https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omC91zMj0Nc (transcribed and formatted with google)
Good morning. Good morning. If folks sort of start to trickle in after, they'll either be in for a very awkward entrance, but you know, such is life when you don't come to church on time.
Uh, so yeah, thank you so much for being at this talk. It's somewhat new for me. I'm actually going to read a lot of it as the subject is sort of too sensitive to riff on. But you know, you could have been at a lot of other places this morning, Saturday morning in San Francisco, best city in the world, but you chose to be here. It's going to be a little bit different than your typical San Francisco talk. I'm going to bring you into the most sincere version of this writing, and I'll start there and then we can talk about the nature of producing it and what it means to work to bring something like this to life. But we'll just sort of start with the experience as genuinely as we can and then we're going to go from there.
Now I'm reading from the book of Daniel chapter 1.
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his God in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his God. Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king's service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility.
Young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well-informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king's palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians. The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king's table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that, they were to enter the king's service. Among those who were chosen were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. The chief officials gave them new names. To Daniel the name Belteshazzar. To Hananiah, Shadrach. To Mishael, Meshach. to Azariah Abednego.
But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine. And he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way. Now God had caused the official to show favor and compassion to Daniel. But the official told Daniel, "I am afraid of my lord, the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men of your age?" The king would then have my head because of you.
Daniel said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, "Please test your servants for 10 days, give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see." So he agreed to this and tested them for 10 days. At the end of the 10 days, they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So, the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead. To these four young men, God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning, and Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds. At the end of the time set by the king to bring them into his service, the chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. The king talked with them and he found none equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. So they entered the king's service. In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom. And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus. The word of the Lord.
Please bow your head in prayer.
Dear Lord, as we take time to interrogate questions of our faith and how it relates to contemporary technology, let us not lose sight of who you are to us, let us remember that we are fallen people in need of a savior. That we cannot create our own redemption, no matter how hard we may try and that redemption is only through Jesus Christ. We pray we never forget that the creations of man, no matter how miraculous they may seem, are but small echoes of your glory. For you brought the world into creation, into existence simply by your word. And by your word, all things are made new. If anything is in this book or what I'm about to speak is outside of scripture, may you bring it forward to our conscience so that we may correct it. May it be seen that it was done without malice, but in trying to bring the scripture with us wherever we go. Amen.
So when God was in the garden, knowing that man had just fallen just moments earlier, what was spoken? Was it a booming voice of discontent? Was it an instant punishment? No. It was a simple and concerned question. Where are you?
As we work through this research, which is mostly selected readings of the book I just completed during my residency, I want to invite you to yield to the search and work of the spirit if you're a believer. Or if you're not a believer, to simply ask yourself that same question. Where are you? Are you hiding in devices while the Lord seeks your companionship? Is your time getting stolen from you by dark patterns of social algorithms? Are the first fruits of your day going towards your phone after your bedside alarm? Like a good Presby boy, I want to focus on three points this morning: The threat we face, wisdom in the age of intelligence, and the joy to come.
First, the threat we face. It's very easy but ultimately dismissive to believe that environments are something that simply happened to us. Reality couldn't be further from the truth. Even in the perfection of Eden, we see that the environment was active and presented humanity with a continuous question. Is communion with God sufficient? Or do you desire to be God yourself?
You see, the fall of man is not only to give context to understand the spiritual condition we face within ourselves, but to know that our environments ever since then are forever in conflict with us. Genesis 3:17-19 says, "Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground. Since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Because we know of this curse and that our labor is fundamentally limited, we must build up our sensitivities to see our fallen environment for what it is. So the task then becomes to decipher both what these environments or built environments or products promote, and two, the effects they intend to have on you. To not take on this task, we come under the threat that all of us are at risk of, which put simply, is just being asleep.
So let me give a less consequential but hopefully tangible example of what I'm talking about. A month or so ago, I was having breakfast with some friends and Jackson Doll, who some of you may know, brought up how he wasn't aware of how bad his recall was until he started using granola. Naturally, my ears sort of perked up at this. And I asked him, "Well, is your recall bad or is your filtering good?" This tiny example in the grand scheme of things, you know, it's really small, right? But it shows that successful products and environments have an agenda. They all have a message, you know, in the very McLuhan sense of the word. And that agenda tends to focus on where you're lacking, right? So it can't say that you have a really strong filtering for what matters. It has to say that your recall isn't perfect and you know how far away from perfection you inherently are. And so that strikes a deep cord in you. What Jackson experienced, you know, not to pick on Jackson, but that's my boy. You know, that's the threat of being asleep, right? The promise of the experience was so enjoyable that he missed the message and consequence of how it was actively reshaping him. And we all do this, myself included. I did it this morning.
