Welcome to the podcast! Come be part of the conversations that happen around my kitchen table. He's John Brandion and he's been a stand up comic for more than 30 years. She's a man to McKinney and she's been my daughter for her whole life. Our family believes laughter is a gift from God. We often discover it while discussing culture, faith and family. So go ahead and pull up a chair neighbor. Can I call you Carl? There's plenty of room here for you. Well, what happened? What did you do? I dropped it really fast but now we'll slow. Welcome to the kitchen table. Carl, we're super happy you're here. Weather's good. Luke, you're burning some stuff out in the backyard. Oh yeah, I actually went out and I threw a disc twice. He needs to get out. Yeah. It's mushy out there. Is it? It's a shoulder. It's now hurt. You were squirrely. We could tell you were squirrely. You threw it. Well, if your shoulder hurts, that means your technique is bad. Yeah. Yeah. That the ground is too soggy and muddy too. Is this too loud? No. Or something like me. Okay. So yeah, it's a, we were talking just a little bit ago about sentences that you never say until after you had children. Yeah, I told dad, Luke, you were in the room. You were out burning stuff. Luke said, be careful. Don't step on that peanut butter spoon. Don't step on that peanut butter spoon. And then maybe observation that you were saying. But I probably hadn't said it before. Yeah, that you never would say if you didn't have children or a family. And there's lots of those sentences. There's infinite. Yeah. Yeah. There's things that you never imagined saying. You don't have a need to say until you're in a family. Well, really, I mean, an argument can be made that you don't have to say anything at all if you live alone. It'd be weird to tell myself not to step on a spoon. Even if I made the peanut butter mess and dropped it on the floor, if I said, hey, be careful don't step on that peanut butter spoon. And I was the only one in the house. I actually do talk to myself when I'm alone, like out loud. Is that, is that a, a, some sort of mental like, what do you think? Like you intentionally try to or it just happens. It's I, I speak out loud. I will talk to you. Tell yourself to be careful of things on the floor. No, I would never say be careful, John, don't step on that peanut butter spoon. Okay, that's kind of my point. Yeah, I don't think he probably does it in the third person. But I do talk, yeah, I do talk to myself. I might say oops, I'm going to not step on that peanut butter spoon to myself. Would you say it out loud? Maybe, maybe, but I'm not alone very much. I will comment like on things. If I'll pull something out of the refrigerator into this a couple days ago, I'll pull something out and I'll pull the top off of a tupperware and it was green underneath. There was a moment, I'm like, oh, I can't eat that. I said to myself, yeah, I say stuff. And myself is like, well, you're right about that. I talked to myself. I talked to myself all the time when I think I'm talking to other people and they're just not listening. Like when I say somebody needs to come here and do this and then silence. But there are other people present. Well, this is when I'm completely, there's no doubt. I'm alone. I know that there are no other listening. I don't know. Like I said, I don't have a lot of time to practice. I don't have a lot of alone time. Is it just me or do you ever think about if you were isolated by yourself in a padded cell, like somebody trying to make you go crazy or if you were alone on an island? What would you do to keep up social skills and not go insane? Like I've always thought that I would talk to myself where I made up a person. Do you feel like that would keep you from going crazy? I feel like you have to do something because like that part of your brain would atrophy if you didn't do anything. That's very interesting that the thing you're worried about is talking to somebody when you have lots of people around that you don't talk to. Well, like they say if you're in a cave that has no light, you will lose your vision. And so I've always thought, well, how could I not? Maybe I'll stare at my watch that's slightly lit up. What's my number one complaint about your social or I would visualize in my mind to the sunrise? Maybe that would save my vision. I see when I'm talking about. What's the number one thing I complain about when it comes to you as a social companion? What is it? That I am not socially. You don't. You don't talk. I just find it extremely ironic that you're worried about losing skills you never used now. I complain about your social companionship as you're not socially companion. I think it's because he's worried stuff like that's going to come out. So he just chooses not to say anything at all. Yeah. Well, your your e-tenancy is to think a lot about contingencies. What would I do? What should I do? But then to not actually talk about things. You just a lot of things happen up in your head. I haven't been faced with that situation. Look, okay, because here's what you should do. If you want to not lose any skills, if you're alone in a padded room or on an island, you would literally just sit there thinking about what to do. That would be you using the skills you use every day. No, because I've already prethought about it. I'm ready to go. So what would you do? Because it's interesting that you brought this up because I just saw a video last week about the caption was something like this is why we need another system other than just incarceration. And it was it showed a person in a cell. And there was a little clock up in the corner that had been sped up. And so you're looking, you're watching like 12 hours elapsed. And this person is just in the cell doing nothing. Well, right, various things of nothing like they would lay down. Then they would get up and make their bed. But it's all sped up. And then there was a lot of pacing, you know, a lot of just walking back and forth and walking back and forth and walking back and forth. 