Latest / I Don't Know You / How the Pope's Essay (on AI) Confirmed Ian Heisler's Convictions On The Importance of The Classroom.

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How the Pope's Essay (on AI) Confirmed Ian Heisler's Convictions On The Importance of The Classroom. · I Don't Know You

0:04
SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Matt,
0:05
SPEAKER_02: and welcome to my recorded conversations for I Don't Know You,
0:08
SPEAKER_02: my search in learning from leaders about their stories and applying their lessons
0:12
SPEAKER_02: to my own journey as I seek to better understand myself.
0:15
SPEAKER_02: If you enjoy what you hear or have a guest you'd like me to ask on, I'd love to hear from you.
0:20
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0:21
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0:23
SPEAKER_02: share it with a friend, and follow me for more of this kind of content.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: Today, I'm joined by my brother Ian,
0:28
SPEAKER_02: one of my closest friends,
0:30
SPEAKER_02: an incredible poet, writer, and teacher for over seven years.
0:34
SPEAKER_02: We are talking about the Pope's new encyclical on AI technology and human dignity.
0:37
SPEAKER_02: Our conversation ranges from
0:49
SPEAKER_02: What stuck out to us,
0:50
SPEAKER_02: what it means for how Ian teaches and how I parent and build things
0:54
SPEAKER_02: with AI every day.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: So to me, this is not a conversation anti-AI, at least from my point of view.
1:00
SPEAKER_02: It's a how do we use this well or can we use this well conversation.
1:04
SPEAKER_02: I hope you enjoy.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: That is good, though.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: To talk to you, one,
1:12
SPEAKER_02: because you're my brother and I haven't talked to you in like a week and a half
1:16
SPEAKER_02: or something.
1:16
SPEAKER_02: And that's exciting to me.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: Longer than that.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: Because, yeah, maybe it has been a little bit longer.
1:22
SPEAKER_02: And two, because I haven't really talked with anybody about this before.
1:29
SPEAKER_02: Because nobody has taken the time to read it other than you.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: So
1:35
SPEAKER_02: I am really looking forward to getting your thoughts on the Pope's encyclical on AI.
1:44
SPEAKER_02: Likewise.
1:49
SPEAKER_02: Kind of,
1:50
SPEAKER_02: I don't know, I'm,
1:51
SPEAKER_02: there's,
1:52
SPEAKER_02: there's a lot of different reasons I'm curious about it,
1:54
SPEAKER_02: but one of the main reasons is because you're a teacher and
1:58
SPEAKER_02: because I think like that's one of the foundational building blocks
2:03
SPEAKER_02: of humanity is like, how do we teach things to people over time?
2:09
SPEAKER_02: And there are a lot of.
2:12
SPEAKER_02: Ways that are probably mostly bad,
2:17
SPEAKER_02: but maybe some good ways that like AI is going to greatly impact
2:23
SPEAKER_02: that whole foundational building block of humanity.
2:30
SPEAKER_02: And so I don't think there's like many other I think teachers have a really unique
2:39
SPEAKER_02: and important voice,
2:42
SPEAKER_02: maybe one of the most important voices to talk about AI in general because of
2:47
SPEAKER_02: The implications that it has on not only our brains and how we grow as humans,
2:54
SPEAKER_02: but also just our souls and stuff like that.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: So this is coming from a guy who uses AI every day and
3:04
SPEAKER_02: it greatly improves
3:07
SPEAKER_02: the efficiency of me working.
3:09
SPEAKER_02: So I also want to have that disclaimer.
3:14
SPEAKER_02: As we start this conversation,
3:15
SPEAKER_02: because I use it and I hope I'm not abusing it,
3:20
SPEAKER_02: but I want it to be a tool that I use and be very cautious of how I use that tool.
3:26
SPEAKER_02: But I do use it a lot and I'm always curious about tools and how we can use them.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: And I always want to use a tool for the most part so that I can understand It
3:39
SPEAKER_02: and be wary of it in the right ways.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: But anyway,
3:43
SPEAKER_02: I'm very excited to have this conversation for that reason,
3:46
SPEAKER_02: because everybody's got a hot take on AI,
3:50
SPEAKER_02: but I really think that teachers who normally don't have a voice in many ways,
3:57
SPEAKER_02: especially in the US,
4:00
SPEAKER_02: don't really like,
4:01
SPEAKER_02: I think they're one of the most important voices and they're often silenced
4:04
SPEAKER_02: because it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, do that.
4:08
SPEAKER_02: So I'm very grateful for your time and willingness to participate in this conversation.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: And I'm excited to jump into it.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks for having me on the show.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: This is a very exciting time.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: I've listened to your conversations for a while,
4:30
SPEAKER_01: and I always find them really, really thoughtful and interesting.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: And so...
4:36
SPEAKER_01: Honored to be included at this time.
4:40
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm grateful that you're honored.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: Oh, shoot.
4:47
SPEAKER_02: Well, as we get into the discussion,
4:49
SPEAKER_02: I want to kind of hear your initial thoughts and like gut reactions,
4:53
SPEAKER_02: because it's like a really big,
4:54
SPEAKER_02: I think it's like 130 pages or something,
4:57
SPEAKER_02: and it's not all based on AI,
4:59
SPEAKER_02: but I think it's like A lot of it is around the spirituality of work
5:05
SPEAKER_02: and how we do work and the implications of AI in that work and education and love
5:12
SPEAKER_02: and Like charity and a lot of those kinds of things.
5:17
SPEAKER_02: And just like a brief overview for those that don't really know what we're going
5:22
SPEAKER_02: to be talking about.
5:23
SPEAKER_02: It's basically the newest pope is basically,
5:28
SPEAKER_02: at least from my limited understanding,
5:30
SPEAKER_02: popes will write these huge documents just on like specific,
5:38
SPEAKER_02: specific cultural Yeah, I mean,
5:41
SPEAKER_02: I don't know super detailedly,
5:43
SPEAKER_02: but yeah,
5:44
SPEAKER_02: so it's an encyclical letter,
5:45
SPEAKER_02: and yeah,
5:45
SPEAKER_02: like you're saying, it's a thing that the Pope will write from time to time.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: I think Pope Francis was the last Pope.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: I think he wrote a few of them.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: I want to say his most famous one is about like environmental issues.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: So it's usually it's as far as I know.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: The Pope,
6:18
SPEAKER_01: like you're saying,
6:19
SPEAKER_01: addressing like some current issue and the role of the Roman Catholic Church in
6:26
SPEAKER_01: that issue or how they should respond,
6:28
SPEAKER_01: how Christians should respond to it, that kind of thing.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's also important to note that Ian is,
6:35
SPEAKER_02: neither of us are Catholic,
6:38
SPEAKER_02: but I think that it is really,
6:42
SPEAKER_02: there's like a ton of really valuable things within this document
6:46
SPEAKER_02: that I think Christians in general,
6:49
SPEAKER_02: like the Big C Church,
6:53
SPEAKER_02: he does a really great job of like thinking about and talking about and
6:58
SPEAKER_02: Even if you don't believe in Catholicism and the certain differences
7:05
SPEAKER_02: between Protestantism and Catholicism,
7:09
SPEAKER_02: I think it's incredibly valuable to listen to.
7:14
SPEAKER_02: Either read this or there's a lot of great podcasts where people just read
7:18
SPEAKER_02: the entire thing out if you don't have the patience to listen to it.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it is long and dense for whatever that's worth.
7:31
SPEAKER_02: Just don't let AI read it for you.
7:34
SPEAKER_02: That would be like a cardinal sin.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah,
7:39
SPEAKER_01: like the point is,
7:40
SPEAKER_01: I think,
7:41
SPEAKER_01: if you want to think about anything,
7:43
SPEAKER_01: whether it's the Pope's encyclical or A news article or a book
7:48
SPEAKER_01: or something like you want to just engage with the actual text itself.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: Right.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I mean, it's helpful, I think, to have summary to read summaries of it.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: Like I was going to talk about this with some of my friends who I was visiting
8:02
SPEAKER_01: in California and I forgot to tell them, like, oh, yeah, I've read the whole thing.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: And they like both read like summaries of it, which is like, OK, you have busy lives.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: It's fine.
8:11
SPEAKER_02: It's a long document.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: It depends on how you print it out.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: I think mine was only like 50 pages, but it's dense.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: It's not a quick read.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: But it's definitely worth reading.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: If you want to think about it well,
8:29
SPEAKER_01: engaging with the text itself,
8:31
SPEAKER_01: whether that's listening to it or reading it, that's going to be
8:35
SPEAKER_02: the best way.
8:37
SPEAKER_02: At the risk of sounding abrasive or...
8:42
SPEAKER_02: Frustrating the three listeners that I have, like,
8:45
SPEAKER_02: you definitely have the time to read it,
8:48
SPEAKER_02: like you spend the time doing other things like listening to other podcasts
8:52
SPEAKER_02: or watching Netflix or like, yeah.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: Well, you listen to it.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: How long did it take you to listen to it?
8:58
SPEAKER_02: It's like a three hour podcast, but I listen to things on two times speed.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: So I just like listen to it through like working out a couple days.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: But it's not.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: It's also the kind of thing where you you would benefit from like listening
9:12
SPEAKER_01: to it slowly over multiple periods of time because it's something to digest.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: It's not something to just like read through quickly.
9:19
SPEAKER_02: Totally.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, and that's,
9:21
SPEAKER_02: I think,
9:21
SPEAKER_02: part of the reason that I wanted to have this conversation with you is so
9:24
SPEAKER_02: that I could listen through it and then also like read through it again,
9:29
SPEAKER_02: make my questions.
9:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
9:32
SPEAKER_02: Oh, so you read it twice.
9:34
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
9:35
SPEAKER_02: But I think like... More prepared than me.
9:39
SPEAKER_02: Well,
9:40
SPEAKER_02: there's a lot of specific questions because he goes into pedagogy within it and like
9:46
SPEAKER_02: the value of that.
9:47
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's just like Um, you, you are probably the most deep thinker that I know.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you're also a teacher.
9:56
SPEAKER_02: And so you kind of like, you
9:57
SPEAKER_01: got to get out more.
9:59
SPEAKER_02: Well, you're, you're very humble and modest.
10:01
SPEAKER_02: Um, but the,
10:02
SPEAKER_02: the fact that the reality is,
10:04
SPEAKER_02: is that you are wise beyond your years and very thoughtful about the way
10:08
SPEAKER_02: that you think about things.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: So, um, I have been excited about having this conversation,
10:14
SPEAKER_02: but that's a very roundabout way to ask my first question was like thoughts
10:20
SPEAKER_02: and gut reactions.
10:22
SPEAKER_02: What were your thoughts on like kind of the imagery he uses of like Tower
10:26
SPEAKER_02: of Babel versus like Nehemiah building the wall?
10:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Which one is like being built?
10:38
SPEAKER_02: Which one is being built?
10:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: Basically, he opens up his writing with the imagery in the Bible of the Tower of Babel.
