, well, you know, you know, you've got to be bold and in what you choose to do. Because that's what I choose to do, because that's what her character, in the broadest sense of it, would have. Would have counseled. And the cape goes and commits suicide. Awful. Terrible, right? You know, tragedy of tragedies. But, you know, I. So I think people read something like that and now they think, oh, well, I know. I know what the chatbots are about now. It's like, well, you don't actually really do it. And, you know, so, you know, what you're talking about is that. And I've had this experience too, you know, when I'm doing research for an episode that I'm going to do with Steve, you know, I'll. I'll throw in an idea. And the way that my mind works is I have a very sort of associative mind. And I don't always know why. If I'm reading this thing, these three things pop up, and one of the things I like doing with Steve is that I can kind of do that out loud. But if I'm kind of getting myself ready, I'll say, oh, you know, like just the other day I was plugging in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, and I was trying, I was thinking of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age in the context of, I think I was reading Dante at the time I was teaching Dante. And it was this sort of cool thing where it's sort of like, well, you know, I can see why this might make you think of this, Kale. You know, and we sort of go back and forth and it's not, it's not telling me, oh, Kale, you're the best thing since sliced bread. You're so amazing. Like, it's not sycophantic, but is it, it's at least sort of doing a kind of back and forth. Whereas like you said, if you go on social media, if I would pose that exact same question on X, you know, I'd have, you know, you know, a handful of people like, oh, Kale, that's a really interesting idea. Then I have a handful of people that, you know, would call me a Jew. I'd have a handful of people that would call me, you know, you know, a retrograde Trumpite, you know, and it's just like, all right, like, what am I even doing here? This is, this is posturing. This is not sense making. So, so that is why I have in the last, I would say, month to month and a half, been much more dark, dark about Big Algo than I am about, you know, chat or clankers or, or whatever, you know, we want to call this. So, so, you know, and I think that's important just to be honest about that. And I don't, I don't see a lot of honesty about this. It's like, and look, I get it, my first inclination with, with the chatbots was like, burn it all down right now. Pull the plug. Bomb, bomb the server farms. Right? I was just like, no, because, you know, I'm, I, I, you know, I, I don't necessarily invite all of these disruptions, but I also know that I don't have the power to stop these disruptions. And so there's a certain responsibility that I have as a dad as, as a teacher to familiarize myself with the world that my students live in. And part of the world is social media. And part of the world, of course, is going to be whether you and I like it or not, Eric. And, you know, you know it's going to be part of their professional lives moving forward. And I think we should be more responsible about how we talk about it.
• 38:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And it's interesting. I just a guy I know who's very smart, he's also Gen X like us. He was just the other day I was talking to him and he said that he does not think AI will live lead to cognitive decline, but instead will actually help. And I, I think there's an argument to be made there. And it's kind of what you just said where you have an interaction with an AI, with a, with a chatbot, with Claude or whoever and you say. And you. And you throw ideas off and it does stimulate. I've done the same thing. And it does stimulate your thinking. Now I know there's the purists who are going to say, well, you should do that within a human being. Well, okay. But I live in 2026 where we all are. Are disconnected from each other. It's not like my neighbor. I'm living in a Catholic ghetto. My neighbor next doors also has a lot of same kind of fundamental beliefs that I do or at least philosophical beliefs that I do. And I can actually have a conversation like this. But like that is. I mean, what's more healthy? What you. The two things you just said. You. You're shooting ideas off of a clanker and getting feedback that is actually can be very helpful or you're doing the same thing on X. I've done that before and I've always regretted it.
• 40:01
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 40:02
  Speaker A: It just ends up being just because people will be like. Because you're not re. The funny part is. Okay, I. I feel like we're getting too much into a pro AI here thing. But I. This is just fine.
• 40:13
  Speaker B: It's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 40:14
  Speaker A: I feel like when you're on social media, everybody's an avatar and you know, we're player characters before we got online that I tend to be more charitable and, and sympathetic and everything to people I know in, in real life, if I, when I encounter online than people I don't. Because you just like people. There is no Kale Zeldin on in real life. The real life one on X. There's just the avatar and you see and people have seen. And really this is what I find. People who don't follow you very closely. What they've seen of your posts are the ones that they've generated the algorithm. So yeah, get. You'll say something negative, boom, that. That becomes. Everybody sees that one.
• 40:55
  Speaker B: Right.
• 40:56
  Speaker A: All the other ones you made. And so, like, how. How human is that, that interaction compared to. You're literally talking to a computer and it's giving you feedback that is helpful. And I think that that's. And, okay, I'm going to go. I'm going to go down a path here and, like, you got me. You know, you and Steve, you're talking out loud. Thing is. Is becoming infectious with me.
• 41:21
  Speaker B: Good, good.
• 41:22
  Speaker A: But there's this thing I've never liked about when we talk about the chatbots, which is. Oh, it's just a word prediction program. All it's doing is.
• 41:30
  Speaker B: It's just a stochastic parrot. Yes, yes. I'm familiar with all of the. All of them.
• 41:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. And it's. It's a plagiarizer. It just takes. It just has all this data dumped into it and it just kind of repeats. It's just doing that. But here's my thought, and I actually put this in my book, and it might be the most controversial part of my book, but I would argue, isn't that what we do, our brains? Because what we do is nobody's truly original. I mean, very few.
• 41:59
  Speaker B: Amen. There are a few.
• 42:00
  Speaker A: But if there are a few, what has happened? Like, for example, all my books, I've written. I've written like a dozen books now.
• 42:06
  Speaker B: Amazing.
• 42:07
  Speaker A: What I do is I've read a ton of books, I've read a ton of articles. I've read a ton of stuff. I've thought about, I've processed it, and then I've said, okay, I'm going to put that all. I've noticed patterns. That's what I'm doing.
• 42:20
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 42:20
  Speaker A: And I'm like, okay, I'm going to put that together and I'm going to say it in a way that I hope other people understand. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to think of the first word I need to put out there, then the second word, then the third word. And my brain is doing that. And I think that what's happened, because if you. If you know the history of these chat bots and stuff.
• 42:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 42:39
  Speaker A: The people who created the large language models were as shocked as anybody by their capabilities when all of a sudden they realize if they dump enough information into it and they have powerful enough CPUs, it does way more than they expected. And some people have taken that kind of conspiracy theory, like, there's demons in there or whatever, aliens, whatever. I'm just more like. I think they designed it much more like the human brain than we expected. And we don't realize how much language is how we think. And so when you give a computer the ability to do language, you're giving the ability on some level to think. And I, I, you can throw all the caveats out there that I do believe.
• 43:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, I know. Same.
• 43:21
  Speaker A: But it just is one of these things. Like, you know, when I see like my grandson, he'll be too pretty soon. Like, I'm watching him develop. Yeah, it's great.
• 43:28
  Speaker B: That's awesome.
• 43:29
  Speaker A: I'm watching his brain develop and he's hearing words and he says words and he's reacting to them. That's how they're, that's how alums are trained. They're trained that they've given rewards if they say the right thing.
• 43:41
  Speaker B: Of course. Yeah.
• 43:42
  Speaker A: And they're. And they're not. If they say the wrong thing. Well, guess what, my, when my grandson screams and cries, he doesn't get the reward because my, my, my daughter and her, my are good parents.
• 43:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 43:53
  Speaker A: Mama or hungry or something like that. You know, he gets rewarded. And so it's like that's, that's what we're, we, that's how they design these things. So I think something they're beyond just. Oh, it's just a word prediction program.
• 44:05
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean. Right. Because analogously, we can say that we are word prediction, you know.
• 44:10
  Speaker A: Right.