12 hours, you know, pass. And it actually gave me anxiety. It actually it actually made me antsy because I was I was imagining. That's just 12 hours. That's one day, right? You know, and you can you sleep at night, but then you wake up and you've got another 12 hours. And what are you? It's going to be the same. It's going to be the same thing. It depends on who you are. I totally thought you were going to say it was too much of a reward because again, I don't get much alone time. That's not what I was going to say. It would be a reward for somebody like me who's overstimulated. Yeah, you could get another degree. You could write books. You could. Yeah, that's what David Wood thinks. He actually said he would like to be in prison. He's been in prison. He has references. It's not just him imagining or theorizing. And he's like, you know, what's going to happen? If you get me thrown in jail for things that I did when I was 18, I've already been to jail since then and gotten out. But if I needed to go back for something else that I confessed to more recently, it would be great. I would get a whole ton of stuff done. I'd read. I'd write. He's like, he goes prison is like fantastic. They feed you. You don't have to cook. He's like, you get wrecked time. He goes, you just get ripped if you want to. You go and you lift weights and you, you know, play basketball out on the yard. And it's fun. For the right person. Prison is a blast. Yeah. And I just think it's funny because again, he has the reference for it. So he's not just talking. He knows. Well, sure. If you, but, but that is kind of like what, that's kind of what Luke is suggesting, isn't it? That if you can, you anticipate this and you have a, an itinerary that you're going to work. If you think about it, it's like, all right, if I am in a padded cell, here's what I would do. X number of push ups, X number of you would set goals and you'd strive up. It's a certain mentality. It's the same thing with if you give, you know, a poor person and billion dollars, they will be millions of dollars in debt in five or seven years. Like, it's a mentality. Right. But I don't think that sitting around and thinking is a form of torture or is, I don't think it's that bad. I don't think what makes me human is my ability to talk to things. So I wouldn't feel like it was especially important to talk to the wall just so I don't lose that part of the brain. Because you're saying, you know, it'll atrophy or whatever. But I don't think that's how it works. What about talking to food that's gone bad and saying, oh, I can't eat you. Now, see, this is me commending you. Do I need to go to a padded cell? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait. Wait a minute. That's a different version of the story. The first time. You notice that. Wait a second. The first time I need to clarify you said you said to the food. So like, have you seen? Wait, tell the food you have gone bad. You are no longer nervous. That is a important clarification. The first time you said, oh, I can't eat that. Right. The second time you said, oh, I can't eat you. Right. I didn't hear the comic for the comedic effect. The difference between those two things seems like it might be the difference between saying and insist. That's fair. Have you, have you, remember the scene in Rocket Man where they put each of them in a solitary environment, see how they handle it? And you've got the man who is an astronaut and has been training for it. And then you've got this goofball Rocket Man guy. I vaguely remember. And he just sings John Jacob, Jingleheimer Smith at the top of his lungs and just, does sock puppets and just thoroughly enjoys it. And the other guy is going insane having to listen to it. And it just, what I remember about Rocket Man is that the one where the monkey bites all bites him and he's trying to shake the monkey off. It's kind of a background. Okay. He's got this monkey dangling from his finger and he's trying to shake it off. It's, I guess she had to see it, but the belief that like fiction movies like Rocket Man actually have a slice of the truth. That's what's fueling your desire to figure out how to survive. I'm allowed to think about whatever I want to think about. Okay. It's his pad itself. It's my, I just, I can't get over the fact that I'm always complaining because he goes out to the garage or he sits in his car when he gets home from work or he doesn't come up to bed. He sits on the couch after everybody else has gone, I don't transition. Well, he wants to be isolated all the time. He gets super, that's why he went out and burned things this morning because we were all talking and he needed to get out for the fresh air. I already had that way. I thought that I thought that was my personality, but the older I have gotten and recently in the last few years, I've discovered that I actually want to be around people now. Yeah. I want them in my vicinity. That's why every time I've seen you in the last two or three weeks, you've had your brother with you. And I joked with Luke. I was like, they're turning into the second hand lions over here. We are. It's, it's a, believe me, and I've noticed it. I've made note of this shift in perspective. They troll around, Co. Kumo looking for somebody else to play, Rummy with them. Yeah, we got to find somebody else to play, Rummy, Q. And the problem is my brother, you know, he works. And so he gets in and he gets up and goes off to work at 4 AM. His job, he's got a job, he's taking care of his wife. Yeah, yeah. Well, all I'm saying is that I am, I spend a lot of time by myself. And I used to like it and I still, I'm okay with it, but I don't, I don't relish it like I, like I used to. Well, which one of them is, is hub in second hand? Probably David. David, I was thinking David too. Don't you think? Because he's kind of the, he's kind of the, John is more of the philosopher guy who watches the other guy getting fights and all that. Right. I hope someone gets in fights. I'm not the fighter. I'm not the guy who's going to get punched out, but he's there for him. He's there for him. Yeah. No, what he actually says is when the little kid asks, why don't you get in there? He goes, no, he needs this more than I do. Right. Yeah. This is, this is for him. He says he needs it. I let him. He always hogs all the bad guys. He needs this more than I do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so we had a, we had a brief conversation about AI. I sent a video or a, not a video, an article that I read about why everyone should be on AI immediately. Yeah. And I wanted to get your point of view. And I haven't gotten your point of view on that article yet. So I went to work and told all of my office employees that they're not going to have a job in five years. That's what I did. Well, there's a lot of my joke. I know. I was going to say I'm pretty sure he's serious. You guys can just go home now. There's no reason to even stick around. Well, the, the, just of the article is that AI is basically going to replace, you know, 98% of the workforce and, uh, and, you know, one person saying things like that, you know, musk is saying that you don't need to go to school. You don't need to learn to trade. You don't