But being asleep to the effects of our environment—personally, communally, globally—not being able to untangle these messages and the subsequent effects... When you don't register that your hand is on the stove, you lose it. Marshall McLuhan once said, and you know despite being Catholic we can still reference him, "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."
This brings us to point two: wisdom in the age of intelligence. The Bible says the eye is the lamp of the body. It also says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. McLuhan again would point us towards, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." All of these are useful ways to understand the broader network of risks with the challenge we face. So now that we are aware about being asleep to the fallen environment and that we can spend a lot of time consuming McLuhan and the others to a number of frameworks that help us deconstruct what the environment is trying to do to us, what's the goal? Like why even go through this interrogation?
And I would say that it's all about maintaining a clear conscience, an active and sharp awareness. This I believe is sort of our primary counterattack towards the environment. Paul speaks about this throughout the New Testament but in 2 Corinthians chapter 10:5 he says, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." I think this phrase, "you take captive every thought," this idea is super, super critical in understanding how we are to maintain a healthy conscious. Our inner voice is flooded with external stimulus. Slight triggers in our content feeds can send us down rabbit holes of seemingly fruitful education as well as pure hedonism. One can say that it fundamentally becomes a question of cognitive security.
As a small personal anecdote, while preparing for this book, my AirPods just shattered. Like, I pulled one out of my ear and it just fell apart and I was like, "Alright." Um, and out of morbid curiosity, I simply determined not to replace them. And what took place was a sort of fasting-like experience. My sensitivities increased. The train was significantly louder. My awareness of the city while I was biking grew. My inner voice was significantly quieter. So much so that the only songs that would ever come to mind were lyrics from worship.
You know, this book is very much meant for Christians. So, it can feel a little maybe startling to hear some of these ideas, but I do encourage all Christians and non-Christians for that matter to embrace a culture of fasting that includes your devices, to regain sensitivities to your environment that have been previously sort of pushed around the equalizer sliders without you really knowing. And other times, we would rightfully call this sort of inner cacophony many are experiencing today as psychosis.
A clear consciousness should therefore be seen as a spiritual health factor akin to a desirable heart rate.
As we move forward in time, I think San Francisco is a city very sort of directionally aimed into the future. As we move further away from our original fall, closer to final judgment, it's important to internalize that our battles are truly becoming tougher. The environment, if you will, is just increasingly turning up the heat. The stove is getting hotter. We enter an age today of both exciting and, you know, terrifying new technologies. A lot of talks at Interact and symposium are about this but you know they possess or at least are imbued with many grand promises. And I think the biggest risk to our conscious lives today is AI, just not for the sort of doomer predictions of like nuclear fallout.
Second Timothy 3 opens this way: "But mark this. There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people."
What strikes me most about this passage is the line, "having the form of godliness but denying its power." Marshall's thesis on technology as an amputation is one of my favorite and it really comes to mind in this moment. Meaning, technology while extending our ability also diminishes or alters a previously functional part of our being. So as AI overtly desires to reach properties of God—having the form of godliness, namely omniscience—the effect if we succumb to it, denying God the authority, is our own lobotomy.
Let's just look at one more example. In a recent talk at Sequoia, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, described the company's desire to be the core AI subscription for your life. Think about the most sort of viral prompts folks are asking AI: "Using everything you know about me, how should I think about X or Y?" The fact is that the dominant use case of these LLMs is some form of psychological therapy and advice counseling. And only then do you really sort of come to understand what's being sacrificed if you fall asleep, which is living authority. To the Christian, living authority has only one placement: Christ, who is in us through the grace of the Holy Spirit. To offload our dependence on the Holy Spirit and the broader word of God to ChatGPT is probably the greatest unconscious error that a Christian can make today.
Remember that technology has no divine plan for your life. It is a willing participant in a transaction that affords its survival. Whether or not you prosper as a result, that's of no matter to it. Human flourishing is not its mandate. But it is part of what God promises to us time and time again throughout his word. In Jeremiah 29:11-14, it says this, "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord."