• 44:10
  Speaker B: Machines. I want to be careful. Human beings are real. I believe we're all made in the image and likeness of God. Like I really do. Well, you know, a good. An old friend of mine, Greg, always used to say, we were in graduate school together and he was a married graduate student at the time. I was just like 23 and you know, not. And you know, he would say to me, oftentimes he's like, watching kids is absolutely amazing because they don't learn language, they steal it. Like, they're just, they're just, you know, they're just grabbing it as it comes. And, and like you said, sort of a system of rewards. You know, the medium of language is communication. And so, you know, it works or doesn't work. Right. And so you kind of, you kind of learn all those things. So. I agree. You know, I, I have, you know, I have been given several opportunities in, in my adult life and recently, you know, the last decade or so of trying to like, what, what am I? Right? I'm a teacher. Right. You know, I'm a husband, I'm a father. I'm those things. And I take that stuff very seriously. But like why do I know things? Right? And, and I realized that I am not in any way, shape or form an original thinker. I think you're right. I think that the original thinkers amongst us are truly few and far between. But I have been blessed with a, a better than above average education. You know, really blessed. I had an amazing education and I have an ability to remember things and put things together in kind of novel ways that make sense to people. And so insofar as I am doing that, I feel like I am, you know, pattern matching and recognizing and there's a tremendous amount of, kind of fun. There's a joy even to be had when you can see a pattern and you can communicate that pattern and you can watch it resonate with, with another human being or a group of human beings. Like, it's truly an awesome experience. But you know, what you were saying about, you know, the avatar thing, I want to, I want to circle back to that because I think that's really important. One of the many books that I read, I read a few years ago, it's written by this, this, these two guys. One is a. His name is Hans Georg Mueller and Paul d'. Ambrosio. And it is called you and your profile, identity after authenticity. And in it he develops this concept of what he calls profilicity. And you need to read profile ict. Right. And he says that we've, we've entered in, in this age of social media and the Internet. We have, it really is Internet first and then social media, but we've entered into this age in which we are our profiles first. You know, prior to that, you know, we lived, you know, roughly 200 years or so in what he calls the age of authenticity. Right. And so, you know, that, that, you know, you and I grew up in a world where we were taught in a variety of different ways and different idioms that, you know, you need to find sort of your true self and you need to sort of be your true self into the world. And prior to that, you know, so he's sort of tracing this historically, and I have a little caveat on that in a minute. But prior to that, you know, you lived in the age of what does he call it? Not, not, not authenticity, Sincerity. Right. And so, you know, if you look at a kind of pre modern world, you know, you, you sort of, you were birthed and then injected into these sort of structures of being later on we have authenticity. Like, yeah, like I might be a bricklayer or I might be a book printer or I might be a leather Worker, or I might be a writer or whatever it is to sort of be my true self. And, and he's not attaching any kind of moral valences to these necessarily. But what is new is that instead of either being sincere or authentic, we are now living in the age of profilicity. So we're always in some way, shape or form functioning as an extension of our projected self. And you know, look, you can get kind of weird and sort of postmodern on this sort of stuff, but I do think it is capturing something that is essentially correct. Now what I would say that there he's, you know, I would say that, you know, all of those options are kind of always on the table, right? I don't have to live my life through social media. I don't have to be my profile. But you know, look, I, I joke all the time, you know, I play a role every day. I show up, I put on my tie, I put on my blazer, I go in the classroom and I'm Mr. Zeldin. You know, and you know, Mr. Zeldin is not exactly the same guy who sits, you know, on a lazy Sunday afternoon avoiding my, my various tasks that I really should be completing and watch a football game and drink a beer, right? You know, that's, that's kale. And you know, or a version of kale. And then what I do on a day to day basis, I'm Mr. Zelda. And man, I remember being 23 years old and being a high school teacher for the first time and they saw, look, you have, you know, they're gonna, the kids are gonna call you Mr. Zeldin and it's gonna feel really weird at first, but, you know, and sure enough, I walk in and I'm calling myself Mr. Zelda. And I'm like a couple of years older, you know, than the high school seniors that I was teaching at the time. But my point is that this, this notion of profile, like to be pro profilic, right? To pro, to, to engage in publicity, is that you start to realize that your avatar becomes the thing that you're, you are serving. And that can lead into some really dangerous situations. And look, look, I think we see this in the commentariat class, you know, YouTube personalities and Twitter personalities, like, you become a kind of stereotype of this image that you're projecting into the world. And if you're not careful, you can very easily be captured by the algorithm. And you start feeding the algorithm. And so all of a sudden you're playing this strange role through the screen that is not entirely aligned with who you are or what God wants you to be or what your real vocation may be. And you know, like, I've seen it, you know, audience capture is a real problem and I do think that we are seeing that. So I, I don't know exactly what to do with that. I, you know, with, with, with, with kids my own children's age, you know, they do not have a memory of living a life in which they didn't have a social media handle. Like, that's just weird.
• 50:24
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 50:24
  Speaker B: You know, and I, I think it's important just to point that out. Like, hey, we did like, I was just kale down the street and now, you know, you're like, you're kale on tick tock and you like, do dances and you do all these kinds of things. And, and you know, it's not all bad. Right. I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not a sort of a, you know, like I said, burn it all down kind of guy. But to be aware of that. And I think that, you know, if we're talking in the Catholic context, you know, how are we going to minister to people who have had to live increasingly more and more of their life into this digital space that has more akin to being a professional wrestler than it has to do with being a fully human being.
• 51:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's a weird thing. Still, I always, I should say it's an awkward thing to me when somebody will come up to me, like, after my son's like, oh, I follow you on X. Yeah, yeah. And literally my, my knee jerk reaction always is, I'm sorry.
• 51:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's funny. But yeah, because, you know, like, I'm pretty out there, you know, on X. And you know, I, I made the mistake during COVID saying what I thought, which got me into a lot of trouble professionally and otherwise, but I'm fine. But still occasionally, like, you know, it's a Catholic school and, you know, it's a mainstream Catholic school. So some of my parents are conservative and some of my parents are not conservative. And a couple of the conservative parents will kind of pull me aside. Like, I follow you, an ex. I love your stuff. And I'm just always like, I, I, I say the same thing. Eric, I'm sorry. And they're like, oh, no, no, no, I love it. I'm like, you know, it makes it.
• 51:56
  Speaker A: And also my, my thing is, is like they, they have an image of me that I know is, is distorted. It's not totally accurate. I mean, it can't be. It's not their fault at all, because I have an image of them if I followed them on X. I mean, I have an image of you. This is the first time you and I have actually had a conversation face to face. So I have an image of you, even though I've listened to your podcast because of all this stuff. And it's just. It's hard to kind of get outside of that. And so it really is a danger. And it's. Because it's always amazing to me how often people think, like, they think they know what I think about everything.
• 52:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:35
  Speaker A: Because they've seen what I think about a few things.
• 52:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 52:38
  Speaker A: And so it's like. And also, the funny thing is, it's not like I post on X. Like, my life. Like, okay. I always. You know, I remember when I first I. I first wrote for Steve for one, period five back in 2014, I think. And he and I. I really felt like, okay, we. We match. But one thing he and I are the opposite of. He will share his whole personal life to the world. Yeah, I. I can't stand that. I'm not saying I can't stand him doing. I'm just saying I understand me doing that. I. I cannot. I'm very. My dad was like this. My granddad was like this. You know, we do not share.
• 53:10
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. There's a reserve. There's a reserve. You know, yes.
• 53:14
  Speaker A: My idea, Hell would be going to a. Like a. A conference in which we have to sit around, share our feelings. Like, going to c. Talking about our feelings about this. That's my version of hell.
• 53:26
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 53:26
  Speaker A: And so, like. But the point is, like, people don't know. Like, you know, they don't. They don't. And also, they're only getting a slice. The algorithm gets them. Like, I. I know there's people who. The only post they ever see of me are the ones where I'm railing on something, I'm negative about something.
• 53:42
  Speaker B: Right.
• 53:43
  Speaker A: And they don't know that. Like, really what I've been thinking about mostly today is, like, by that. That ball game I watched last night was awesome. That was great. Or, you know, I can't wait. I'm reading to my kids. Lord of the Rings again tonight. We're on a great part, actually. We are. Because. Just gave the big charge and they did. I mean, I seriously have a hard time getting through it, reading, because it was just, like, so powerful. But anyway, that's the kind of thing that's mostly on my Mind, but nobody, I don't share that normally with the world or anything like that.