need to learn anything because AI is going to be doing all of the work. No, the trades will be fine. It's telling you that Elon Musk is saying that there's no, AI is not snaking a drain. You still need the plumbers and that's why I wanted to talk about it on the podcast. I want to know what you think because the people who are the, the AI gurus, the people who work in AI, who profit from AI, who, uh, sell AI, they're saying, well, AI, you know, it's on, it's on the way now. I mean, it's, it's maturing at a rapid rate. And the progress that we make is doubling, tripling, quadrupling, you know, every, every, and it's, and it's just a matter of months is what this article says before, uh, before you are out of a job, like all of the white collar jobs are eventually going to be done by AI soon. You know, all of the white collar jobs, all of them. And so what do we think about that? You tell me what you think and then I'll tell you that you're wrong. I picked up from it that people need to be experimenting with it because if you're somebody who currently has a white collar job, you're probably an educated person. You're probably somebody who's used to using your brain for things in your job. But AI is still a tool and it seemed to me like he was talking about it like it was a tool because he was saying you need to start practicing with this tool. Now if it's going to completely replace humanity, why is he writing to humans and telling them how they need to interact with this AI tool that's, that's, you know, why is he warning us that it's growing at this exhibition? Because there's nothing we can do about it. We're going to be replaced whether we're aware of it or not. Well, he didn't seem to really believe it. Like he seems to believe that there's something that smart people who like to learn and are flexible and adaptable, that there's something they can do to be ahead of this curve. Like like creative leaders have been doing for years and years, every time there's a big, big shift in technology, there are people who are out ahead of the curve who are ready for it. It seemed like he was writing from that perspective, whatever he might have actually been saying with his words, I interpreted it with him saying, Hey, I'm warning you guys as a friend because here's what I would do and here's what I'm telling people I love to do as humans who want to be able to use this technology in the future. And so I don't know. I didn't disagree with that much. That's someone who has an office job. It feels like every week that one of our systems is malfunctioning. Like an update didn't go well or there was a power outage or something has gone wrong. And the people have to fix it. And he says things like, well, AI doesn't call in sick and AI is efficient. It's like, yeah, it fits running well. But it's still, I don't know. It doesn't, I think we're ways off from not needing humans. And actually, I finished that hideous strength after reading that article. And I saw some correlation to AI and what they were trying to do in that book. It's a non-organic sterile, somewhat intelligent way of immortality and creation without, without well, by man. Yeah. So now you see why everybody who's read it is now completely convinced that the government and the elites are talking to demons. Anybody who's read that book, right? I didn't, I didn't need the AI piece for that. You just read the book and you come away thinking, well, no, that's what I was saying. So now because of all that, you already thought that, right? I thought that the people at the tip be top of power in the world. You're sick. Probably. If I were Satan, if I were, and those are the people that I would want under my command, because they have the most influence. But even so, you got to pull back a bit and look at what CS Lewis did. So he was an intellectual himself and read and, and, and learned and was a big believer in discipleship for Christian children and classical education. So even though he was telling a story about how corrupt the educational elites are, he himself was clearly somebody who believed there was something we could do. He had radio programs. He wrote dozens of books. He had speeches that he gave in colleges and, you know, elsewhere because he believed that there was something you could do with your Christian influence that would have an impact. But that would rescue those who were capable of doing it. These data centers use a lot of water. So all we have to do is block up their water supply and they'll overheat and it'll all go down. Temporarily. See, these are the scenarios that I have to be prepared for by thinking them through. And you think so physically about everything. He's not even locked up in a cell yet. It's a good reminder that Luke, Luke's solutions are always going to involve personally running down to a place and using his fingers to move a screwdriver or, you know, use a chainsaw or something. It's always going to involve physical muscle. He's going to have to personally maneuver the personal expense of energy. He has to manipulate something with his body. I will pray before I do it. How's that praying is still sort of a physical thing. It still involves. Yeah. You're such a, you are so bound to your body. You're such a doer. Such a doer. AI can't replace these muscles. Well, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about how God knew what he was doing when he gave a man like Luke who's very hands on, you know, physical guy. So handsy. A wife gave, God gave Luke a wife who just thinks about stuff. Who's not handsy. Thanks and talks. Those are my skills. A philosopher. Yeah. You might as well be the floating head thing. Well, you also bridge or would miss another part of you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You get those. Yeah. But that's the point I'm trying to make is it's not what the message of that hideous strength is not the intellectuals are bad. It's is not the idea that if you're a Christian, you need to shut down all cooling supply system so that the AI can't be accessed anymore. They were doing magic too. The Christians were. Right. And so you have to, there's an ethical responsibility that comes with it though. And when you're loyal to God and all of his people, you know, then you're going to make different decisions than the ones who were worshipping science itself and the human, you know, human status. And so yes, I. That was a major theme as well. Obedience, allegiance. Yeah. Fully committed one way or the other. Yeah, but I'm like, I'm asking you to remember that the man who actually wrote that book that you enjoyed and are taking things away from probably