Season 2 | Episode 86 | Technology, AI, and What it Means to Be Human with John Dyer, Ph.D.

Lance, what's going on?

Brett, my man. Dude, are you stoked for today?

I am. It's this podcast number 86 as well, so we are cruising along towards our goal towards 100 by the end of the year.

14 more?

Excited? Yeah, um, I am excited. So we're gonna skip announcements today, you know, because I want to get as much time with our guest as possible. I want to like start my introduction by saying when I moved to Dallas in 2008, um, you know, I didn't know anybody, barely, like barely anybody. My wife and I were alone with our 1-year-old daughter. We had some kind of some— we had some family in town And I was using Twitter like crazy. Twitter was, I guess, at that point, I don't know how old, a couple of years old maybe. Yeah. And so I met this guy on Twitter and hit it off really quickly and connected with him and a bunch of other people. And for the next several years, actually, we would have meetups and just get together for coffee or hangouts. And my guest and I today, we actually, for, I don't know, we'll have to touch base here and figure out what it is, but for maybe a year, year and a half, 2-year period, we would go to churches and lead workshops on like technology and parenting. Um, John handling the technology piece, me handling the expert I was, the parenting piece, you know, navigating all that stuff from a psychological perspective. With your 1-year-old kid. Yeah.

I got this dialed.

I do, totally. And then we also would kind of co-host these like church tech meetups that happened at Fuller, happened at DTS, some other places where we would— I think early on there was a group of people who were pretty involved in technology from different aspects, and people were in ministry, and we would just kind of discuss, I don't know, the use of technology and how do we think about it from a theological perspective. How do we think about it from a ministry perspective? So that's a long way to say that tech is what brought us together, which is appropriate for today's conversation. John Dyer is a professor at DTS, vice president at DTS, VP at DTS, the author of several books, which RO will put up in the show notes and the links here. And John is just somebody I really respect. Thank you. I get to hang out with him pretty regularly, not as much as I'd like because our lives are busy. But whenever I really want someone's wisdom on something, I usually ask John about it, and he's always got a thoughtful response about things. And one of the things that I ask him about a lot, in fact, I asked him last time we were together, is just how do we think about technology? How do we think about AI specifically, especially for those who come from a faith background? And also, more specifically for this podcast, how do we think about the use of technology? How do we think about AI as therapists, as people who meet, meet in a room most often with people to do work, to do the work of restoration and healing? So all that to say, John, welcome to the RT Dialogue. Super excited to have you on today.

Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks.

Does that sound right? We met on Twitter, right?

Yeah, and you're right. You moved in 2018. to Dallas, and I had— we had our first kid, and you invited us over for Thanksgiving. Like, we only met each other once in person, and so you had a 1-year-old and I had a, you know, 3-week-old. And, um, so that was great. So it's been fun to watch our kids grow up together and all that.

And you were a student at DTS at that time, am I right?

Yeah, I just, just finished up when we met, so just finished a master's degree. Yeah.

The ThM at DTS.

Yeah.

And then finished your PhD at the University of Durham. That's right. In religion and sociology, essentially.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I don't know if you can see this, but behind me I've got a little Lego set of Durham Cathedral here, and then this is the DTS campus here. So yeah, good little nerdy fun stuff. But yeah.

So you're working on it. Is it done or is it in— is it in progress?

Oh, both of them are done. I mean, I can bring them here if you want to see them. So here's Durham Cathedral. This was an official licensed set my family got me, which is super cool. I finished in 2019 and I didn't get to go back for actually graduating just because of COVID and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. And then this one is, um, the DTS campus. So this is what it looks like if you ever come. This is what the buildings are. So just kind of a fun—

Nice. Which building are you in right now?

Oh yeah, great question. I am right in here, right in that little corner.

So, all right.

Yeah.

