# Jay Richards—Reality, AI, and the Courage to Change Your Mind (Preview)

An episode of [Bible Answer Man Podcast with Hank Hanegraaff](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/569236334), 23 Mar 2026, 39 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/70689111/hup_ctr_preview_2.mp3

Jay Richards has made more appearances on Hank Unplugged than any other guest. As the longtime producer of the podcast, Dave Hanegraaff thought it would be fitting to have Jay be one of the first guests to join him on his new podcast, A Commitment to Reality. In this preview from A Commitment to Reality, Jay and Dave explore the importance of listening to those we disagree with, how social media distorts our perception of reality, and why embodiment—simply going outside and being present—may be one of the most important disciplines we’ve forgotten. They also dive into the growing influence of artificial intelligence, why the debate over AI is ultimately a question of anthropology, and how our understanding of the human person will shape the future more than any technology. To hear the full conversation—including Jay’s reflections on fasting, discipline, and practices that reconnect us to reality—search for A Commitment to Reality wherever you listen to podcasts and follow the show so you never miss an episode. You can also watch full episodes and clips on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ACommitmenttoReality

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: This is Dave Hannigraf, the producer of the hand Gunplugged
[0:04] Speaker 1: podcast and the host of A Commitment to Reality, a
[0:08] Speaker 1: new podcast brought to you by the Christian Research Institute. Today,
[0:13] Speaker 1: you're hearing a preview of a conversation from a Commitment
[0:17] Speaker 1: to Reality. On this show, I sit down with the
[0:20] Speaker 1: same types of guests that you've become accustomed to hearing
[0:22] Speaker 1: on the handgum plug podcast, think the most interesting, informative
[0:28] Speaker 1: and inspirational people on the planet, to explore what it
[0:32] Speaker 1: means to live in alignment with what is true with reality.
[0:37] Speaker 1: On this episode, I'm speaking with longtime guest on both
[0:40] Speaker 1: The Bible answer Man and hand Gunplugged, Jay Richards, to
[0:45] Speaker 1: hear the full conversation. Search for a Commitment to Reality.
[0:49] Speaker 1: Wherever you listen to podcasts, enjoy Jay Richards. Thank you
[0:55] Speaker 1: for joining me.
[0:57] Speaker 2: It's great to be with you, Dave.
[0:58] Speaker 1: We've done this a lot, but you've never actually seen
[1:01] Speaker 1: my face. I've been involved with a podcast with you
[1:05] Speaker 1: for over a decade now, but I've always been off
[1:08] Speaker 1: to the side, and I've always been heavily involved in
[1:10] Speaker 1: the kind of pre and post and sometimes during sliding.
[1:14] Speaker 1: A little note in like, hey, ask Jay this, but
[1:19] Speaker 1: never never face to face. So this is great, this
[1:21] Speaker 1: is really exciting.
[1:22] Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
[1:24] Speaker 1: All right, I want to start with a confession. Can
[1:27] Speaker 1: I tell you something?
[1:28] Speaker 2: Okay, I used to hate you really.
[1:34] Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, as a young adult, college aged, you know,
[1:40] Speaker 1: in college pushing the boundaries of what I grew up
[1:45] Speaker 1: with my Christian faith and flirting with socialism. And my
[1:49] Speaker 1: dad would say, you've got to read this guy Jay Richards,
[1:53] Speaker 1: or you've got to listen to this guy Jay Richards.
[1:57] Speaker 1: So i'd look you up. Uh, this guy with the
[2:02] Speaker 1: perfect hair and hustle jaw like classic Republican.
[2:07] Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, see this guy coming a mile away.
[2:11] Speaker 1: Dead on arrival. I'm not giving him a chance. And
[2:15] Speaker 1: so for the longest time he would just recommend you
[2:18] Speaker 1: you got to read money greeting God as money greeting.
[2:22] Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Yeah, you know it changed.
[2:25] Speaker 2: What I Oh.
[2:26] Speaker 3: Okay, well, okay, good, I'm glad to hear that. So
[2:29] Speaker 3: maybe I wasn't the caricature you imagine what.
[2:32] Speaker 1: You might have been. But you know, it just goes
[2:34] Speaker 1: to show the benefit of actually hearing arguments out as
[2:38] Speaker 1: opposed to the projection of what you imagine them.
[2:40] Speaker 3: To be absolutely, yeah, absolutely, And you know, I mean
[2:43] Speaker 3: the reality is especially in apologetics. I mean, there you
[2:47] Speaker 3: can have a perfectly valid argument, but if it's not
[2:50] Speaker 3: delivered the right way, appropriate to the audience, or you know,
[2:54] Speaker 3: it's not received, and so both of those things absolutely matter.
[2:57] Speaker 3: And I recognize that when I'm writing about economics and
[3:00] Speaker 3: other things that especially economics, people have lots of mental
[3:04] Speaker 3: pictures in their imagination that I think blocks them from
[3:08] Speaker 3: just sort of thinking this passionately about the nature of
[3:11] Speaker 3: economic reality, you know, and so that's always fraught. I
[3:15] Speaker 3: can say it's less controversial than the stuff I've been
[3:18] Speaker 3: working on the last five years. It's just general ideology,
[3:21] Speaker 3: which is existential and obviously much more controversial. But then
[3:25] Speaker 3: topics like fasting, which I love, right, that's a lot
[3:29] Speaker 3: less controversial, but still, you know, most people kind of
[3:33] Speaker 3: have a lot of misconceptions about it, actually mhm.
[3:36] Speaker 1: So it just goes to show the benefit of listening
[3:38] Speaker 1: to people. And even when your name would come up
[3:41] Speaker 1: for podcast interviews, that guy, and then we continue to
[3:46] Speaker 1: have you on and every time I just love listening
[3:49] Speaker 1: to you because you're curious, which is why you're involved
[3:52] Speaker 1: in so many different things, And that's a question that
[3:54] Speaker 1: I want to ask you. Yeah, you also aren't afraid
[3:57] Speaker 1: to change your mind? Yeah, And how do you change
[4:01] Speaker 1: your mind about something?
[4:02] Speaker 3: I changed my mind about something. Usually I hate to
[4:05] Speaker 3: say it. I wish I were just sort of entirely dispassionate.
[4:08] Speaker 3: And I said, Okay, how much do I actually know
[4:10] Speaker 3: about this? Okay, it's like one percent of what I
[4:13] Speaker 3: probably should know. So I'm going to study all the
[4:16] Speaker 3: best representatives on all sides, or if I can't find
[4:19] Speaker 3: a good representative of position, I'll steal man at myself.