10:49
SPEAKER_02: And so basically,
10:51
SPEAKER_02: if you don't know that story,
10:52
SPEAKER_02: very briefly,
10:53
SPEAKER_02: it's basically just like all the peoples of the world come together
10:58
SPEAKER_02: and they're unified and they build this tower that reaches into heaven.
11:02
SPEAKER_02: And then God purposefully...
11:06
SPEAKER_02: Basically confuses them because he's like, hey,
11:10
SPEAKER_02: the purpose isn't to become like me and to get so much achievement
11:16
SPEAKER_02: that you build this tower into heaven.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: The purpose is to worship me and depend on me and be in relationship with me.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: That sounds really terrible.
11:27
SPEAKER_02: There's not enough time to be nuanced about that conversation.
11:29
SPEAKER_02: But the other side of that is like Nehemiah building the wall around Is it Jerusalem?
11:37
SPEAKER_02: Yep, rebuilding the wall.
11:40
SPEAKER_02: So that story, I don't remember all the details.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: If you do, Ian, you can chime in.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm just looking at this part in the letter, the Pope's letter.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'll just read like two little parts from it because I think
11:54
SPEAKER_01: that can help illustrate some of the images.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: I think they're helpful images.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'll say more about that in a second.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: But here's him talking about the Tower of Babel.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: He says,
12:03
SPEAKER_01: Fearing beings scattered across the earth,
12:07
SPEAKER_01: they sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves,
12:11
SPEAKER_01: and above all, to make a name for themselves.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: It was an impressive feat, a single language, a single technology, a single direction.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: However, the project concealed a profound danger.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: It was a project conceived without reference to God,
12:27
SPEAKER_01: supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization
12:33
SPEAKER_01: over communion.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency,
12:39
SPEAKER_00: communication breaks down.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: And then he contrasts that with the image of Nehemiah rebuilding the walls
12:49
SPEAKER_01: of Jerusalem after the exile,
12:50
SPEAKER_01: which he says is a more humane, dignified, and collaborative
13:16
SPEAKER_01: But I think that,
13:17
SPEAKER_01: especially that description,
13:18
SPEAKER_01: the end of that description about Babel really kind of gives you a sense
13:24
SPEAKER_01: of what he's going to talk about as some of the dangers of the way people think
13:32
SPEAKER_01: about AI and things like that.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I think that's like one of the prefaces of his whole letter.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: I think that's helpful.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: I've talked to some people who are like,
13:46
SPEAKER_01: well, that's not really what those parts in the Bible are talking about.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's probably true, but I think he's just kind of using them as
14:08
SPEAKER_01: Sort of helpfully symbolic,
14:11
SPEAKER_01: like biblical examples of this kind of way of thinking and operating in the world
14:17
SPEAKER_01: and in society versus this other kind of way of being.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: The limits of any human effort that arises
14:30
SPEAKER_01: from self-affirmation sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires
14:37
SPEAKER_01: to reach heaven without God's blessing.
14:40
SPEAKER_01: He's going to go on at great length to expound what are the...
14:47
SPEAKER_01: The problems with sacrificing human dignity for efficiency.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: And he's saying the Tower of Babel can be like a symbol of that.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: So anyway,
14:55
SPEAKER_01: so I think I found that to be a helpful sort of lens for reading the rest of
15:02
SPEAKER_01: the letter.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's certainly a striking symbol.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: As far as my overall impressions of the encyclical, I think it's really helpful.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: I think it's pretty multilayered.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: He's talking about a lot of different things.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't actually start talking about artificial intelligence until almost halfway
15:21
SPEAKER_01: through the whole thing, which is kind of long.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: The first half of it is mostly about the Roman Catholic Church's social doctrine,
15:30
SPEAKER_01: which he's then going to kind of say,
15:32
SPEAKER_01: this is where these issues around AI fit into how we should think about things.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: So that was really interesting to me because I like I didn't know anything about that.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: And so I learned a lot about the Roman Church's social teaching.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: I also think it was just helpful.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: He outlines a lot of problems and dangers, which I'm very sympathetic to.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of like I have like I err on the side of being a Luddite where it's like,
16:04
SPEAKER_01: oh, I want to like.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: Get away from AI as much as possible.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's fair.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: The connotation of Luddite is like, oh, I didn't know that this thing existed and I'm an idiot.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: Luddite is not the right term.
16:20
SPEAKER_02: I think you are wise enough to be cautious.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: That's a better way of saying it.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: If you want to put it that way.
16:30
SPEAKER_01: I tend towards the side of like,
16:34
SPEAKER_01: Anti-massive changes in technology and like technology proliferating
16:39
SPEAKER_01: and Permeating every aspect of our lives.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: I think that's I'm against that generally.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the things that he says are like, here's a danger, here's a problem or whatever.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: I was very like, oh, yeah, totally.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of the things that he points out as being problematic or dangerous
16:55
SPEAKER_01: about the ways that AI is developing were things that I hadn't actually thought
16:59
SPEAKER_01: about.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: And he's he sort of expands
17:02
SPEAKER_01: on how this how these developments are actually affecting a lot of people.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, kind of on the, on the lower stratums of society, right?
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Like people who are not like,
17:14
SPEAKER_01: you know, tech billionaires or, or like wealthy middle-class people even, right?
17:20
SPEAKER_01: But like people living in more poor countries that are going to be affected by
17:24
SPEAKER_01: or just people in,
17:25
SPEAKER_01: in the Western,
17:26
SPEAKER_01: more wealthy world who are,
17:27
SPEAKER_01: who are living in the lower class who are more, um, vulnerable in a lot of ways.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: How are they going to be affected by it?
17:33
SPEAKER_01: So that was really helpful.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: And I think too, like,
17:37
SPEAKER_01: Even though he has a lot of cautionary things to say and critical things to say,
17:44
SPEAKER_01: it's still
17:45
SPEAKER_00: ultimately, I think, that
17:52
SPEAKER_01: he's expressing throughout the whole thing.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: I think he's not saying, oh, this is inevitable.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: We just have to accept that this is going to ruin the world.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: No, he's saying, like, actually...
18:04
SPEAKER_01: We can decide what we're going to do with this.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: We have to take charge of it.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: And he's sort of appealing to world leaders and industry leaders and tech developers
18:18
SPEAKER_01: to take responsibility for it and try to steer it in a better direction.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: But I think he's hopeful that we actually could do that.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: I get that sense of hopefulness throughout.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: The letter,
18:29
SPEAKER_01: which I think was helpful for me because I'm also I tend to be more like, oh, well,
18:34
SPEAKER_01: we just have to, like, resign ourselves to this destroying the world or whatever.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, there's every generation has
18:42
SPEAKER_02: a version of that.
18:45
SPEAKER_02: What you were just saying reminds me of there's this great Instagram reel
18:50
SPEAKER_02: that I saw recently of this guy.
18:53
SPEAKER_02: And it's like one of those self interviews where and I think I sent it to you
18:57
SPEAKER_02: or Andrew sent it to us or something.
18:59
SPEAKER_02: And it's like this guy talking to himself about like AI and specifically about like AI movies.
19:06
SPEAKER_02: And this guy is like, no, I didn't watch that.
19:09
SPEAKER_02: We should keep using AI.
19:11
SPEAKER_02: And he's like, oh, well, why should we keep doing that?
19:13
SPEAKER_02: Well, because we have to keep optimizing.
19:16
SPEAKER_02: And he's like, I mean, why do we have to keep optimizing?
19:19
SPEAKER_02: He's like, because it's the thing to do.
19:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's like, there's...
19:24
SPEAKER_02: There's this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of like, well,
19:27
SPEAKER_02: we just have to do this because,
19:28
SPEAKER_02: you know, there's competition and there's iteration and innovation.
19:31
SPEAKER_02: And if we want to innovate and it's all these like synergistic words
19:35
SPEAKER_02: and very much like, well, what are you actually saying here?
19:38
SPEAKER_02: You know, like you could get off the treadmill and stop, right?
19:42
SPEAKER_02: Like you don't have to continue.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: Of course, there's so many arguments where it's like, well, what about our enemies?
19:48
SPEAKER_02: And like, they're not going to stop.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: And so we can't and we have to make sure we have power.
19:53
SPEAKER_02: And that was actually one of the questions that I was really intrigued by,
19:58
SPEAKER_02: like that he talks about
20:01
SPEAKER_00: like a little bit later was like.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: Romero Gardini, and I don't remember exactly who Romero Gardini is,
20:14
SPEAKER_02: but he has this quote, contemporary man has not been trained to use power well.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: And I was thinking about that and it was like, oh, like,
20:24
SPEAKER_02: have we ever,
20:25
SPEAKER_02: as a species, like, as humans, have we ever been able to use power well?
20:30
SPEAKER_02: Like, Or, like,
20:32
SPEAKER_02: what are the unique circumstances in our context that have not allowed us
20:38
SPEAKER_02: to be trained well in power?
20:42
SPEAKER_02: How can we use power better?
20:44
SPEAKER_02: And when was the last age that we, like, used power well?
20:51
SPEAKER_02: I think that's, it's paragraph 95 inside the... Oh, thank you.
20:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was looking for that.
20:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
20:58
SPEAKER_02: But yeah,
21:00
SPEAKER_02: I just I was like thinking through that and I was like,
21:02
SPEAKER_02: huh, that's a really interesting take.
21:07
SPEAKER_02: And I think like at least my understanding of humanness is like we are broken and sinful.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: And again, like I am my lens for looking at the world is through a Christian perspective.
21:22
SPEAKER_02: And so like I'm obviously going to,
21:26
SPEAKER_02: anything that I see,
21:27
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to look through that lens and the Pope is looking through that lens too.
21:33
SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious, like,
21:36
SPEAKER_02: is this time period any different than like the past from a standpoint
21:41
SPEAKER_02: of us using power well or not?
21:44
SPEAKER_02: And do you agree with that?
21:48
SPEAKER_01: Do I agree with the idea that this era is different from past eras in terms
21:56
SPEAKER_01: of how people use power?
21:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, do you agree with the quote of contemporary man has not been trained well to use power?
22:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, how can people kind of use power better,
22:10
SPEAKER_01: I guess?
22:11
SPEAKER_01: Totally, yeah.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think like in some sense...
22:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, human beings are the same as we've always been.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: I think human nature in a fundamental way doesn't change.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: And that's actually, I think, part of the Pope's sort of argument.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: That's part of his argument is that human nature,
22:37
SPEAKER_01: specifically human dignity, is this thing that it's a gift that God's given us.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: And that isn't changed by...