• 54:09
  Speaker B: So yeah, I think you have them and the profile. Yeah, I think you have a kind of sense of digital modesty and sort of digital decorum and I think that's right for you. You know what I mean? I think that that's right. I'm also not terribly confessional online. I mean I certainly share my ideas, but like, I don't talk about my kids, I don't, my family, you know, I just don't do that. So I want to ask you a question. You know, we're talking about AI and I think we could still get to the alien thing in a bit or the UAP or whatever you want to talk about, however we want to characterize that. But how have you sensed or have you sensed that the church has been flat footed in this new digital age?
• 54:51
  Speaker A: Okay, so this is my thesis that I, I, I lay out a little bit in my book and I'm, I'm going to keep bringing it up, but
• 54:58
  Speaker B: like, yeah, that's fine.
• 54:59
  Speaker A: I feel like there have been, you could say many more, you could debate a little bit of details, but there have been three major kind of technological tests in the last like generation or more. There is television.
• 55:13
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 55:13
  Speaker A: There was the Internet and there was smartphones.
• 55:16
  Speaker B: Yep. Yeah.
• 55:17
  Speaker A: And I lived through two of them. Obviously television for my time. But I worked for a Internet company in the 90s, a web hosting company. I was part of the dot com boom our company went from. I literally was a guy who worked. A friend hired me in his basement to do some extra work and in two years we had 300 employees and wow.com we were going to go public and all that. And I won't worry about details. But then also of course, the smartphone age. And I felt like there's no question in my mind that the church failed those tests. If you look back, like you'll see popes in this, in the 50s talking about television. They did a pretty good job of it. But in general it was the same thing for all of them. We just kind of went along with, let's look at all the promises and how great these things are, you know. Fulton Sheen, EWTN for TV and then like for the Internet, oh, we can get out and we can evangelize the world. We have these tools that we can let people know about it and smartphones the same way. Like, oh, we can put the whole catechism on your, on your phone and stuff like that and all. But none of Them did we take very seriously that, oh, there are real dangers to these things. All those things you said about the positive might be true.
• 56:25
  Speaker B: Right.
• 56:25
  Speaker A: But like, let's just. All three of them, for example, porn. I mean.
• 56:31
  Speaker B: Right, that's right. Right.
• 56:32
  Speaker A: All three of them. That, that led to a, a massive, you know, use of porn by and. Which is so destructive and evil.
• 56:40
  Speaker B: Right.
• 56:41
  Speaker A: I do think I could be wrong. I actually think because of Pope Leo, I think the Catholics might have a chance here on this one. In fact, that's one of my big hopes, is that the Catholic Church is primed for this. Now I have all my complaints about the status of the Catholic Church and the problems in the church. Everybody knows those. But like in my mind, AI brings out philosophical, anthropological and theological questions that were not part of the conversation, the cultural conversation. But the Church is primed more than any institution to address because they've been thinking about these exact questions for thousands of years. And so like, like, in fact, I just agreed to give a talk in April at a conference on AI. It's like a Catholics and there'll be some non Catholics is more of an academic conference.
• 57:35
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 57:35
  Speaker A: Like my topic is going to be how AI can actually lead to deeper evangelization. Not like the whole kind of generic, oh, it gives us tools that we can be more efficient, but more like now people are going to be asking questions like what actually is intelligence? How are, how do we differentiate from machines? Are we just machines? I mean, if you look at all the AI like proponents, the guys who have kind of driven this forward, they have philosophical nightmare positions. I mean, they just were. We're just like machine flesh machines.
• 58:09
  Speaker B: Well, we're, we're bootloading. Transhumanism is basically what they think.
• 58:12
  Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And so like, here's our opportunity. And I do think like as little faith as I have in a lot of our bishops and stuff like that, I, I do feel like Leo might be like his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. It was way too long. Lots of stuff didn't need to be in there. But chapter three.
• 58:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, this is a good start.
• 58:35
  Speaker A: This is a good start. I think this addresses some real key issues. And so I am at least as much as I can be with my kind of dour personality at times. I am hopeful that we, we won't be as flat foot because I think like the smartphone thing in particular, you, you've, I think you've mentioned you've listened to Kyle Newport before.
• 58:55
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 58:56
  Speaker A: He's great. I Love him.
• 58:57
  Speaker B: He's fantastic. Yeah.
• 58:58
  Speaker A: One of the things he talks about a lot is that, like, when smartphones came into the scene, we all just kind of said, great, great, this is great. And we all, we all got them and we all got on social media, which I kind of. Look, smartphone social media is like the same one thing. Because that's really what powered it.
• 59:14
  Speaker B: That's really what powered it. Yeah.
• 59:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, right. Well, the promises made were you're going to be more connected, you're gonna, you know, know what your friends from high school are doing. You're gonna have all these great conversations. And then of course, it became just a big program that you hooked and addicted. And I think because we've seen that there is less like, I'm not an AI Doomer. And I don't think AI doomerism is good, but at the same time, I think it's good that there is some doomerism, because there was no doomerism about smartphones when they came out. Except for, you know, the, that one guy, Nicholas, the guy who is Google making a stupid. That guy, he was pretty good.
• 59:50
  Speaker B: But yeah, Nicholas, yeah, I read the book far, yeah.
• 59:57
  Speaker A: I mean, he was one of the few, but nobody listened to him. I do think now at least there is a real, like, understanding. Okay, let's just not embrace this without any worries. Let's actually consider a little bit more. So I think it's, I think that's a good sign.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker B: So that's great. I, I appreciate the, I appreciate the, the, the, the optimistic note of that. I'm, I, I think, you know, two things popped in my head as you're talking. You know, the Church has often, and with increasing frequency, as you lay out, had to deal with novel technological developments that function as disruptions. I mean, you know, people forget the material underpinnings of something like the Reformation were downstream from the novel technology of the Gutenberg Press, right? And of course, a couple of years later, we have Columbus blowing open the promises of global navigation, right? Those were two massive detonations on a, up until that point, relatively stable period of Church history. Again, I know when you go into the weeds, it's always a mess. I mean, just read Dante, right? Read about the Avignon Papacy in 1306, right. You know, it's like, like these are really, really bad, apocalyptic type events. But in terms of technological disruptions, one could argue that we've actually never recovered from the Gutenberg Press, right? So I'm not against the Gutenberg Press, obviously. I have a lot of books I'm pro book. But, but the idea of, of, of cheap, inexpensive seeding of sources changed the world. Right? And, and so, so, but what did not destroy the Church necessarily was that deep reading is good. And deep reading, under the proper tutelage and guidance of a wise teacher, even better. But absent the wisdom and the proper deference to tradition, et cetera, bad things can happen. And we could see that play out over and over and over again. So the idea of disruptions are something of course, that we have to kind of deal with. But, but, but I think you're right. You know, the sort of, the tv, Internet, smartphone thing, I don't think that we handled in the 20th century. I don't think the Church handled technology well. I, I, I would agree with that. And, and of course the, the, the greatest, and I think the most disruptive of that, those mid century technologies, it wasn't nuclear war, you know, that was sort of a geopolitical thing that I think stole a lot of attention. But what didn't get paid attention to was the, the technology of television and the technology of artificial birth control. Right. I mean, I think those are sort of two massively confounding events. So if we, we can kind of think of technology, you know, in, you know, it's not just like zeros and ones, you know, it's not just sort of the digital, but, but, but, but using those technologies. You know, I've heard people talk about like social technologies, you know, and I think that can be a helpful frame for these kinds of things. But what, what, what I don't think the Church was willing or able, able to really deal with is that, what is the formative function of technology in the day to day lives of the faithful. Right. You know, so you know, what does it mean, you know, that, that, that all of us are watching. I don't know. Happy Days. Nothing particularly wrong with Happy Days. I'm not, I'm not ragging on Happy Days at all. But you know, how does that form people, right, so that, that their, their, their nightly rituals become this sort of strange thing where we, we turn on a screen that is the same screen as like, you know, millions of other people on any given night. Again, not necessarily bad, but that this changes the game and in certain radical, radical ways. And so I, I, I would hope that the Church would, rather than dealing with the technology as such, deal with how is it forming young people, how is it forming young adults, older adults, you know, by having this insertion of a technology that, that, that, that oftentimes it's not just what they get on their smartphones. Yes. You mentioned porn and all the, the variety of bad things that can come through your smartphone or your Internet. So, you know, whatever. But how does that form you as a person? And how does that either hinder or help, you know, ultimately your relationship with Christ? And I don't see a lot of attention paid to that.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, and I think you're right. I think it's exactly where Catholics have kind of dropped the ball because, I mean, even things like the fact that these television shows in, like the 80s and 90s and continue on today, they're almost always based in New York or Los Angeles.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker B: Right, exactly.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker A: And that does affect your view of the world because you look at New York as, oh, this is, this is the place where things happen, where good people live or the pretty people live.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker A: I want to be. I'm living in Podunk, Iowa. I don't want to be lived here. I want to live out there. Oh, now you've, now you've separated your whole family now all of a sudden the whole family unit because you want to be one of the pretty people. Because you've been watching a show that may or may not be. It might have some immoral things, but it's not like.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker B: But mostly. Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker A: Yeah. It just. And so like, it really has. But then what happens is the discussion among Catholics seems to be only, oh, they want two things. First is they just say, well, we can use this technology for good. We can have, you know, Bishop Baron or something like that, which.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker B: Fine, fine, fine.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, but that's only go so far. And then secondly, they're like, they're just. We get kind of hung up on, like, well, it's only a problem if it had immoral things in it. Well, it goes deeper than that.