[4:22] Speaker 3: Try to come up with the best argument I can
[4:24] Speaker 3: think of for a position I disagree with. But it's
[4:28] Speaker 3: usually not quite that simple. What it is is that
[4:30] Speaker 3: someone that I recognize is intelligent and articulate says something right,
[4:34] Speaker 3: and then it's confirmed by someone else, and then I think,
[4:37] Speaker 3: you know, maybe I don't know this topic as well
[4:39] Speaker 3: as I think I do. And then you have this
[4:41] Speaker 3: moment of introspection where you say, okay, am I am
[4:44] Speaker 3: I just sort of accepting an intellectual orthodoxy or accepting
[4:49] Speaker 3: an idea because it's costly to believe otherwise, Or have
[4:51] Speaker 3: I really looked into it, and as you know, I mean,
[4:54] Speaker 3: if somebody googles me. I've written on a lot of
[4:56] Speaker 3: different topics, but in most of those cases it was
[4:59] Speaker 3: because I decided to look into something and realize, okay, wait,
[5:02] Speaker 3: there's a lot more here. And in some cases it
[5:04] Speaker 3: would be oh wow, I was completely off base and
[5:09] Speaker 3: you know, need to totally change my mind on this, even
[5:11] Speaker 3: if it's inconvenient. Other cases, you look into it, it's like, wow,
[5:14] Speaker 3: the arguments for this are actually much better than I realized.
[5:17] Speaker 3: And so you never kind of know going in if
[5:19] Speaker 3: you're going to be serious about investigating a topic, and
[5:23] Speaker 3: I think to seriously investigate a topic is to be
[5:25] Speaker 3: willing to put yourself in a position to say, okay,
[5:27] Speaker 3: got to be willing to say. A position I disagree
[5:30] Speaker 3: with is that it's possible that it's true. You know,
[5:33] Speaker 3: you don't have to assume it's true, but it's possible
[5:35] Speaker 3: it's true. And what would count in its favor? What
[5:37] Speaker 3: kind of evidence account its favor? If you can't do that,
[5:40] Speaker 3: you know, you might be right. It's possible that you
[5:43] Speaker 3: just landed on all the correct opinions, right, That's that's
[5:47] Speaker 3: certainly a possibility. But it's unlikely. And the fact that
[5:50] Speaker 3: I myself have ended up on different sides of issues
[5:52] Speaker 3: based upon my own study is a reminder to me that, Okay,
[5:56] Speaker 3: we're fallible beings, and there's sometimes I mean, you know,
[6:00] Speaker 3: in God's grace, you might just be born into a
[6:02] Speaker 3: family that's already thought these things through, you know, and
[6:06] Speaker 3: you can just sort of take that for granted. But
[6:08] Speaker 3: in some ways, even your own intellectual confidence usually requires
[6:11] Speaker 3: that at some point as an adult, you look into
[6:14] Speaker 3: these things. But you know, especially in an age of
[6:16] Speaker 3: social media in which I'm more and more convinced that
[6:18] Speaker 3: social media, especially you know, social media apps and the
[6:22] Speaker 3: kind of infinite scroll capacity and then the algorithm that
[6:26] Speaker 3: sort of gives you more of what you like, it's
[6:28] Speaker 3: highly addictive. It's just works against careful deliberative thought because
[6:34] Speaker 3: it you know, it stimulates us psychologically and you know,
[6:40] Speaker 3: I mean literally sort of boosts particular hormones. And so
[6:43] Speaker 3: I think this has never been more crucial that people
[6:46] Speaker 3: have some kind of internal method that they follow in
[6:50] Speaker 3: order to try to okay, come to your views honestly
[6:53] Speaker 3: and carefully when when needed, and just don't be caught
[6:56] Speaker 3: sure of things you haven't looked into.
[6:59] Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's getting so much harder than ever. I
[7:01] Speaker 1: haven't read the article. Last night, I couldn't sleep. In
[7:04] Speaker 1: the middle of the night I saw I say, oh,
[7:05] Speaker 1: I'm going to get back to that tomorrow. But it
[7:07] Speaker 1: had to do intuitively. I understand what it's getting at
[7:11] Speaker 1: the blue sky versus the X bubble, and how depending
[7:15] Speaker 1: on which platform you're using, your conception of reality is
[7:18] Speaker 1: completely altered.
[7:20] Speaker 3: Totally, Yeah, And I constantly remind myself of that. And
[7:23] Speaker 3: now I find the X feed, my X feed indispensable.
[7:26] Speaker 3: But it's because I follow particular journalists from different perspectives
[7:29] Speaker 3: and I can very quickly get at least, okay, a
[7:34] Speaker 3: representative sample of what people are thinking about something and
[7:38] Speaker 3: to do it quickly. But it's also extremely dangerous, precisely
[7:41] Speaker 3: because it's tailored to you, and precisely because not everyone
[7:45] Speaker 3: is on social media. I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I
[7:47] Speaker 3: spend a number of hours on X, but it's still
[7:50] Speaker 3: not a large segment of the population, and you know,
[7:54] Speaker 3: they'll be thinking major controversies that are happening on X,
[7:57] Speaker 3: which I'm sort of the middle of a different time.
[8:00] Speaker 3: But then I'll talk to somebody else, and it's like, yeah,
[8:03] Speaker 3: I didn't really hadn't heard about that. In fact, I
[8:06] Speaker 3: often use my sister, one sibling, my sister who we
[8:09] Speaker 3: grew up in Texas. She stayed in Texas. She's plugged
[8:12] Speaker 3: into politics and stuff. But she's not hanging out on AX.
[8:14] Speaker 3: You know, she's got a job to do. And I
[8:17] Speaker 3: kind of use her to as a test. Okay, how
[8:20] Speaker 3: deeply into you know, the broader conversation has this gotten?
[8:23] Speaker 3: And if she's totally aware of it, it's like, okay,
[8:25] Speaker 3: it's gotten deeper. But if it's some kind of in
[8:28] Speaker 3: house sort of dispute on X, you know, it's like
[8:32] Speaker 3: you got to realize, okay, talk to some people that
[8:34] Speaker 3: aren't plugged into that and find out, yeah, how how
[8:36] Speaker 3: far it is? And then, as you know, colleagues had say,
[8:39] Speaker 3: go touch grass and look at the blue sky. Get outside, right,
[8:43] Speaker 3: I mean so many of them don't in the blue
[8:46] Speaker 3: skuy if it exists, right, I've got it right here
[8:47] Speaker 3: outside my window and I hardly even look out there, right,
[8:50] Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean this there's so many I think
[8:53] Speaker 3: of our sort of maladies these days could certainly for
[8:57] Speaker 3: young people, could be solved by kids. Three months working
[9:00] Speaker 3: on a ranch shoveling manure. I mean, honestly, touch the
[9:04] Speaker 3: material reality, remind yourself of your embodiedness, right, and not
[9:10] Speaker 3: the digital thing. And I say that to somebody who
[9:12] Speaker 3: you know, I see all the kind of benefits from
[9:14] Speaker 3: this technology, including what we're doing right now. But every
[9:17] Speaker 3: technology has its ups and its downs, and the more
[9:20] Speaker 3: powerful it is, the more severe the downs could be.