David Foster Wallace in his very famous Kenyon College speech says everybody worships. And what is worship if not explicit and sustained attention? This choice is where you will derive your world system, your values, your satisfaction, your loves. So stay attentive to that which is sustaining your attention, as you might unknowingly be building altars within yourself for things that simply don't deserve it.
And then we can finally get to this desire for wisdom. Very famously, Proverbs 9 verse 10 says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the holy one is understanding. For through wisdom, your days will be many and years will be added to your life. If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you. And if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer." I think we all know what a mocking culture feels like today.
While the promise of AI is this sort of raising of the floor with regards to intelligence, both personal and collective, it should never gain the authority of first consultant, if you will. Where do we go when we face the big questions? Where do we seek guidance and in what hands do we place our concerns? If the first and resounding answer isn't "In God I trust and I am not afraid," then we are in very big trouble. So we must assess the alignment of our affections. If the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, then I'd say the blocker to wisdom would be our tendency to create false idols. What are false idols? How and why do we tend to make them? In short, they are anything that takes the rightful first position of the Lord in our heart because our flesh does not naturally desire to submit to God. We are default rebellious as people.
Augustine would ask, "Are your loves out of order?" We've all experienced, or at least we've seen, what happens when loves are out of order. When we place career ahead of family, our families suffer. A son can feel unloved by their mother. A father can feel utterly disconnected to their daughter. At the root is a fundamental misalignment of how we believe our loves are to be arranged. And the goal is a noble one. We believe that our arrangement will create a higher sense of flourishing, reinforcing this very severity of the question of keeping our affections in order. Pray and search your heart to know if you've made idols of your technology. Ask yourself how you might keep the wide array of technology we interact with in its proper place.
Finally, we arrive to the joy to come.
I'm a technologist. You know, I'm here. It would be neither true nor genuine not to take time to sort of expand on the joys of technology at the same time of this talk because progress, even complicated progress, is a joyful gift and a reminder of God's promise. That promise is twofold: one, we can take part in God's plan of renewal, healing, housing, and more, and two, what we do here, while incomplete, does matter. I believe technology in the full spectrum of that word—not just information technology—is where we see some of the promises existing in full bloom from believers and unbelievers alike. And how do we square that reality with the reality of everything we just covered, right? Just sort of whack-a-mole everything.
Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." It says all things. It's not some things. It's not this one little sliver of things. It's all things. All things created. All things existing live today. So, one way to bring this home is to get you guys hip to this idea of common grace. What is common grace? Common grace refers to God's undeserved goodness shown to all people, not just the elect, in multiple forms. It's distinguished from saving grace—that is salvation—in that it does not regenerate or save a person. But what it does do is restrain the full effects of sin, that curse of the environment that we just talked about earlier, and imparts positive blessings that enable human society to function and even flourish despite the fall into sin. I believe we can bucket progress we experience and strive for in technology as a sign of God's common grace towards us, a common grace that we can take part in.
The most visceral of these experiences I've had and continue to have is riding in a Waymo. In the first moment I distinctly remember saying, "Wow, this is God's promise to us." Which is silly, but I really felt it. You know, growing up in Pennsylvania, I grew up in the Poconos, which is the woods. And every year a kid from my school or a neighboring school would die in a drunk driving accident. And when I mentally fast forward to Waymo's future, I saw those stories of pain—those stories of families just wrecked, the prize of their family, their children, being taken from them. I saw all of those stories get wiped away. And these are the moments of experiencing common grace that we can take full joy in and should point us back ultimately to Christ's promise. They should inspire us in our work to promote promises that are echoes of Christ: of renewal, of healing, of communal joy.
And what do we have a complete and sure hope in as Christians? For the Christians here, and what sure hope can you be interested in if you're coming here maybe interested in Christianity? Where is this all headed? You know, these existential questions we all ask ourselves at some point laying in bed at night. The answer is this: It is a final and all-encompassing renewal of God's people and the world that he created. This is our present hope and our shared work.
