Human is the New Vinyl - With Micah Voraritskul

You are listening to the rethinking faith podcast, I'm your host Josh Patterson and I'm glad that you're here. I'm a former pastor, turned brewer with a deep love of theology and philosophy. Although I don't always wear the label comfortably, Christianity seems to be baked into who I am. I've found a home within the world of process relational thinking and have made close friends with the mystics. So whether you're a devout believer, a questioning skeptic, a bold atheist, or simply someone trying to figure out what it means to be human, you belong here. Thank you for joining me and taking the risk of entering into the sacred space, and thank you for reminding me that we aren't alone on this journey. Let us imagine a better way to be human together. Let's see how we begin. All right friends, welcome to another episode of the rethinking faith podcast. As always, I'm your host Josh Patterson, and joining me today is actually a new friend, a new guest to the podcast, and that is Micah Vorritzko. Micah, what's going on, man? What's happening? Josh, it's so good to be here, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for taking some time to come and hang out. You know, I first, you know, we kind of talked about this a little bit prior to recording, but I stumbled upon, and geez, words are hard for me today, I guess. I stumbled upon your book, Human is the New Vinyl. After I saw a friend of mine, and also a friend of the podcast, Aaron Simmons, post about it. I was immediately hooked, it's a great title, and so I texted Aaron, it was like, hey, your buddy Micah, would he be a good guest for the podcast? And he said 100% yes, I'll connect you, and the rest is history. Now here we are. I'm so glad he connected us, Aaron's a great guy, and any friend of Aaron's is a friend of mine. So I'm so grateful to be here, and thanks for taking the time, and thanks to all your listeners to you for tuning in. Yeah, most definitely, man, well, for listeners who didn't, you know, see the post about your book on Aaron's social media page, and then aren't familiar with you, would you mind maybe sharing a little bit of your background, who you are, and what kind of things you find yourself doing? Yeah, so, yeah, sometimes it's hard to know where to start. I have been in my life, I've been a school teacher, I've been a missionary, I've been a pastor in mega church world, and I've been a carpenter, I've been a waiter, so I've done a lot of different things. Lately I'm the founder of a movement, an organization called Verified Human, and we have members for Verified Human in 28 countries on all six inhabited continents. So a pretty broad-based movement, but we're small in grassroots still, we have a few hundred members, but these are real artists, writers, musicians, real photographers, filmmakers, voice actors, and our purpose was, you know, when AI proliferated so greatly in 2023, 2024, I started saying, oh man, this is going to crush, like generative AI is going to crush the creative arts, and it's going to be a massive problem for education too, where students will be able to write papers using chat GPT or a clot or a Gemini or whatever, and teachers aren't going to know how to assess the learning, right? Because it's a teacher's job to teach, and a student's job is to learn it and to write out what they've learned for the teacher to assess. So I knew it was going to be a big problem, so I founded this group called Verified Human, and our goal is to help differentiate human-created content from AI-generated content, which is getting harder and harder to do. But we got in it early in the conversation, and remind me, and I'll tell you a couple of fun stories about what really triggered me to jump into it, but that's what I've been up to. The book, "Human is the new vinyl, why human creativity still wins in the AI revolution." That came out in August, and I just released the audio book, which I would love for more people to get, especially if you're a podcast person. I narrated it myself, and we'll talk more about that. It was hard to narrate it myself. I'm glad I did it, but it was for the listeners, it was for my audience. I didn't want to hire somebody else. I wanted to do it myself, I wanted them to hear what my brain was doing, so yeah, man, that's a little bit about me. Yeah, sweet dude. Actually, I'm interested. I do want to ask you kind of what were those things that to use your language, like, triggered you to jump into the world of AI. One thing I wanted to point out that I really enjoyed, in a way, it seems like it could be an own object lesson in itself of your book, is, so like you said, it's called "Human is the new vinyl," and I'm, so I'm a nerd, my degree is in digital media graphic design, and I took many typography classes, and I absolutely love the physical layout of your book. It's very intentional. I think it's beautifully laid out, and it also, it gives that human feel to it. It feels like a creative person piece this together very conscientiously, and so I thought that was a neat connection I made in my head, as far as this is a very human book. I thought that was pretty cool. I appreciate you saying that, because every single design decision was made by me and my wife and Aaron, and we, you know, I picked the fonts, I wanted it to be, I wanted a "served font" to be the main body, I wanted a non-served font to be the headers, I wanted it to be clean, so all of the layout, all the graphic design, and everything was done by, by me, my wife, and then all of the direction on organization and stuff came from Aaron, and some folks over at wisdom work, my publisher, but all organic, 100% home spun, and it turned out pretty good. Just like, it looks like any book that would be on a Barnes and Noble shelf, so we're really super happy about the way it turned out. Yeah, I mean, it looks nice, dude, like, I mean, just anecdotally, there's a, there's a spot that I like to hang out at. It's called Backwater Books, and it's an independent bookstore, ran by two amazing owners, Matt Nally, and they are former school teachers, and they want to open up a bookstore, an independent bookstore, but here's the spin, it has a bar in it. Nice. The first floor kind of has like, there's like a meeting area for like book studies and stuff, and then, you know, the cash register and like, chachkis and some like, little books and stuff, you go upstairs, that's where all the main stacks are, but also the bar, and so they have like local craft beer on like a spinning rotating, you know, kind of menu, they have an amazing cocktail program that they brought in recently, wine, all sorts of stuff. But anyway, I was reading this at their bookstore, and the bartender came over and like, it caught her attention, and she was like, oh, this is really cool, and she also picked it up and looked through it and was commenting on just, you know, the overall beauty of the book is a whole as well. Well, it's cool. I've got to try to get it out of the design. Well, too. Thanks for saying that. Most people don't even notice that really, so that makes me feel good, because we did, we were very intentional. I wanted the book to look good, I wanted it to be clean, and I wanted it to be legible. So, you know, when you get down to these decisions, when you're making a book about how big do you want your margins to be, how many blank pages do you want there to be? You know, those are all decisions that cost money, because that's why people use small margins, because then they'd have to pay for less pages to be printed, right? But I was like, no, I don't care about the page count. I want it to be laid out. I want it to