22:44
SPEAKER_01: So, in a sense,
22:45
SPEAKER_01: I think, yes,
22:47
SPEAKER_01: we're always this,
22:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:49
SPEAKER_01: we're the same humans as the way that humans have existed in terms of our nature
22:53
SPEAKER_01: and our dignity.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: Certain conditions in our present world that affect the ways that power is used.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: So in that sense,
23:19
SPEAKER_01: I think,
23:19
SPEAKER_01: yeah, it's true that
23:23
SPEAKER_01: those conditions are not training us to use power well.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: This part's actually right in the middle of a part that I thought was really, really helpful.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: He puts a name on something that I think I had thought about a lot before,
23:35
SPEAKER_01: but I never like Named specifically,
23:38
SPEAKER_01: which is if you go up to paragraph 92, he talks about the technocratic paradigm.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, I guess he didn't coin this term.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: Maybe Pope Francis, his predecessor, did.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: In a different letter,
23:56
SPEAKER_01: same kind of thing,
23:57
SPEAKER_01: but what Pope Francis wrote, same kind of essay letter thing, the encyclical.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: Pope Francis,
24:05
SPEAKER_01: he says,
24:06
SPEAKER_01: denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in our globalized world,
24:11
SPEAKER_01: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency,
24:14
SPEAKER_01: control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I thought that was a really,
24:24
SPEAKER_01: that's a really helpful name to describe the mindset that is,
24:29
SPEAKER_01: I think,
24:29
SPEAKER_01: driving a lot of AI development and in general technological development over
24:34
SPEAKER_01: the last, whatever, you know, several decades, I think.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's this kind of, like he says, the logic of efficiency, control, and profit.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: Like those are like sort of the three, um, Chief, like goals in this paradigm.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: And so if you think about it, it's like, okay, well, what's that?
24:58
SPEAKER_02: So like not even power, like GDP.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think he's saying that power is tangled up in all of that, right?
25:08
SPEAKER_01: Like, so the development of technology to be more efficient, to be able to control more things.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: And to maximize profits, like those are all forms of power, I think, right?
25:22
SPEAKER_01: It's certainly to control more things.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: And so anyway,
25:28
SPEAKER_01: so yeah,
25:28
SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah,
25:29
SPEAKER_01: the conditions created by that paradigm and just like general ways that
25:36
SPEAKER_01: the world is changing these days, yeah,
25:38
SPEAKER_01: I think like are not conditioning us to use power Well,
25:44
SPEAKER_01: I think one more part in this same paragraph I think is just helpful to read right
25:49
SPEAKER_01: after that part I stopped at.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: He says,
25:50
SPEAKER_01: this makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool when it becomes
25:55
SPEAKER_00: the standard by which everything...
26:02
SPEAKER_01: ...reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in
26:08
SPEAKER_01: a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: So I think this is like going back to what you were saying earlier about like,
26:16
SPEAKER_01: you know, AI using AI as a tool and trying to use it well and cautiously.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: I think that's something that and there's other parts where he talks about this, too.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: But there's that's something that he he talks about that I thought was really helpful is.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: Kind of pushing back on this idea, right?
26:33
SPEAKER_01: That AI and other forms of technology are not just tools.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they kind of appear to be sometimes,
26:40
SPEAKER_01: but it's also like this sort of independent like force that like shapes us
26:49
SPEAKER_01: and influences us.
26:52
SPEAKER_01: And it can become even like this mind,
26:56
SPEAKER_01: like it sort of Tends towards developing a certain mindset in the larger economy,
27:06
SPEAKER_01: in society, and certainly in individual people.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: And like he's saying, this mindset basically prizes efficiency above everything else.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: And if you do that, then it's very easy to see...
27:22
SPEAKER_01: The created environment of nature as simply objects to be exploited by humans or
27:28
SPEAKER_01: to see other people as objects to be exploited by,
27:31
SPEAKER_01: you know, the people who control the technology.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: So that.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: Named like this technocratic paradigm and then also that idea of AI just being a tool.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, it's more complicated than that, right?
27:50
SPEAKER_01: It's inevitably something that's going to shape our mindset.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: And if we already kind of have this mindset of the technocratic paradigm,
28:00
SPEAKER_01: then it's going to have some pretty dangerous effects on us.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: When do you think the last time that we used power well was?
28:13
SPEAKER_02: Which point in history?
28:15
SPEAKER_02: The more I come back to that, I don't think we've ever, as humanity, done that well.
28:23
SPEAKER_02: Which is, I guess, part of the fall and the reason that we need Jesus.
28:28
SPEAKER_02: Right.
28:28
SPEAKER_02: Like that,
28:29
SPEAKER_02: that's my,
28:30
SPEAKER_02: I'm curious if there's like,
28:33
SPEAKER_02: cause, cause I don't know where that Romero Gardini guy is coming from.
28:37
SPEAKER_02: Like when,
28:38
SPEAKER_02: when he says like contemporary man has not been trained to use power well,
28:43
SPEAKER_02: like when was the last guy trained well?
28:48
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I guess you can Google it and see what comes up.
28:51
SPEAKER_02: You can use Google to find an answer.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: No, Romano Gardini, right?
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: He was born in 1885 and he died in 1968.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah,
29:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
29:13
SPEAKER_01: one of the most brutal periods of world history.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: You got World War I and World War II.
29:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
29:21
SPEAKER_02: And the Industrial Revolution and all that funny stuff.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's a big question.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: That's hard to answer.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: When was the last time humans used power well?
29:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't think my answer is simple.
29:38
SPEAKER_02: I don't think they've ever used it well.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think there are examples of people that have used it well,
29:45
SPEAKER_02: like people like Solomon or I don't know, probably some sort of kings.
29:54
SPEAKER_02: I'm just thinking of like kings in general because like that is the,
30:00
SPEAKER_02: that's the paradigm of God, right?
30:04
SPEAKER_02: Like he's a monarch.
30:08
SPEAKER_02: And so like maybe the small version of that,
30:12
SPEAKER_02: the small M monarchy, like maybe that's the only way.
30:15
SPEAKER_02: Like if you have someone that's,
30:17
SPEAKER_02: Like Solomon,
30:19
SPEAKER_02: like living into and of course,
30:21
SPEAKER_02: he wasn't a perfect person, but like
30:24
SPEAKER_01: you're becoming a monarchist.
30:26
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think I've always been a monarchist.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: We should we should get rid of the representative democracy of the US and have a king.
30:36
SPEAKER_02: Obviously, I think there are incredible aspects of the country we live in.
30:42
SPEAKER_02: And I'm very grateful to live in a democracy and have a voice on some level.
30:48
SPEAKER_02: I do think like in a perfect world,
30:50
SPEAKER_02: which we do not live in, we would be ruled by the monarch, right?
30:55
SPEAKER_02: Like the capital M monarch.
30:59
SPEAKER_02: Well, yes, I'm not going to disagree with you there.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it I kind of I probably agree with you in
31:06
SPEAKER_01: that I think there's been individuals in the past,
31:09
SPEAKER_01: if you study history, you can see have used power well.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: But I think it's a lot of the time,
31:18
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:19
SPEAKER_01: it doesn't look like maybe what a lot of people would think like one example.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: And of course, there's plenty of things to criticize about him.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: But the first president of the U.S., George Washington, right?
31:31
SPEAKER_01: Like he got elected to be the president, served two terms.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: And then he's like, all right, I'm done.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to retire when he like he easily could have kept being the president.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: Like he's the most popular person in the country.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: Everybody wanted him to keep being the president.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: Some people are like after the Revolutionary War,
31:48
SPEAKER_01: they're just like, oh, let's just make him the king of America.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: And actually, some of his own officers like suggested that.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, no, I don't want to do that.
31:59
SPEAKER_02: And so I mean, that's like through what we just went through.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know, like giving up power.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: Right.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: When.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: When, you know,
32:10
SPEAKER_01: you're being offered it,
32:13
SPEAKER_01: but you know, like, oh, this wouldn't be what's best for the people.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: I know that's one example.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you can find examples like that, I think, pretty much in any era of history.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: I think maybe more what the Pope is talking about is like the conditions
32:31
SPEAKER_01: of contemporary history.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: Society and,
32:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:36
SPEAKER_01: that quote from Romano Gardini,
32:41
SPEAKER_01: that's like, you know, probably during sometime during the period of the world wars.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's very easy to look at that period of time and be like, oh, yeah,
32:50
SPEAKER_01: like the conditions during that period of time are very like the cards are stacked
32:57
SPEAKER_01: against people.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Different parts of Europe.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: We have like tyrannical like communism in Russia.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's like the Great Depression in America.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: And then like these that's like between these two,
33:18
SPEAKER_01: like insanely brutal wars,
33:21
SPEAKER_01: like more brutal than any other wars have ever happened in history.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: And the first one, like World War One, it's like.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: Why did that even happen?
33:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's kind of because it's like a power struggle between the empires of Europe,
33:33
SPEAKER_01: essentially.
33:34
SPEAKER_01: And then World War II is kind of similar.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: It's like, again, these big imperial superpowers clashing for different reasons.
33:43
SPEAKER_01: But that's an oversimplification.
33:45
SPEAKER_01: But there's a lot of,
33:47
SPEAKER_01: I think any period of time you look at in history,
33:50
SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of examples of people abusing power.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: And maybe those are more glaring and easy to find.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: I think that,
33:58
SPEAKER_01: like you're saying, the examples of people using power well are maybe less apparent.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: You have to look a little, you have to dig a little deeper to find.
34:09
SPEAKER_02: It's not movements in culture.
34:11
SPEAKER_02: It's like individuals in their lives in different ways.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: But to bring it back into the present.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sorry, this is getting off topic.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: No, I love this.
34:23
SPEAKER_02: This is exactly where I wanted this conversation to go.
34:26
SPEAKER_02: Do you see AI as a way to amplify power of those creating it or like be
34:34
SPEAKER_02: a leveraging force or a leveling force for the people using it?
34:39
SPEAKER_02: So the people creating it,
34:41
SPEAKER_02: obviously it's giving them some version of amplification because they can like Put
34:46
SPEAKER_02: in all the logic that they want on the back end.
34:49
SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean,
34:49
SPEAKER_02: there's the famous like catastrophe of Google Gemini having a certain logic
34:58
SPEAKER_02: that bent any sort of image generation to like ethnically diverse.
35:07
SPEAKER_02: Basic like really interesting racist creations of like George Washington being like
35:16
SPEAKER_02: a black person.
35:22
SPEAKER_02: Or like any sort of image creation you made was like a Native American
35:28
SPEAKER_02: or something like you could basically,
35:31
SPEAKER_02: there's these famous examples of like the logic behind the business logic
35:36
SPEAKER_02: behind like a lot of the models.
35:39
SPEAKER_02: Being written a certain way to have a ton of control and power over the way
35:44
SPEAKER_02: that they're shaping answers and stuff like that.
35:49
SPEAKER_02: But do you see AI as a leveling force at all for the common man to pull himself up?
35:59
SPEAKER_02: Or do you think it's just a lever for more power for the people creating it?
36:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's interesting.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it seems pretty obvious that it's going to benefit the designers
36:15
SPEAKER_01: because they're the ones who are kind of creating the whole space that it's going to
36:19
SPEAKER_01: then operate in.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: They're setting the parameters for the programming,
36:25
SPEAKER_01: which they can do it in,
36:27
SPEAKER_01: you know, in a way that's more suited to their interests, right?