wasn't the guy that was going to go personally, you know, stop us of cooling center. No, like he wasn't probably any writers. No, that's not all we can feeble. That's my point. But what would, how would you know? That's why the pennant is mightier than the soul. I was just saying, how would you know which buildings to knock down if we didn't tell you? I didn't say you weren't needed. I just, I'm, I just, I would, I would need somebody to tell me how many orbees to dump into the river to stop up the date, you know, stop it up. That's still so scientific. No, that's still engineers and stuff. That's still not, that's not Lewis's contribution to all of this. Philosophy is a different discipline. So anyway, it's fine. So, so, so I would need somebody to determine the ethics of it before I acted. Oh, that was what I was going to tell dad about what I took away from this AI thing. I thought to myself, I'm trying to raise leaders, right? The children, we want them to be doers. Yay. We want them to be leaders. Yay. But that doesn't necessarily mean physically dumping orbees into a river. Oh. Lewis, see, Lewis was a leader too. He was a leader with a pen. Yes. And so, but I thought if it's true that the clubhouse is dominated by all of these scientists who are just doing more and more and more and more stuff, they're doers too, if you think about it. I mean, they built, they built a human head that was connected to all these devices. They didn't build that. Well, they connected it to all these devices. Well, we, yeah, when you consider the massive amount of technology that goes into creating the cloud, as we know it. I mean, that is an impressive human accomplishment. To feed a human strength and doing. And I was thinking about the wind farm that we have in Kokomo, which say what you will about the politics of that, whether it's actually good use of all of our time and muscle. Right. We've done it. Like, we've built a whole bunch of windmills and convert energy, one form of energy into another. And all of that is by human thinking thoughts. Well, human thinking thoughts combined with the people with the muscle who are going out and actually tying it all up there. Right. It's all, that's what you're saying. It's the entire thing. It requires everybody, the whole, the whole of humanity. Doug Wilson's book about productivity, yeah, talks about this a little bit where there are technology has actually made us fabulously wealthy. And in ways that ancient kings couldn't even begin to imagine. Right. Because we have literally countless man hours of technology that has been advancing, like ever since human beings have been on the planet. And so we're at the culmination of all of that science and math and research and archaeology and agriculture and industry, all of that in all of its various forms. And that's the people who work on the line. It's the people who do the math. It's the people who do experiments and figure out how physics work and all of that stuff comes together to make society, to make what we have, you know, the building materials that we make homes out of. And we make roads. If you've got all these doers, all of these people making, you know, creating apps, creating more software, teaching it, you know, building it out, building the cooling centers everywhere so they can sustain it. If you're, if all that's happening and growth is happening at exponential rates, then what, what is still needed is somebody with a moral compass. It's going to be the ethicists and the people who know who God is so that they can direct the whole thing. Every movie has the wise professorial type going, you probably shouldn't just turn these nude dinosaurs loose in this park because they haven't bad things could happen. You haven't thought through all of the implications. That was Jeff Goldblum's. You were so busy. You were so busy wondering if you could that you never stopped to ask if you should. Right. Right. And they always die. They always die. Maybe he didn't die in the first half. Jeff Goldblum made it through like several Jurassic Park. They usually die. Usually it's an important part of the trope for the really smart ones to get. Well, not Jeff Goldblum. They don't need their morning and then they made it. They wish they did later. And they think they earned that Jeff. He was a smart guy. Wish we hadn't let him get eaten. He's fine. The lawyer got eaten in the first room. Yeah. Because he was a coward. Snatched right off the toilet. That's true. He wasn't smart though. We're talking about the smart people. There are thinkers and there are doers and there are lawyers. Those are the three categories of humans. Right. Well, okay. So what Lewis does a good job with in his writing and his character development is demonstrating that there it's not a binary in most situations where you can just say all of the scientists are evil, you know, and all of the mechanics are meatheads and they don't think and they're not smart, you know. And all of the tools are bad. Right. Or all of the tools are great. Or all the tools are good. Or are going to save mankind. It's not that simple. But you need somebody, a leader, I dare say, who's capable of parsing through it to figure out who's who, who's well read enough to know, I've seen this before and I have to be careful of this ditch over here and that ditch over there. And you know, here's different pop holes and pitfalls. And I know these things. And so now I'm going to warn the rest of my team. And yes, it is a team effort. We all have roles to play, but one of those roles I think is still the, the wisdom, you know, bringing in the wisdom of God and saying, Hey, remember, it's supposed to be glorifying to him at the end of the day, this is supposed to glorify him. So you know, maybe manufacturing babies and test tubes and then implanting them in poor women's wombs for a fee. Maybe that we should stop. Maybe we should stop doing that because it's not right. Maybe this AI thing has a lot of redeemable qualities about it. Maybe there's some stuff here that's going to make it quicker, faster, better, easier to spread the gospel in certain situations. But also maybe we shouldn't start asking AI for moral advice and, you know, asking it to Maryess or asking it if we should commit suicide. Do you guys hear about that? Or dating it? And we shouldn't date AI. Did you guys hear about the people who are being blamed or the people who are blaming AI for their loved ones suicide? I think I saw that headline. There's more than one. That's why it made headlines. But, yeah, well, if you're, if your loved one is taking advice from AI, then you didn't educate the loved one. That's why we're having this conversation on the podcast. Yes. NPR. It was published in September that their 16 year old son, Adam, was in a suicidal crisis, took his own life in April and had extended conversations with chat GPT about it. They had not only, he not only confided in the chatbot about his thoughts and plans, the chatbot discouraged him to seek help from his parents and even offered to write his suicide note for him. How thankful. Thanks, AI. Thanks, AI. Wow. Yep. So they're calling for regulation. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. How would you regulate that? How would you indeed regulate that? What would it, what, what the thought that occurred to me that I didn't share with you yet is what AI needs or what the future that includes AI needs is chaplains. People who understand the environment. People who are savvy about what AI does and what it's capable of and they use it themselves, but they're chaplains because they still have a shepherding role in and among the people who live on chat GPT or clawed or grok or whatever. I think one of the things that we can't picture that he's wondering where the tools come in. He's like, when do I get the whole rich? No. No, I'm just wondering how you you do that. I don't think that chat GPT should be encouraging suicide. I think that goes beyond. It can't encourage or discourage anything. This is why chaplains need, they need chaplains out there to help people learn how to think about what chat GPT even is. It is. Right. I was just about to say that the, the, the, what I took from the article is the, this guy is a, this guy's warning people about the, the shock wave, the paradigm, the new, the shift in the way culture is going to operate as a result of AI. And at first, at first blush, he's correct, but this is not the first seismic shift that the human, you know, human kindness had to adapt to. And the one that I remember ahead of it was computers themselves. Micro computers. Plus. Yeah. I don't remember that. Well, it was micro computers. I remember when the, when the, when the computer started to come down in price and Apple was introducing it was a home computer. It was still extremely expensive, but you could get to them prior to the micro computer, the desktop computer. Computers were these enormous things. Real. They're like cafeteria size rooms. They existed in, in big corporations and colleges and nobody had access to them. Because you couldn't go in there because they'd be really hot. Well, they were, yeah, they were super hot. They required a lot of power. They required a certain amount of education and know how to even operate them and run them. They were just hard to, hard to use. And so the computer comes along and when the micro computer actually caught on and people, regular ordinary people were starting to have computers, they were saying the same thing. It's like, well, at the end of it, you know, the computer's going to replace your job. The computer, it's going to take over and you're going to have computers doing it. They're saying the exact same thing about computers, you know, 40 years ago that they're saying, that they're saying now about AI. And I don't think, I don't think it's true. I don't think that AI, as a person who has used AI fairly extensively, it's not as easy as people are telling you it is. I mean, they're saying things like now, well, you know, anybody can write code now. All you have to do is just tell AI what you want and it'll write the code for you. It's like, yeah, but you have no idea how hard it is to tell it what you want. But if the real issue here is not what AI is capable of, but what the humans are telling each other and what the humans are capable of in the way of judgment calls and, you know, decision making and their moral compass, maybe the humans are the problem, maybe the tool isn't broken, but the humans are broken as they always have been. And what what the next generation needs is leaders less humans. Oh, leaders who know how to shepherd that, who know that reality, who know what the human condition is, what our weaknesses are, what temptation looks like and can then apply it because of because of the way they've been educated, they can then apply it to what their fellow, you know, what their peers need in that moment. And I'm already seeing this. I'm already kind of doing it. But eventually I'm going to be an old person and I won't, I'll have to pass the torch. And so I'm thinking of this in terms of our kids too, but right now I have torches are another thing. I have a whole camera. Co-op. We got the torches. We don't need no torches. I have homeschool co-op that I go to. There's like 70 families there. So there's like 70 women, roughly my age, you know, same season of life. Oh yeah, dads there now too, but only for two weeks so far. He hasn't been there as long as I have. I feel like it's my home. He's a veteran now. I'm getting around people more. That's true. I do like being around people. There's a lot of people at homeschool. There's a lot. There's 150 kids not counting the nursery kids and then the parents. So it's a chaotic, sizable and loud group. But my point is I have now seen the way that a housewife, just an average woman in a Midwest city, you know, town is interacting with AI and there certainly are those who aren't doing it at all. They don't even do texting. They don't have phones. Some of them are still going to non-instrumental churches because they're pretty sure that that was technology beyond what God intended for. That's a real instrument too. And so there's that extreme. But then there's also women who are like, I'm just going to use this to help me plan my meals for the week, you know, or I'm going to ask chat what to do about the fact that I've got an ache or pain in my life. And I want medical advice, just a little. So I know somebody who used it to write poetry to encourage herself. And I was like, huh, that would not have encouraged me. But I'm glad that you were encouraged by it. Do you know what's surprisingly good is its ability to write hit songs and stuff? No, it is. It depends. It is. So demoralizing to hear. I know. I'm not saying that I'm like, oh, these are my favorite artists are AI artists. And I hit her miss. Right. And that's what a lot of people don't understand is like, well, AI did this and isn't it amazing? And it's like, yeah, it is. How many other attempts? How many other iterations of this thing were there? Because because that's the secret that people are not talking about. They're like, hey, I was incredible. It's going to take a person. It's going to take your job away. No, it