be really clean and legible. I want the font size to be big enough that guys, my age, don't have to put on their reading glasses to read it, you know, so I appreciate you saying that, that means a lot, man. Yeah. For sure. I don't know. Just like I said, as a nerd who pays attention to those kind of things, it made me excited. But to go back to kind of where we started, what did kind of trigger your interest in the world of AI? Like, why did you want to take such a deep dive into this area of study? Yeah, I was not a big, I've always liked technology. I've always been very connected with technology and recording technology. You know, I've gotten into that. I was a huge music fan, my, my, my, have been my whole life. You know, I went from the vinyl's and the vinyl records and eight tracks to cassette tapes, to CDs, to MP3's and M4As and Wayfiles and all that stuff. I downloaded thousands of songs from Napster, you know, trying to rebuild my lost library. I was one of those promiscuous people who were just like, hey, I bought this at one point. I have the right to get it again, you know, and all that stuff. So I've always kind of been a techie. I've always had the newest, latest, you know, Apple products before even Apple was cool. And so I've been interested in, you know, when AI came on the scene, my son is a computer science and math major. And he's brilliant, his name is Ethan, and he got like a 15 something on the SAT. I don't even know what it was, but he's one of, he's like that smart. You know what I mean? He's like, not just like, oh, he's an intelligent person. He's like smart, smart. So, but he came in one day and was like, hey, dad, there's this new thing called mid-journey. And there's another one called stable diffusion. And these are like text to image generation models. So you can just like tell it what you want and it'll draw anything. It'll draw a dog eating a banana while riding a bicycle, if you want, and it'll do it in the style of digoss. And I literally was like looking to him like he was speaking a foreign language. I was like, I don't even understand the words you just said, dude, like what? You're telling me that with words, I can tell a computer program to create images and their novel images. I was like, what are they even based on? And he was like, oh, well, they're based on every scrapable image ever created on the internet. And I'm like, and it's learned how to what they are, what the shapes are, what the colors are, what the patterns are. So it's a pattern recognition model that basically just takes your words and crushes them and then can create images. And I was like, okay, he goes, try it. I was like, tell it to draw. And I was like doing a bathroom project. I was like putting a vent fan up in our guest bathroom. And so I was like on a ladder literally when he came in and I was like, tell it to draw a half Asian guy on a ladder angry installing a vent fan into the bathroom. And he's like, okay, and he's like, and then 10 seconds later, there were like 15 images of me doing exactly what I was doing in that moment that looked remarkably like me doing what I was doing in that moment. And they didn't exist in the universe 30 seconds earlier. And I was looking at it just like, I can't believe what I'm seeing, man. This is insane. And my first thought wasn't, this is awesome. My first thought was, this is going to crush the visual artist out there. This is going to crush photographers. And so it was cool, about three months later, that was in July of 22, about three or four months later, chat GPT came out and he said, hey, remember that model that made images? And he's like, well, there's a new model now that writes incredibly and it can pass the bar exam and it can pass the MCATs and it can write essays, poems, lyrics, it can do studies for you, it can do outlines for you, it can do anything, it can write anything a human can write, and it can already write in 100 languages. And I was like, oh my gosh, so we played around with it and I was just like, my first thought was as a teacher, this is going to crush, this is going to crush education, what's going to happen when billions of students no longer had the ability to think critically and write like that. So on the one hand, I'm awed by the technology and on the other hand, I'm worried about humanity and that really got my attention. So I started thinking to myself, how would we differ, like, my first thought was, soon this, this technology is going to advance very quickly. And soon this is going to get crash music production, it's going to get crash filmmaking and it's going to get crash video game creation, it's going to get great, get crash vocal and vocal, you know, voice, voice attacks or synthetic voices that technology has been developing since the 1970s. So that's not a big deal. We're used to that, we're used to Amazon, Alexa and Siri and we're used to hearing electronic voices. But I was like, it's going to be able to synthesize human voices to the degree where you will not be able to tell if your mom is calling you or if it's a computer. I literally thought that in 2023 and people thought I was crazy. They're like, no, the uncanny valley is like, it's never going to get that good. I was like, no, dude, just trust me. In about two or three years, this is going to be so good. No one will be able to tell the difference between something a person has made and something that AI has made and they're going to assume by default, AI probably made this unless you can prove otherwise. And that's a major problem for human kind. Like that's a massive problem in so many different ways. What's ironic is that an article came out two weeks ago from the CEO of Instagram and he literally said, it's going to be easier now to a valve human created content than it is to disavow AI created content. And I was like, I told you, I told you, here we are. So that got me going, I'm sorry if I'm talking too much, but the two ways that people have decided are the best ways to solve this problem, to mitigate this problem. The first one is technology. We're going to block chain encrypt this or we're going to watermark this, right? Well, AI doesn't care about that. It's like, yeah, sure, give me a watermark image and I'll make an exact replica of it with no watermark on it. Because media moves so fast, individual creators don't have the ability to even monitor that or I mean, they don't have the band, but they're trying to make a living. They're not trying to like get out there and figure out if anybody's ripped them off. So I realized very quickly that technology was going to fail and also like AI detection and writing. I was like, well, you know, it's going to be a cat chasing its tail because AI is going to write something, then AI is going to detect the writing, then AI is going to figure out how to write it to where the detectors can't catch it. And sure enough, undetectable.ai can rehumanize content now. I think they're getting better with that, but anyway, I just realized this is going to be like technology is not going to be the answer. The other thing, the other way that they're trying to solve it is through legislation. So it's huge solutions to the problem, our technology and legislation. Well, I call my friend on the hill in DC and I said, hey, what is Congress, what is Congress saying right now about AI? And this was probably April and May of 23. She goes, they don't even know what chat GPT is yet. I was like, you got to be kidding me. I was like, there's 300 million users. There's more chat GPT users than there are people in the United States now, or there will be like in a month. And they don't even know what it is. She goes, no, remember the