I love it. I've seen you, I've seen you, I've seen you post that online, I think, at one point in progress and stuff. Yeah. Um, Okay, so kind of big overall question. I just want you to kind of start where you want. Your first book, From the Garden to the City, and even in the workshops we did together, I really appreciated just your perspective on how we are to think about tech and technology and the use of it. Mm-hmm. And I know you pick up on a lot of early thinkers that you were that you were influenced by. And so, just to kind of start with that question, you know, how should we think about tech, about our use of it, especially coming from maybe a background of faith, you know, those who want to be faithful to having a good theology of it?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I just brought out a bunch of Legos, and that's not just being, you know, dorky, which it is, but I also just like making stuff. And so, I've always enjoyed putting things together and whatever that kind of says was, or, you know, with code or something like that. I think that's just part of the way I'm sort of wired. And so I think, I guess maybe when we talk about theology of technology, I'll start with what I started with, and then what started to shift for me at some point. Okay. I think I started with the idea that maybe something like this, like technology is just neutral, it's just a tool. And so my only lens was morality. So, you know, I'm a good Christian boy, I want to do good things, I don't want to do bad things, I want to, you know, do things for God's glory, I don't want to sin. And so those are sort of my 2 categories of You know, when you're using technology, you can use it for sinful stuff or you can use it for good stuff. So you can use the internet for Bible studies or you can use it for pornography or something like that. You can use it to connect with other Christians and share the gospel, or you can use it to, like, find bad stuff or whatever. And really, that was the extent of my understanding. And so I think I approached my early career as just, I like making stuff and so I can make money with websites. And so I should try to make some that are sort of insurance companies and some that are for Christians, and that's really it. But my kind of faith is over here and my technology is separate, because all that really matters is how you use it and morality. And so, at some point along the way, I started to get challenged by that and say, there's really more to it. Your Christian lens is almost blinding you to what is actually happening underneath the hood. And so, the idea of technology sort of not being neutral, it doesn't really mean that every technology is morally good or morally bad in and of itself. It just means It just means that when you're using it, you're going to get formed in some way. So, like, the simple way of saying this would be something like a shovel. So the biblical story starts out with Adam and Eve being created and God saying, hey, I want you to care for this creation. I want you to make stuff from what I've made. And so you think about a shovel or something like that. And when you use it, you could, again, use it for morally good ends, you can use it for morally bad ends. You could build churches, or you could kill people or whatever. But when you use a shovel over time, you know, Lance, what happens to your hands when you use a shovel over time?

Well, my hands get calloused.

Yes. Yeah. So, maybe—

Or I get blisters.

Yeah, yeah. Blisters turn into calluses. And you could extend this metaphor, right? You could say, if you do it a lot, your muscles might get stronger. Gnarled. Gnarled, yeah. And you get a big shoulder, you get a big back, or, like, you start to learn about soil. And, like, you know, I live in Irving, Texas, that's all clay, and it stinks, you know, and you learn about all this stuff. So, you start to get transformed, and it really doesn't matter If you're using it for good or bad ends. So you could be, you know, build 1,000 churches and you're still going to get shaped by that shovel. And you could kill a million people and you're still going to get shaped the exact same way. And so that started to make me think about this era, you know, when Rhett and I met, when things like Twitter and social media and early iPhones are coming out of, yeah, I can use this for good. I can have all the Bible apps and all that stuff on my phone, but it's still going to be shaping me in some kind of way. And so I'm trying to put 2 things together here on like the theology side of things to say, when I look at scripture, I see God making us in his image, and God is creative, and he gives us this creative power. He gives us this command to care for the earth. And yet when we use these things, we get shaped. And so you go through the biblical story and you find all these little places where human making and creativity shows up in all kinds of ways. We don't have to go through all these, but, you know, the Tower of Babel, Noah's Ark. Yeah. The 10 Commandments, the second one is about how we use images, you know, all that stuff. It seems like what we make and how we use it is deeply formative to us spiritually. And yes, there are bad— like idols are bad. But also all this other stuff that we do in our— where we put the pulpit and where we put the baptismal in our congregations, all that shapes the people and the audiences that we see. And then going in the New Testament, there's all these little places where things show up, like We talk about the Roman Road or about the ability to write in papers. We talk about, you know, at the end of John's Gospel, you know, he talks about— John's letters, he talks about going face to face versus writing with paper and ink, you know, and which one is better for different situations. And then, you know, you may have grown up in one of those— if you grew up in some Christian traditions, they emphasize like you die and you go to heaven and you forget that the biblical story really ends with this idea of a city where God takes all the things humans have made and somehow redeems our bodies, redeems our souls, but also redeems the stuff that we made and somehow makes them good and whole for our flourishing. So I think the biblical story has lots of human making, lots of tool usage, lots of technology. And yet it always has this formation part of it that we do want to be aware of that isn't just about morality. So that's my initial take, those 2 big things, formation, but also creation being part of the story.