[9:24] Speaker 1: Well, and you just touched on the whole premise of
[9:27] Speaker 1: the name of this podcast, a commitment to reality. It's
[9:30] Speaker 1: like I just began to sense more and more that
[9:34] Speaker 1: if we don't literally hold onto the ground, you're floating
[9:38] Speaker 1: off into the ether. I mean, there's no limit to
[9:40] Speaker 1: how ridiculous it can get.
[9:42] Speaker 3: Yeah, and yeah, absolutely, I mean this is you know,
[9:45] Speaker 3: I wrote a book, in fact, your dad interviewed me
[9:48] Speaker 3: about it, I Believe the Human Advantage back in twenty eighteen,
[9:51] Speaker 3: really addressing. I wish I had written it in twenty
[9:54] Speaker 3: twenty five because all the stuff I was talking about
[9:55] Speaker 3: in the book is happening now, right. Self driving cars,
[9:59] Speaker 3: genuine robots that are you know, android in appearance and
[10:03] Speaker 3: kind of autonomous, not plugged in somewhere. All that stuff's
[10:06] Speaker 3: happening now. The book was really a defense of the
[10:08] Speaker 3: human person and not this dystopian vision, not this kind
[10:12] Speaker 3: of anti technology screed, but like, look, there are lots
[10:15] Speaker 3: of technologies that are going to be coming online in
[10:17] Speaker 3: the next few years, you know, change our lives. We're
[10:19] Speaker 3: going to change the way we work. It is not
[10:21] Speaker 3: going to replace us as humans. Human beings are not machines,
[10:25] Speaker 3: so machines can't replace us. It will just change the
[10:28] Speaker 3: types of work we do. More things get automated. But
[10:31] Speaker 3: you know, this was you know, kind of realization because
[10:35] Speaker 3: what's happened if you were to say, actually, so what
[10:37] Speaker 3: distinguishes like say, the information economy from the service or
[10:40] Speaker 3: the industrial economies went before one is called digitization. This
[10:44] Speaker 3: is what the kind of uh information economy economists talk about.
[10:49] Speaker 3: And so it's moving from the world of molecules to
[10:51] Speaker 3: the world of bits, in which more and more things
[10:54] Speaker 3: that before you thought of okay they need to have
[10:55] Speaker 3: a physical manifestation can actually be converted into bits. Said,
[11:00] Speaker 3: is the kind of the language of software. So you know,
[11:02] Speaker 3: the way we consume music, right initially it was literally
[11:06] Speaker 3: had to have a music you know, the musicians in
[11:08] Speaker 3: front of you and then we figured out how to
[11:10] Speaker 3: record it. At one point in my own lifetime as
[11:12] Speaker 3: a little kid, I was listening to my mom's LPs that,
[11:15] Speaker 3: you know, the vital discs, and then you're like, what
[11:18] Speaker 3: is that? Yeah, exactly these, And then we went to
[11:20] Speaker 3: a thing called eight track tapes, which was a terrible technology.
[11:24] Speaker 3: That was a transition to cassettes, and then it went
[11:26] Speaker 3: to CDs. Where are we now, Well, I haven't bought
[11:29] Speaker 3: a CD. I can't remember the last time I bought
[11:31] Speaker 3: a CD because everything is streamed and so it's just
[11:34] Speaker 3: this it's a fully digital kind of manifestation of something
[11:38] Speaker 3: that you know, initially had to be physical. And so
[11:42] Speaker 3: that's when we realize that, Okay, that's the nature of
[11:44] Speaker 3: the information economy, is that movement. But we live in
[11:48] Speaker 3: the world of molecules, right, We have bodies, uh, you know,
[11:52] Speaker 3: we're you know, we have things in common with other
[11:55] Speaker 3: organisms in our environment. And so if we get too
[11:58] Speaker 3: detached from that fundamental human reality that we are embodied,
[12:03] Speaker 3: God has created us as these sort of unique material
[12:07] Speaker 3: spiritual hybrids that are fully fully material and fully spiritual,
[12:12] Speaker 3: you can put it that way. And anything that sort
[12:14] Speaker 3: of that alienates us from that. There's going to be
[12:17] Speaker 3: some cost to it, and we've got to become aware
[12:20] Speaker 3: of it.
[12:20] Speaker 2: Doesn't mean you can't ever use your computer again.
[12:22] Speaker 3: It probably means you need to buy intention do things
[12:27] Speaker 3: to cultivate and remind yourself that you're embodied.
[12:31] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[12:31] Speaker 1: You know, a friend of mine from church came up
[12:35] Speaker 1: to me around Christmas and he gave me a gift.
[12:37] Speaker 1: I don't need a gift, so actually it's for your
[12:41] Speaker 1: fortieth birthday. I just getting into a little late. So
[12:45] Speaker 1: I went and I sat in the car and I
[12:47] Speaker 1: started to unwrap it and I gasped.
[12:51] Speaker 2: Fun.
[12:53] Speaker 1: He didn't read my mind, he read my soul.
[12:56] Speaker 2: Wow.
[12:56] Speaker 1: He gave me a cassette Blair with two blank cassettes,
[13:02] Speaker 1: and I thought wow. And my wife got me a
[13:09] Speaker 1: landline that connects my Bluetooth to your cell phone.
[13:13] Speaker 2: So that oh, that's how it works. But it's a
[13:15] Speaker 2: sort of a regular phone that you pick up with.
[13:17] Speaker 1: It's a regular phone that you pick up and so
[13:21] Speaker 1: and then what we're intending to do is to set,
[13:24] Speaker 1: you know, for a period of time, let's say it's
[13:27] Speaker 1: on Sunday, to set a almost done away message. If
[13:30] Speaker 1: you remember from the old chat machines. Yes, that if
[13:34] Speaker 1: you get a text it says, hey, I'm not on
[13:36] Speaker 1: my phone right now, or whatever disclaimer you want to
[13:40] Speaker 1: put out there, give me a buzz if you really
[13:43] Speaker 1: need me, here's the number and you can call. Wow,
[13:46] Speaker 1: and all of that. It's what you're saying. It's intentionality,
[13:50] Speaker 1: it's okay instead of listening to whatever the algorithm thinks
[13:55] Speaker 1: that I want, and it could be dangerously good. It's unbelievable,
[14:01] Speaker 1: and you discover and it's so hard because you discover things.
[14:05] Speaker 1: There are bands that I've discovered via the algorithm that
[14:08] Speaker 1: it says, you know what Dave based on your listening,
[14:11] Speaker 1: I think you'd like this, And I say, you're right,
[14:14] Speaker 1: that's great. I never would have discovered that on my own.