internet, remember when they were like, oh, the internet's just going to be a fad, you know, that was Congress in 1996. This thing called the internet, it's just what the kids are doing. It's never going to catch on. So I realize very quickly that copyrights are complex. People don't really, people just ignore them, laws are slow. So I realize really quickly, like, this is going to boil down to human trust, man. It's going to boil down to trust between someone who makes something and the person who is their audience. And they're going to have to look their audience in the eye and say, I made this for you. And this is how I did it. And this is what I didn't do. And I'm going to put this label on it, like my fingerprint, to sit, to tell you, I made this this way. And I'm asking you to trust me. And that's not nothing, it's more valuable, and nobody's doing that, nobody was doing that. So we decided that's what we're going to do, that's what verified humans all about. Yes, wait, it's, it's definitely interesting. It's been interesting being able to watch AI kind of, you know, erupt and blow up on the scene, and see, you know, people like my sister, who is 16, almost kind of grow up with AI in a sense, and like go through school with it when I didn't really have that. And I'm not too far from her, I'm 31, but like, this kind of stuff wasn't, you know, as prominent, even, you know, G's 10 years ago when I graduated college, which that makes me feel old. Yeah, it just keeps happening that way, bro. But I do, so I do think though, you know, you're talking about trust and verified human. And the title of your book is also a metaphor that you use that kind of runs throughout the book as a whole, which is human is the new vinyl. And so I'm just, I'm curious if you could kind of break down that metaphor for us for and for the listeners. Yeah, so for the vinyl fans out there, you'll, you'll know that, you know, vinyl had, you know, it was the, it was the main way that music got distributed in the United States for probably about 50 years. You know, vinyl first came around, you know, started getting developed by, by guys like, you know, Bell and Bert and Bert Linner in Germany. And, you know, then it got, it got big in the United States in the 1920s and they started making, they started putting music on vinyl records and selling them and they were like, oh, this is great. So people started buying turntables. And vinyl was like the way that people bought, bought most of their music. If you wanted the best version of music that you could get, you wouldn't buy a cassette tape in the night, you know, from the 50s to this, to the 80s, you buy vinyl because it sounded better. And so vinyl was, was the king of all music. It's house. It's out old DJs. That's why they call them disc jockeys because they would take, not CDs, but they would take record discs or 45s, 45, you know, was the single version, the small version. And they would jockey them. They would spin them around and that's, that's where disc jockey got its name was, was people using vinyl. So vinyl was massive that it sold almost a billion units in 1982. Michael Jackson's thriller was the best selling album of all time. By 2002, it had dropped by a billion units. What would cause vinyl to fall by a billion units in 20 years? Well, it was the emergence of CDs. It was the emergence of digital music and streaming platforms. In 2002, there were like 500,000 vinyl pressings worldwide. It was a billion in 1982, there were 500,000 in 2002. So now though, vinyl's making this massive comeback, right? I'm like, like kids in their 20s are buying turntables and I'm like, so pumped about it. You can go to, you know, this record store day and there's all this, you know, you can go to these vinyl shops and find all this incredible vinyl for like five bucks. You can buy an Elvis Presley album that's like pristine, it's unbelievable. So vinyl made this comeback. And one of the questions I ask in the book is why? Why would vinyl make a comeback? You're a digital media guy. Digital audio is better. It's faster. It's cleaner. You can have thousands of files on a small space. Vinyl sucks. It's brittle. You can scratch it really easily. It warps in the sun. You can't take a record player with you anywhere. If you have 15 albums, they weigh 15 pounds, you know, so it's like, why would anybody ever go back to vinyl? You know, so the book kind of explores that, what's the, what is the tendency? Why aren't we going back? Why did I, why did I see a on NBC national nightly news last night? They talked about knitting coming back among like Gen Z. They're like, all these grandma like crafts are coming back. Why are people in New York City standing in line for two hours to get into a photo booth with their friend and get four black and white pictures out of a little thing and pay eight bucks. You have a billion megapixel camera in your pocket. You can take NASA grade photos, you know, with this photo in your pocket, but you're standing in line for a photo booth. Why are people writing with pencils again? You know, so I think there's this big return back to something you can touch, the experience. When you have digital audio, like you're, you're kind of connected to the ear level, but that's it, right? In the final, you just leave the vinyl, you look at the cover notes, you look at the album artwork, you drop it, you have to stay there with it, you have to flip it over, 22 minutes. It's all you got on the side, 22 minutes, you got, you got to be there for 22 minutes. Later, you got to flip it over. There's something tactile and real about it, and I think that's what's coming back and over against artificial intelligence, I think that's going to come back in all of the creative arts, and I think that people are going to long for something that they can say, "I know a human made this and not an algorithm or a machine," so that's kind of the idea behind the metaphor. Yeah, it's curious, though, and it's funny. It makes me laugh because I got a record player when I was in college. I still have it. Awesome. I love picking up vinyls of like, you know, whenever like, you know, some of my favorite bands or something put out new music and they release a vinyl with it as part of pre-order, I have a tendency to pick that up as well because, you know, it's fun. Yeah. And then like, with the knitting thing, I have a friend who's been knitting, she's my age, I think. Yeah, she'd give her take a year or two, but she's like, been knitting a sweater and putting it on her Instagram story, and it's been like, it's been like, really fun to watch like the progress of this like, random sweater being made from a ball of yarn to like, a wearable thing. And then recently, I had a friend I was talking to, and I noticed that like, I really liked how their pen wrote and talked about like, enjoying pens and stupid shit and then they sent me a video of this pencil, which it's not the kind of pencil you talk about in your book. This is a mechanical pencil that the company Uni puts out and I love their pens. And so it's like weighted listeners, I'm holding up a pencil. It's weighted here. So it feels kind of like, has the weight of a pen when you write. And the actual lead is on like a contraption that like with gears, I don't, yeah, you're probably not going to be able to see it through the camera, but I can see it. Yeah. It writes it actually spins the lead. So it almost feels like you're writing with like a, like, you know, ball kind of pen, but it's that is so cool. I'm going to have to. I'm a pencil fanatic and I'm going to have to give you a link. Please do. I would love to get a link in the show notes too. I'll get. If you're