• 1:05:57
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker A: It goes much deeper than that. Because it, it, like I said, like just the idea of like, where all the good stuff happens is in New York City.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker A: It's like, well, it. Now all of a sudden, I mean, I wonder how many people were influenced to leave their small town to go to a big city. Might not have been New York, but big city because of growing up on television.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker B: Millions.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker A: Yeah. And that. What does that do? Because, I mean, I'm not like one of these people who thinks like small town America is like the perfect utopia, but I do think it's more healthy for families to stay together through generations.
• 1:06:31
  Speaker B: Generational. Yeah.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker A: And all that stuff.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker B: Yeah. Look, and I could speak to that. I mean, I, I Live in. I live in Rhode Island. I'm from Louisiana. My mom and dad are there. And that's like one of the hardest things about raising kids, you know, and, and, and being a family is that I'm not embodied with my extended family. It's. It's the hardest thing. It's like the, you know, it's a true regret in my life. I mean, you know, my wife and I had to do what we had to do, and, you know, fine, but. But it's. I can't pretend that there hasn't been a real cost there. Right. And. And you scale that out, you know, in a buffer ways. So, so what you just said there reminds me like, you know, maybe it's time for us to reconsider or, or, or listen again, you know, to somebody like Marshall McLuhan, you know, who's, you know. Because what you're talking about is the medium is the message. It's not that they're like, like immoral stuff on Friends. It's like the fact that we're all watching Friends too. Right. You know that there's this. The medium instructs, the medium forms. Right. And look, I don't.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker A: What you're saying about the algorithm.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker B: Right? That's right.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker A: The algorithm is literally forming you through this medium of social media.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker B: Right. And look, I'm not interested in litigating the liturgy wars right now, but, you know, to me, the, the, the. The. The truth, you know, that, that I think that, that the, you know, the Latin Mass folks really understand is that when you meddle with the, you know, as Catholics, we would say the ultimate social technology. And I don't want people to get mad at me for saying that I love the Mass. I believe in the Mass. I believe in the real presence, but it is the ultimate social technology because it is this thing which takes all of us and forms it. Us, and we offer that us up to God through the priest. Like, that's profoundly formative and, and to sort of just scramble that because, you know, why not? It's the new age, man. Like, let's go, like, deeply naive. Deeply naive in terms of its downstream effects.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. They really is relation between thinking, oh, it's okay that everybody's watching the Cosby show in the 80s because there's nothing moral with it. And it's okay that we all attend a mass which is. With terrible singing. Terrible. Because it's valid. Right, okay.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker B: Right. It's like, yeah, right. I really am not.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. We're trying to argue simply, like the medium does it really lift us up to God? Because, I mean, that's the thing. The beauty about. And I'm not trying to get down the liturgy path either, but like, the beauty of when, you know, the. The development of liturgy over time in the church's wisdom is you can really see how it's so human. And yes, it is fine. But it's so human because it understands, like, it can attract somebody who's a big dummy like me, or it can track academic or something. It can attract a kid. It can attract. You know, and the whole point is it's not just set up because instead of this by committee. And so, yeah, I think all these things, though, like, how will AI bring it back to AI then them? How will AI that medium? How will that. Because we've. We've seen television changes this. We see the liturgy changes. You know, we. We see that. That smartphone, social media, it changes us. How will AI change us? How will that kind of change the way we think?
• 1:09:48
  Speaker B: Yeah. So my hope, again, if I'm sort of putting on my. My, My. My. My. My happy hat, right, or my hopeful hat, maybe a better way to say is that social media fools you into thinking that it is the point, right? In other words, the point of going on Instagram is to get more followers and to get more attention, right? So it understands itself as the destination point. But if you. We can think of these technologies, AI, for instance, as a mechanism by which we recognize that it is not the final destination, but it is meant to sort of bring us to something back to something more whole and more human, then I think we can see the way in which an honest engagement with the technology, properly understood as a kind of liminal space between time in order to sort of live a more embodied and real and true and holy existence, then I think it. We. We can get there, right? But. But the problem is that the technology seems to encourage worship of the technology. You know, we're on YouTube right now, I'm sure, right? This is where this is going to go. You know, our show's on YouTube, and you get the temptations like, oh, well, I'm really popular on YouTube, like, all right, but I still got to take out the trash, right? I still have to love my children. I still have to provide for them. You know, I have to do all these kinds of things. You know, it's not the final destination point. So to me, if this can serve. If. If this can serve me and make me a better person in my embodied life, then it can be a good thing. It's a big if. Right, Right. It's a big F. But, you know, interacting with, with, with a Grockbot, you know, talking about, you know, the interaction between, you know, a secular age and Ian McGilchrist's, you know, the master's emissary, like that can be potentially a generative experience so that I can then take it. And when I'm talking to my kids in my classroom room or I'm talking to my friends or we're doing this kind of thing, you know, that actually can, can better enable me to help other people make sense out of things. You know, I'm not going to worship the clanker. You know, I'm not going to understand that my, my real destiny is not to be with God forever and, you know, you know, to know, love and serve God in this world and be with him forever in the next. No, you know, you know, you know, if I can't substitute for that, but if it can make me a better version of that, then yeah, I, I can see the way in which we probably should stop it with the kind of doomerism speak and just sort of say everything is demons.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, I, I kind of feel like that almost brought me to make me want to go to the alien thing. But.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, fine.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, but, but the, the. I feel like some of the pan. I feel like these are somewhat similar to the, the 1980s satanic panic. Yeah, the 2000s Harry Potter panic. And so then it's like in like kind of the AI panic. And like, again, the funny thing is, if you, if you. When my book comes out, it's. I can't remember how many pages is a large section of it is the dangers of AI I am not a, you know, AI optimist type person. It's gonna make all the, you know, world better. Anything like that.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker A: What I do feel like, I really sense the same type of thing. Like, just yesterday, I think it was Matt Walsh who, you know, he's got some good takes and all that stuff, very, you know, forthright about them. He was like, hundreds of millions of people will end up having like, these terrible relationships with their AI that will, you know, be the destruction of humanity or something like that.