I'll end with this. As this group of very inspiring people hoping to do inspiring work that matters—maybe even you're feeling anxious about work or getting stuck in the permanent underclass, if you will... Tolkien in his story "Leaf by Niggle," which is a very unfortunate name, talks about an artist that is working to paint a beautiful tree. He takes his time. He often gets distracted. He's also known to be really helpful to his neighbors. His neighbors often come to ask of small things from him. If only his neighbors would stop bothering him so he could get to the work at hand. He only gets out a few beautiful leaves before he passes away. They are found and they're placed in a gallery. A few visitors enjoy the intricate leaves that he's painted. They sit in front of the painting and they really admire it. They really take their time with this thing that Niggle has left for them. And on the other side of the story, while crossing a field in eternity, Niggle sees the tree. It's as perfect as he imagined it, but it's real and it's complete. He walks up to it. He presses his hand against the bark. He sits and rests under this tree.
Our lives are much like this. Even the best technologists with as pure intentions as they can have can only etch out a few leaves during their life. The Christian technologist rests in the comfort that the fullness of the tree we imagine is not only coming, but it is already complete in Christ our savior. That is our sure hope and present joy. It's why we can critique technology and still be fully at peace with all the directions that it may swing. Why we don't have to be afraid of the proverbial permanent underclass. That we can laugh at that as a joke, as meaninglessness.
Let's close in prayer and then we can do the sort of Q&A and discuss the research portion of this.
Lord God, we love you. We thank you for your perfect wisdom and pray that we can hold steadfast in giving you proper authority over all things in our lives. For our nature is selfishness. We long to challenge your sovereignty. We ask you to build in us a humble spirit so that we might submit to your ways, knowing that they are perfect and for our benefit. We repent for all the times we have foolishly given our attention away to lesser things. We ask that you renew our conscience, that through the blood of Jesus Christ, we can be made anew, justified in the saving grace you have gifted us. Let us not fall victim to the powers that are around us. Help us to rely on your promise that you who are in us are greater than anything we face in the world. We thank you that you are the source of all wisdom and you have given us your word to rely on. Let us never lose the word of God in our homes or our heart. Help us to always be prepared to dispute that which is ungodly but presents as intelligence. We ask for this love... Amen.
Woo.
Uh, so, you know, despite growing up in church, that was really new for me. Um, you know, I've given plenty of talks, blah, blah, blah. But, um, you know, this research is obviously a little different. Um, probably the most difficult thing I've done in quite a while. For a month and a half, I basically just consumed different theologians and a practice of prayer and devotion, a fast both intentional and physical as well as, you know, the story you heard about my AirPods which is mostly accidental.
And what's different about this research is, you know, all these moments were having a very supernatural and obviously spiritual effect on how I viewed not only the subject of putting this book together, but on my heart condition towards each of you in the audience, praying about who was sitting in the audience. Um, and these sensitivities continue to grow in myself in sort of preparing to deliver this, you know, talk. Um, and then you know as the events in the nation and globally just sort of further increased this sensitivity. It's funny, you know, you do all this work to not be your dad and then you get to something like this and you're like, "Ah, my dad."
But my dad talks about spiritual work as sort of the highest calling that there is. And the material, the design material we're dealing with is people's soul. And I used to sort of scoff at this but, not to be like a Stewart Brand boy, but like in a pace layering way, we can view sort of everything downstream of the condition of one's soul, of the condition of communal souls interacting. And, you know, it might feel aggressive saying this. I do have like this running bit that San Francisco is the best city in the world. Um, or is it a bit? But I do feel it's important in the sense that it is one of the top three exporters of American culture. I feel there's LA which is media, there's DC which is policy, and then there's San Francisco. I actually don't know how much New York is exporting anything right now.
But if we aren't tending to the souls of the people here, the output will deteriorate in an ever-increasing fashion. And that can be as nefarious as sycophantic AI or as annoying and decently harmless as clumsy advertising. But at the heart of these things is the same thing. It's a deteriorating soul condition unconcerned with strong definitions of flourishing. Obviously for me, I have a very Christian definition of these things. But I think all of you could probably list examples that are economically or sort of status-structure rewarded here that are very against even your own views of what flourishing means. I think we don't spend enough time sort of wrestling with that reality. And so the tension was sort of my mandate for these past two months, which built a very real, I would say psychological and spiritual burden on myself but was also sort of transformed in joy through the word of God and the grace that comes from it. And you know hopefully you felt that as it was expressed to you. And I'm happy to take any questions.