going to put a link in the show notes, you have to put a link to blackwing pencils. Blackwing602.com. I don't know anybody over there. They don't know who I am. So I'm not selling this for my own benefit. I just love their pencils, but that I started writing in pencils in 2019 as a New Year's, as a New Year's resolution. I was like, I'm only going to write a pencil for the whole year. And my wife is like, why? I was like, because I just miss the smell of sharpening pencils and I used to be more creative and I used to like slow down and write stuff. And now I just type everything and, and you know, we got a junk drawer full of old pens. And like, I wanted to have something nice. And so I was like, I'm going to find the best damn pencil I can find in the world. So I started doing research and I found black, these blackwing pencils and like John Steinbeck and, and like Frank Lloyd Wright and all these famous people used to write with this blackwing pencil. And they almost went out of business in the 80s. And then people like Rick Rubin and all these Disney illustrators were up in arms about not having their blackwing pencils. So they made a company bought Palomino and they they revived the brand and now like they're selling, now they sell out of all their pencils is great. So blackwing pencils, you have to try it. Yeah, I definitely looked in, yeah, right on, I definitely looked into the blackwing pencils reading your book because I picked my interest. And I even think Aaron says something, I don't remember if he was in like his endorsement or in the, it was in the forward. Yeah, that he wrote like made a joke about you and your pencils. I know. I'm such a nerd like that. So it's a cool thing to be a nerd about. But I love this man. I love that your sister is knitting a sweater and that she posts about it. That's exactly what human is the new vinyl is about. It's TV dinners sucked. They were, they were the 1950s and 60s answer to a home cooked meal. You know what, they were fast and efficient, but they were terrible. Right. They were just. They represent everything that is wrong with technology. Yeah. First of all, the food was incredibly processed and horrible for you. Second of all, it destroyed the fabric of like the, the family meal, like how rare it is to sit down with your mom and your dad and say, Hey, what happened today? Even if the kids are like, No, I'm fine. How's your friend? Good. It doesn't matter that, that, that family interaction just totally broke down. And now people are cooking meals together again. Now people are, you know, are saying, Hey, we're going to have a dinner party again. And we're going to, um, we're going to, we're going to start knitting again and needle point. And I love, I love it. I love all of it. I love the fact that Polaroid cameras are coming back. I love the fact that, um, vinyl records are making a massive comeback. I mean, they haven't reached free 1982 levels yet, but they are, they are, they are growing super fast and I'm, I'm just so thrilled about that. I'm so happy for artists and stuff. So in live music, live music is, is huge. You know why? Cause, cause a robot robot can't get on a stage and scream into a microphone and blow sweat and spit all over everybody, just like you can't fake that, right? So I love that live music is made a massive comeback in 2025. It's the highest grossing live music touring year of all time, 2025 in history. That's it. Yeah. I, I love live music and I actually think there's something interesting, you know, earlier you talked about, um, how you used to be like a pastor and make a church world, um, as I told you, I, I also used to be a pastor, um, and there's something about, you know, people like complain and such about worship music and oh, it's purely manipulative and blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, and like I get what they're saying, but also in general, music is supposed to be manipulative. It's supposed to make you feel something, right? And you go to a concert, if it didn't make you feel something, you'd be like, well, this is fucking stupid. Why did I pay money to come see this? Right. And so I think one of the things that's interesting is, um, and I'm not, you know, a sociologist or anthropologist, whatever the correct word is, but like as church attendance continues to drop and, you know, the nuns and the nuns are, are on the rise and like concert going is increasing or live music, I wonder if there's some kind of, um, I don't know, that that kind of collective effervescence that you miss out on when you step away from kind of participating in a worship community. And now you can find it in, you know, the bar down the street from my house that has, you know, live music, uh, or then the stadium that's giant and can bring in like the big, you know, massive performances, but like, I wonder if there's some kind of correlation there. So that is, that is a brilliant idea. You could write a whole book probably just about that idea right there. That's, that should be your book. You are uniquely suited to write a book like that. That, that is a fantastic idea that you have. The idea that, that people want to be in a collective musical experience together, that there's something greater than the sum of the parts, that, that's, and, and also that, that you're not uniquely focused on you, you know, that's the, the goal of worship is to get the, the attention off yourself and onto your higher power or whatever, to God in a Christian sense in, in other faith traditions is to get your, your focus off of you. And it's all about me and my problems and what I'm feeling. It's like, no, just, just think about something bigger and better and that's going to make you better. And there's something about going to a concert. I, one of my most spiritual experiences in a musical setting was at a YouTube concert in Baltimore. I was in Baltimore. I was in your city, man. And I remember standing there on the floor of this concert and just going, and it wasn't even like a, a, a slightly Christian ish YouTube song. It was just, I don't know, it was elevation or one of those songs and I was just like, in the moment, and I was just like, I feel close to God in this moment, you know, so that's, a brilliant, mark that down, you need to write that book, Josh Patterson right there. He needs a certain masses, collective effervescence word, noted, added to my list of writing projects. I've been, look, I've been supposed to be writing a master's thesis for like a, a, the longer amount of time than I would like to admit to you right now. And I just haven't been doing it and have been writing fun stuff instead for like my sub stack or whatever, but, uh, hey, look, I will take any excuse not to write my master's thesis at this point. Maybe you should change your master's thesis to that and then get a book out of it and a thesis. Right. That's smart. There we go. I'll put you in connection with my advisor and you tell him that I'm going to do. I'll talk to him because if he, if he has a student that's writing about something that the student is passionate about, it's going to be a better product and the student's going to learn more. If that, if it, if it's a teacher worth this salt, he might, he might listen to that. So I think that's a good point because I think that's part of my hang up is like, uh, you know, now I'm giving you unsolicited, uh, stuff about Josh Patterson, but I have ADHD. And so I chased dopamine and there is zero dopamine in my master's thesis. No. Little dopamine. I read, I read fun books like this instead and write other things and do the podcast. But anyway, um, I'm working on it. I'll solve that problem eventually because I