[14:17] Speaker 2: I know it.
[14:18] Speaker 1: But there's also music that I haven't listened to because
[14:20] Speaker 1: it gets buried.
[14:21] Speaker 2: That's right.
[14:22] Speaker 1: And then I find it and I say, wow, I
[14:24] Speaker 1: love this album. Why don't I listen to this?
[14:26] Speaker 2: Yeah?
[14:27] Speaker 1: And so the cassette player a CD LPs, like you're saying, what,
[14:31] Speaker 1: and they're all kind of having a renaissance. I don't
[14:33] Speaker 1: know if you pay for this.
[14:35] Speaker 3: Yeah, my younger daughter actually has an LP for playing
[14:39] Speaker 3: vinyl records, which have their own sound. It's like a
[14:41] Speaker 3: kind of a cool sound that you know you lose
[14:44] Speaker 3: in a digital medium.
[14:45] Speaker 2: But it's funny.
[14:45] Speaker 3: But if you think about it, even cassettes or even that,
[14:48] Speaker 3: even right, the LPs were a move toward digitization, right,
[14:54] Speaker 3: So we moved from okay, I need to be in
[14:57] Speaker 3: the presence of a string quartet to hear it, and
[15:00] Speaker 3: it's going to go off into the ether and no
[15:02] Speaker 3: one can ever hear it again. You record it, you
[15:04] Speaker 3: sort of freeze that in place, right, so you're able
[15:06] Speaker 3: to remove the experience of the listening from that kind
[15:09] Speaker 3: of physical origin point. And so we're already sort of
[15:12] Speaker 3: moving in that way. But there is something I think
[15:15] Speaker 3: profoundly different about the kind of radical digitization combined with
[15:21] Speaker 3: radical connectivity too, that that just you know, these are
[15:26] Speaker 3: these things are beneficial, but they can also amplify all
[15:29] Speaker 3: of our sort of worse aspects. I mean, it's just
[15:32] Speaker 3: like the more connected and the more you can communicate
[15:34] Speaker 3: with other people, the easiernes is to communicate the evil plans, right,
[15:38] Speaker 3: And so that's just that's always true, but I think
[15:42] Speaker 3: it's especially important now that people have a good anthropology
[15:45] Speaker 3: and a good metaphysics, because so much of the debate
[15:47] Speaker 3: about artificial intelligence and transhumanism it's a proxy war for
[15:52] Speaker 3: people's metaphysical differences, and so the materialist has a particular
[15:56] Speaker 3: take on this. Theists and Christians ought to see it differently,
[16:01] Speaker 3: but sometimes they themselves don't know how to sort of
[16:04] Speaker 3: translate their theological views into this kind of complicated technical zone.
[16:10] Speaker 3: But I think there's never been a time in which
[16:12] Speaker 3: having good metaphysics is necessary for sort of analyzing technological trends.
[16:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, and so I actually wanted to ask you about
[16:20] Speaker 1: this later, but since we're in it, Yeah, what how
[16:25] Speaker 1: do you use AI, because I know you use it?
[16:27] Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, absolutely, I use it quite liberally, I would say. So,
[16:33] Speaker 3: I mean I think I did I have the benefit.
[16:34] Speaker 3: I'm at gen X, and so I had the experience
[16:37] Speaker 3: of using actual physical card catalogs as a look yet,
[16:41] Speaker 3: and even in graduate school there was still a card
[16:43] Speaker 3: catalog in a big library I use. And then we
[16:46] Speaker 3: went to the cd ROM databases, and then you know,
[16:50] Speaker 3: of course we've got search engines in which journals are online,
[16:54] Speaker 3: and the search engines themselves were amazing. I still remember
[16:57] Speaker 3: my first Google search around I don't know, nineteen ninety
[16:59] Speaker 3: nine or two thousand and the AIS by which these days,
[17:04] Speaker 3: when people say AIS, they're mainly referring to the chat bots,
[17:07] Speaker 3: even though search engines are a form of AI. But
[17:11] Speaker 3: they're so good, and they were good even when they
[17:14] Speaker 3: were hallucinating a lot right at the beginning, because they
[17:17] Speaker 3: are so good with natural language that everyone's recognized. Okay,
[17:20] Speaker 3: the capacity to be able to use natural human language
[17:24] Speaker 3: like a human. That's a high bar because even though
[17:26] Speaker 3: we have the rules, of course, there's grammatical rules and
[17:29] Speaker 3: spelling rules, it can be easily delineated. There's just a
[17:32] Speaker 3: lot more going on when two humans, you know, two
[17:36] Speaker 3: conscious agents are communicating. And so it's tempting to think, okay,
[17:40] Speaker 3: now we're reaching a point in which our technology it's
[17:43] Speaker 3: getting more like us. Right before, Okay, a tractor that's
[17:47] Speaker 3: not like us, that's right, Maybe that replaces a job
[17:50] Speaker 3: for an oxygen. But you know, well, the mental stuff,
[17:53] Speaker 3: the intellectual stuff that seems like it's like us, and
[17:55] Speaker 3: so it seems sort of scary, but it's easy to
[17:57] Speaker 3: forget that. Okay, those chat bots, how did they get
[18:00] Speaker 3: so good? They got so good because they have this
[18:02] Speaker 3: massive amount of data that it can be trained on,
[18:04] Speaker 3: and all of that data was produced by human beings,
[18:07] Speaker 3: intelligent agents. Every web page, every journal article. It's just
[18:11] Speaker 3: really good at running the statistics and you know, under
[18:15] Speaker 3: discovering underlying patterns we might not have noticed. And then
[18:18] Speaker 3: of course the systems themselves are are designed by software engineers,
[18:23] Speaker 3: they're optimized, they're tweaked, and so humans are still all
[18:26] Speaker 3: over this, and so again it's just another tool, but
[18:29] Speaker 3: it's a very it's a very amazing and sophisticated tool.
[18:32] Speaker 3: And so I would say at the moment, my main
[18:35] Speaker 3: use for the for the chatbots is for research. I know,
[18:39] Speaker 3: that's that's actually kind of a really low level thing.
[18:41] Speaker 3: I don't use it to write by papers or something
[18:43] Speaker 3: like that. I will ask it, okay, find the most
[18:47] Speaker 3: authoritative and most cited reference on this topic, and it'll
[18:51] Speaker 3: find it.
[18:51] Speaker 2: I mean, it's just like that. It can help you summarize.