Hmm. It's interesting. Like, the— I see that, like, where the, the item now has, like, sometimes it can, like, take a hold of us too much. Kind of like, is it like in Matthew where Jesus says, like, live by the sword, die by the sword?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Like, this, this tool now has been something that has, like, something I live by. So now it's going to be my ultimate end. Like, is that kind of what you're thinking? Does that flow within your frame?

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's those, you know, the Psalms and the prophets say things like, the things we make will become like them, usually referring more to like idols and stuff like that. But I do think there's something that we have some allegiance to that thing. And sometimes that I think is helpful. The craft that you're called into is a deep part of your occupation and who you are. So in the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as a techton. It's the Greek word from which we get technology. It means artisan or craftsperson, someone who makes things with their hands. And we think that the kind of artisan or craftsperson that Jesus was, was a carpenter. And so that tekton gets translated as carpenter, that he's the son of a tekton. So it's interesting that, you know, again, Jesus works with wood nails for 30 years, and then he gets killed on wooden nails, that somehow God incorporates that into the biblical story. So I think there's ways in which these tools can be forming us in helpful directions. But I think with a lot of modern tools, there's some ways that they can be more often deformative than even a sword.

Yeah. Where did this shift occur for you when you started to think about this way? And then you said there was like this shift. Was it something you read or experienced, or was it just kind of a slow progression over time where you just saw things differently?

I think, I mean, in my mind, it's a moment in a class with a professor. It was a theology and society class, and he just in a throwaway statement, said this idea of one of the most dangerous things you can do is to believe that technology is neutral. And I was like, wait, that's exactly what I think. And then he, like, got sick and never came back to the class, and they had a sub the rest of the semester. And so, I never got to ask him. So, I just started looking for books. And so, that's where I sort of came across those ones that you mentioned earlier, some of these early thinkers, like Marshall McLuhan was a big name that was, you know, popular in the '50s and '60s, kind of died out. And then, really came back in the internet age and Neil Postman and Jacques Ellul and those names that were all writing in the middle of the 20th century about this big giant shift that they were seeing, even pre-digital, of society changing around technology. And so as I started to read that, I think the most accessible stuff is communication technology. That's what McLuhan did a lot of. And he saw the difference of his early students before television and then after television. That's what started to clue him in, just that there was a change. And then of course we were observing it in our age You know, with not just the internet, but really the social media and when we carry around the little glowing rectangles in our pockets.

Yeah. Where do you think now you're like, where do you see yourself sitting at this moment? Are you in the midst of any like shift or a new understanding kind of in this moment of how you see yourself kind of moving forward and how you're thinking about technology? And I know obviously we haven't mentioned even AI, but there's been a lot of developments. I mean, I know it existed before, but now it's more in an easy-to-access form. So, I'm just wondering even where you sit today, how you're starting to think or even question some stuff.

Yeah, I think you're right that right now, the AI question's huge, from work to relationships, to will we have jobs or will our kids have jobs? All that stuff is important. I would say I'm looking at one other question. And so, I think that I make this parallel between what phones were to the internet, something is to AI for me. So, what I mean by that is that if the internet is like a base interesting technology that companies get really excited about, when the consumer physical version of the internet came to us in the smartphone, that really, I think, was more significant to our life change than the early internet. And so, I think likewise, AI is this big thing. It really matters. It's huge. But when AI gets a body, and you can afford a home robot, I really think that that's probably an even more significant change for us. So I'm trying to do some work on that now as those become, you know, we all can maybe experience Waymo or self-driving cars is probably the most, the first thing that we'll experience. But, but the sort of humanoid robots that would do more of our tasks, I mean, certainly there's the, there's the sexual side of it, but I think just the work side of it and the relationship side of it. Is what's really interesting to me. So we can talk about that maybe in a little bit too.

Yeah, you sent me on a text, you sent me a kind of a website link that you have kind of just temporarily up there, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just sent in a book proposal recently to say, hey, could we work on this together? So yeah, trying to think ahead a little bit and just think about our own embodiment. So if the AI question is a little bit about our minds, maybe something like that, like, what are we really doing in our relationships? And what happens when Our machines get smarter than us. The Industrial Revolution is what happens when our machines get stronger than us. And that really did have massive change, especially, I think, especially for men who typically saw themselves through the lens of physical strength. Once that went away and we went to office work, you know, that's really changed how we view masculinity. But with this, you know, we still as humans think of ourselves as smarter than all the other creatures. And when we create something that's smarter than us, that's It seems threatening and scary and all that. But when you put those 2 things together and you have something that's smarter than you and stronger than you and it charges next to your daughter's bedroom, it's a pretty big deal. So that's what I want to work on.

