The three hosts are back at the end of the summer, and the news has piled up. Meta settled with forty-seven state attorneys general for up to $17 billion, and Austin walks through what the company actually conceded, why those concessions leave the core product intact, and how Meta turned its own loss into a strike at Snap, TikTok, and YouTube. Andrew noticed that Claude’s memory feature excludes religious beliefs, which leaves a secular default sitting underneath everything else it personalizes, and Joel explains what really happened when models “escaped the sandbox,” whether a VPN is worth paying for, and why an ordinary church is an easy target.
Wyatt Graham returns to read Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — not the Pope “coming out against AI” but Catholic social teaching applied to the new thing. Technology is never neutral under the condition of the conditioners, the few oppress the many through its instruments, and prudential reasoning is the one thing AI cannot do.
A year after his ChatGPT prayer went viral, John Piper revisits AI on David Platt's Radical podcast. Austin and Joel hear less of a reversal than a sharpening. AI is a real kind of intelligence, and what makes us human is the spirit, not the feeling.
Crossway gave the show permission to play a whole chapter of Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World, “Machines: Becoming Industrialized,” read by the author himself. All three hosts then respond: whether the AI moment is a second Industrial Revolution or what Joel would rather call an autonomy revolution, why Austin thinks the internet is still the closer analogy, why the Luddite comparison turns dark around data centers, and what the invention of marketing did to who gets to speak in a church.
SEO is dead, so Andrew reframes the whole question: communication is how we love our neighbor, which means choosing the right medium. The hosts work through email, group texts, church apps like Planning Center, a Google Voice text ministry, and the new robots.txt era of search.