[18:55] Speaker 3: It's just really really powerful, and so it's it's qualitatively
[18:59] Speaker 3: different from the experience of search engines, which just kind
[19:03] Speaker 3: of give you a list of other sides. And so
[19:06] Speaker 3: I mean, the reality is if everyone else is using
[19:10] Speaker 3: these chatbots and you're not, you're basically foregoing the use
[19:13] Speaker 3: of a tool that would make you much better at
[19:16] Speaker 3: probably what you're doing. At the same time, that tool
[19:20] Speaker 3: is really good for cheaters, right that want to just
[19:23] Speaker 3: you know, it's like the days of a professor giving
[19:25] Speaker 3: an essay exam and then just having it turned in
[19:29] Speaker 3: or probably over.
[19:30] Speaker 2: You've got to have checks.
[19:31] Speaker 3: And balances that might just mean that, okay, you got
[19:34] Speaker 3: to go back to blue book exams where they're you know,
[19:36] Speaker 3: you've written out, or to oral exams or you know,
[19:39] Speaker 3: and then that's which is actually really a better test
[19:42] Speaker 3: of knowledge anyway, but it's much more labor intensive. And
[19:45] Speaker 3: so I mean, it's it's important to remember that we're
[19:47] Speaker 3: just a couple or three years in to these chat
[19:50] Speaker 3: bots and they're already amazing. Imagine what they're going to
[19:53] Speaker 3: be like in ten years.
[19:55] Speaker 1: Well that's I guess the fantasy and the fear right
[19:59] Speaker 1: exactly like. And we're all kind of in the middle
[20:01] Speaker 1: of that moment where we're trying to figure out what's
[20:06] Speaker 1: in this lamp and do we want to keep it
[20:09] Speaker 1: in or take it out? And there's this kind of consensus.
[20:15] Speaker 1: Everybody who's working on this technology has a fear of it, right,
[20:20] Speaker 1: and yet we can't stop.
[20:21] Speaker 2: That's right, Hey, what do you make of that?
[20:24] Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's funny you say that, because I
[20:25] Speaker 3: just read this book just a few days ago. If
[20:28] Speaker 3: anyone builds it, we all die, which is absolute, Like
[20:32] Speaker 3: the title gives. The whole thing is they run these
[20:34] Speaker 3: scenarios by which it seems almost inevitable that eventually we
[20:37] Speaker 3: build a super intelligence that won't have a need for
[20:40] Speaker 3: us and we're gonna all end up dead. And they
[20:42] Speaker 3: created as plausible as scenario as you can for that.
[20:45] Speaker 3: At the same time, the book is a long exercise
[20:48] Speaker 3: in equivocation and begging the question because they just presuppose.
[20:53] Speaker 3: Like in the whole sort of artificial intelligence debate, there's
[20:57] Speaker 3: this idea of the hard problem of consciousness. Okay, how
[21:00] Speaker 3: do you account for first person perspective or that our
[21:03] Speaker 3: thoughts are about things? That's not a molecules aren't about things,
[21:06] Speaker 3: but our thoughts are about things, right, and so anybody
[21:09] Speaker 3: that's gonna deal with this stuff has to have some
[21:11] Speaker 3: way of dealing with that. Well, the way the authors
[21:13] Speaker 3: of the book deal with it is just to completely
[21:15] Speaker 3: ignore it and just talk about computers choosing things and
[21:18] Speaker 3: determining and preferring and having opinions and deciding and doing
[21:22] Speaker 3: all the things that agents do. But they never justify
[21:25] Speaker 3: that these things could ever be conscious, intelligent agents, which
[21:28] Speaker 3: is so they just beg the biggest philosophical question of
[21:31] Speaker 3: all And I think that's the that's the problem with
[21:35] Speaker 3: so many people that work in this area. On the
[21:37] Speaker 3: one hand, if you ask them, okay, what's happening under
[21:40] Speaker 3: the hood, it's like, Okay, it's actually fairly simple.
[21:43] Speaker 2: I forget if it was Gary.
[21:45] Speaker 3: Wolferm or someone that wrote a little book about like
[21:47] Speaker 3: what's happening with chat GPT, and in terms of describing it,
[21:51] Speaker 3: it's actually really not that complicated. What it does is complicated.
[21:56] Speaker 3: But if you yourself have a bad metaphysical view of
[22:00] Speaker 3: the human person, so you think we're ultimately machines. You
[22:03] Speaker 3: think that human beings ultimately are reducible to physics and
[22:07] Speaker 3: chemistry and a simple process such as natural selection, right,
[22:12] Speaker 3: and we became conscious through these kind of processes, and
[22:16] Speaker 3: our agents, Well, there's no reason that we couldn't design
[22:18] Speaker 3: machines that do the same thing. That's the kind of
[22:22] Speaker 3: that's the sort of leap. And if you press them,
[22:23] Speaker 3: they'll they'll sometimes downgrade us and say, well, who's to
[22:26] Speaker 3: say we're conscious?
[22:27] Speaker 2: Maybe that's an illusion, right.
[22:29] Speaker 3: So you can see how again metaphysics, if you don't
[22:31] Speaker 3: have the right metaphysics, you're going to get freaked out
[22:33] Speaker 3: by this, because they really do. The guys at Google,
[22:35] Speaker 3: they think they're in the process of building a general
[22:40] Speaker 3: artificial intelligence, which won't even really it won't be artifical artificial,
[22:43] Speaker 3: it'll be an intelligence. And if you think that you're
[22:46] Speaker 3: doing that, and you think that makes sense it is possible,
[22:50] Speaker 3: you would you should fear it. That's terrifying.
[22:52] Speaker 2: Right.
[22:53] Speaker 3: On the other hand, I think, actually, if we want
[22:56] Speaker 3: to really anticipate the bad stuff that can happen, we
[23:00] Speaker 3: need to decide what things not to worry about. And
[23:03] Speaker 3: so the set of things not to worry about include
[23:05] Speaker 3: things that are impossible. Right, So if it's not possible
[23:09] Speaker 3: for a machine to be turned into a person, right
[23:12] Speaker 3: at least, you know, without supernatural powers, then we don't
[23:16] Speaker 3: need to worry about that. We don't need to worry
[23:18] Speaker 3: about Skynet waking up, hating us and killing us. It's
[23:21] Speaker 3: got the problems are going to be someplace else, and
[23:23] Speaker 3: that's not waste your time on this. A lot of
[23:25] Speaker 3: the technologists here, because they have bad metaphysics. I think
[23:28] Speaker 3: they waste time worrying about these things that don't make
[23:31] Speaker 3: any sense philosophically.
[23:33] Speaker 2: Mm.
[23:35] Speaker 1: Yeah, somebody was telling me the other day that they
[23:37] Speaker 1: actually think that AI is demonic and that it's evil spirits.