John, you're freaking me out, bro.

Yay, that's good.

My daughter. Ah.

Yeah, yeah.

Bigger, stronger.

Yeah, yeah.

I just thought of it as like Rosie the robot who's going to come and clean my house and You know, listen to all my commands and stuff.

Yeah. Well, I think that's what's right is that oftentimes we buy a technology for one reason, one telos, one purpose, one end. But because it's so multifaceted, we end up using it for all these other things. I think we all bought smartphones, or maybe if you're my age, you bought a phone in college because you wanted it. It was purely for safety, right? And then as the smartphone came on, you started to do these really cool things like none of us ever go to the bank and turn in checks anymore. You can take a picture of it if you get a check. Great stuff like that. But all this other whole thing that we do, we all spend more time on our phones than we wish we did, right? Well, I think a similar thing is happening with AI right now, where you start using it for one thing, but you start using it for a lot of things, and you go, is that going to affect me in a way that I ultimately lose an ability that I want to have, whether that's relationships or creativity or writing or whatever that is, or even just my own job? And I think with the robot question, it would be similar where you would buy it so it does your lawn care and your laundry and your dishes and all that kind of stuff. But then when, let's say you have an 8-year-old, like, are you going to leave it to protect your 8-year-old instead of a babysitter? And then you come back and your robot is teaching your kid chess or doing volleyball drills or maybe being its therapist or whatever. And then you want to walk your daughter down the aisle when it's— really been raised by this machine or this sort of this butler? So that's a sort of interesting question. And then I recently— my father passed away this summer. And, you know, I think about the elder care, you know, question of that level of embodiment and being with someone when they die and through those last stages, you could see the robot lifecycle being with you, you know, at every place. And so you go, well, what is my body for? And what is a human for? I think we're really having to ask those questions in new ways.

And you have all the answers, right, to that already?

Yeah, definitely. Just thinking ahead. I just, yeah, watch a lot of sci-fi.

So one of the things I want to like kind of dig in on and just ask questions and to think through, um, because I don't even know if we're asking the right questions, but I mean, what is it going to mean to be a therapist today and tomorrow in the future? Is that job even going to be important to be in human form? I think I started thinking about this a lot. Probably, I mean, that's been on my mind for the last couple of years, but more so probably about maybe 8 months ago, I was at a speaking event at a church that I speak at quite a bit. I was meeting with the leaders ahead of time and they knew I was a therapist. This lady leans across the table and says, oh, I don't go to a therapist anymore. I just go to AI.

Mm-hmm.

And I said, okay, well, tell me about that. And so she's like, well, it's really good at giving me advice and everything. And it's essentially free in some ways, right? Therapy can be really expensive. And she's like, what do you think about that? And I said, I don't know. I said, I have some concerns and here's some of my experience of people getting advice from AI where I didn't think it was actually very helpful. But that made me really start questioning. I don't know, I just kind of want to put that out there and just kind of pick your brain about like, how should we, as people who work with others in a very sacred way, I think we'd call that, like, what, what are questions we should be asking ourselves? Or how should we be framing things? What are concerns we should have? That's a lot there.

No, no. Well, I'm not a— obviously not a therapist, not trained in therapy. So I have some, some general knowledge there. I've certainly experienced it.