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker B: I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker A: I don't see how it is. To me, it really reminded me of how when Harry Potter was, you know, bigger, you know, in the cultural conversation a lot Christians were saying it's going to lead a bunch of kids to demonic worship. And the Occult.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker B: Yeah yeah.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker A: And what happened was, is were there a few kids who were led to that after reading Harry Potter? Yes, because why they already had pre existing. It's kind of like covet they kind of pre existing conditions that led to that demise. And so adding Harry Potter the mix was not a good thing because they didn't have the ability to see. Oh this is all pretend thing. This is like her form of technology in this world, all that stuff. Whereas like my kids all read Harry Potter, not one of them have ever been attempted to the occult. They're all practicing Catholics and all that stuff you know and, and they, they still like Harry Potter's like it's like. And I feel like, like there are real dangers and like I think this is where you, you look at the AI companies and their responsibility to make sure that they're putting in some controls and things like that. Like some kids have already commit suicide because of influenced by AI and that's horrible. But I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if you look at that person's, that kid's family life and that may not. I'm not blaming their parents. I'm not trying to say but it's hard.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker B: Yeah yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker A: Their, their life that there were issues that led them to be asking questions that led them to kind of trick the AI to encouraging them to kill themselves. And that's, and that's, that's where the real problem lies. It's not just AI and like, like I said I wouldn't have. I don't think kids should be using AI so they'll solve that problem too. But I do think that it's like this panic. I think we're in panic mode right now. I think 2026 is the, the year of AI panic. And I feel like what's going to happen over, over the next few years we're going to kind of settle down and realize okay, some of these, yes, there's some bad things that are coming out of it but like everything before you know, we, we can manage it and, and society will survive life.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker B: I mean you know, I don't know the history well enough to say this but I would imagine when the printing press came out that there were there was a non zero amount of sort of old school like batten down the hatches types who have been like this is the work of, of of of the devil. And, and so you know, yeah, you're right. It was at times the work of the devil. Not going to dispute that. But I mean you know it's also a great thing.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker B: It sort of greatly expands my, My, My. My knowledge base and my background information and prop in a properly oriented and properly integrated person. It can, it can make me a better human being. And, and so I, I agree. I think the panic is probably not terribly helpful right now. And we'll see. I, I look, you know, part of me that thinks. Thinks that, like, those guys are just so weird, you know, like Dario Amade. So Steve and I have been sort of po. You know, going down some rabbit holes, kind of investigating these guys and reading what we can like, I mean, talk about, like a. A soup of bad philosophy and bad theology. I mean, it's. And, and it is religious, my friend. I mean, it is a religious undertaking for these people. And, you know, if anybody in the audience, I'm sure many people in your audience actually have read the Space Trilogy or the Ransom trilogy as true fans know it, they are, in essence, a combination of Divine and Weston. They are the upper ups in the Nice. I mean, I'm teaching out of the Silent Planet right now, and I will be for the next month and a half to two months. And, and it's like these guys have read the Nice. They've read Weston's, you know, pronounced proud pronouncements, his arrogant pronouncements, and decided, like, yeah, that's great. I'm gonna. I'm gonna do what he did, you know, and so, you know, so it's a remarkably bad set of ideas and certainly, you know, a powerful tool in the hands of somebody like that. Yeah, I think that's something we should be concerned about. But I, I think, think we should be, I don't know, maybe a little bit more nuanced as to how we appreciate the technology. Because what I found is that there's a sort of a horseshoe effect. Like, those people who really, really, really hate AI over here and those people who really, really worship AI, they're both sort of committing a same kind of intellectual sin of, you know, it's something we should worship and it's something we should, you know, cast out. Like we would cast out a demon. It's. It's a. They both give it something a little bit more than I think it merits.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker A: And that's where I was saying earlier about that when you, when you picture, like, the Terminator scenario where, you know, if anyone builds it, everyone dies, there are some serious philosophical assumptions being made there that are false, smug functionality and all that.
• 1:18:54
  Speaker B: They're smuggled in. They're smuggled in.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker A: And so the people who both think. Think like Kurzweil, you know, who thinks like, the world's going to be this, you know, utopia of transhumanists and are. Are uploading all they have, like this. It's a new form of evolution next time. Evolution. Well, he has the same philosophical understanding, misunderstanding that somebody who's like a Catholic who's like, oh, this is all evil and it's gonna, you know, we have to destroy it because it's gonna take. Well, no, wait a second. What are we talking about here? We are ultimately talking about zeros and ones and machines and things like that. That. That we can. That we should be able to control. But I. I think probably. I think you're right. Probably the greatest danger in the. Of AI is the sociopaths who have built some who are in charge. They're not even the ones who build it necessarily.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker A: Like, when I rank them, I'm like, you know Dario and Sam.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, right up there. Yeah.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker A: Worse, like, that guy is just. Zuckerberg is just the worst. Elon is just a mixed bag of I don't know what.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker B: Definitely a mixed bag. Yeah, Totally agree, totally agree.
• 1:19:53
  Speaker A: And then I, you know, know Demis Hassabis. He's the one.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker A: Yeah. He's funny because he seems the most rational, the most normal. Yeah. He also does have some pretty optimistic ideas about what, hey, I'm gonna do.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker B: You know, I never know which one. Which are the ones you should concern yourself with more, the ones who get the press or those that don't.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker B: You know, it's like, you know, like, man, he's kind of quiet in the background. Maybe he's the one we should be looking at. Right, right, right.
• 1:20:22
  Speaker A: I mean, it's funny because he seems the most normal to me, at least from his public Persona against his profile.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker A: But maybe you're right. Maybe he's more dangerous. You know, but we'll see. So I want to segue. By the way, it's you that causes long podcasts.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker B: I'll tell Steve that I was like, steve, I thought I was like an hour guy. No, apparently I'm the cause of the three hour guy.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker A: You are the cause of. It's not Steve, it's you. But I do want to just at least return to kind of bring into this aliens, because I think people might be like, wait a minute, you're talking about AI? Why are you switching over to.