have friends bothering me about it. You know, my buddy, Tripp calls me all the time and harasses me about it. Tom Ord bothers me about it. Aaron bothers me about it. Yeah. The professor himself. Um, yeah, that's, that's great. That's great. Um, I don't know how much time we have left. But one of the things that, you know, I know this is a rethinking faith. And you know, there isn't, there's a spiritual aspect to this, this idea about AI, you know, one of the things that got my attention early was, you know, if you're, if you're a Christian or a Judeo Christian or even a Muslim, then you're part of a group of people that is more than half of the world's inhabitants. And your faith, tradition tells you that a benevolent God created God, created the universe by using words. That is not insignificant. That create the creation of the universe was a speech of it. And that the clearest revelation of, in the first job that, that this God gave human beings was to name, create living things, put words on it, call it something. Because when you call it something, you define it. And the power of words is really, really something to look at. That babble was a confusion of languages because people were using language to get ahead of themselves and make an idol of their own creations. And when I heard, and you know, and the word of God, and Jesus is the word, the logos, I mean, there's Pentecost was a, it was an event with language. So the idea that we're talking about large language models, being the driving factors behind a lot of this AI technology. And people think that AI is all just large language models, it's not. It's just, that's the part that, that they sell the consumer. So we get clawed chat GPT, Gemini, copilot, and all the agents that come with them. And there's a lot more to AI than just that. You know, there's all the robotics and technology and medicine and genetics and all stuff. But it's all based on, a lot of it is based on language and probability. And so when I heard that these large language models went vertical in 2021, is when all the models started taking off, because all of the silos of AI development had consolidated their research through LLMs, through large language models, I was like, oh my gosh, they're all speaking the same language again. It's a reversal of babble. And this is an anti-babble moment in human history where you're singing credible, unprecedented things happen because of language. So part of that for a Christian audience is to not be afraid of it to realize, hey, God is the God of language, man. God is a vocal, verbal creator. If you're a part of the Christian tradition or the Muslim tradition or the Jewish tradition, you believe in a God who speaks and we're in a revolution that is about language and languages and large language models. So it is important for Christians to be in this conversation and not to be sniping at it from the sidelines, right? So that would be my challenge to your audience is if you're a believer in this benevolent God that creates with language, then you need to be in the conversation about where AI is headed because the root of it is human language. So that's just a little pastoral theological tidbit I'll throw in there. Yeah. For sure. So are you personally okay on time? Yeah. I'm good. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I'm good too. Yeah. I wanted to make sure that you're fine. So basically how you structured your book was, you know, you have a whole section kind of about how we built the future and how it's building us where you talk about like the rise of final, the rise of the digital world, the rise of AI, and you talk about cool things like the the turing test and, you know, the AI models beating not just like a chess master but a go master, which I learned what go was. And then I watched videos of it on YouTube and it was fascinating because I had never heard about it before. It's insane. That was a crazy game. Yeah. It's probably in most of the world. It's probably actually played more than chess, even, but it's not popular in most Western culture. So it's really big in China and all of Southeast Asia. But anyway, yeah. It's absolutely smarter than the US. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So like that, all of that bit was super interesting. But then in like your next section, you do kind of AI as, you almost like it is like this new tool as a part of this, you know, next step in a revolution and you go through a whole like history of a wide variety of different, like mediums, so to speak. So you do like writing, visual arts, music, speaking, and like teaching and learning. And I thought maybe it would be fun to kind of riff off what you were just doing with some of like the theological implications. I thought maybe it'd be fun to talk about that in some of these spaces. I feel like, for example, you know, you had your whole section on writing and you know, chat GPT can write and create and these kind of things. And so then it becomes interesting when you're like, okay, so say here you are a faith leader. And you have a sermon that's due once a week because Sundays come with a scary regularity. Yes. And now you have chat GPT writing sermons for you. Ethically, I don't know. So it's just more of a prompt than anything. But with like the writing bit, I thought that might be an interesting thing to look at. Yeah. You know, that's that's a big question that I have people asking me all the time is like, is it okay? Are you anti AI? I'm like, no, I'm not anti AI. I use AI in my writing every single day. I use it to help me draft a lot of stuff like I'm like, hey, let me pull together the disparate pieces that are floating under my brain about this thing that I need to compose an email about. Draft me an email, but then I take what it's drafted and I copy and paste it into text edit, which is like the most rudimentary text program. It's not even like, it's like Microsoft Word, but it's not even rich text. It's just like just the text and I totally redo the thing. Like I just look, look at it and there might be the salutation or whatever, but I'm like, I just rewrite the whole thing, right? And then I can send that to my friend, but that saves me a lot of thinking time. It doesn't make me not engage with that email or that person, but it does save time. When it comes to things like sermons and poems and stuff like that, I think people just have to understand that they are engaging. It's not about what is efficient for you. So the bigger question is, what is your audience expect from you? And are you violating their trust? How would your audience feel knowing that you wrote the entire sermon using chat GPT? Would you disclose that to them? If you wouldn't disclose that to them, why wouldn't you? That's a good question for you to ask, right? If anybody asked me, did you write that email, I would tell them exactly what I just told you. I wrote it, but I didn't draft it. Chat GPT drafted it based on what it knows about our conversation. But I wrote the email, the final email has my name on it, therefore I'm claiming it as something that I wrote. So that's what I tell authors all the time who are like, you know, I've used, I've used Grammarly to, you know, suggest better ways of phrasing the sentence. Does it mean that AI wrote it? That's, that's something that you're as an, you as an author have to, you have to wrestle with that at an individual level. And the big question that we at Verified Human would ask people is, what, what does a relationship of trust between you and the audience? The audience is anybody that you give that to you saying, this is what I wrote. What does that relationship like? What do they expect and