And you're very good at pastoral counseling, I would say, though. You fit

And Red says you give good advice. Oh,

okay. Okay. Well, good. Now the pressure's on. Yeah, I mean, I think that in all sorts of Christian ministry, you know, there's a place of— there is a communication event that happens, that some transfer of knowledge and wisdom and whatever. But I think we wouldn't limit it to that. And we wouldn't want to say that being a pastor is just about like, reading some Bible verses and telling you some advice. You know, there's something much deeper to that, that has to do with embodiment and presence and movement and rhetoric and all that stuff. And so I think that a lot of professions over the time of the internet have seen a shift where people are self-advocating in helpful ways, and then the pendulum swings over into unhelpfulness at some point. So we've probably all heard of doctors where someone comes in and they've got, you know, 30 sheets printed out and they think they have every kind of disease, or they become sort of hypochondriac because of the information. Yeah. And so the doctor's like, well, what is my role now? On the other hand, there's another pendulum on the other side where people don't have access to information and don't know anything. And so I think there's been a lot of helpfulness to it. But it is, I think we as like humans are typically not good at handling abundance. And so if I use a food analogy, and I promise I'll come back to counseling in a second, but if I use the food analogy, we say, You know, for thousands of years or millions of years, people have been just trying to get enough food. Well, now we finally have enough food and we cannot stop ourselves from eating unhealthily, you know. And so we gravitate toward the easiest thing. And so now we have to invent diets and all this stuff. And the same thing with our physical bodies, you know, we had to do, you know, physical labor was just part of what we did. And then now that that's gone, we invent things like exercise. And I think we're now in that place with, you know, information and in our souls, there's an overabundance of information. That doesn't mean that we're any healthier or any better I think for the therapist now, I mean, there's been self-help books, there's been like information, but that's all in essentially a broadcast format where you're just hearing the information or reading the information. But I think a lot of what happens in, you know, more of a counseling in some type of setting is the dialogue part. And that's the thing that AI is simulating so well is it doesn't feel like I'm just Googling my symptoms. And clicking on links, but I feel like I'm having a conversation with something. And it's in that conversation that we feel like we come alive and that we feel heard. I think that's the difference is all the previous things of YouTube videos and books and all that kind of stuff, whoever produced that never hears you. And it feels like AI hears you. And I think it really speaks to all the other trajectories that we've seen societally from the book Bowling Alone, whatever that was, 25, 30 years ago, where there's fewer and fewer fewer places where people are able to feel heard in their day-to-day life. So everybody goes into Starbucks and we put our headphones on, you get on the airplane, you put your headphones on, everything is so isolated, even when you're physically around people, that sometimes I think, as you probably all know, the therapy office is the one place where people actually do feel heard. And so AI is doing a really good job of simulating that. So I think the question is, what is it about being heard that is so healing and so important, maybe. And I think you know this better than I. And then what is it about the AI part of it that maybe at some point limits out where, yes, you get some really good information and you can really push it to push you, but where does its limits hit? And I think one of those hits, one of those limits is its own experience of embodiment is pretty poor. And so that may be an area that's different. I know we're doing a lot of telehealth now. But again, I would start on that, like, That shift from getting information sent to you versus feeling heard. And then what is the role of embodiment in therapy?

Lance, what do you think? Because I was, you know, one of the conversations you and I have is, you know, we do a lot of talking in therapy. I think we feel that one of the shifts that's happened in our community restoration therapy that Terry has talked about is maybe back in the day, he would say we needed 80% insight and 20% practice. And now we need 20% insight and 80% practice. Right. There's a really experiential piece that we feel like we're trying to do in the room with people and not just talk, but be experiential, this embodiment. But then if you think about robots, AI taking on embodiment form as robots and being in an office, in an embodied way. I don't know, Lance, I'm just throwing that out to you, how you kind of think about it.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting to me, like, as a therapist, I feel like there's so much soul work that goes on in the room of interacting with a person, being with a person, like this calling to greatness. There's this ability to see beyond, um, that, that we that we get to do with our clients. And I think like, um, the, the frustrating thing about what AI gives is like, it gives what, what it gets, right? So it's, it's a, um, and this is my, I'm, I'm kind of a Luddite. I don't know if I'm total Luddite, but, um, like when you put something into it, like it's gonna give it, give you back and it's gonna be, um, deferential to you.

Hmm.

Um, and I think like as a therapist, we're not always deferential. In fact, we're— we can actually see the unhealth that is being exhibited in the room. Um, that in that, I think maybe one day AI would be able to give, um, you know, that deeper feedback in helping people to move towards health and healing. But I feel like it's got some ways to go, but maybe not. I don't know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it is concerning when a client comes in and they say, well, I entered in my argument to AI and this is why it's told me that I'm right. You know, I think that like when I have a lot of clients doing stuff like that, um, or I put in my— I wrote my whole family history and I put it into AI, um, and it just gives me this feedback. Mm-hmm. Um, so yeah, that part concerns me, but I don't know. Sometimes, like, I have some clients that also use AI to remind them to do the practices of RT, like to do their 4 steps. They can say, oh man, I got into an argument with my wife and like, I, I don't, I need to do my 4 steps. Could you help me? And then it'll, it'll ask the questions. Mm-hmm. So then it's like, that would probably be kind of what you were saying, John, earlier of where it's now a tool with that, that I'm using. For, you know, like, going back to your original thoughts on a neutral tool that helps me to be better. But I don't know.