36:32
SPEAKER_01: Which is kind of a big thing that Yeah, go ahead.
36:35
SPEAKER_02: As benevolently or malevolently as they would like.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well,
36:41
SPEAKER_01: and regardless of whether they're benevolent or malevolent,
36:48
SPEAKER_01: maybe malevolence and benevolence aren't the terms I would think of it in.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: More so, are they going to create a system that's more...
37:00
SPEAKER_01: It creates more opportunities for people or just creates more opportunities
37:04
SPEAKER_01: for their own interests and their own allies and stuff.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: Right.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: And so are the are the systems going to be skewed to be more useful
37:16
SPEAKER_01: to other tech developers or other wealthy people or people living in,
37:21
SPEAKER_01: you know, Western societies or whatever?
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Or are they going to be more, you know, Equitable.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't really even know what that would exactly
37:31
SPEAKER_00: look like.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: Equalizing force.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: Could you
37:43
SPEAKER_01: expand on that?
37:47
SPEAKER_02: I think this question is related to paragraph 108,
37:56
SPEAKER_02: but basically the leveling force of a tool,
38:01
SPEAKER_02: and maybe tool isn't the right word,
38:03
SPEAKER_02: but a framework like AI to now I can do the work of four people by giving AI
38:16
SPEAKER_02: The instructions to go and do stuff.
38:22
SPEAKER_02: But then I can really like spend a lot of my time in The ways that I am most gifted
38:29
SPEAKER_02: to really provide more value to whatever job I have or whatever thing I'm working
38:37
SPEAKER_02: on.
38:38
SPEAKER_02: So in that way,
38:39
SPEAKER_02: it's more of a leveling playing field because it's like, well,
38:43
SPEAKER_02: everybody has access to the free version of ChatGBT,
38:47
SPEAKER_02: or as I like to call it, ChatGBT.
38:54
SPEAKER_02: Anybody can go with any idea they have and now basically code out an idea and make
39:00
SPEAKER_02: an application and pretty easily launch something and get it out there and build
39:06
SPEAKER_02: a business and monetize it.
39:08
SPEAKER_02: If it's like you're like, even if you just speak into your microphone, you can do that.
39:13
SPEAKER_02: So like that,
39:14
SPEAKER_02: I think is probably that's a piece of where my question is coming from,
39:18
SPEAKER_02: like leveling the field of like why I didn't go to.
39:23
SPEAKER_02: Berkeley and was a computer engineer and studied that for 15 years and now have
39:28
SPEAKER_02: the opportunity to build like whatever app is going to be
39:32
SPEAKER_02: the next big social media thing.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: Like I'm just a guy that went to school and Is creative and has a bajillion ideas
39:41
SPEAKER_02: and is like, well, I need to train for a half Ironman.
39:44
SPEAKER_02: So I'm going to like,
39:45
SPEAKER_02: oh, no options are available to me that are less than like a hundred bucks a month.
39:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm just going to build an app in like a couple hours and that'll be my training app.
39:54
SPEAKER_02: Like I literally did that the other day and it was like,
39:57
SPEAKER_02: it was cool to be able to just now, like now I have the access to do that.
40:05
SPEAKER_02: Those LLMs are like,
40:07
SPEAKER_02: Being trained on and that's a whole other conversation like IP and a way
40:12
SPEAKER_02: to subvert IP.
40:15
SPEAKER_02: But like, yeah,
40:16
SPEAKER_02: for worse,
40:17
SPEAKER_02: like I can trust the training plan that I have because I'd like looked at a lot
40:23
SPEAKER_02: of other research and stuff.
40:25
SPEAKER_02: But then I know that the LLM is like pulling in a lot of that.
40:28
SPEAKER_02: So there's that.
40:30
SPEAKER_02: That's what I mean by leveling the playing field.
40:33
SPEAKER_02: If that gives more context to that.
40:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: So like you're saying,
40:36
SPEAKER_01: like in a in a specifically business kind of context,
40:43
SPEAKER_01: it gives people who maybe wouldn't have training or certain resources or experience
40:48
SPEAKER_01: the opportunity to still like develop things
40:53
SPEAKER_02: more efficiently or
40:54
SPEAKER_01: more quickly
40:55
SPEAKER_01: or more complicated things that they maybe wouldn't have had the training for.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: And it's not going to be the same like our friend who is
41:05
SPEAKER_02: a full stack web developer who's worked at multiple startups,
41:11
SPEAKER_02: like he's obviously going to be able to do things that you and I cannot do.
41:16
SPEAKER_02: With the tools that are at his disposal,
41:20
SPEAKER_02: just like in the same way that you're going to be able to write something
41:24
SPEAKER_02: that I'm not going to be able to write because you have your masters in that.
41:28
SPEAKER_02: So it's like there is a specialty and an expertise to the individual,
41:35
SPEAKER_02: but then how do we use that creatively?
41:41
SPEAKER_02: And maybe like as a crutch,
41:44
SPEAKER_02: because you don't have that expertise,
41:46
SPEAKER_02: but like it's still a really powerful way to get an idea across and
41:50
SPEAKER_02: to build something or to use something in some way
41:55
SPEAKER_02: that you never would have had access to or education around.
41:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's just an interesting thought that I had with that question.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's interesting.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think paragraph 108, I was just looking over it as you're talking.
42:11
SPEAKER_01: I think he's kind of talking about like a larger global economic thing there.
42:17
SPEAKER_01: So he says,
42:19
SPEAKER_01: in fact,
42:20
SPEAKER_01: as with every major technological shift,
42:22
SPEAKER_01: AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources,
42:28
SPEAKER_01: expertise, and access to data.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: So like you're saying,
42:32
SPEAKER_01: you know,
42:32
SPEAKER_01: like anyone with a microphone can use ChatGPT to develop an app, for instance.
42:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but they have to have a microphone.
42:40
SPEAKER_01: You have to have, like, a smartphone or a computer, basically, right?
42:45
SPEAKER_01: You have to have internet.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: Even if you have those things,
42:49
SPEAKER_01: but you, like, don't have basic necessities or, like, a job, right?
42:53
SPEAKER_01: Then it's, like,
42:54
SPEAKER_01: you know, that's maybe more of the kind of thing that he's, I think, thinking about.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: I think he's also thinking about it kind of,
43:01
SPEAKER_01: like, on more of a global scale, not about, like, individuals.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, and I
43:05
SPEAKER_00: think this is later on.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, go ahead.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I was just going to say this is later on,
43:10
SPEAKER_02: but he talks about like, well, how do we even have the
43:16
SPEAKER_02: potential of using this?
43:20
SPEAKER_02: We have this because of like a lot of the third world countries and
43:24
SPEAKER_02: the supply chain lines that allow us to even build the resources.
43:31
SPEAKER_02: Like when you're responding to A prompt within your chat window
43:36
SPEAKER_02: for whatever AI you use,
43:39
SPEAKER_02: it's important to remember that it's not just like a magical vacuum
43:45
SPEAKER_02: that you're creating in.
43:48
SPEAKER_02: The processing power and compute that you're using has a ton of trickle-down effects
43:55
SPEAKER_02: that basically end in a lot of third world country laborers working
44:05
SPEAKER_02: Produce and provide the materials and power to make these things happen.
44:13
SPEAKER_02: So that's also like a piece of the caution and wariness of like,
44:18
SPEAKER_02: and of course,
44:19
SPEAKER_02: there's always the argument of like,
44:20
SPEAKER_02: well, if I don't use it, like still everybody else is going to use it.
44:23
SPEAKER_02: But it's just like, well, That is not a good reason to do anything, obviously.
44:32
SPEAKER_02: Check yourself before you wreck yourself, as they say.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean,
44:37
SPEAKER_01: it's not a good reason,
44:38
SPEAKER_01: but it's a very compelling reason why a lot of us do things, right?
44:42
SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't want to be left out.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: I want to be part of the current trends or whatever.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
44:47
SPEAKER_01: I think like you're saying, I mean,
44:50
SPEAKER_01: the rest of that paragraph,
44:51
SPEAKER_01: I think he's expounding more on what you just said, which is basically...
44:56
SPEAKER_01: You know,
44:57
SPEAKER_01: large language models like ChatGPT,
44:58
SPEAKER_01: you're using it and it gives you this,
45:02
SPEAKER_01: really it's an illusion, right,
45:03
SPEAKER_01: that it is kind of a genie in a bottle and you just kind of tell it to do something
45:07
SPEAKER_01: and then it like magically does it, right?
45:10
SPEAKER_01: But like.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Like you're saying, like,
45:12
SPEAKER_01: how does that,
45:14
SPEAKER_01: that is an illusion because it's not just like,
45:16
SPEAKER_01: oh, this is another app on my computer.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: No, it's like a tons of servers, right?
45:22
SPEAKER_01: That, you know,
45:23
SPEAKER_01: require all these natural resources to be built,
45:27
SPEAKER_01: to maintain, to like keep them from overheating.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't remember,
45:33
SPEAKER_01: I haven't looked up the stats on it,
45:34
SPEAKER_01: but it's like,
45:34
SPEAKER_01: isn't it like Tons and tons of hundreds of thousands of tons of water
45:40
SPEAKER_01: that are required to like cool a data center or something.
45:43
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we could fact check it.
45:45
SPEAKER_02: It's probably not worth fact checking, but it's like, it's something like
45:50
SPEAKER_02: 100 water bottles or a thousand water bottles for like every prompt that you put
45:55
SPEAKER_02: into chat
45:56
SPEAKER_01: or something.
45:57
SPEAKER_01: That's insane.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:59
SPEAKER_02: There's an actual number.
46:02
SPEAKER_02: I'm probably wrong on that.
46:03
SPEAKER_02: But it is some crazy stat like that where it's like, oh,
46:06
SPEAKER_02: just like the amount of hydrothermal like power necessary
46:12
SPEAKER_02: to like cool one server wrap or whatever.
46:16
SPEAKER_02: In Texas or wherever the servers are is like, yeah,
46:22
SPEAKER_02: I don't think people think about the physicality of like
46:26
SPEAKER_02: the conversation you're having in the chat window.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's very,
46:32
SPEAKER_01: it's very,
46:32
SPEAKER_01: it's based,
46:33
SPEAKER_01: it appears to be this sort of intangible thing that exists in the cloud on
46:38
SPEAKER_01: the internet, right?
46:38
SPEAKER_01: But it's like,
46:39
SPEAKER_01: it's all based on very,
46:41
SPEAKER_01: Very real world physical things that cost a lot and
46:45
SPEAKER_01: that are like changing large numbers of people's lives,
46:49
SPEAKER_01: not necessarily in a good way.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: Right.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: And so it's like I think that's more of what the Pope has in view there.
46:56
SPEAKER_01: It's amplifying the power of.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: Tech developers and other really wealthy people who are investing in it, right?