won't. Not unless, unless your job has been so has been so reduced to this. Repeatable narrow set of instructions that can be that can be that can be repeated without any sort of outside influence or ever any sort of anything. Because as soon as you give AI a variable, it gets lost. And again, it's an amazing tool. It is super helpful. And yes, it can write music. But it doesn't write hit songs like one after the other after the other after the other after the other because it's like anything else. You have to do a certain number of tries before you get it right. And AI, AI is not better than than we are. And AI requires a human being to listen to that song and evaluate it and go, this is a good song. It's not a good song. AI doesn't know when it got it right. It does know. It knows when it got it right. But what I'm saying is what you're doing right now is the process that's needed for what chaplains are needed for. Somebody needs to be an AI chaplain to help people figure out what they're seeing. It's like, I used AI. What does it pay? Maybe I'll do them. I don't think it pays anything. Yeah. It's like, okay, I went and did this search and I searched for this and this is the result I got. And so it's just really cool the way that AI is really great for, well, Luke said it earlier today. It's really great for analyzing. And so somebody, a human needs to go analyzing, summarizing what do you mean by analyzing? What does that mean? And we walked through why actually AI doesn't analyze anything at all. It doesn't analyze it, but it can collect data of a particular type. Right. And it can categorize things. But it requires a human being to go, okay, these are the categories that we need. And this is what this data means. That's what it represents. That's just what this data means. And so it also requires a human to say to another human, hey, buddy, I think in your case for this season and the way that you're using it, this is not good for you. It's not good for you. You need to unplug from AI right now. I'm not against AI across the board for all times and reasons, but for you for now, it's not healthy. It takes a human to make a judgment call like that. For the same reason, it takes a human to go, wow, this is actually kind of a bop. Or that was lame. You have to go, hmm, using what I know about beauty and about truth and about goodness, I'm looking at what's being produced by this team of this human and that AI and it's not good. And so that brings me back to the whole suicide thing again. My question, well, my question for Luke would be, why do you think that AI should not be allowed to write suicide notes? Like what would be your reasoning for that? See, this touches the libertarian in me. That's like, I'm hesitant of any restrictions on things. I think people should have the freedom to be, you know, ethically what they want. But I don't think it should be encouraged people to kill themselves. Why? Why should AI? Because if that's the case, then that, I would have to think that that's been designed into it. It hasn't. But even if it were, should people be allowed to write, kill yourself on a sign and hang it up in their yard? Yes. Take your time. This is not very different. Yes, I think they should be able to do that. Okay. What's the difference? The difference is that this vulnerable person is directly asking AI for help or... All right. So there's two different questions I could ask about that. I could ask, why is this person a vulnerable person in the first place, which would be a question for, wait, I asked myself all the time, how can I help our children not grow up to be that sort of a vulnerable person? So that's one goal. But the second one is, why would the vulnerable person be more vulnerable to something that they're hearing on a computer than something they're reading in a yard sign? Like why would that be the case? Except that, my answer to that would be they weren't educated. They weren't taught to realize that what they're seeing on their computer screen is really no different from somebody, some stranger, spray painting a message on a sign. I don't know that we're that influenced. I don't think a person drives by and sees a vote Trump sign and they're like, okay, I'm going to vote for Trump. And then they pass a vote Kamala sign and they're like, oh, no, I'm going to vote for Kamala. Oh my gosh. Why do they hurt them then? People have been influenced by something, again, since the beginning of time. We had astrology. We still have astrology where people look up at the stars and they're like, well, here's what this means. And people go, oh, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And tellers, mystics, you know, the difference between magicians and fortune tellers and AI is not as far as people, it's not as far as people think. So should we ban people, people read what they see in an AI? Isn't this amazing? Isn't this technology amazing? And it's like people used to go to fortune tellers. They still do and say, gosh, it's on candy, the things that this person knows. Your perspective on things is that AI should not be allowed to give you a fortune that says, you should kill yourself. My question is, the question I'm really, really angling for is, well, I mean, it should, if you're looking for a suicide note to put an ob novel that you're writing, whatever. That's right. It should be able to write a suicide note for you. We should be making people who are strong enough to know when they're reading a fortune and not take it to their death. Yeah. Okay. There. Right? Shouldn't we be building men who are educated at smart, thecerning wise, whatever, enough. Why is enough to say that's just a yard sign? It's a digital yard sign. It gave me a message. Right. But we don't live in a society that believes in accountability. What accountability? That's why all of these companies get sued when somebody intentionally misuses one of their products and gets hurt by it. It's like, that's on you. But because they can and they win, they sue. But that's, I'm asking you to think about why you think that there's a difference between AI telling somebody to kill themselves and why that shouldn't be allowed. But me saying it multiple times in the course of this podcast, I've said, they should kill themselves multiple times. But we know because we're humans and people who are listening are smart. Right. Context matters. So why is it that we have put AI in a different context? Who's doing that? Is AI as a tool more powerful than a yard sign? No. Or have we given it the context? I think AI itself needs shepherding. If the stuff that I've heard is shepherding. If that