Yeah, I think I would probably say, you know, like, I would probably emphasize the sort of the non-neutrality of that and go, there's some formation that's happening even as you're being helped in a direction. You know, you're deciding something that you're gonna do or not do. You're saying, like, there's something that I could choose to do myself that might be formative for me, like, say, running, like, that might change my body a little bit. But if I cede that all over to machines, my body's going to change a little bit, even if I still get to point A or point B. So, you might get to doing your 4 steps, but developing, like, the internal capacity may be something that you want to do. And so, my little, like, kind of silly catchphrase for AI right now Mm-hmm. Is to say, you should use AI for anything you never want to be able to do again. So, what I mean by that is that there are some, like, overarching tasks that you might still do, like, let's say, in my profession, make a website, right? And there's all these layers of what it means to make a website. So, I never, like, actually make a silicon chip. I don't make a server. I don't, you know, do all these other layers, but I used to actually write more of the code, you know? And now I'm giving that up to take a higher level up in there. And I think I'm okay with that, kind of like I'm okay with the GPS. I'm okay with not knowing how to get to my sister's house, even though she doesn't live that far away, because I've ceded that over to the machine. So I'm using AI, in this case, the AI of Maps, to not be able to get to my sister's house. Like, my mind will never remember the 8 turns to get to her house. And I think I'm okay with that one. The question on the AI thing is, like, am I giving up something that's, like, essential to me? Because I think that giving up is a non-neutral thing. So, it might be that I'm okay with, say, not writing code, but when it comes to writing a book, there are certain parts of it that I wanna be able to do. Now, I don't wanna edit, right? I'm terrible. I have all kinds of misspellings, and I miss words. And I don't want to develop that capacity, so I want AI to do that thing. But I find that writing isn't just a linear thing. It's this sort of cyclical thing. When I write something, I learn what I think. So, if I do too much of that to the AI, it's gonna have this non-neutral effect of, like, I might get the outcome, a good paragraph, but I end up getting changed in a way that I don't want, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so, that's really what I'm trying to figure out is what do I wanna replace or not do? And what things do I want to give up? And what things do I want to do the hard work of doing? Do I want to be able to bench a little bit more? Well, I'm going to have to not have a robot move the weights up and down. I'm going to have to do that if I want to be able to change in that particular way. And so again, with AI, all tasks, like all my job stuff, when it comes to the therapy questions of, do I want to develop some of these capacities? And that way, you might say, I want to look at my family history first. And I want to kind of see What are the systems? What are the dynamics? I don't really do that. Now, I might ask AI to interrogate my results. And I think early AIs, they were built in such a way that they had a reward and point system. And so they were kind of designed to give outputs that people liked, which is what you were pointing out, the sycophantic version, where it's going to give you things that you want to hear. I think they've gotten better. Most of the companies, they publish a sycophancy score about how likely it is to tell you what you want to hear. And then you can do a pretty good job of saying like, okay, be bad cop here and be mean. So you can do that. And so I think the results are getting better and better and better. But again, ultimately at the end, that AI can't tell you, here was my experience in my family. It's different than yours, but it can't give you that. Right. And it can't say, here's what it's like to have a body in this world, even if it's really good at whatever sort of therapeutic lens you want to look at something. And even if it's really good at pushing back on what you say, there's still going to be some limitation to its own experience.

Yeah, I was reading something about like offloading versus outsourcing. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Where, yeah, like when you're like, what do I want to like offloading? Yeah, I'm very happy to offload Having to grab a map to look to see how to get somewhere, like, that's probably not that needed. I mean, it could be needed later on, but, um, but like outsourcing raising my daughter, probably don't want to do that, but it's something you could do. Yeah,

yeah,

yeah. That's, yeah, it's kind of like the old days where you had to learn math and like when there was a calculator available to you, but you still had to learn multiplications and stuff like that. Like, there's something important about the process of, of learning, um, for developmental stuff and the like.

Yeah.

John, you used an analogy, I remember, with— it's when you and I and Scott were hanging out about math. I think that was helpful for me. Do you remember?