47:03
SPEAKER_01: But he's a major part of this whole letter is devoted to talking about all the ways
47:12
SPEAKER_01: that it's benefiting those people at the expense of,
47:17
SPEAKER_01: like you're saying,
47:17
SPEAKER_01: people in the majority world or people on the lower strata of society
47:23
SPEAKER_00: who are less wealthy.
47:32
SPEAKER_01: That has to be part of the conversation, I think.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
47:35
SPEAKER_01: how is this affecting You know,
47:37
SPEAKER_01: the world in general,
47:38
SPEAKER_01: like the larger majority of people,
47:41
SPEAKER_01: not just like the tiny little percentage of people who are super excited about it
47:46
SPEAKER_01: and who are like,
47:46
SPEAKER_01: gung ho,
47:47
SPEAKER_01: let's just go for it and do as much as we can with it and take it as far as possible
47:51
SPEAKER_01: as quickly as we can.
47:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, of course, they're going to be excited about it because it's making them tons of money.
47:56
SPEAKER_01: Right.
47:56
SPEAKER_01: But like, how is it affecting everybody else?
47:59
SPEAKER_01: That's like a big part of what he's talking about in this letter.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:04
SPEAKER_02: Switching gears a little bit, I am curious to get into the teaching pedagogy side of this.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: He writes about the idea of AI being something that is cultivated more than built.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious, as a teacher, How do you bring this into your context?
48:28
SPEAKER_02: Do you distinguish between cultivating or building a student,
48:34
SPEAKER_02: for lack of a better way of saying that?
48:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where is that part again?
48:39
SPEAKER_02: I think it's probably after...
48:41
SPEAKER_02: I just want to look at it
48:42
SPEAKER_01: real quick.
48:44
SPEAKER_02: What's that?
48:46
SPEAKER_02: Let me see if I can find the actual... 108?
48:49
SPEAKER_02: I think it's after that.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: Let me see if I can find the actual.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: Well, I can I can say some initial thoughts while you're looking for it.
48:56
SPEAKER_01: But cultivating versus building.
48:59
SPEAKER_01: You said a student.
49:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think like I would just I think that's maybe like a paradigm.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: Those are like two different paradigms as well.
49:14
SPEAKER_01: And like.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: I don't really remember what he means by cultivating AI,
49:20
SPEAKER_01: but I think education,
49:22
SPEAKER_01: I would say, is definitely more of a cultivation than a building.
49:28
SPEAKER_01: Those are just two different metaphors for talking about it, right?
49:30
SPEAKER_01: But in a sense, you could say you're building when you're teaching a student, right?
49:37
SPEAKER_01: Building up their,
49:40
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:41
SPEAKER_01: the structures of their intellect,
49:44
SPEAKER_01: their reasoning abilities, their imagination, whatever.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: That's fine.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: I think building implies that it's like more of a, there's a product at the end of it.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: Whereas I like cultivation a little more, I think, as a metaphor because
50:00
SPEAKER_00: it implies
50:05
SPEAKER_01: And repeating process,
50:10
SPEAKER_01: like if you're cultivating land,
50:11
SPEAKER_01: you don't just do that once,
50:13
SPEAKER_01: get a product, and then you've used it all up and you're done.
50:16
SPEAKER_01: You keep doing it, right?
50:17
SPEAKER_01: And you keep cultivating.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: And it's a long process, takes a lot of time.
50:23
SPEAKER_01: And it then bears fruit,
50:25
SPEAKER_01: which you can then benefit in different ways from eating or making
50:30
SPEAKER_01: into other things, right?
50:31
SPEAKER_01: So it's like, that I think is a More like what's happening in education.
50:38
SPEAKER_01: Cultivating somebody's soul, their mind, and their imagination.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember what he means by cultivating AI.
50:50
SPEAKER_02: Well, it's just like...
50:53
SPEAKER_02: The framework for AI is that it is not built per se,
51:00
SPEAKER_02: but it's cultivated by inputting data that's already existing into it as an LLM.
51:09
SPEAKER_02: Hardly ever really the building of it is building the business logic around
51:16
SPEAKER_02: when you have this data that you've input, that you've cultivated,
51:23
SPEAKER_00: Like, this is the type of
51:25
SPEAKER_01: output that
51:25
SPEAKER_02: you get.
51:28
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I think this is, like, right above 108, actually.
51:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he...
51:40
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you can tell me if this is not the part you're thinking of,
51:44
SPEAKER_01: but it's the paragraph 104.
51:45
SPEAKER_01: It starts with, from this follows a simple but compelling consequence.
51:48
SPEAKER_01: We cannot consider AI to be morally neutral.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: Is it that part?
51:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
51:55
SPEAKER_01: In reality,
51:56
SPEAKER_01: every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures,
52:02
SPEAKER_01: what it ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.
52:07
SPEAKER_01: If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy
52:11
SPEAKER_01: or excludes them without the possibility of appeal,
52:14
SPEAKER_01: then it is not merely a tool to be used well
52:17
SPEAKER_01: since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of
52:22
SPEAKER_01: the human person.
52:24
SPEAKER_01: For this reason,
52:24
SPEAKER_01: ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system
52:30
SPEAKER_01: for good or bad purposes.
52:31
SPEAKER_01: It must also examine how the system is designed and what vision of the human person
52:36
SPEAKER_01: in society is embedded in the data and the models that guide it.
52:41
SPEAKER_01: Is that kind of part of what you were thinking about?
52:45
SPEAKER_01: How the AI is developed is like a process of cultivating Cultivating it in a sense
52:53
SPEAKER_01: because you're sort of feeding it certain things that will
52:55
SPEAKER_01: then generate certain assumptions and certain paradigms.
52:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
53:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
53:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, and it's going to be shaped in the image of its creators for lack of a better metaphor.
53:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
53:10
SPEAKER_02: So so like, yeah, this kind of goes along with my next question.
53:16
SPEAKER_02: This is from paragraph 100.
53:19
SPEAKER_02: One of the dangers that he talks about AI being is like basically persons losing
53:26
SPEAKER_02: a desire for real human connection because of the simulation of care in AI.
53:36
SPEAKER_02: Along with the mirror of the creators,
53:40
SPEAKER_02: I'm curious about your take from a teacher's perspective on if like There is a shift
53:48
SPEAKER_02: because you've been teaching for what, like seven years?
53:54
SPEAKER_02: Seven?
53:56
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, ish, a little more.
53:59
SPEAKER_02: A little bit more.
54:01
SPEAKER_02: But like,
54:02
SPEAKER_02: and I think as you were starting to teach,
54:05
SPEAKER_02: like this was becoming a lot more of a conversation like AI in the classroom
54:09
SPEAKER_02: and how it was working.
54:11
SPEAKER_01: Really not until like two years ago, actually.
54:15
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
54:16
SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious, like,
54:17
SPEAKER_02: have you,
54:18
SPEAKER_02: and maybe this is more of like a parent's question with their kids,
54:23
SPEAKER_02: but have you seen like that sort of simulation of care that AI provides?
54:29
SPEAKER_02: Gives that false sense of relationship,
54:32
SPEAKER_02: basically,
54:32
SPEAKER_02: and emotional stability to,
54:35
SPEAKER_02: like, people that are using it ad nauseum or even just a little bit over time.
54:39
SPEAKER_02: But, like, have you seen that in the classroom?
54:43
SPEAKER_02: And then, like, how does that kind of rear its head, do you think?
54:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I...
54:50
SPEAKER_01: So, we...
54:52
SPEAKER_01: When we realized a couple years ago that...
54:57
SPEAKER_01: I think it was basically when... What's the company that makes ChatGPT?
55:03
SPEAKER_02: Oh, man.
55:04
SPEAKER_01: OpenAI.
55:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, when they made ChatGPT free or whatever...
55:09
SPEAKER_01: That's basically when I think when this thing kind of exploded.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: And then we realized at my school, like, oh, OK,
55:14
SPEAKER_01: like if we have students like write,
55:16
SPEAKER_01: like type anything on a computer at home,
55:19
SPEAKER_01: there's absolutely no way to like regulate.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: Are they using like a chat bot or are they writing it themselves?
55:27
SPEAKER_01: So now we just do completely in the classroom, handwritten everything.
55:33
SPEAKER_01: And so so we don't.
55:36
SPEAKER_01: That has been, at least so far, a pretty effective way, I think, to
55:41
SPEAKER_02: get around that.
55:41
SPEAKER_02: That's a pretty hard line.
55:47
SPEAKER_02: Many people would say that's pretty intense.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just hard to think of what else you would do, though, right?
55:56
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
55:56
SPEAKER_01: if we want to guarantee that The kids are going to actually write things themselves
56:02
SPEAKER_01: and like engage their own thoughts in their brain and put it on paper
56:07
SPEAKER_01: and not just like,
56:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
56:08
SPEAKER_01: even like some good students would be like, oh, well,
56:10
SPEAKER_01: you know, I just like asked Chachi to like, you know, edit my paper or whatever.
56:15
SPEAKER_01: And then it's like, OK, well, that's not really your own work then.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: Right.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah.
56:19
SPEAKER_01: So anyway,
56:19
SPEAKER_01: if we want to guarantee that,
56:20
SPEAKER_01: I think it's I can't I don't know of any other effective ways to do it, but.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I guess it might it might appear to be intense to some people, but no.
56:30
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, we don't really do that.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: But I mean,
56:32
SPEAKER_01: that doesn't change the fact that,
56:33
SPEAKER_01: you know, most of our students are spending hours every day on their phones.
56:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think a lot of it is just like on social media or on TikTok or whatever.
56:43
SPEAKER_01: And I think that or or.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: Or like playing video games online with other people or against bots.
56:52
SPEAKER_01: But I think like, yeah, I don't know.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, like the illusion of relationship that you could get from talking to a chatbot.
57:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
57:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I guess I should ask my students,
57:07
SPEAKER_01: like, do you just have a conversation with ChatGPT or whatever?
57:10
SPEAKER_01: I think most of them probably spend more time on TikTok than talking to ChatGPT.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: And that in of itself, I think, that's a whole other conversation.
57:21
SPEAKER_01: It has a deadening effect on your soul.
57:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you are having a conversation nonetheless.
57:27
SPEAKER_02: Like, the amount of technical...
57:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh, again, I'm, I'm using this word business logic.
57:34
SPEAKER_02: Cause that's how like technology is basically written and built is like around
57:39
SPEAKER_02: the problems that is trying to solve.
57:41
SPEAKER_02: The technocratic paradigm.
57:43
SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
57:47
SPEAKER_02: But you are having a conversation with TikTok.
57:51
SPEAKER_02: It's basically just reading your eyes and your desires.
57:55
SPEAKER_02: And then it's like, oh, I will just give you more of this thing that you keep spending time on.
58:01
SPEAKER_01: That's a pretty sad definition of a
58:04
SPEAKER_02: conversation, but yeah.
58:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
58:06
SPEAKER_02: No, I agree with you.
58:08
SPEAKER_02: But it's reading you like a book in many ways,
58:13
SPEAKER_02: which is just like, Pretty dangerous to give yourself over for
58:18
SPEAKER_01: that.