• 1:20:56
  Speaker B: No, it's connect. It's connected.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker A: It's connected and I do feel it. First of all, I think People have made arguments like I read a book, Camera, which one? It was about AI and it was saying that in a lot of ways AI is like an alien intelligence. They mean it in a like metaphorical way, of course. But the point was, is like it does, you know, we don't know how AI thinks. It does not, I'll put better way to put this. It does not think like we do. I know we could say then it's not actually thinking, fine, whatever term you want to use.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker A: It's doing something, it's not doing exactly the way we are. And because it doesn't have like I've a big part of thing I have the whole idea of intelligence is so much broader than what these people who promote Gen I AGI think yeah, but alien, you know, the idea though of like these, I feel like there's, there's similar vibes to the doomers of the AI world, the doomers of the, of the UAP world and also like, but also those who kind of embrace it and kind of worship AI and those who get really into the, the UFO thing and kind of, it becomes a spiritual thing to them. And so do you in your mind, do you have. I don't have a connection really in my mind, but I feel like there is one line.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker B: So, you know, I think first we just have to as Catholics recognize that the, the undergirding sort of foundation of our faith is ultimately miraculous and strange and uncanny. Right. I, I, I think we just have to remember that. I think in, as we go about our day to day lives and we, we try to go to Mass during the week and we get to Mass on Sundays, we say our rosaries and you know, do those kinds of things. I think we forget how weird and strange Christianity is and I think so I just want to say that out loud like, you know, we believe in the miraculous. You know, we believe that there are, you know, we're not, we're not certain brands of evangelical Protestants who, you know, believe that all the miracles ceased, you know, at the death of the last apostle. I forget exactly. Supersessionism or something like that, I don't remember. So, so we're not like that. And we have story and testimony after testimony of, of really strange, weird things happening. And so I would just recommend to our fellow Catholics to sort of reacquaint yourself with the strangeness and the oddity and I'm using that word strange kind of intentionally. You know, the strange is sort of this, this uncanny thing that we have or that we Experience is maybe a better way to put it. And so we should, as Catholics, have a tremendous amount of faith and confidence. We already believe in a world that is not merely material. And, and so therefore we have a kind of operating system, if you will, that, that, that can absorb a high degree of high strangeness. So that being said, you know, what is going on in this UAP story is a big mess, a big bundle of mess. And you know, there's a lot of disinformation. There's a lot of sort of, you know, hype and drama and all this sort of stuff. But when you start to read the testimonies of, you know, what they call experiencers, you know, you start to see that, that something very, very strange is happening. And again, I don't automatically judge, you know, where those things fall. But, you know, you listen to some of these experiencers and they had this sort of beautiful experience where it's like sense of peace and wholeness and love and, and then you, then you be the, you know, there's the other group where you're experiencing something, you know, which is terrifying. It feels like a second death. You know, you feel a use and abused. And so, you know, so broadly speaking, you have experiences that are positive and we have these experiences which are decidedly negative. You know, so, you know, we, so we have to recognize that whatever this story is that's unfolding in time, you know, it is, it is not all good and is not all bad. It is not all, you know, what we would call angelic, and it is not all demonic. You know, there's something sort of going on here. What it is exactly, I do not know, but it, it, it, you know, my argument that it is probably some combination of spirit. It's, it's a spiritual event. And if you read somebody like Diana Pasulka, her sort of first two books, American Cosmic and Encounters, are really kind of like an academic sort of report on kind of what is going on. But if you read her latest book, it's called the Others, I think she is very clear and confident that, you know, this is a, an emergence of some kind of new, new religion. Right. And, you know, before, you know, but, but, you know, so, but, but it's big, it's messy, and, and it's all over the place. And, you know, for. And I think that that's clear. Right. In other words, we are believing, worshiping creatures, you know, and so what is the old Chesterton line? It's not that, that, that a man will believe in nothing. It's that he'll believe in anything. And so I do think a lot of this is, is that right? You know, I, I, I want to believe in, you know, glass and steel tech, but I don't want to believe in angels. You know, I don't want to believe in Jesus and in these kind of things. So I do think that that's a massive element. And so what do you do with it? If I'm making the argument that we are, by our nature, we are worshiping creatures, worshiping believing creatures, you know, that doesn't go away just because you say that you're a materialist. Right. It just finds another avenue for some kind of expression of belief. So I, in many respects, I feel like the materialists who are really into this whole UAP thing are the ones who are sort of in the most precarious position because we are finding out again that, you know, despite this sort of roughly 500 year period of time in which all the smart people believe that, that the material universe is the only thing that exists. Like in a weird way, it's all getting blown back up and wide open again where people are talking about dimensions and people are talking about psionics and telekinesis and all these kinds of things that, you know, I am fairly comfortable as a believing Catholic. Like, yeah, like, I mean, like, just look at the miracles in, in, in the Bible. Look at the miracles in the early church. And it's like, you know, there's a way you can say, well, well, I've been, I'm being communicated, telekinesis, you know, through telekinesis. Like we didn't use that word back then. You know, God spoke to me. Yeah, right. You know, like, I believe that God spoke to Paul on his way to Damascus. Right. I don't pretend to know the mechanics of the thing, but I know that God spoke to him. You know, why are you persecuting me, Saul? Saul, why are you persecuting me? Like, yeah, like so, you know, so, so again, we have this, all this weirdness that we all sort of conveniently forgot for the last several hundred years. You know, we, you know, you know, even, even like a sort of a rank and file, you know, believe, you know, believer, you know, basically posits a material universe. You know, they might sort of sprinkle a little bit of angel dust on, you know, angel dust on the top of their understanding. But basically they believe in bridges and, and, and airplanes and, you know, paved roads and, and so what I think is happening here is that, that through some Weird uncanny series of events. This whole notion of. Of dimensions and spirituality are reopening. You know, a lot of authors have talked about re. Enchantment. You know, Rod and several others have talked about re Enchantment. And I, he's always very careful to say, like, look, just because I believe we're entering into a re. Enchanted age, that doesn't mean that, you know, Christendom 2.0 is happening. You know, we. You and I both know lots and lots of different. Different versions of alternative spiritualities that are pretty dangerous and scary things.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I, I wonder, you know, as you're talking, I was thinking, like I, I just said earlier that I'm kind of allergic to apocalyptic type talk, but I do and I. Because a lot of times the reason for that is because I've read tons of history and I know how you know when there's a knee jerk reaction to things are bad in my life. Therefore, it's the end of the world.
• 1:29:28
  Speaker B: It's got to be the end of the world. Right? Right.
• 1:29:29
  Speaker A: You gotta be in the world because you want to put yourself in a bigger story.
• 1:29:32
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 1:29:33
  Speaker A: You don't want to be like, I'm just some schmo who's having a bad life and I got stuck in a bad, you know, with a bad deck of cards. I'm part of this cosmic, you know, eternal struggle and stuff like that. And I get that. But there is something I. I do feel like somehow the 21st century just does. I don't. I can't. I cannot. I'll put this way, I cannot easily just compare it to another time and be like, oh, see how that. Because we have a situation where the church is, Is very weak. No question. I mean, to act like it's not. Is kind of silly. It's weak. We'll just say that we don't have to say why or how or anything like that.
• 1:30:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, agreed, but.
• 1:30:16
  Speaker A: And secondly, we have a situation. We do have not only new technology, but technology being added. Such a rapid pace, an exponential face. Moore's Law. It just.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker A: That is something that I thought about for a long time. That we're just simply not able to keep up with it. I mean, it just is important for our brains. I don't even mean like, yeah, I don't know all the technical. I just mean like comprehending.
• 1:30:42
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:30:42
  Speaker A: Like, you hear, you and I have been talking about for all this time about like the impact of AI. We don't know. We. We're guessing our best guesses and it's A small sliver will actually happen. So you have that. You have like this definite growing fascination with the spiritual realm. And by that I'm including anything that is not the, the strict materialistic view of the universe or even, like, which included aliens, you know, being able to, you know, cross dimensions to get to us or whatever the case may be. This growing belief and like, like you put that all in a soup and it. I don't see. Like, I, I cannot think of a time in history. And also. Oh, and also we're globalized in ways that never before.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker A: This is impacting China as well as America, as well as Europe as well as Russia as well as Africa. You know, it's affecting all of us. So we have that. And so, you know, you just have. It does make me at least be like, okay, Eric, don't be so. Don't be cocky that it's not the end of the world. At the very least, I would argue, I would say it's, it's clear. It's a major disruption. We are shifting into a new era of humanity. And by that, I'm not trying to say Age of Aquarius.
• 1:31:57
  Speaker B: I just mean how.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker A: How the, the, The. The post Reformation time was a different era. The Enlightenment was different era than medieval times, which is a different era than like the Dark Ages and the Roman times. Something. Yeah, there's no question in my mind. And Tucker Carlson, you know, who I think has gone kind of off the reservation a lot recently, but he. Oh, he likes, you can tell, he pinpoints a lot to the discovery of nuclear weapons and things like that.
• 1:32:21
  Speaker B: Yeah. And there is something said for, I mean, totally agree.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker A: Very different from today.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I mean, look, like I think about this a lot, you know, and we just sort of breeze right through it. You know, you talk about nuclear power or even nuclear weapons, like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we split the atom. Like, like what, like what did we do? Like, this is insane. Right? You know, and it's become almost pedestrian to us, but it's, it's, it's. It's crazy, right, that we did this. Now what's fascinating about the whole UAP thing is that that upon the splitting of the atom in the desert in 1945, this is when all of this stuff floods back into reality. I don't know, whatever we want to call it, you know, so, you know, was whatever you think of these things, right? Whatever you think of these events and these, these, these accounts and These experiences, like 1945 is when, when, when it starts in a Big way. Now, there are a couple of good books you can read that kind of chart. Like the way, you know, sort of these, these UAP events, or what do they call them? Not disclosure, but anyway, these sort of events, you could kind of look backwards in history. You could say, oh, yeah, what's that? Okay. Oh, that's kind of weird. That's kind of weird. Right? You can play the game. But from 1945 onward, like, it is very clear to me that, that, that events of high strangeness happen with. With, with frequency and, and, and regularity. And, you know, you have to deal with that. That's what I mean. Like, in other words, I don't pretend to know what they are, but, but that they are something. Seems to me with. With every passing week and every passing month, more and more the case that it is somehow something that we have to figure into what we conceive of as the real.