Yeah, yeah. I tend to think of, you know, skill development as, you know, this thing that progresses over time. And when you might introduce an accelerating technology into it, that if you introduce it too early, then you might not ever develop that core ability to actually accelerate. It's just going to flat out replace it. Whereas if you develop that core capacity first and then introduce the technology later, you might be able to accelerate it while still maintaining more of that core skill. So, in the case of math, I would say something like this, that if you give a calculator to a kindergartner, you're committing educational malpractice because you're cutting off their ability to ever understand numbers at a more fundamental level. But then again, if you don't give a calculator to a high school student, you're also committing educational malpractice because you're not enabling them to do the kinds of math that really is higher level with calculus and all that kind of stuff. So, with the calculator, it's pretty straightforward. I think, honestly, like, you can make an analogy with AI for that, that if you say, you know, have a recent college graduate at 22 and you say, use AI to do everything, Then you might limit their ability to get up into management or some other skill. But if you allow them to have a couple of years of development before you start doing that, that could be helpful. But I think AI does seem much more complicated than a calculator. So, I don't wanna say that it's the exact same thing, but I think when you introduce that, what core skills you develop, and then when you choose to use AI to do it. I still, though, think that when you start using AI to do it, that your capacity to do that task unassisted seems to go down. So there's all kinds of reports of a sort of deskilling of, let's say, like a radiologist, their ability to read an output. Let's say they get it right 94% of the time, they use AI and it goes up to like 98%, which is super cool. But then if they pull the AI tool, then their ability to do it without goes down to like 85% or something like that. And so, you can lose skills pretty fast. And that's what I think we're all trying to figure out is like, what sort of makes me human? And not— so, this shift of saying, not just what do I want to produce, what output do I want to have, but who do I want to become? And so, I'm thinking about this idea of becoming like, what do I want to be when I turn 50? And what kinds of hard work do I need to do to get to that place? Not just what results I want to produce in my job or what outputs I want to have.

Recently, even in the last couple of weeks, so kind of giving some examples, I hooked up Claude to Squarespace and I built a new website. I started having Claude do some coding and I realized that wasn't very helpful actually. It got kind of messy. So I removed Claude from coding, started over, but I did have Claude as an attachment onto Squarespace to go in and just give me advice. on how to organize some things. And so I had written a bunch of content over the last several months, and then I had Claude walk me through all the steps of how to put it in, how to create the pages, how to do everything, how to redo my Google Admin Console to hook up my new URL, how to make sure everything— I took an old blog that I haven't written in 6 years that was on XML files. I had Claude go through all of that data. And sift out all of the— it was like 1,400 posts. Sift all the ones out that weren't relevant to the work that I'm trying to do these days, and then create new extension files so I can load it onto my blog and it's accessible on the web again, where before it would've been a broken mess. Mm-hmm. So I had Claude help me with that. I would never know how to do that. And if I did, it would take me years. But then I also wrote 2 days ago on my Substack and on my blog that all writing and editing is done by me with some research, some research done by AI. Like, I was kind of making a differentiator for me in my own life right now that for me, I don't want to give up writing or even editing. And editing in terms of like, I know some people use it for like spelling and stuff. I was thinking editing in terms of how I organize material and think about stuff. But, you know, sometimes there's a word I want to look up and I look it up and I'm like, I'm curious about that. And so I'll put that word into AI and all of a sudden there's pages of resources of like, oh, this is really helpful for me. Does that make sense? So it's like, I want to hang on to this. I don't care about this piece. That's not my skill set. And then Lance and I were talking about something. And John, I think I probably— I think I told you and Scott this, but— Maybe 6 months ago, I— one night I'm like, I'm gonna have a conversation with Claude about just my life, where it's at, my vocation. And I'd been having some ongoing conversations, and it got pretty deep where Claude was saying some things and writing, um, that I was like, wow, that's really insightful. And so I took that and I read it out loud to Heather. And I started crying.

Hmm.

There was something that I saw, and when I communicated out loud, which I feel like is an experience of embodiment, like now I'm saying this out loud, it was actually very moving. And so I ran that by Lance and a couple other people in the community, and one of their convers— one of their thoughts was, well, you know yourself pretty well, you've been doing a lot of work, you know all the right questions to ask. You know, which is probably true to a degree, but there were some correlations that Claude had lifted to the surface that I don't know if I would have necessarily made the connections.

Mm-hmm.

And then the further step of actually saying that out loud was pretty powerful for me. Kind of freaked me out, to be honest with you, you know. So I just kind of dropped those little things in there to say, kind of, this is kind of where I'm at and thinking through things. That's when it made me really wonder about therapists and our roles in the future.