58:20
SPEAKER_01: This is making me think of earlier you were talking about how we can use technology as a tool.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: I think it's also sort of using us in a sense, right?
58:32
SPEAKER_01: Which is why I think the category of tool is maybe not the most accurate.
58:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to harp on your usage of this word.
58:41
SPEAKER_01: I think everybody talks about it that way.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: It's not like...
58:46
SPEAKER_01: It's not just like, oh, some people who are obsessed with technology think it's a tool.
58:50
SPEAKER_01: No, like literally everybody you talk to is like, oh yeah, it's just, it's a tool.
58:53
SPEAKER_01: So of course we can use it.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: But I think it's like tools don't really like use you, right?
58:58
SPEAKER_01: Like a hammer doesn't use you.
59:00
SPEAKER_01: Like you hold it in your hand and you like hammer something in.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: But like you're saying, like TikTok, it's used, like it's manipulating you, right?
59:09
SPEAKER_01: And I think like...
59:10
SPEAKER_02: Well, you are the product, right?
59:13
SPEAKER_02: Like your attention...
59:15
SPEAKER_02: Is the product.
59:17
SPEAKER_02: Totally.
59:17
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's literally how they make money.
59:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
59:22
SPEAKER_01: But like to go back to the part that you're quoting from the Pope in Section 100,
59:28
SPEAKER_01: where he says the danger is not so much that
59:31
SPEAKER_01: a person may believe they are communicating with another person,
59:35
SPEAKER_01: but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire
59:37
SPEAKER_01: to form genuine human connections like like you're saying.
59:42
SPEAKER_01: When you're using TikTok,
59:43
SPEAKER_01: or I think even if you're talking to a chatbot a lot,
59:47
SPEAKER_01: like It's using you and you become this product.
59:52
SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like bringing you down to the level of a product,
59:56
SPEAKER_01: to the level of a commodity, right?
59:58
SPEAKER_01: And in some ways that can be appealing, right?
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, yeah,
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: I'd rather be like a commodity and a product that doesn't have to worry about like
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: the riskiness of human communication and human relationship.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't have
1:00:20
SPEAKER_01: I can feel good about myself and not have to worry about like interacting
1:00:24
SPEAKER_01: with real people because that's so much harder.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's like obviously it's very seductive.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_01: And and so it's not just like this insane like if we talk about it as like,
1:00:39
SPEAKER_01: oh, yeah, this thing is making me into a commodity.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_01: That sounds really terrible and ugly, right?
1:00:45
SPEAKER_01: But nobody talks about it that way, right?
1:00:47
SPEAKER_01: And we don't think about it that way.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: We're just hooked in by the system that it is, right?
1:00:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is really reminding me a lot of one of my favorite books
1:01:00
SPEAKER_02: that I just re-listened to a month ago, That Hideous Strength.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_02: And for those that haven't read it, it's C.S.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_02: Lewis, the guy that did like Chronicles of Narnia.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_02: He wrote like a sci-fi space trilogy, these three books.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_02: And the third book is called That Hideous Strength.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_02: And it's basically,
1:01:23
SPEAKER_02: I feel like it's like a lot of,
1:01:28
SPEAKER_02: there are a ton of parallels in my mind to like a lot of the conversation.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_02: In contemporary context that we're living through right now.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_02: And I'm sure there was some version of that in what he was going through too.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_02: But I really feel like there's so many themes and just the way
1:01:51
SPEAKER_02: that he writes is like,
1:01:52
SPEAKER_02: I mean, he's like the best writer ever in my opinion, but yeah.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_02: Just the way that, I mean,
1:01:59
SPEAKER_02: even just the way that we talk about like our attention and like we are,
1:02:03
SPEAKER_02: we become what we like worship and behold and want to be a part of
1:02:07
SPEAKER_02: and all those kinds of things.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_02: Like even the character of the head within, and this is spoilers.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_02: So whatever, read the book.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_02: It's been out for a long time.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: There's a disembodied head.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's basically taken from this guy that used to be alive and they basically reanimate him.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_02: And what the people that are a part of this organization don't know
1:02:34
SPEAKER_02: that it's like, They,
1:02:36
SPEAKER_02: they think that they're the ones animating the head,
1:02:40
SPEAKER_02: but the reality is,
1:02:41
SPEAKER_02: is like this evil spiritual force is animating the head,
1:02:45
SPEAKER_02: which I think there's like even kind of weird,
1:02:48
SPEAKER_02: scary parallels when we think about like some of the products and tools
1:02:54
SPEAKER_02: that are like out now
1:02:57
SPEAKER_02: that like people maybe like think are uh like people are making them
1:03:03
SPEAKER_02: but like what kind of spiritual ramifications are behind the things
1:03:07
SPEAKER_02: that people are making too uh I mean I can think of a lot
1:03:12
SPEAKER_02: of like yeah sinister things that like people are making
1:03:17
SPEAKER_02: with these incredibly powerful uh llms that like are only from the devil obviously
1:03:25
SPEAKER_02: but um Wait,
1:03:28
SPEAKER_01: the LLMs are from the devil or the things that people are making
1:03:32
SPEAKER_02: with them?
1:03:33
SPEAKER_02: Some of the things that people are making with them.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_02: Some of the content.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, totally.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_02: And that's always been the case for anything that's man-made, right?
1:03:41
SPEAKER_02: Like, there's always applications of that.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, that book is...
1:03:47
SPEAKER_02: I feel like there's a lot of parallels there.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_02: And if you haven't read it,
1:03:50
SPEAKER_02: you should definitely read it because it's riveting and really beautiful
1:03:56
SPEAKER_02: and redemptive.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of really interesting parallels.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts.
1:04:07
SPEAKER_01: So I'll try to be succinct.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: But I think the whole idea that you're getting at is the...
1:04:16
SPEAKER_01: Ways that the technologies we make can, in fact, shape us.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_01: We think we're in control of them.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: They are, in fact, influencing us a lot.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_01: Especially a lot of, I mean, all technologies do this.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_01: Even if you go back to just the early Industrial Revolution,
1:04:37
SPEAKER_01: it's like, oh, great,
1:04:38
SPEAKER_01: we can make all these tools or technologies or machines
1:04:42
SPEAKER_01: that will make our work more efficient.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_01: But by doing that,
1:04:46
SPEAKER_01: we now sort of create different conditions in the world that will then
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: in turn shape us.
1:04:53
SPEAKER_01: And that creates, of course, the whole industrial Western world.
1:04:58
SPEAKER_00: And then later on, the post-industrial world.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_01: It's not just like one person decided to do this and...
1:05:14
SPEAKER_01: Then we now have, uh, you know, a digitized society.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_01: No, it's like,
1:05:19
SPEAKER_01: it's this huge thing that,
1:05:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:05:20
SPEAKER_01: people made individual choices and over time,
1:05:23
SPEAKER_01: it's sort of,
1:05:24
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:05:24
SPEAKER_01: what we decide to do individually with innovating technology,
1:05:30
SPEAKER_01: it's always going to like extend or not extend, um, uh, slip beyond our grasp.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, like,
1:05:40
SPEAKER_01: like a great, uh,
1:05:42
SPEAKER_01: The encapsulation of this idea is the ending of the movie Oppenheimer,
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: I feel like, if you know that.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_01: He sees what he's created and the whole world has been changed by the atomic bomb.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_01: But that idea that what we invent or the technologies that we use,
1:06:04
SPEAKER_01: we have complete control over and it's not going to change or affect us,
1:06:08
SPEAKER_01: that's a huge illusion, I think.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_01: We have to be careful of that.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_01: I think also there's certain things about large language models
1:06:19
SPEAKER_01: that we just don't understand how they work.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_01: This was a week and a half ago or two weeks ago.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_01: I think I sent you an article about this.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_01: Was it Google's chatbot that are not Google's LLM that like went rogue
1:06:40
SPEAKER_01: and they didn't even know for like four days what what it was doing.
1:06:43
SPEAKER_01: And it was like hacking all these things in the Internet,
1:06:46
SPEAKER_01: like just like, quote unquote, on its own.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_01: Like, was that even like, why did it do that?
1:06:51
SPEAKER_01: Like, what does that even mean?
1:06:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, like, we don't like to think that we fully understand the thing that we're making.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_01: Is a mistake,
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: which is more reason why we should be careful and cautious about the speed
1:07:05
SPEAKER_01: of developing it.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: And I think you're right that the spiritual world permeates all
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: of our physical world all the time.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_01: But I think the people who are developing AI,
1:07:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't think they, a lot of them, probably don't believe in the spiritual world.
1:07:22
SPEAKER_01: So that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not affecting them, though.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_01: Totally.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to plug my
1:07:28
SPEAKER_01: computer in.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_02: What's that one line from the, is it the usual suspects?
1:07:33
SPEAKER_02: It's like the greatest thing the devil ever did was convince people that he didn't exist.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_02: That's some version of the paraphrase of it.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I mean, like,
1:07:46
SPEAKER_02: obviously anything that's human made, like,
1:07:51
SPEAKER_02: Their spiritual forces will be a part of that in some way,
1:07:56
SPEAKER_02: for better people, literally.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_02: But that's the hope that I see in a lot of his writing,
1:08:05
SPEAKER_02: is we have the free will and the responsibility to decide those things as humans.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's I mean,
1:08:19
SPEAKER_02: there's so many other questions I have and I want to be cognizant of your time.
1:08:25
SPEAKER_01: But I have as much time as you want.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_02: I am curious around.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_02: Kind of.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_02: Around kind of the spiritual aspects of of like AI and this whole conversation,
1:08:41
SPEAKER_02: like as he kind of ends a lot of his writing.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_02: Towards the end of it, he talks about these ideas of two loves and goes further into this.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_02: I think it's paragraph 118 and then a little bit of 130.
1:09:07
SPEAKER_02: It goes through that,
1:09:08
SPEAKER_02: but it's basically he uses this analogy of these two cities,
1:09:13
SPEAKER_02: like love of self versus love of God and neighbor.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_02: And humanity is flourishing often through its limitations.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_02: And he cites examples of like really the hope.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_02: And this is like the hope part of what he's talking about, like.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_02: In spite of our limitations, we do incredible things as humans.
1:09:37
SPEAKER_02: And like, because of our limitations, we do incredible things.
1:09:43
SPEAKER_01: Not despite, but through.
1:09:45
SPEAKER_02: Yes, exactly.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_02: I said that wrong.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_02: But yeah,
1:09:50
SPEAKER_02: he quotes like people with some versions of disabilities that like,
1:09:56
SPEAKER_02: Through them, still do incredible things.
1:09:59
SPEAKER_02: And because of them, because of those limitations, there's that beauty in it.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_02: Your thoughts on that?
1:10:13
SPEAKER_01: Well, just to riff on that for a second.
1:10:17
SPEAKER_01: This is one of my favorite parts of the encyclical.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_01: This is section 120.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_01: He says...