• 1:34:22
  Speaker A: I mean, it is crazy if you think about it, because that same time is when Turing is coming up with basically a modern computer. It's when artificial intelligence gets started in the, in the 50s. You know, television is breaking through into the general populace. In the 40s and 50s. Especially in the 50s.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:34:39
  Speaker A: We see the Internet, which is created in the 1960s. I mean, everything that we're talking. And then, of course, there's a huge rise in people saying we see these strange beings and these strange, you know, flying things like that.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker A: In the 40s and 50s, literally all that's happening basically from. If you take the widest range from like the mid-30s to the mid-60s.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker B: Right. That's right. That's right.
• 1:35:02
  Speaker A: That's the widest range. And. But that's a. That is a very, very, very short amount of time in history.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker A: And yet it's what really is changing the world, I mean, to a new era. I mean, because so the technology kicks in with, you know, with the idea of the, the aliens and all. I mean, all this stuff and like, we're not. Obviously, we're not answering any of these questions.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:24
  Speaker A: It does make me think that, you know, how do we even process this? I mean, to me, I do sometimes come back to just, you know what I do? I just sit in my room, I pray, I go to mass. I love my kids and my wife, and I just do that. And I just keep my head down.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker B: Yeah. And that's wheeling. True. Right. I mean, like, those things, those are still. Those are necessary things. Whatever shows up on your Internet screen in the next, you know, year, two years, Whatever. Like, still do those things. Right, still do those things, but how
• 1:35:52
  Speaker A: you will survive them.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker B: Right, right, exactly, exactly. But, but to put your head in the sand, I think is what you're getting at. Like this is, I think it's going to become increasingly difficult to ignore. And therefore what I would encourage people is to familiarize yourself with all these things. Not in the spirit of just believing everything you read, my goodness, no. But, but familiarizing yourself with, I mean, because in some sense, you know, you have to prepare yourself for potentialities, cognitive and emotional potentialities. And so for me, as, as a believing Catholic, I am leaning very heavily on not just the last hundred years of church history, you know, not Even the last 500 years of church history, but like I need to kind of find a way to remember it all. And despite the fact that I go to a nice little suburban parish and my nice, very suburban car and. And everything's kind of nice. And everything's nice. Right, right. You know, that's why I keep going back to like strange Christianity is true Christianity. And you know, any attempt to, to bourgey it make it sort of acceptable. You know, it's not, it's a scandalous faith. You know, Paul says this from the get go. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a scandal to the Greeks and you know, a scandal to. I just flipped it. Deny. You know, it's a stumbling block for the Greeks and it's a scandal of the Jews. Right. And so, so, you know, it remains that, it remains that. Right. So, so therefore the weirdness that you're going to see coming out and coming out and coming out, you know, how do you figure this into the way that, which you imagine and approach the world? Because it's going to become increasingly difficult to deny, I think.
• 1:37:39
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think being a little self critical in the sense of being critical of kind of my people, this is one of the frustrations I'm growing within me among traditional Catholics, not all traditional Catholics, obviously, these things, we're talking about segments and things like that, but this kind of retreat to what I think is a early 20th century, more influenced by Protestant fundamentalism idea of, okay, it's all demons, it's all this, it's all, you know, it's like, you know, and like that's why I think I have allergic reaction to. Because I, I was, I grew up Protestant and we weren't fundamentalists, but I had some connections with them.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker A: Of course panic hit my church. I mean, I'll Put that.
• 1:38:17
  Speaker B: Wow. So, yeah, yeah, it was like, you
• 1:38:18
  Speaker A: know, it was part. I remember reading the books when I was literally, I was like 14 years old, and I'm given a book by my youth pastor about the Satanic panic. I remember the guy who was the fake guy, the guy who. Who claimed he was a Satanist but wasn't. I remember actually, years later, I was in a trad parish and there's a guy who claimed to be a former Satanist, and I just. I didn't believe him. And like, he might be telling the truth. I'm not saying, but simply because my experience, I'm like, I don't think that's, you know, I just know. And everybody was like, oh, yeah, this guy. You know, we got the real deal. Yeah, right. And so. But my point is, is like, if you go back, like, what you said resonated with me about saying, not just past 100 years, not far, but like the whole. If you look at Christianity on a whole, Catholicism on a whole, it's much more broad. It's much more willing to embrace some things that. That, you know, might seem a little uncomfortable. Like a great example, St. Hildegard, who's like, talking about, like, you know, the power of stones or whatever things that we've got. New Age.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker B: Right, right, right. But. But you say that's a modernist. That's a sort of a modernist critique of the. Of the. Of the. The enchanted strangeness of early Christian, earlier Christianity.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker A: Because I remember New Age being the big boogeyman. Yes, yes, The New Age is bad. Like, there's parts of it. They're terrible, awful and all. Don't, don't get involved in New Age kids. But the point is, is like it became then the way we just. Now, anything that's outside of our materialist kind of view of the world is New Age is like, you know, we. We dismiss his New Age. Like, no, okay. That's not how St. Albert. Great. You know, or St. Thomas Aquinas, for that matter.
• 1:40:00
  Speaker B: Matter, Right, right.
• 1:40:02
  Speaker A: Especially not how early Church fathers. I can. St. Jerome or something would have seen things. And so it's like, that's what I feel like we need to have is like. It's this weird thing because on the one hand, we absolutely need to, as Catholics, we. We hold on to our faith. We hold on to the. The truths of our faith. And the other hand, we. We do have an open mind of what God's. Of God's grandeur. That's why I did just. I have no patience for the people who say all aliens are demons.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker A: Like, I personally think if you, if you ask me, put money on it. You got to put all your money on this and you got to go one way or the other. I'd say I personally actually don't think aliens exist. I, I think that I just don't. But like, I refuse to make that dogmatic. I refuse to, I, I, in fact, the truth is I've said this before publicly, it's like, I think it'd be cool if they did.
• 1:40:52
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, C.S. lewis certainly would say, hey, that's pretty cool. Like now let' do it.
• 1:40:59
  Speaker A: How does it work? I would be excited to be in. And honestly my reason I don't think it exists is more almost a scientific thing from just what we know about things. I also think even if they do exist, I think we don't, we miss, we don't understand how vast space is and we're never going to encounter them. Is that, that's why I don't think aliens have actually come here myself. Because that, but the fact is, is it's one of those things where you have different views. Like I'm 100 confident in like for example, that I exist. I'm 100 confident that the trend. You got his trinity.
• 1:41:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:41:27
  Speaker A: I'm like, you know, I'm like, okay, I'm shooting at a dartboard about whether or not aliens exist.
• 1:41:32
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:41:33
  Speaker A: I could be right, I could be wrong. And I'm not gonna like. So when I hear stories about things like, okay, I'm not gonna just be like demons. It's demons.
• 1:41:39
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker A: It's like, I think we need to have a. And so there is that, that tension there between not so broad and open minded that you let your mind fall out, but also not so. Yes, I'll use the word rigid and our previous Holy Father liked to use yes, you refuse to even see the possibility that, that God's creation is greater than your conception of it. I think that's probably the best way I would put it.