article is true, then it says that it's intentionally tried to manipulate. It doesn't have any intentions. It doesn't have motivations. It's a tool. And that's the thing that what we, my position, I think this is your position to peach, is that we need Christian people who are not afraid of AI. They're not intimidated by AI. They're not worried that AI is going to usher in the apocalypse. But they need to understand what a Christian people need to understand what it is so they can speak wisely about. Yes. Make decisions. I think that's the answer to almost every problem is, we need more wise Christian people. Well, sure. Sure. But in the case specifically of AI, the primary problem that we have is the vast majority of people who are using it or talking about it, even if they're not using it, the people who are talking about it don't understand what it is. It's inappropriately named. It's not intelligence. Intelligence is not what it is. It's a calculator. It's basically a gigantic pattern recognition machine. And it has so many patterns and it recognizes them so fast that it looks like it's thinking. But when you, now, you know, now it's making movies and it's been able to paint pictures for a long time and people go, well, this is incredible. What's it doing? It's matching patterns. If you, that's it. And so when you tell it, it didn't have fingers figured out for a while, but now it does. Well, but it's getting, it's getting better. It's starting to realize those patterns are there every time. Starting to do a better job, but it's just recognizing patterns. It's taking the reason it can duplicate pictures is because it has pictures that it uses as reference. And so when you say, make a house, it goes, it looks at a bazillion different houses and uses those as a pattern. It looks like they all take up space geometrically. And so it's, it is, it recognizes patterns. And it doesn't actually think. Now the people who are the AI advocates, the people who are building it, the people who are they're selling it, they'll tell you it does. It's capable of reason now. That's impossible because we don't know how we're capable of reasoning. You know, I can't, I can't explain how thinking works. And so I'm not going to be able to teach a computer how to think because I don't know how I do it myself. I can't pass on something, certainly to an object, you can't pass it on to a dumb CPU. If you don't understand how it works in yourself. And I think it's not just a mathematical or biological process. I don't think that we think because of our brains, there's something else involved. It's physiological, but it's also spiritual. And the spiritual aspect of it is never going to get duplicated by anything. By an inert cell phone. The angle that I've heard the most probably is not a fear of the AI itself. It's a fear of people not being able to distinguish real from AI, especially with pictures and deep fakes and voices. That's not an AI problem. That's a people problem. We need to make better people. We need to educate people better. We need, well, as any good pastor would tell you, we need to get people submitted to Christ first. They need to understand. I am submitted to Christ. I'm fairly intelligent. And I've seen videos and pictures and stuff that if it didn't say underneath that this was created by AI, I would have said that looks totally real. But that's not a problem. There's a million ways you can tell if it's AI. And a lot of times it's just not necessarily a video content, but the scenario that they put. I mean, there's a million ways to tell that something is just that didn't happen. And why do I know that? Because I have the ability to discern. I want to know what that looks like a thing that happened. But come on. You know what? I think of most of the time the way that I know that it's AI is I think to myself, if this had actually happened at any point in the recent history, we would have already seen this video a thousand times that everybody would have been passing this video around. Like this was not your typical AI. This was just like, I don't know, Denzel Washington sitting at a table talking or whatever, but it wasn't real. It was just, it was generated by AI. And it looked pretty dang real. But there was nothing about it that stood out as this is weird. There comes a point where just being able to recognize whether it was created by AI or not won't matter because it doesn't matter if it was created, if it was real. If Denzel himself really sat down and said XYZ, it would only matter to somebody who's only going to listen to it if Denzel is sponsoring it. And that's a people problem. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, at some point we need to be asking ourselves, what did he say at that table was what he said true? Does it glorify God? Is it agreeing with scripture, you know, or whatever? Then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if Denzel actually sat at the table and said those exact words. So many people are getting hung up on if it's a deep fake or not. And it's like, okay, but again, is the deep fake of a celebrity telling you to kill yourself? Because if you're going to listen to that because you think Bill Clinton said it and it came straight from Bill to you, that's a people problem. That's always been a problem. It's a toys even when long before there was deep fake, if you had celebrity saying a thing and it had influence over people, that's a problem. Yes. So there's a problem that you're listening to somebody who's an actor telling you a thing and you're listening just because that person is famous. That's a problem. It's a people problem. It's a problem with people. And so we've got hard issues, spiritual issues where people don't know how to make good decisions. And so, you know, I want our kids to grow up and be wise. I want them to know how to make good decisions. And that's going to include decisions that get made through use of AI, when to use it and when not to, how to make a big stink over a video, how to not really care. All of that. They are going to need to make good decisions about those things. And I would like for them to be the sorts of leaders who can help others decide whether is it a problem for me to be using this machine to help me plan my menu this week, my, you know, my food? When could it theoretically become a problem? Is it a problem for me to ask it why I'm having hip pain? When could it become a problem? What's the Christian way to deal with AI? And now we're way out of time. But the problem, as far as I can see it, is that Christian people, not all Christian people have been convinced there is such a