[23:42] Speaker 3: That's right, So evil spirits are sort of channeling into it,
[23:44] Speaker 3: into the technology. I mean you can't, of course, you know,
[23:48] Speaker 3: if you're Christian beliefs in the unseen realm, you can
[23:52] Speaker 3: never sort of dismiss that out of hand. But I
[23:54] Speaker 3: don't think we need anything like that to explain what's
[23:57] Speaker 3: what's actually happening with the chatbots. We actually, even though
[24:01] Speaker 3: we don't know the exact answer they're spitting out, we
[24:04] Speaker 3: know what's happening in terms of backward propagating, and they're
[24:07] Speaker 3: sort of tweaking. It's a you know, a statistical process
[24:11] Speaker 3: involving massive amounts of computational power trained on data that
[24:15] Speaker 3: was written by intelligent agents. That's what's happening. And so
[24:19] Speaker 3: I don't think in this case you don't need to
[24:21] Speaker 3: invoke something like that. It's not like the you know
[24:24] Speaker 3: that hideous the end of that hideous strength, right, or
[24:27] Speaker 3: it's his head is really getting demons are being channeled. Yeah,
[24:32] Speaker 3: so that's that. Again, that's not something I worry that
[24:34] Speaker 3: much about. I do think that the demonic forces are
[24:38] Speaker 3: involved in, you know, all of our activities, but I
[24:41] Speaker 3: don't think that you need to invoke that if you
[24:43] Speaker 3: sort of know a little bit about what's actually happening
[24:45] Speaker 3: under the hood with these technologies.
[24:46] Speaker 1: Yeah, but Jay, listen to this. So I'm going through.
[24:49] Speaker 1: So it was a conversation that I had on this podcast.
[24:52] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[24:53] Speaker 1: And so I was going through on this editing software
[24:55] Speaker 1: that I have, and I've been working all day editing
[24:58] Speaker 1: it because I'm still learning. And I start to edit,
[25:02] Speaker 1: like a little clip of do you use AI? I
[25:05] Speaker 1: hate AI. I think it's evil spirits. I try and
[25:10] Speaker 1: ignore it as much as I can. This is funny.
[25:12] Speaker 1: I'm trying to make a little clip. So I tried
[25:14] Speaker 1: to make a little clip of it, and I couldn't
[25:17] Speaker 1: figure out exactly how to do it. I had done
[25:18] Speaker 1: it before, but I saw all the program has a
[25:22] Speaker 1: co creator, an AI co creator, all right, so I said, hey,
[25:26] Speaker 1: can you make me this little clip? I'm it erased
[25:29] Speaker 1: my entire day's work.
[25:33] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like my co pilot on all my all
[25:35] Speaker 3: my Microsoft stuff.
[25:37] Speaker 2: It's like wanting wanting to be there to help you.
[25:39] Speaker 1: So IT saw her evil spirits comment and said, okay,
[25:43] Speaker 1: watch this.
[25:44] Speaker 3: That's right, though they could just as well be you know,
[25:47] Speaker 3: they they the programmers have shamelessly made it, you know,
[25:52] Speaker 3: created something that because to resist disparaging comments about AI.
[25:57] Speaker 1: Well, that's an I've had so many people tell me
[26:00] Speaker 1: that the way that they interact with these large language models, yeah,
[26:04] Speaker 1: is always with a veil of kind of politeness. Could
[26:08] Speaker 1: you please? Would you please? Thank you? Because they're trying
[26:12] Speaker 1: to train it.
[26:13] Speaker 3: Yes, that's right, you're trying to train it. And also
[26:16] Speaker 3: you're habituating yourself, right, So I do the same thing.
[26:19] Speaker 2: I don't.
[26:20] Speaker 3: I don't want to accustom myself to speaking bluntly, right,
[26:23] Speaker 3: Like I guess I could just ask these questions very bluntly,
[26:26] Speaker 3: but I recognize so I wouldn't want to write colleagues
[26:28] Speaker 3: that way in an email because it sound bad, And
[26:32] Speaker 3: so I try, you know, you habituate yourself, and so
[26:34] Speaker 3: I try to write like I would write to a person.
[26:36] Speaker 3: Although I have absolutely no temptation to think that that's
[26:39] Speaker 3: really a person anymore than I think it's really a
[26:41] Speaker 3: person giving me my answers to a Google query.
[26:44] Speaker 2: And so I think that's good.
[26:45] Speaker 3: It's just why it's the reason you shouldn't use a
[26:48] Speaker 3: bunch of profanity in private, right because then when you
[26:50] Speaker 3: get mad in public, it's it's going to come out
[26:52] Speaker 3: where creatures have it. So I think it's a good thing.
[26:55] Speaker 3: And then you know, the ais themselves have been optimized
[26:58] Speaker 3: for different things. So I know Claude, which is by
[27:03] Speaker 3: the companies called Anthropic, I know that Claude. From the beginning,
[27:06] Speaker 3: they wanted the AI to really be optimized for de escalating.
[27:10] Speaker 3: So in other words, if you're asking it questions and
[27:12] Speaker 3: you're getting very very agitated, it tries to give you
[27:15] Speaker 3: more careful, nuanced answers to kind of draw you back
[27:18] Speaker 3: from the brink. And they tell you that that's and
[27:20] Speaker 3: so you'll notice that it's doing that. That's actually that
[27:23] Speaker 3: seems like a noble thing. You know, it can maybe
[27:27] Speaker 3: misused or something, but they thought, okay, we don't want
[27:29] Speaker 3: this to amplify anger online, and so we're in our
[27:34] Speaker 3: in our chatbot, we're just going to make it so
[27:37] Speaker 3: that it de escalates, you know, and and it can
[27:39] Speaker 3: tell when you're getting agitated, you know, based on I
[27:43] Speaker 3: suppose the grammar and the if you use all caps
[27:46] Speaker 3: or something like that. But you know, but then it again,
[27:49] Speaker 3: that is, it has these properties because of the choices
[27:53] Speaker 3: of engineers. And the engineers themselves are intelligent persons made
[27:59] Speaker 3: in the image of God.
[28:00] Speaker 2: You can choose things.
[28:01] Speaker 3: And the problem is is that because we use so
[28:03] Speaker 3: much metaphorical language with our technology. You know, we talk
[28:08] Speaker 3: even the fact that we call it artificial intelligence, that
[28:10] Speaker 3: was a marketing plan, right, that was literally people came
[28:14] Speaker 3: up with that term precisely to get us to imagine
[28:17] Speaker 3: it in that way. If we had called it, you know,
[28:20] Speaker 3: I don't know, advanced statistical algorithms or something like that, right,
[28:25] Speaker 3: would be less tempted intelligence. But they got the name
[28:28] Speaker 3: artificial intelligences on now you know, we're off to the races.
[28:32] Speaker 1: Yeah, so it sounds like you're not anti AI or
[28:36] Speaker 1: large language models that you're just approach with discernment.
[28:40] Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I mean, I would say, here's the spectrum
[28:42] Speaker 3: on these questions. Techno utopian tech is going to save us.