[Applause]
Questioner 1: Um, one of the things I thought was really interesting when you were talking, you used the term like not letting AI become almost the first consultant. And I think I promise you for many of us in the room where it's like I feel like I am very intentional when I want to have a reflection or I'm trying to answer a deep question to, you know, turn within and turn to God. But I think for me, it's actually where it starts to eat into my life is like, "Oh, I just want to decompress. I just need like 20 minutes." And where I might have been quiet before or I might have subconsciously let prayer or God take that space, now that has kind of been cannibalized by just doom scrolling. Or getting back to emails or whatever, you know, kind of like a mindlessness. And so I'm just interested in what the research says and maybe what your personal opinion is on what's the loss in that situation because I think it feels more mundane and it feels like a less risky place to let technology take that role in your life. But I'm very interested in what happens when there's not quiet anymore.
Speaker: 100%. What I would say is this: Does the rest you experience from Netflix or doom scrolling, do you genuinely feel that that's regenerative? You know, the point of resting in the Lord is a regeneration of the self, right? That is true rest. So soothing your anxieties of the day, that's like a shot, you know, it's penicillin of sorts. That's not resting the soul, right? And so I would say that's the sort of main contrast. And that's not to say that I don't... I love watching Seinfeld for like an hour and a half after the workday. That's perfectly fine. But I think if you really took stock of your day or week and you're just like, "Oh wow, there's actually zero resting in God happening here. There's actually zero quiet happening," you know, that's when it becomes a really interesting question of reflection. Because then we have to ask like what is it that we're so uncomfortable with that's existing in ourselves, right? So yeah, I think it's about taking stock. I think there's a type of Christian that really over-rotates and says like Netflix is bad, scrolling is bad. It's like, well, that's a little extreme, right? But 3 hours of Netflix and zero hours of resting in the Lord every day, that is structurally bad, you know, and that does need to get balanced out. And I think what's at stake is what true regenerative rest is, which is not consumption in the traditional media sense.
Questioner 2: Your comment about the AirPods was really interesting to me because I sort of had a similar experience where I guess mine was a little bit more intentional rather than serendipitous where I was like, "Okay I'm going to try experimenting on myself and not listen to any music at all for a period of time." And so what I noticed was after a while my brain would start playing music and I was able to correlate, "Oh this sort of music, these tracks are coming to me because I was listening to a lot of this at a certain time in my life," primarily this was after the pandemic. And I realized through that process that after those tracks had played I started reflecting a lot on that time and that I hadn't really reflected on or contemplated the events that had informed that period and processed it. And so I started processing some of that stuff and then, you know, kept going and I was like, "Okay my brain is sort of in this mental space right now of this time period," just going until my brain sort of went quiet and I was able to be like, "Okay I think I've processed everything." But it was like the music would come back from a certain time period a little bit quieter. But it's kind of made me think, you know, are we so afraid of contemplation and reflection now that we feel the need to constantly numb ourselves so that we don't need to think about... we do need to reflect on some things... what's happened. I feel like a lot of people have not processed or acknowledged the fact they need to reflect and contemplate and so we seek to numb ourselves with this little like 10 minutes at a time on social media or with music or whatever. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that sort of avoidance of contemplation and reflection.
Speaker: That's right, yeah. I mean I don't have much to add, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think the reason why I wanted to open with this sort of threat as being asleep is because I think it's a very clear visual of how vulnerable you are. And when you're asleep to effects, you're vulnerable to effects. If someone was sleeping right here, you know, we could draw on their face. Everything a hijinks kid would do. And if you think about yourself asleep and you think about those hijinks-ing kids as simply corporations that have agendas writing on your face, you'd find that image really disturbing. And I think that's sort of where we are. And so, if nothing else, I wanted this to be a sort of jolting of like, "Oh, have I been asleep to these effects?"
I also think this is why we struggle to think of futures beyond the present set of realities of technologies we have today. Why is it really hard to think past the iPhone? It's because we don't want to lose any of the anxious attachments we have to these little ticks of scrolling for five minutes, having something in our ear. And because we don't want to overcome those ticks, we can't even think past the thing that developed them in the first place. This is the difference between being asleep and being awake as a technologist. The example I like that a friend gave me is in pre-industrial Britain, their water wasn't really clean so they drank beer, right? Naturally. Now you have a drunk British population. Then as they started traveling, they brought back teas and coffee, right? And the coffee houses formed. And as they went from literally a drunk society to a caffeinated society, out of that came all these pushes in the industrial revolution. Now we have what I would consider a heroin society. Like, I think social media is going to look like pregnant women smoking in the 60s. Like it's going to be such an atrocious image in the future, my hope, right? And we need to be able to say that clearly, get these images into the broader sort of understanding of what technology is doing so that we can even imagine past it. And that's sort of the trap we're in right now, I feel.