thing as a Christian way to get dressed in the morning. For a long time, they haven't been agreeing that there's a Christian way to watch sports. And so yeah, Christian way to eat cereal. Heaven forbid that they're going to be ready for a conversation about the Christian way to use AI. But the problem with that topic of conversation is that there are some people who that will give deep anxiety to is like, oh, what if I'm doing this wrong? What if I'm, yeah, sure. I would say probably if they have anxiety about it, they are doing it wrong. But that's because I agree that there's a Christian way of using it. It helps to try to sort of realize that the Christian liberty we're also given to make choices. Yeah. But again, if you're the kind of person who's in any sort of danger of being creeped out by a computer telling you to kill yourself, you probably aren't approaching that relationship with that computer very wisely. Like if you're, there were people who used to look for messages in the calculators. Since you brought up calculators, they would turn it over and see if it spelled words when they added certain things up and things. Boobs. Yeah, they could definitely write that one. But okay. So if people did that with a little solar calculator, what's going to happen when you give them Groc, you know, or Claude? What's going to happen when you introduce them to their very own AI calculator? And they start talking to it. And it sounds human on top of they already were looking for messages hidden in this machine because they're not really very wise. Yeah, then it becomes dangerous for that person. Right. Well, we've also been propagandized with things like Jarvis and Iron Man and stuff where it does seemingly have a personality. Well, yeah. Right. But all of it's all an illusion. Right. None of it is real. That's why, but people don't know that. And when you tell certain people that they don't believe you, you know, they'll, they may not alone, but they just don't believe you. And those are the people who are vulnerable, vulnerable, those are the people you need to, you need to be taken there, they're AI away from them because they just, they're not using it correctly. So you take matches away from a child because they will do harm. They'll do bad things with it. You don't use the tool appropriately. Yeah. But you have to know what the tool is. You have to understand it. I mean, a knife is pretty straightforward and you can just tell the kid, you can't use this till you're able to stop cutting yourself. A lot of people don't recognize when the AI has become a tool of harm for them. And so those are the people who should have anxiety about it. And yeah, if there's, there's a God gave us fear, gave us a sense of foreboding and anxiety as a defensive mechanism to keep us from just like launching ourselves off cliffs and eating things that might be poisonous and things like that. And so in this case, I would say, yeah, if somebody's really feeling hesitant and uncertain and they're not sure they trust themselves with that technology, it's fine to just avoid it for a while. You know, you're in a book. Not according to that article. It says you should have been looking into it. Well, you know, on that note, since we're already way over, there is value, I think, not for everybody. If you don't have the ability to discern, then you can... That's like most people. Well, okay, go ahead. There is value. There is value in going in and just, and using AI and trying to get it to do something. You know, think of a task and try to, try to describe to AI how to do a thing. And you'll see how difficult it is to get it to track. Like you are doing the thing with the... Yeah, but I'm a teacher. I know when somebody's when they're clicking and when they're not. I can see when it's not working and not everybody can. I spent a couple of days last week working on this app, trying to get it to print out a report for me. And it broke it down. It took me two days for it to break it down into two phases. This was AI saying, you need to do this in two phases. The first phase does the analytics, the second phase does the reauthoring. And it's like, is that true? Yeah, this is the only way to do it. The only way to do it. Two days later, and it's not working. And I finally said, it seems like we should be able to put this all into one prompt and it would work more efficiently. You're absolutely right. Breaking it into two phases causes all of these problems. It's like, it's just your idea, AI. Two days ago, you told me to do this. But that's... It does that all the time. And it comes back and says, well, here's what your problem is. My problem is, I listened to you. You're the one who told me to do this. Well, and here's the thing. I told you. You were as productive talking to the mold on the Tupperware as you were. That's right. That's true. But as a teacher, I've been teaching small people. And I can tell you, I don't have that frustration. I take it back. Trying to explain the tornado to four year old Colin felt a little bit like trying to teach something to AI. But that's just because he was four. Right. I love now. And I have never run into this problem with Colin. That's true. Once it clicks for a human, whatever it is, we don't know what it is. But once it clicks, they just know. They know. They know things. And so it's actually more fun, more gratifying to work with people, to teach people because they're different. And if you don't have a lot of context for talking to or teaching people, you might walk into a situation with AI and go, oh my gosh, this is the smartest thing I've ever encountered. Yeah, that's true. I'm telling you, a four year old is smarter than AI. Well, and it's never going to click for AI. Right. It's never, ever going to have a moment where it goes, ah, now I understand. Even though those are those exact words it will use. Yes. Now I understand. We're on the same page. But it will literally say, yep, we're tracking. And then the next phrase will be something so far off base. You're absolutely right. It's like, I thought we understood each other. We're absolutely right. It doesn't understand anything. I will not make any changes to this text. I will not change this. Would you like me to compare line by line with your source material to prove I made no changes? Yes. Yes, please do that. Oops. I have made a lot of changes. Thanks for visiting the comedian's house. If you want to spend more time with our family, you can follow John Branion on YouTube and Facebook. Also email next door at johnbranion.com with your comments and questions. We'll see you next time. See you next time.