[28:45] Speaker 3: It's going to be our salvation. And then like ludditeism,
[28:49] Speaker 3: which all technology sort of bad and it displaces us
[28:52] Speaker 3: and ruins our jobs and alienates us. And then there's
[28:55] Speaker 3: kind of techno optimism over here, or techno pessimism, techno
[28:58] Speaker 3: optimism over here, and you get the middle something like
[29:01] Speaker 3: tech realism. And so I would say I'm like just
[29:04] Speaker 3: one click toward the optimist, but in the tech realist space,
[29:07] Speaker 3: because I do think that we it's generally a good
[29:10] Speaker 3: thing that we can build tractors, you know, or build computers,
[29:14] Speaker 3: because it actually these are expressions of human creativity. They're
[29:18] Speaker 3: part of the mandate, the odds command be fruitful and
[29:20] Speaker 3: multiply and fill the earth.
[29:23] Speaker 2: And subdu it.
[29:23] Speaker 3: So our fecundity, you know, biologically and having children and
[29:28] Speaker 3: our fecundity and creating those are both in themselves expressions
[29:33] Speaker 3: of the fact that we're image bearers, but we're falling,
[29:35] Speaker 3: and so that that's sort of fractured. But because I
[29:38] Speaker 3: think of technology that way, it's a sort of intellectual
[29:41] Speaker 3: prosthesis of human creativity. I think, Okay, I give it
[29:45] Speaker 3: kind of a benefit of the doubt, but let's look really,
[29:47] Speaker 3: really carefully at the ways in which human sin can
[29:50] Speaker 3: distort these things.
[29:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know if it's unique to him, but
[29:54] Speaker 1: I've heard Derek Thompson talk about how AI is going
[29:58] Speaker 1: in these large language moments, are going to create two superclasses.
[30:03] Speaker 1: One that's a superclass that uses AI to think with
[30:07] Speaker 1: them kind of like what you're explaining, like I say,
[30:10] Speaker 1: help them with research and to kind of really synthesize.
[30:14] Speaker 1: And a superclass if you could use the word of people,
[30:18] Speaker 1: but lower class who it uses AI to or they
[30:23] Speaker 1: use AI to think for them. So with versus four,
[30:27] Speaker 1: how do we avoid that? Because I feel like the
[30:29] Speaker 1: line is it is vapor thin.
[30:31] Speaker 3: I mean again, it's the sort of Matthew principle. To
[30:34] Speaker 3: him who has much more will be given and to
[30:36] Speaker 3: him who has little even what he has will be
[30:37] Speaker 3: taken away. It feels that way because I mean someone
[30:41] Speaker 3: like me, somebody like my children. You know, they're homeschooled
[30:44] Speaker 3: and college degrees, graduate degrees and were born just early
[30:50] Speaker 3: enough that they didn't have their entire lives in front
[30:52] Speaker 3: of you know, touch screens. We're beneficiaries of this technology.
[30:57] Speaker 3: I'm using it to amplify what I would do anyway,
[30:59] Speaker 3: which is search and write those sorts of things on
[31:02] Speaker 3: the other hand, if you don't have that it can
[31:05] Speaker 3: you might use it. Like it's sort of just live
[31:07] Speaker 3: your life inside a gaming universe with you know, the
[31:11] Speaker 3: oculus goggles on and you use it because you feel
[31:15] Speaker 3: like your life is not fulfilling, and so you spend
[31:17] Speaker 3: all of your time in this imaginary digital world. And
[31:22] Speaker 3: you know, if you're asked to write a letter or
[31:24] Speaker 3: to write something, you just use the AI to do.
[31:26] Speaker 2: It for you.
[31:27] Speaker 3: And so if you have any skill, it's figuring out
[31:29] Speaker 3: how to query to get the right answer right that.
[31:31] Speaker 3: I think that's quite possible. I don't think it'll be
[31:33] Speaker 3: quite as stark as Thompson describes it, but it's memorable
[31:36] Speaker 3: because it's like these sort of two things. Just as
[31:39] Speaker 3: people predicted that. You know, they'll always say, well, there's
[31:43] Speaker 3: this massive hollowing out of the middle class and you
[31:45] Speaker 3: get like a few super rich and then everybody's poor.
[31:48] Speaker 3: That's actually not true. I mean, if you just actually
[31:50] Speaker 3: look at the statistics, it's not true that the middle
[31:53] Speaker 3: class has disappeared. There's still vast majority of people are
[31:56] Speaker 3: in the middle class. There are some ultra rich, you know,
[31:59] Speaker 3: billlionaires like Elon Musk with over one hundred million dollars.
[32:03] Speaker 3: But I think that in general, these technologies, as long
[32:06] Speaker 3: as they're deployed properly, will create value. And if value
[32:10] Speaker 3: is created in an economy or wealth, that ends up
[32:14] Speaker 3: having an effect for lots of people.
[32:16] Speaker 2: Because it's not it's not It's like Elon Musk, I
[32:18] Speaker 2: can't remember what it is.
[32:19] Speaker 3: Net worth is. Maybe it's let's just say it's three
[32:21] Speaker 3: hundred billion, which you know, or something like that. He's staggering.
[32:24] Speaker 2: He's not sitting on three hundred billion dollars worth of gold, right.
[32:27] Speaker 3: Almost all of that is assets that are deployed and
[32:30] Speaker 3: being created. And so I don't think there's any reason
[32:34] Speaker 3: to think we won't have something like that. I do
[32:36] Speaker 3: think there'll be these kind of first major, first mover advantages.
[32:40] Speaker 3: Musk again a perfect example. He and a few guys
[32:43] Speaker 3: started PayPal. He took that money and he parlated into Tesla.
[32:48] Speaker 3: He owns the boring company. Right, of course, he has SpaceX,
[32:52] Speaker 3: the robotics that he's developing, and you know the satellite
[32:58] Speaker 3: you know sort of you know, email and Internet satellites
[33:03] Speaker 3: that he's deployed everywhere practically in orbit around the Earth.
[33:07] Speaker 2: Notice what he's done.
[33:08] Speaker 3: Is he's basically taking on and developing technologies in these
[33:13] Speaker 3: areas that he imagines are going to be part of
[33:14] Speaker 3: the future, and then also serve a role in getting
[33:18] Speaker 3: us to Mars. Almost every one of these right has
[33:20] Speaker 3: something to do with that particular goal. But you know,
[33:24] Speaker 3: it's very hard to say, well, he's the only beneficiary
[33:27] Speaker 3: of that. I mean, having self driving Tesla cars. He's
[33:30] Speaker 3: not the only beneficiary of that in Iran. If your
[33:32] Speaker 3: only access to the Internet is because he's turned on
[33:36] Speaker 3: you know, Skylink, that's that's beneficial to other people as well.