Questioner 2: Very quickly about that, 100% agree. I think something also kind of going back to the industrial time period is like I feel like back then there were robber barons, right? I feel like social media and these giant companies, we sort of have time thieves. We have people who are stealing the time away from us little by little and sort of draining any sort of sense of youth that's left, and that's so much more valuable than any sort of money or resources that we once had. I also do think that what you were mentioning before about not being able to see past the iPhone does sort of reflect itself in the fact that Gen Z does not have a defined aesthetic and our hyper fixation on nostalgia and recycling all these trends. Yes, trends do come every 20 years, but I know as somebody who is Gen Z and works in design, branding, graphics, marketing, whatever, I see this happening in real time and I do think that there's certainly something to that. We can't see past these trends into the future because we are so afraid to feel that discomfort that is needed for great change.
Speaker: Yep. 100%.
Questioner 3: The Daniel passage and the fasting is just how it's laid out in terms of this idea that, you know, you fast and you become like the best wizard. That's how I think about the modern day wizards or magicians or people who are building these tools. Like they are magic. You know, you talk about Waymo all the time and it's like machines flying around the street is insane. So, how... do you have any ideas on how to take something like that passage or that fast... how do you turn that into maybe some kind of magical product or tool that it becomes like this divine product? Because you were saying before these products are not divine, they're not meant to elicit that feeling in your life.
Speaker: Yeah. That's a great question. So I think the path to answer that is unpacking a little bit of what's happening in Daniel. What's happening in Daniel, right, is the Israelites just got taken over by a foreign king. And now that foreign king is engaging in cultural warfare. He's taking the elite, the young elites of that culture, and he's trying to reshape them into his cultural image, right? I think what's very fun about San Francisco is that nearly everyone moves in here. Very rare, like there used to be a period of time where it was rare to be like a New York New Yorker. There were zero kids that grew up in San Francisco and stayed there, right? So everyone is sort of like Daniel, right? They're all getting thrown into a cultural reshaping that is the city and its values and they're coming from outside of the city.
So then we have to look at what's happening. Daniel says, "I don't want to be defiled so I'm not going to do this. I'm going to fast." He's creating a bodily separation. Holiness is known as separation. So, he's creating a bodily separation to not be defiled. And then his results are better than everyone else. I think to pull from last night, bodily separation right now probably looks most like Opal, right? It's like it's going to fully hijack my phone to separate me from the environments that everyone else is in. And now I'm going to be forced to engage in totally new environments with totally different values and in 10 days or in 10 years, let's look at those results. To me it's like the next Timothy Leary "turn on, tune in, drop out" is going to be that. It's going to be like leaving this sort of network space, whatever forms are popular right now, forming a new one, and not in a "where is John Galt" way, I don't like that one. But like a truly new space to allow new values to emerge, to allow those values to take hold into daily behavior so that the output looks significantly different than our peers. And that's what happens here. They fully separate themselves, they take on completely different diets, right? And they emerge significantly stronger and wiser than the rest of the youth that did not separate themselves.
Questioner 4: So, I think it's like a mix bouncing off both of them. And your granola example and the asking OpenAI about "everything you know." All of these kind of point to losing... and the more I work on these projects as well, there's a sense that people are going to lose their discernment.
Speaker: Correct.
Questioner 4: The more I design the technology, I'm like, can you design technology in a way that you can still not dull that faculty of discernment? Or do you have to kind of step away from technology to develop that, you know, be able to discern and feel your agency while you're making a decision and not end up in a state where you're not thinking about filtering and you're thinking about your lack of recall?
Speaker: Yeah. I like to think about David Ogilvy and how he talks about advertising. He talks about going away with absolutely nothing around. He doesn't consume anything so that he can create better advertising. I think technology is very much the same. If you do not recognize that you are fish in water, you will actually never understand what water is. So you need to uncomfortably be lifted out into the air, really rest in that, and then you will start to see like, "Oh actually this water temperature is awful." And then you could start to change the nozzle a bit. That might not be the economically best answer for you, by the way, but it might be the stronger human dignity answer, and that's important. Okay, before Marin gets mad at me.
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