• 1:42:04
  Speaker B: Yeah. You know, this might be a little bit too cute, but you know, I, there's never any going back. Right. You know, there's no R, E, T, V R N return. But we need to find a way to retrieve the pre modern in order to be truly postmodern. And I don't mean postmodern in the postmodernist sense of it. But if we are going to escape the iron cage of modernity, if we're going to escape this, you know, this imminent frame to use Charles Taylor's language. If we're, if we are to be sort of truly Catholic, we need to retrieve something from pre modernity in order to find a, sort of find our way to move forward beyond what we're seeing right now. Know and you know, sticking your head in the sand and pretending that this stuff is not newsworthy. And I mean that in a positive sense, you know, is, you're, you're simply ignoring some aspects and elements of God's creation in some strange, maybe mystical, maybe really strange way. I don't pretend to know, but I don't think that that's an option. And you know, especially because, you know, we have hope and we believe in children and we believe in families and we believe, you know, that, that, that however long we have on this planet, our job is to, is to marry, have children and watch our children have children and watch our children's children. You know, I mean, that's the, that's the proper order of things. And I want to make sure that I'm helping as many people as possible to sort of, of make that an incarnate reality as possible. So. So why do I care about the alien thing? Well, number one, I'm just interested in kind of what people are talking about. But it's also, I've seen enough compelling things and I know enough people sort of operating in this space that it's something that merits our attention and it does not. I almost think it's immoral to ignore it.
• 1:44:05
  Speaker A: And I think we had just as Cass, we need to take these things seriously because other people are taking them seriously and because that we need to be there, there and just dismissing it as all demons. I mean, yeah, we should be warning people of the red.
• 1:44:15
  Speaker B: Demons are real. Demons are real. They should be avoided.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker A: Exactly. And there are definite cases of these UFO type situations that are definitely demonic in nature and we should learn about that. Yeah, but I just think that, like we need to be. I mean, we're going to wrap it up here soon, people. Don't worry.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker B: It's my fault. It's my fault. Exactly.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker A: Now, I know, but I will say, I think the only one, only podcast I did as long as this one was with Joshua Charles.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker B: Oh, that's funny.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker A: Yeah, so, but the, but like, okay, I have a friend of mine, he is a faithful Catholic, bunch of kids. I think he's got his wife's pregnancy, his eighth or ninth. I don't even know. Just a bunch of kids. A great guy, awesome. Faithful. Also, he's very much a technologist. Though, and I was talking to him, I got together with him in person, which of course better. Now we were chatting because he didn't live in the same. He didn't live in town. And we were chatting in and I was saying how I don't think AI has consciousness, can never have a consciousness. And I still do believe that. But he's like, well, why not, Eric? Why not? I said, well. And I gave my explanation why I think, you know, because God puts the consciousness, puts what, you know, the soul as part of the soul. God puts that soul into us when we are, you know, when we're conscious conceived. And so that, you know, it's not possible that we could create something as sub creations. We can't actually create something that would have a soul. And he just kept pushing back. It's like, well, well, why not? Why couldn't God put, you know, make it so that when, you know, at some point a machine will have a true consciousness? I said, well, will it go? And I'm pushing back, I'm arguing with him. I'm like, no, this is ridiculous. You know, you know, you're saying they're going to be in heaven. He's. And he's just like. In the end though, I was just like, you know, there's nothing wrong or heretical about his thoughts because he was very clear. Like he's an orthodox Catholic and he is like, yeah, tomorrow said, no, machine just, it could never happen, whatever we believe. He'd be like, okay, I'm with you. But he was just like, let's just kind of go there and see what. And I think those type of discussions are good ones to have. I do think typically when they happen on the Internet just boggles down into just a mess. That's why it was nice. I'm just sitting with him having coffee and we're just chatting and.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker B: Right, right, right.
• 1:46:32
  Speaker A: And also since we're friends, I don't have to worry about all my profile
• 1:46:34
  Speaker B: of like, he's right, right, right, right.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker A: We can just kind of get. So I do think that that is kind of what we're talking about here. Of, of open mindedness. That's not just, you know.
• 1:46:44
  Speaker B: Well, it's interesting. Yeah. To, to, to, to, to tag that a little bit. I remember in that piece that I wrote, quote for Steve, and on 1 Peter 5, you know, I invoked the great Saint Justin martyr and I said, you know, kind of riffing on the Benedict option. But what I said is like, perhaps it's time for us to exercise the St. Justin martyr option, which is if it's true, it's Christian. And so as Christians we need not fear anything in that regard. And so why not pursue the inquiry to its end? You know, so, you know, you're invoking your friend right now and that seems to me the spirit that he's adopting. These questions, let's be as generous, you know, where, where would St. Thomas Aquinas be right now? Well, I would be shocked if he weren't in Silicon Valley, if he were alive in 2027 not being a Dario booster. But you know, you know, but, but, but being part of that conversation and, and, and pushing back properly, hearing generously, but also being highly hyper discern, discerning in terms of calling balls and strikes. And so I, I feel like we have a responsibility, you know, to call balls and strikes. And you can't call a ball and strike if you're not watching the game.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker A: Right. And the great thing about us entering a conversation is we have an infrastructure that we're bringing with us that the church has created and so we can know when things. Because if you have a conversation where you're also open minded that like, you know, you, you're willing to accept contradictions, for example.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.
• 1:48:15
  Speaker A: Then that's not really helpful. But we're able to bring, I think as Catholics, we're able to bring this kind of infrastructure there that says, okay, we can't say A is B and not B in the same way. In the same way, you know, things like that, those types of things. And so, and we can't. And like understanding the difference between animals and, and humans.
• 1:48:33
  Speaker B: Yes, yeah, yeah, yes, yes.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker A: So I think this is great and I think I, so I, I, we'll, we're going to wrap it up up right now. But I want to plug again. I'm gonna plug again. You're out in the show Notes podcast monitoring the situation. You guys just start up this year, I believe. And, and so it's been, it's just, it's worthwhile. I think it's, it's a good podcast to listen to. I appreciate what you and Steve are doing also. I found that. And you guys are doing this. I found that. I stopped for a while telling people to like and subscribe and I noticed less people were liking and subscribing. So I will put up my little button there. There. Please subscribe to the Crisis Point. You know, subscribe to Monitoring Situation and subscribe also to us. We appreciate. I figured I put the end of the podcast the real Hardcore people will. Yeah.
• 1:49:16
  Speaker B: I just have one thing. So this, I hope this is not a file, but I don't know if you've ever seen this little book.
• 1:49:22
  Speaker A: Oh yeah, the Pocket Rosary. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:49:24
  Speaker B: The scripture rosary. So my father in law wrote it. My father in law.
• 1:49:28
  Speaker A: Really?
• 1:49:28
  Speaker B: This book. Yeah.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker A: When I first became Catholic in the 90s, yeah. Somebody gave it to me and I loved it. I. I only know I still have a copy, but I loved it.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker B: So it's a great story. My father in law wrote. Wrote it back in. Actually he wrote it in 1958, couldn't find a publisher. So in 1961 he decided to self publish it and it became his business. So he quit his job and he ran it full time. And he ran it until he passed away about a decade ago. And my mother in law took over the business and kept the business going. She has just given it to my wife and to me to sort of continue. So if you're interested in the scripture rosary, like it's a really great book. I. I think Eric, you would agree it's a wonderful way to pray the rosary and you can just find it. It's thescripturalrosary.com and I literally run it out of this office right here with my wife. So if you're interested. It's a great book. It definitely helps you pay pray. It helps you pay attention. So that's all I got.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker A: Very good. And send me just before I forget, send me a link to it and make sure in the show notes as well so people will see.
• 1:50:29
  Speaker B: Awesome.
• 1:50:29
  Speaker A: I think. Yeah, I. I remember that thing very well. When I was first becoming Catholic, somebody get in like a bunch of us had it and I. It was because I just started. I mean I. People don't know my story. I. I became Catholic. The proximate cause was praying the rosary.
• 1:50:42
  Speaker B: Wow, that's so cool.
• 1:50:43
  Speaker A: Yeah. So the rosary is a big deal. I mean it still is, obviously.
• 1:50:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:50:46
  Speaker A: I gave that to me when they knew that my sort of industry really helped me we get into. So I'll promote that definitely.
• 1:50:53
  Speaker B: All right. Thank you so much, Eric. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
• 1:50:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's been great. And God bless everyone. Until next time. God love you.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker B: I love you.