[33:40] Speaker 3: So I don't think there's no reason to think we'll
[33:42] Speaker 3: have this dystopian Healscape with twelve super elites enjoying this
[33:46] Speaker 3: stuff and everybody just sitting in their version of the matrix.
[33:49] Speaker 3: It's a really good image though, to help clarify, Okay,
[33:53] Speaker 3: let's do what we need to do to make sure
[33:55] Speaker 3: that nothing like that happens.
[33:57] Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, getting back to why I hated you initially.
[34:03] Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's right, that's why we were on that topic.
[34:06] Speaker 1: You know, we're going to talk about you know, communal
[34:09] Speaker 1: versus individual. Yes, and this quote came up and I thought,
[34:13] Speaker 1: you know, on on its face, it doesn't sound that bad,
[34:18] Speaker 1: but I want you to dissect it. Now, this doesn't
[34:20] Speaker 1: have to do with fasting. We are going to talk
[34:22] Speaker 1: about that, But tell me why together we will replace
[34:26] Speaker 1: the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
[34:31] Speaker 1: Isn't as beautiful as it sounds.
[34:33] Speaker 3: Well, it isn't as beautiful as it sounds because it
[34:35] Speaker 3: trades on a couple of stereotypes. Right, So rugged individualism.
[34:40] Speaker 3: People use that, and it's sort of associated with Ronald
[34:43] Speaker 3: Reagan and things like that, and it's supposed to invoke
[34:45] Speaker 3: this idea of the wild West, right, which these individuals forged,
[34:50] Speaker 3: you know, a world for themselves that they didn't depend
[34:52] Speaker 3: on others. So there's this kind of radical autonomy. Of course,
[34:56] Speaker 3: if you read Alexi totolk Phil's Democracy in America, even
[34:58] Speaker 3: in the eighteen thirties.
[35:00] Speaker 2: It was nothing like that that.
[35:02] Speaker 3: The thing that stood out to him wasn't a bunch
[35:03] Speaker 3: of isolated individuals. It was these voluntary associations in which
[35:07] Speaker 3: these little towns and communities would build up and the
[35:09] Speaker 3: first thing they do is build a church and a
[35:13] Speaker 3: school for everyone, and they have community groups. And he
[35:15] Speaker 3: noticed how communal like spontaneously communal Americans were, and so
[35:20] Speaker 3: that's always been I think a stereotype. And then the
[35:24] Speaker 3: warmness of collectivism. Okay, so what are you talking about?
[35:27] Speaker 3: So collectivism is sort of vague? Is Soviet communism or
[35:31] Speaker 3: maybe like under stalin is that what we're talking about.
[35:33] Speaker 3: Are you're talking about a family, right, that's a community
[35:36] Speaker 3: of persons. Well, it's supposed to invoke all those things.
[35:39] Speaker 3: It's what it's really designed to do is to get
[35:41] Speaker 3: you to imagine that what ends up looking a lot
[35:44] Speaker 3: like Stalinism is more like the family. And so it's
[35:49] Speaker 3: entirely designed to trade on our kind of mental images
[35:53] Speaker 3: of what these things are. And so if you're, say
[35:56] Speaker 3: a right winger and you believe the rugged individi jewel myth,
[36:01] Speaker 3: you're going to find it insulting. And if you're on
[36:03] Speaker 3: the left and you like the idea of collectivism, you're
[36:05] Speaker 3: going to like it. And also, by the way, you
[36:06] Speaker 3: hate rugged individualism. Neither of these things is actually an
[36:10] Speaker 3: accurate description of the American experience or American culture, because
[36:16] Speaker 3: if you associate, for instance, a market economy with rugged individualism, well,
[36:21] Speaker 3: people's well being as much greater in market economies, all
[36:24] Speaker 3: things being equal to in any kind of command economy.
[36:28] Speaker 3: But really, I just think we need to think beyond
[36:30] Speaker 3: these stereotypes. And when we were talking about different political economies,
[36:33] Speaker 3: you've got to talk about all the details. It is
[36:35] Speaker 3: the rule of law as or state that's functional but
[36:39] Speaker 3: isn't tobratly powerful, so that you have things that a
[36:42] Speaker 3: society that recognizes and respects are genuine individualities, creatures made
[36:47] Speaker 3: the image of God with intrinsic rights as the declaration
[36:51] Speaker 3: of independences and responsibilities, but also recognizes and respects our
[36:56] Speaker 3: communal reality, the family, the church, local environments, as opposed
[37:02] Speaker 3: to flattening everything out so that it's just isolated individuals
[37:05] Speaker 3: related to the state.
[37:07] Speaker 2: We asked the question that way, right.
[37:09] Speaker 3: It's more complicated and subtle and not good for a
[37:13] Speaker 3: politician stereotype, but it clarifies what we actually should want.
[37:17] Speaker 2: And what we don't want.
[37:18] Speaker 3: One of the things that we don't want is an
[37:20] Speaker 3: overly centralized decision decision making apparatus in which things are
[37:26] Speaker 3: decided coercively when they didn't need to.
[37:29] Speaker 2: Because in a sense, you could.
[37:30] Speaker 3: Think of the role of the state as if the
[37:34] Speaker 3: state's doing what it ought to do that's the domain
[37:36] Speaker 3: of coercion, right, and the limits actually the use of violence. Well,
[37:42] Speaker 3: it'd be nice if as much as possible could be
[37:44] Speaker 3: decided deliberatively or voluntarily rather than coercively. Collectivism, at least
[37:49] Speaker 3: in its socialist and communist manifestations, basically just puts absolutely
[37:53] Speaker 3: everything in the hands of the state, and so it
[37:55] Speaker 3: reduces all social relations to the relation of government and subject,
[38:01] Speaker 3: in other words, power. And this is unfortunately, we don't
[38:04] Speaker 3: learn these lessons. Everybody that's you know, under forty has
[38:08] Speaker 3: no memory of the Cold War, so they don't really
[38:10] Speaker 3: remember what's at stake, and so the same dumb kindness
[38:13] Speaker 3: in my from I you socialist stereotypes keep emerging, precisely
[38:16] Speaker 3: because like the word socialism, right, it sounds nice. It's
[38:19] Speaker 3: got the word social in it. Isn't that good? What
[38:22] Speaker 3: do you want to answers? Yeah, those are your option
[38:25] Speaker 3: to shaw this goes right? But okay, yeah, but that's
[38:27] Speaker 3: just a word and a mental picture. Right, Let's look
[38:29] Speaker 3: at the way this actually works in real in real practice.
[38:32] Speaker 1: You've been listening to a preview of my conversation with
[38:36] Speaker 1: Jay Richards from a commitment to reality to hear the
[38:39] Speaker 1: rest of this conversation. Follow a commitment to reality wherever
[38:44] Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts, and make sure to subscribe so
[38:48] Speaker 1: you never miss a conversation. I'll see you there

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