are you violating their trust in any way? So we're not asking people to disclose every time they use a chat GPT or they do spell check. We don't want to legislate people's behavior down to the click level. It's just, that's the stupid. So I think it's more of a heart and content issue. If you don't have enough brass to, to write your own insights and thoughts about a scriptural passage and it's relationship to a good human life, then you probably don't need to be writing sermons even if they come around to slapping the face once a week. It's like, I used to spend 20 hours on one, one hour sermon. I took it that seriously. If I didn't, if I was writing a sermon in an hour, I would be ashamed of myself because I'd be like, there's 500 people listening to what I have to say. And my job and my calling is to take these scriptures and apply them to my understanding of what God wants for these people, this audience is good human flourishing. And if I'm doing that using a chatbot and that's it, that's cheap. What level of involvement does it have in organizing your thoughts or pulling together sources or you don't even have to have concordances and stuff anymore. You can just go on forplexity and you know, it's read every, it's read every single theological book that's ever been written. So you're going to have a pretty good resource, you know, if you need to say what did John Calvin say about this particular verse, it's going to tell you. And I think that's great. I think sermon should be better now than ever before people should be like, oh my god, like they, every time someone preaches now, if they use chat GPT or if they use a, a model to help them research it, every sermon should blow everybody's face off. Every time you're not blowing everybody's hair off, you know, just because it's so awesome, I would say don't you shouldn't be preaching every week, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It gets, so like where gets kind of messy for me? So like from a theological perspective, I come from, or I don't come from, I am place myself within the process, theism camp, so like process theology, you know, stemming from the philosophy of organism from Alfred North Whitehead. And within his kind of metaphysical system, his conception of the divine is a lot more complex than just like this supreme being, he has like the primordial nature of God, the consequent nature of God and this thing called creativity and creativity is kind of like the inherent force that's kind of drawing creation forward. And so when it comes to things like writing and just human creativity in general, so any of the other, you know, areas that you talk about in your book, it's just curious to me, like can AI actually participate in this like metaphysical reality we call creativity? Or is AI simply just replicating things? And it's like this weird, like space that I've been trying to like think through and wrestle with. And like even asking for myself, like if I'm using chat, GPT to help me write something or draft something, is chat, GPT participating in creativity in the way that I am. Or is it just like this other thing basically being a copycat and spitting it out? It's like, I don't know, do you have any thoughts on that weird leapfram? Yeah, I think the answer to your question is yes. Is it, yes, is it participating in the creative process? I would say that it is, is it, is it participating at the level of a human being? No, it's not, it's not a living thing. It is a computer program that has all of the similances of a human being. I, you know, AI, I don't know about these conversations about sentience and is, is, do the language language models reach a point where they actually start to have feelings and consciousness? I don't know. I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know the answer to that question. What I do know is that it's not a human being and it doesn't have a body and it doesn't live a human life. What I also know is that it has read about billions of human lives. So it knows a little bit about human life probably more than we do about, it knows more about everything than we do. So you have to take that seriously. You're sitting with a contributor who is the greatest encyclopedia and genius that you could ever want and he's sitting in your room helping you write a sermon. He's never lived a human life, he's never, he's never, he's never crapped his pants, he's never, you know, he's never got sick, he's never been slapped in the face or heartbroken. So, you know, that question is really thorny. I think it's, it's one that if I, if I were here to say that I had an easy answer for that question, I think I would be selling you something. Sure. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, actually, it's funny when you were talking, you mentioned like the consciousness thing and that's one of my like 8 HD hyper fixations is philosophy of mine stuff. Yeah. And within that, there's like this philosophical prompt. I forget exactly all the major, like the minor details, but I can give you the general overview. And basically it's like picture or imagine that there's this woman named Wendy. And Wendy has lived her entire existence in a single room that is all, everything is black and white. So she has never seen color, nothing like that. She has everything is, is this duotone black and white kind of thing. However, she has been given all the possible information about the world that she needs to know, right? So she has read about all of the things, she's read about things like, oh, the color blue, the color red, the color green. So she has all of the knowledge, everything, but she's lacking some kind of experiential reality. And then the question that trips people out then is they say, okay, if Wendy leaves that room and steps outside, kind of like in Wizard of Oz when she goes from the black and white to the, you know, the beautiful color, yeah, and Wendy sees a red flower for the first time has Wendy gained new knowledge. Intuitively, people want to say yes, because she has this new kind of experiential knowledge of the color red, even though she knew everything about the color red prior to ever seeing it. And it seems similar to me with the whole like, is the computer conscious bit, or like is AI, you know, going to be sentient? I don't know either. But that kind of mind, trick, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, I came to mind when you were talking. That is a fascinating thought experiment. My hunch, you know, my first blush hunch is there's probably a really, really good pushback against saying yes, she's experiencing something new, but my intuition tells me that she is experiencing something new. And, you know, it's one thing to describe to someone what an apple tastes like. It's something else to just bite into it. Right. You know, it's like, you don't really know until you've chomped on an apple, you know, so, but I'm sure there's a good counter argument to that as well. There always is. That's right. It's fun. That's right. That's right. I should have known that you being so close with Aaron, we're really into this philosophy, this philosophical way of unpacking the universe. I love that was Bart was Carl Bart of process theologian, uh, Bart wasn't a process the ologian. Um, yeah, but, uh, I'm trying to think where Bart and process might overlap. I mean, they're like, I mean, like, so a buddy of my trip, he's a process theologian, but a joke about trip is that they call him like a six beard Bartian. So like around his six beer, he really starts to sound like Bartian, which he hates because he's like opposed to Carl Bart very much. And so like one of my favorite things to do is like, once he said something, but like trip, that sounds very much like Carl Bart, man, you might want to be, be careful. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, so, so light head is kind of the, the, the capstone, yeah, he, white head kind of popular, like, I mean, this is going to be a complete aside, but yeah, process, like kind of some of the thoughts and like foundations of it. I mean, you can trace it back into like Greek philosophy, um, ancient Eastern philosophies, like Native American spirituality, white head kind of is like the name that most often is associated with it. Right. And then that was appropriated out of the philosophical into the theological. And then John Cobb was really like, kind of like one of the big names to kind of make process theology popular and then, um, I mean, today you have people like trip and, and Tom Ward and Catherine Keller, um, David Ray Griffin, these kind of people, Andrew Davis, uh, doing process theology. That's cool. Yeah. Aaron likes to make fun of me for being a process person. I know, you know, you, you've lost first that's cool. Well, um, so we talked about writing, uh, you know, and, and I think it's a similar writing as the hardest one because it's what everybody does, um, you know, writing is, is definitely the big one. It's, it's, it's hard in, in visual art. It's, it's a little more cut and dried in visual art, not in film. That's going to be messy, um, it's going to be messy with film because we've already accepted a certain amount of artificial in film, like we, we like CGI, right? Like we have accepted that. Nobody's like, I really think that building blew up that way or that car flipped 70 times. You know, now if you see an actual real car crash that was filmed like the old fashioned way from a 1960s movie, you're kind of like, that looks very unimpressive, right? It's very boring. You know, watching, I watched the last mission impossible movie. I was, the whole time I was watching it, I was like, thank God for CGI. This is insane. It's so cool, right? So we'll, we'll get to a point where with AI and visuals that we're, we're saying thank God for AI, maybe, maybe in entertainment, I don't know, but, um, you know, one of the stories I tell in the book was, you know, my chancellor and one of my mentors is a guy named Dr. Paul Conn. He's the chancellor of the Lee University. That's my alma mater. Aaron's, Aaron's dad was a teacher there for a long time. Okay. Cool. And our teacher. So, um, so, oh, and Aaron also went to Lee. He's a, that's his, that's his undergrad on modern as well. Sorry. So Paul Conn, you know, I was telling him about Verified Human. He's like, why shouldn't you make care of someone if AI makes a picture? You know, like, if you got to have a picture of on a flyer and you can make it with Dolly and then put it on the flyer and get it out the door, why would you even go to Getty images anymore and shut her stock and pay $19 a month to download five stupid pictures. And because if you can just like, I was like, you're absolutely right. If you have a pizza party and you need a picture of people eating pizza, Dolly's your win. Right? Because it's disposable. It doesn't matter. But you have this picture on your wall that's framed. And it's a drawing of ships in Boston Harbor by John Stobart. And I see that it's side five of 500, which mean or 17 of 300, whatever it was. It's a limited edition print and it was low numbered, meaning that there's only a certain number of these out there. And this is John Stobart's work. It's like, why would you spend like, he probably spent five or six hundred bucks to buy that picture, have it framed, matted and put on his wall? What if I told you that we could replace that picture with a Dolly image of that same scene? But have you and Mrs. Khan sitting on the back of that skiff? Wouldn't you love that? Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't you frame that and hang that? I mean, that would be even more personal, right? And he's like, okay, I get your point. I was like, yeah, because when we see things of artistic value, when we see things that matter, when we have audio books that we're recording because it's content we wrote, when it's not disposable, that's when it's going to matter. That's when you're going to say, no, I want to know. That a human really did make this. And so I think it's that way in visuals. I think that the the jury's out on what people will tolerate in terms of visual arts in the future. I know there's a huge backlash in video gaming and film right now where video gamers, dude, they are. Video gamers like anti AI, they're like, if they see like one pixel that looks slightly AI, they go up in arms, they're like, this is bull crap, and voice actors voicing real video game characters. I mean, that's a big, that's a big part of voice acting is voicing characters in video games. You know, the super kick, you know, that's my old school chinally from Street Fighter. But the person who said super kick got paid to say super kick, thank God for them, right? I don't want a robot saying super kick. I want a person saying super kick. So that's visual arts, education is a rough one. My friends, your teachers are struggling right now, man. Yes. Why them black to book, back to blue books, they're just making students sit down and write essays in a blue book and to see what they know. So I don't know, man, I think the jury's really out on on a lot of it music is really complicated, as you know, because it's like, what do you call a human? If the vocals are human, but they've been processed by an AI like, like, ampere, you know, to put an effect on it, it's my vocal, but I stuck an ampere compressor on it because it sounds awesome when I put an ampere compressor on it. So I ran my entire vocals through an AI algorithm and the output is 100% modified by AI, right? And then I played the guitar in the bass on this track, and I had a real guy lay down the drum track for me, but then I have like all these fruity sounds that I got from my cousin in Florida who just has this loop that sounds really cool. So I laid that down as a track, and I had 35 different tracks going into this one song. You know, and I can see them all laid out there and half of them are like, slimy eyes, half of them are me, half of them are my friend, John, half of them are from, I don't know where. How do you then say was this song made by AI or was it made by a human? That's a hard question. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's dicey. Yeah. Yeah, I think what's, with the music thing, one thing that I thought was kind of funny is like, you might have seen this recently, there was an AI artist that topped the Christian music chart. Yes. The number one country song was made by an AI artist. Yeah. One country song, like, like a month ago. Yeah. It's crazy. And it's just, it's, I don't know, it's super interesting. And like, you know, you talked about in the book how, you know, when you ask people, like, who cares about that? And I think it was basically like, people over 40 really care about that. And then people younger than me care less about that. Yeah. And like, don't care. Like, is it good? I'm fucking caring about it. Like, is it good? I'm going to listen to it. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And you're going to have that range of people, you know, from, I call them, conscientiously concerned to, I don't care. Yeah. You know, they're like, you know, I care a lot. I don't want to hear a song by robot to the, uh, the song's pretty good, but it's weird that a robot made it to a person that's like, I don't really care, man. That song rocks. Yeah. I don't know, man. I think the jury is out on all of it. I do think that human is going to be the, the, is going to be the new vinyl. I think it, I think there is something to that metaphor that is, that is enduring. We always, we always return back to the needle point at some point. We always go back to knitting. We always go back to the home cook meal. We always buy the pencil again. We always go to hear someone read their own poem that they wrote, you know, in a coffee shop. Yeah. I mean, that, that's, that's what being human is about, man. And so we might, we might have 90% of our life like with all this disposable crap that just hits our screens, which is just such a shame. But I do think that like, I do think we're going to see a comeback as we're seeing like a rebellion against AI, there's already kind of a AI backlash, but against AI, but not just that, just against all things that are less connected to humanity. Yeah. I, I think so. I mean, if, you know, history repeats itself, I think it's definitely the possibilities there. Like you said, there's already kind of this pushback on one AI. I know one of the big ones is kind of the, um, the ecological impact. Oh, yeah. That AI has. And I didn't even get into that in the book. Yeah. That's a whole other like one, one AI super plant, you know, um, it could, could take the, the amount of electricity. It takes the power of all of Manhattan. It's just insane. Um, that's just a lot. That's a lot, you know, so it's, it's all such a mess, man. I don't know where it's all going to go, but that's why I just, I just bet on humans, man. I bet on humans, and I bet on authenticity in the long run. And I'm, I'm excited about where AI is going. I'm excited about all the ways AI is helping, um, with, with medicine and safer cars. My daughter, my daughter is not a great driver. I like to say she crashes into lots of things at slow speeds. She doesn't even bumpers on her car anymore. I mean, so no bumpers, no hubcaps. She's just, because, but I'm not so, for me, I'm like, yeah, get her all of the AI in her car to keep her from killing herself or someone else. Right. So, um, so there's lots of benefits to it. I'm not, I don't want to throw the baby out with a bath water. Um, I want to keep the baby. I really want to keep the baby. Mm hmm. So. Yeah. It's, it's kind of like there's, there's two questions. I mean, you open the book with them, but it kind of like, then you explore them through the route, and I think they're questions that even with like verified human, you continue to ask. And that's, you know, how can AI improve our lives without compromising what makes us human? Mm hmm. And then also, can we pursue progress without losing the parts of ourselves that make life worth living? Mm hmm. I think those two are very good, that sounds really good, man. That's not really good. Yeah. What I have to see, I'm going to hit up verified human and see if they can tell me if that's AI generated or if somebody wrote those questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you should put my book through a thing and see. I did, I had like a crazy thought at one point where I was like, you know, how crazy would it be if like we get to the end of the book? And then Micah is like, surprise, this entire thing is written by nothing but AI as a, you know, to prove a point kind of like, you know, you talked about the guy who won the photo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he won the photography contest by doing that thing, yeah, made a fake image and submitted it. And there's no gotcha on this one, but I will tell you this, I used AI to look for sources a lot. Sure. And since it before, people really knew like hallucinations were like a big deal, like the White House found out. Yeah, like every yeah, Deloitte, I mean, it's like crazy, but it's funny because like I started looking like I wanted to have sources, I had like 300 footnotes in that book, like, like footnotes. And I knew where some of them were, some of them I didn't know where they were and some of them I was just like, I've said something that I know I've heard somewhere. I need to substantiate it with an actual something that in print. And back then, there was no perplexity. It was just chat GPT and Claude was terrible. Claude didn't even go on the internet when I was writing this book. Claude couldn't even like open a web page. So I would use chat GPT to like research stuff. I'd be like, where did I hear this before and it'd be like, oh, this is, it's cited in this book. I put in like probably a hundred footnotes and I went back and checked them with perplexity like a year later. And I want to say 25 of them were completely non-existent. It was, but it was crazy because it was like kind of an odd sounding name like you would think, oh, this is a real person. And it was like a real city. It was like Oxford, England, Oxford University Press with a date and all this, all the stuff is there. And the page number and I'm like, going and trying to find the book. And I'm like, oh, this book, this book doesn't exist. It's like horrified. So I had to go back through and literally re-verify all of my research and footnotes. Like a year after I started writing the book, it's crazy. Yeah. That is crazy. Cool, man. Well, I think like, I mean, I don't know. Ultimately, I love your optimism that human is the new vinyl and that, you know, there will be kind of this pushback and return to the human because there really is something about interacting with people that just, I don't know. It feels better. You learn that lesson during the pandemic, right? Being locked up and then getting to go explore. People willing to risk their lives to go see their friends, right? Yeah. So I think you're right. I love that. And one last little bit that I thought was really cool is, somebody asked me a question and I thought was one of the best questions that I've heard in a long time. They said, who would you be if there was no power, no electricity? Like what would be left of you? Like I thought that is a really fantastic question. Like if there was no social media, no television, no nothing. So then you become who you are to just the people that you that you see, not even the people that you text or call. If there was zero electricity, like if you were taken literally back into the early 1800s, who would you be? I thought that was a great question. That is a good question. I'm going to have to say with that one for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Good to go. Well, Mike, this was a lot of fun, man. Yeah. I've had a blast. I've had a blast. You are a fascinating person. I would love to. I wish I had a podcast and I could bring you on and just ask you what you think about stuff. Right. You know, it's never too late to start a podcast. That's right. That's right. That's right. Cool. Thank you so much. I'll be sure to link your book in the show notes. I'm going to link both the audio book and the physical copy. Cool. Yeah. And also, you know, the fun pencils, you know, for listeners, why not go grab yourself some pencils, friends? Yeah. And send me the link to your pencil that you showed me. Yeah. And then, you know, if, if, you know, time goes by, if we have another conversation, I would love that. So, if you get some traction and you're looking for another guest in a year's time or something like, man, you know, always, always here, always available, always love talking to guys like you, man. You're, you're super interesting and this has been fun. Sweet. Well, thank you so much. Let's do future interactions and, um, listeners, shout out to you guys. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today and as always, go and peace. Go and peace.