1:10:27
SPEAKER_01: Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering human wisdom teaches us not
1:10:31
SPEAKER_01: to deny or suppress it but to integrate it.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_01: To eliminate suffering entirely would mean in the end extinguishing love and desire as well.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_01: Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_01: And over the years,
1:10:47
SPEAKER_01: we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars,
1:10:50
SPEAKER_01: the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_01: It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of
1:10:59
SPEAKER_01: the soul occur within us,
1:11:01
SPEAKER_01: allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity,
1:11:04
SPEAKER_01: to renounce this adventure,
1:11:06
SPEAKER_00: both tragic and splendid,
1:11:13
SPEAKER_01: It could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.
1:11:17
SPEAKER_01: I thought that was like one of the most striking parts of this whole thing to me,
1:11:20
SPEAKER_01: because I think sort of embedded in the logic of the sort of technocratic paradigm
1:11:27
SPEAKER_01: of looking at the world, which I think a lot of people who are really into AI have.
1:11:33
SPEAKER_01: And I think that logic is maybe even embedded within like the systems of large language models.
1:11:40
SPEAKER_01: That logic kind of implies, oh, yeah,
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: it's best for us to escape all of our limitations,
1:11:46
SPEAKER_01: to escape anything that's inefficient and to sort of transcend our human finitude,
1:11:55
SPEAKER_01: which he also talks about that later.
1:11:57
SPEAKER_01: And it's like, God also wants us to do that, but not by ourselves.
1:12:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_01: I think this idea here of through suffering and limitation is
1:12:10
SPEAKER_01: how we experience
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: the fullness of our human nature.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_01: That's like, yeah, we got to remember that.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:12:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, and I think like a part of part of that that's stuck with me is just this.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_02: I like most people do not want to go through painful things and I don't want to.
1:12:32
SPEAKER_02: I want to efficiently go through painful things as quickly as possible
1:12:37
SPEAKER_02: and learn everything about them as quickly as possible.
1:12:40
SPEAKER_02: But that's never how like I've grown as a person.
1:12:43
SPEAKER_02: And so and I think like.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_02: It's very frustrating.
1:13:13
SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's very, very, very frustrating.
1:13:16
SPEAKER_02: And so like, I'm in the process of growing and cultivating.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_02: And I think like that word efficiency is what I come back to with like,
1:13:27
SPEAKER_02: I want control, I want efficiency, I want to get through the painful things quickly.
1:13:32
SPEAKER_02: But that's like What does that do to our soul where it's like
1:13:36
SPEAKER_02: the more I learn things faster through the internet,
1:13:41
SPEAKER_02: the worse I become at remembering anything.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_02: Like if I just quickly look up an answer and I'm like, oh, when was the margarita invented?
1:13:50
SPEAKER_02: Oh, cool.
1:13:50
SPEAKER_02: There's like 17 reasons.
1:13:54
SPEAKER_02: This is a very random example.
1:13:56
SPEAKER_02: I did not look this up last night.
1:13:59
SPEAKER_02: Late at night, I was talking with Shelby.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_02: Hypothetical.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_02: What'd you say?
1:14:09
SPEAKER_01: Purely hypothetical.
1:14:10
SPEAKER_02: Yes, very hypothetical.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: But the fact that I like now have that information,
1:14:16
SPEAKER_02: that information becomes less valuable because I can like immediately find it
1:14:22
SPEAKER_02: and I'm not going to remember it.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_02: And that like,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_02: If we continue to train,
1:14:26
SPEAKER_02: and that was one of my questions we didn't get to was like,
1:14:29
SPEAKER_02: have you seen that in your students at all where it's like,
1:14:32
SPEAKER_02: it's harder for them to ask hard questions.
1:14:34
SPEAKER_02: It's harder for them to say.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_02: Totally.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_01: It's harder for them to have depth.
1:14:40
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I have seen that in my students.
1:14:42
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:14:43
SPEAKER_02: Um, and,
1:14:44
SPEAKER_02: and like efficiency above all at the,
1:14:48
SPEAKER_02: for the sake of anything, sacrifice anything to get efficiency.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that's like so much of, I mean,
1:14:56
SPEAKER_02: so many bigger conversations around,
1:14:59
SPEAKER_02: like they drive,
1:15:01
SPEAKER_02: like big tech drives towards efficiency because they need the better model faster
1:15:06
SPEAKER_02: so they can make more money from their competitor.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_02: Like there's so many incentives for that,
1:15:12
SPEAKER_02: but The human work of cultivating and growing something is time consuming and slow
1:15:19
SPEAKER_02: and arduous and challenging.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_02: And how do
1:15:26
SPEAKER_02: put something like AI in its place and Understand that,
1:15:33
SPEAKER_02: like, maybe the best thing for us is not the fastest thing.
1:15:37
SPEAKER_02: Hardly ever is it the fastest thing.
1:15:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_02: Because I that's a challenge for me.
1:15:45
SPEAKER_02: I want fast.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_02: But.
1:15:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, and part of the reason why you want that is because you and I and everyone in
1:15:53
SPEAKER_01: the U.S. live in a culture that prizes efficiency above everything.
1:15:59
SPEAKER_01: So it's not as if it's just a personal flaw that you have.
1:16:04
SPEAKER_01: This is like a cultural...
1:16:06
SPEAKER_01: Like structure, like systemic problem in Western society.
1:16:13
SPEAKER_01: But I think like the thing about efficiency, you said, have I seen that of my students?
1:16:18
SPEAKER_01: Like every day, like the whole like mindset of like, let me...
1:16:24
SPEAKER_01: Let me just like, okay, give me the worksheet.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to fill it out as quickly as possible.
1:16:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to finish it faster than anybody else.
1:16:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm done.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_01: Now I can like sit back and do nothing and chat with my friends.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_01: It's like, okay, well, you're not really learning, right?
1:16:38
SPEAKER_01: Like you're just like trying to fill out a worksheet as quickly as you can.
1:16:44
SPEAKER_01: Like learning is not an efficient process, but like-
1:16:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe by God's design.
1:16:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
1:16:55
SPEAKER_01: Like the way that our minds and souls operate.
1:16:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_01: It's just it's not something that it moves slowly.
1:17:06
SPEAKER_01: And like you're saying, like we see the evidence of this, I think, when what you learn.
1:17:14
SPEAKER_01: When you learn something really quickly, you don't care about it.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_01: You don't value it.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I can Google this.
1:17:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to forget it 30 seconds after I close my browser.
1:17:27
SPEAKER_01: Whereas, oh, it took me a whole week to learn how to write a paragraph.
1:17:34
SPEAKER_01: Now I like know how to write a paragraph and I'm going to be proud of that knowledge.
1:17:40
SPEAKER_01: Or like it took me an entire year to like
1:17:44
SPEAKER_00: finally speak up.
1:17:50
SPEAKER_01: And what other people said back to me in that conversation way more than,
1:17:55
SPEAKER_01: you know, that one fact I learned on Monday while I was Googling it, right?
1:18:00
SPEAKER_01: The things that we learn,
1:18:04
SPEAKER_01: quote unquote, efficiently, like you're saying, how much did we actually learn them?
1:18:11
SPEAKER_01: It's like a little pebble bouncing off across the surface of your mind or something.
1:18:17
SPEAKER_01: It's not actually sinking in.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:18:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:18:23
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:18:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:18:24
SPEAKER_02: I'm curious,
1:18:25
SPEAKER_02: like after reading all of this,
1:18:29
SPEAKER_02: how does it make you feel about like the time that we're in?
1:18:34
SPEAKER_02: What's something that you're like going to do as a result of reading the encyclical
1:18:40
SPEAKER_02: or having this conversation?
1:18:42
SPEAKER_02: Or is it just like, yeah,
1:18:44
SPEAKER_02: I like pretty much thought About the same before I read this
1:18:49
SPEAKER_02: and now I feel confirmed in the way that I thought before.
1:18:52
SPEAKER_01: No, I found it challenging.
1:18:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think like Yes,
1:18:57
SPEAKER_01: a lot of the things that he says were things that I already agreed with
1:19:01
SPEAKER_01: or was inclined to agree with.
1:19:03
SPEAKER_01: But I think he,
1:19:05
SPEAKER_01: especially the stuff that he says talking about, like,
1:19:09
SPEAKER_01: how is this affecting marginalized people,
1:19:11
SPEAKER_01: poor people, people in the majority world?
1:19:14
SPEAKER_01: Like that stuff that,
1:19:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:19:16
SPEAKER_01: I live in a very privileged little bubble of,
1:19:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:19:19
SPEAKER_01: affluence, like, you know, pretty much anyone in, to an extent, anyone in America.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_01: You know, in our socioeconomic status, right?
1:19:30
SPEAKER_01: Middle, upper middle class or whatever you want to call it.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_01: Like those are things that I like didn't think about before.
1:19:39
SPEAKER_01: And I think those are challenges to me personally where it's like,
1:19:42
SPEAKER_01: no, we actually need to think about how is this affecting the poor?
1:19:46
SPEAKER_00: So for me, that was challenging.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_00: I think all.
1:19:53
SPEAKER_00: So just prioritize
1:19:55
SPEAKER_01: human things, right?
1:19:56
SPEAKER_01: Like, oh,
1:19:57
SPEAKER_01: like I have to,
1:19:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:20:00
SPEAKER_01: go grade some papers, but this one student really wants to talk to me right now.
1:20:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to blow them off.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_01: I'll be like, okay, fine.
1:20:08
SPEAKER_01: I'll like, I'll, I'll, I'll listen to you, you know, and let, let's have a conversation.
1:20:12
SPEAKER_01: Like any,
1:20:13
SPEAKER_01: any sort of thing where it's like,
1:20:16
SPEAKER_01: oh, this is interrupting my routine or interrupting my life.
1:20:19
SPEAKER_01: So just like having patience for those things and, and,
1:20:22
SPEAKER_01: Like you're like you're talking about with the whole cultivation metaphor, right?
1:20:25
SPEAKER_01: Like embracing the slowness of a human life.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's I mean, especially.
1:20:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't know, there's so many paradoxes within like God and how he operates, but.
1:20:44
SPEAKER_02: The slowness of human life and then also in the season that I'm in as a new dad,
1:20:50
SPEAKER_02: like the quickness of and the adaptability and the efficiency
1:20:56
SPEAKER_02: of like how God wired us and created us to like just talk about like Putting data
1:21:03
SPEAKER_02: into an LLM,
1:21:05
SPEAKER_02: like that's sort of what it feels like on some level
1:21:08
SPEAKER_02: with like your kids are just seeing and hearing and observing everything.
1:21:14
SPEAKER_02: And they're,
1:21:15
SPEAKER_02: they're moving so quickly and iterating and adapting
1:21:18
SPEAKER_02: and changing their understanding like language and they're able
1:21:23
SPEAKER_02: to string sentences together that like you didn't know what's possible
1:21:27
SPEAKER_02: for their brain to, I mean,
1:21:28
SPEAKER_02: that's a bad analogy,
1:21:30
SPEAKER_02: but, um, Sorry,
1:21:32
SPEAKER_01: my face is just communicating everything I'm feeling right now.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
1:21:38
SPEAKER_02: You're like, why would you ever compare your daughters to Chat Jubilee?
1:21:42
SPEAKER_01: To a bot.
1:21:43
SPEAKER_02: To a bot.
1:21:46
SPEAKER_02: But it's I think like, yes, time is slow and it feels really fast, too.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_02: In this season where it's like there's there's a there's a speed to like the season
1:21:58
SPEAKER_02: that we're in because of just the fast changing pace of young parenthood.
1:22:04
SPEAKER_02: But I think like there's a pull for me.
1:22:10
SPEAKER_02: To do a better job and be more intentional about the slowing down of that in order
1:22:16
SPEAKER_02: to really be intentional about like,
1:22:20
SPEAKER_02: again, I think it goes back to like so much of how we do life is how we're taught.
1:22:26
SPEAKER_02: And so like, what are the things that I'm teaching our family about?
1:22:34
SPEAKER_02: And like cultivating in them the things for them to think for themselves.
1:22:40
SPEAKER_02: I think like one of my assumptions about one of the many challenges
1:22:46
SPEAKER_02: that teachers face right now is like,
1:22:50
SPEAKER_02: Inspiring critical thinking when the easy button,
1:22:54
SPEAKER_02: there's literally a feature on Claude,
1:22:58
SPEAKER_02: which is like my AI of choice that says quick answer.
1:23:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so it's like,
1:23:05
SPEAKER_02: it is intentionally designed to like,
1:23:08
SPEAKER_02: get you to from point A to point B as quickly as possible without you having to do
1:23:14
SPEAKER_02: the critical thinking necessary to like Do that arduous work of like sweating
1:23:21
SPEAKER_02: through like, how do I do this math problem?
1:23:24
SPEAKER_02: How do I do this concept and understand this concept in literature or whatever it is?
1:23:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, now I'm reminded of
1:23:35
SPEAKER_00: like a couple of weeks.
1:23:42
SPEAKER_00: Celebration of life.
1:23:43
SPEAKER_02: And one of the mornings,
1:23:44
SPEAKER_02: it was like,
1:23:45
SPEAKER_02: one of my favorite times of that entire weekend was like,
1:23:48
SPEAKER_02: you came and joined me after I was doing my devos in the hotel lobby.
1:23:53
SPEAKER_02: And we started reading through this insanely beautiful,
1:23:59
SPEAKER_02: crazy, amazing creative book by this author and poet, Malcolm Gite.
1:24:08
SPEAKER_02: And like, Thank you.
1:24:10
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know that.
1:24:36
SPEAKER_02: But the first one is Galahad, which is one of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.
1:24:42
SPEAKER_02: But it's just this really beautiful poem.
1:24:45
SPEAKER_02: Picture like the Odyssey,
1:24:47
SPEAKER_02: like it's that type of kind of it's a narrative poem that's like hundreds
1:24:53
SPEAKER_02: of pages long.
1:24:54
SPEAKER_01: A ballad, yeah.
1:24:57
SPEAKER_02: And I think about the sweat that was like the sweat equity of creating a work like
1:25:03
SPEAKER_02: that where like you could probably just write a prompt in AI and have some version.
1:25:11
SPEAKER_02: And it was like,
1:25:12
SPEAKER_02: use this type of poetry model and make me an Arthurian poem of Galahad and do
1:25:19
SPEAKER_02: that thing.
1:25:20
SPEAKER_02: But I think like the fact that He wrote every line of that.
1:25:26
SPEAKER_02: He sweat over every word of that.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_02: There's a different price, in my opinion, of creating something like that.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_02: That is built out of a lifetime of effort and cultivation.
1:25:42
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
1:25:44
SPEAKER_02: And when you think about the masters of any sort of craft or art,
1:25:51
SPEAKER_02: A skill.
1:25:54
SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes it comes at the sacrifice of hundreds and thousands of hours
1:26:00
SPEAKER_02: and relationships and for better or for worse,
1:26:03
SPEAKER_02: like there's a reason that like some of those tech people are in the positions
1:26:09
SPEAKER_02: that they're in because they're an expert in something like they spent tens
1:26:13
SPEAKER_02: of thousands of hours becoming great in something.
1:26:18
SPEAKER_00: Coding.
1:26:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:26:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, there's an art and a beauty to that too.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_02: I mean, like even talking to our friend who works for these startups,
1:26:28
SPEAKER_02: like he sees the beauty in like code and he hates messy code.
1:26:37
SPEAKER_02: He loves like beautifully written code.
1:26:40
SPEAKER_02: And that is like something I cannot really comprehend and understand.
1:26:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
1:27:00
SPEAKER_02: But yeah,
1:27:01
SPEAKER_02: I'm super grateful for this conversation and just working through this deep,
1:27:10
SPEAKER_02: meaty essay.
1:27:13
SPEAKER_02: And yeah,
1:27:15
SPEAKER_02: I would love to do more of this because I think it's a really this is like
1:27:17
SPEAKER_02: the most I've ever prepared for a podcast podcast.
1:27:22
SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_02: No, it's awesome.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_02: I wanted to I really wanted to do this in person,
1:27:27
SPEAKER_02: but I am grateful that we're doing it like this,
1:27:30
SPEAKER_02: too, because I'm glad it's happening.
1:27:34
SPEAKER_02: And it's cool to allow this to happen every podcast.
1:27:39
SPEAKER_02: Well, do you have anything else you'd like to add before I ask my next question?
1:27:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll just read one more quote.
1:27:49
SPEAKER_01: There's so many other quotes I'd love to read,
1:27:51
SPEAKER_01: and you should know that the Pope quotes from Gandalf later on in the encyclical,
1:27:58
SPEAKER_01: which that part is awesome, and you should read that.
1:28:00
SPEAKER_01: But I'm just going to pick one more quote to read just to close out my thoughts here.
1:28:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:28:17
SPEAKER_01: There's too many to pick from.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_01: I'll just do this one because I put a star next to it.
1:28:22
SPEAKER_01: He says,
1:28:22
SPEAKER_01: Finitude,
1:28:23
SPEAKER_01: when truly accepted,
1:28:24
SPEAKER_01: does not diminish us, but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others.
1:28:31
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of simple, but yeah, I think just like you're saying...
1:28:35
SPEAKER_01: Like, uh, the finitude of human life is a gift from God.
1:28:42
SPEAKER_01: It's not a curse we should try to throw off our shoulders in an effort to,
1:28:48
SPEAKER_01: you know, become Superman or whatever.
1:28:50
SPEAKER_01: But, um...
1:28:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:28:53
SPEAKER_01: Go read the Pope's encyclical.
1:28:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:28:56
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't want to read it,
1:28:57
SPEAKER_02: listen to it.
1:28:59
SPEAKER_02: Have a real person speak it out for you.
1:29:02
SPEAKER_02: That's what I did.
1:29:03
SPEAKER_02: There's no shame in it.
1:29:05
SPEAKER_02: No shame.
1:29:06
SPEAKER_02: Every
1:29:09
SPEAKER_02: podcast, I have the last guest ask a question of the next guest.
1:29:16
SPEAKER_02: And so the previous guest asked this question for you to think about and respond.
1:29:22
SPEAKER_02: What is one habit you know you need that you don't have yet, like you haven't started yet?
1:29:34
SPEAKER_01: For the past several years,
1:29:36
SPEAKER_01: one of my New Year's resolutions has been to start arriving to places and events
1:29:42
SPEAKER_01: on time or early.
1:29:45
SPEAKER_01: And it's an ongoing process.
1:29:50
SPEAKER_02: You're cultivating that.
1:29:52
SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to cultivate
1:29:55
SPEAKER_01: the virtue of punctuality.
1:29:57
SPEAKER_02: It's like the growth of a redwood tree.
1:30:00
SPEAKER_02: It'll happen over the next hundred thousand years.
1:30:03
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
1:30:03
SPEAKER_01: Just like being digested in the belly of the great sarlacc.
1:30:11
SPEAKER_02: That took a random turn.
1:30:14
SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's correct.
1:30:18
SPEAKER_02: Anything else to add to that?
1:30:22
SPEAKER_01: No, yeah, punctuality.
1:30:24
SPEAKER_01: What's the question?
1:30:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's a habit you want to form?
1:30:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:30:27
SPEAKER_02: It sounds like you have the habit you want to form.
1:30:29
SPEAKER_02: You just want to be better at getting to places on time.
1:30:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, also probably also practicing the mandolin.
1:30:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you can see that in the background.
1:30:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:30:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right next to the Miyazaki posters.
1:30:45
SPEAKER_02: That's right, yeah.
1:30:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's another thing where it's like,
1:30:49
SPEAKER_01: I think that would be another great way for me to live a more embodied life,
1:30:52
SPEAKER_01: you know, instead of watching TV play the
1:30:54
SPEAKER_02: mandolin.
1:30:56
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, you could always play the mandolin while you watch TV.
1:31:00
SPEAKER_02: That's what I do.
1:31:02
SPEAKER_01: That is true.
1:31:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a good point, actually.
1:31:05
SPEAKER_02: People really don't like it, but I don't really care.
1:31:10
SPEAKER_01: You're just sitting there on the couch watching tennis, playing your ukulele or whatever.
1:31:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, tennis is like, you don't need to listen to that.
1:31:17
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
1:31:19
SPEAKER_02: Watching a movie
1:31:20
SPEAKER_02: playing your ukulele.
1:31:22
SPEAKER_02: Exactly, very quietly.
1:31:25
SPEAKER_02: And what is a question that you have for our next guest?
1:31:30
SPEAKER_00: Oh, so much power.
1:31:36
SPEAKER_01: Let's think about this.
1:31:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know.
1:31:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've been talking a lot about Like humanness in this conversation.
1:31:45
SPEAKER_01: So I guess what I'll ask them,
1:31:51
SPEAKER_01: what is something that's making your life more disembodied
1:31:58
SPEAKER_01: or making your life less human?
1:32:02
SPEAKER_01: And how could you rehumanize your life more?
1:32:07
SPEAKER_02: That's really good.
1:32:09
SPEAKER_02: I like that.
1:32:10
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's the nice thing about this.
1:32:12
SPEAKER_02: I don't have to answer it.
1:32:13
SPEAKER_02: I can just wait for the next guest to answer it.
1:32:18
SPEAKER_01: That's your right of authority.
1:32:22
SPEAKER_02: Yes, it is indeed.
1:32:24
SPEAKER_02: I am the captain now.
1:32:30
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for taking so much time, my dude.
1:32:34
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:32:35
SPEAKER_02: I'm very grateful for this conversation.
1:32:39
SPEAKER_02: I love thinking deeply with you.
1:32:43
SPEAKER_02: Same here, brother.
1:32:44
SPEAKER_02: Alrighty.
1:32:45
SPEAKER_02: Peace.
1:32:45
SPEAKER_02: Shabbat Shalom.
1:32:47
SPEAKER_02: Shabbat Shalom.