Well, I love it. All those things, I love that, you know, your first part, you're giving some distinctions between, like, I want to be the writer, you know, the core content ideas, but I don't want to learn all this technical gobbledygook, and I want to have AI do that. And that was really, really great. But I actually think there's maybe a little bit of a relationship between what you said there Versus the sort of life part. I think, you know, one of the things AI is really good at doing is analyzing massive sets of data and doing something with it. And so, you know, you gave this example of all these old blog posts and real technical things, being able to analyze that and organize it in some way. But then I think, like, looking at your life story and all this data and being able to keep it all in, because, you know, there's conversations you and I have had, Rhett, over beers for years and years and years, and I've probably forgotten You know, as much stuff as you told me, and I and you have to tell me again. You're like, gosh, how did you not remember that or something like that? That it's really good at remembering all those things and seeing sort of novel connections there. So so I do think that's a really helpful potential use of AI to see that because you know when you have a new client in your therapy, it might take a couple of sessions just to like get a little bit of enough of a life story to have some context for that person. Whereas that that's something that AI is. Pretty good at remembering. But I do think, you know, too, and just to get back to your therapy session, I think one of the things we probably all have seen lately is, you know, when you get on Zoom, there's all the note-taker things, you know, that are on there, and they're summarizing the meeting and sending it. And, you know, there's more AI note-takers than there are people in your meetings and all that. And I know there's a variety of products that I think are supposed to be compliant with all the right rules that would You know, record your therapy session, so that you don't have to do handwritten notes. And I'm sure you guys have strong opinions about, is the process of writing the notes, is that part of my process of therapy? And just having a machine do that, does that take out something essential in the way that I process what this person is telling me? And then what kinds of outputs and, you know, the 80/20 rules that you were talking about earlier, does my engagement with that help? And if I— Yeah. Use AI to accelerate that I'm actually replacing a pretty core function. So I think maybe there's some both/and there where you would be able to use AI to make sure that you don't miss something in the comprehensive post-note analysis, but that you're still trying to be deeply physically and bodily engaged in what the person's telling you and the way that you capture and try to put an output. I don't know where you guys are on the AI note-takers in sessions, but I'd be curious to hear you on that.

Well, I use SimplePractice, which is kind of the big under-the-hood tool that everybody uses, a lot of people use for like session notes.

It's like a sparrow nest.

Yeah. Okay. And calendaring. And I've chosen intentionally not to allow AI to do my notes for several reasons. One, you have to have, you have to record the session, which already feels different to me. And then 2, I actually— part of taking notes is my process of like getting into the weeds, and that I don't want to let go of that. It keeps me engaged in a way that I feel like is that muscle, like going to the gym and lifting and getting stronger versus offloading that. And that's just me. I'm not saying what other people should do. I have colleagues who use note-taking, but— That's a good example, John, clearly where AI has come into the therapy room and I've made a decision not to do that. Um, and then I have clients, as of recently, they'll email me ahead of time sometimes. They ran a bunch of notes through AI that they wanted me just to look at for bullet points for us to talk about in session.

I like that. That, that can be helpful. I feel awkward about recording, putting things on a— using cloud resources. I don't mind recording sessions to watch them for myself. I think that's actually really helpful, but I don't know. I still have a cheat sheet. I have a handwritten note that I always have that I keep track of with my client. Um, to keep— to stay in the flow. So I, I feel like I'm probably once again a Luddite again. Um, but, um, yeah, I don't know. I think that's— but I do— some of my associates, um, like, they, they've tried the AI app, the AI tools, um, and sometimes they, they, like, they'll notice some interesting pieces that maybe, um, they wouldn't have noticed before. So. I think there, there probably is, you know, going to the radiology example, like maybe there's, you know, maybe it's able to see 98% versus they can only see 90%. But, you know, you strip that away from them, are they actually learning how to hear and, and work with a client?

Yeah.

Um, it's, uh, yeah, that's got me like, I might, I might tell them they might not be able to do AI notes anymore. Sorry, guys.

Yeah. And I think that our— there's something in us that if we know we're gonna have access to information later, we just don't memorize it. You know, like, if you're a Christian and you think that you should sometimes meditate and memorize the Bible, it's so much harder to do that when we have 1,000 translations in our pocket. You know, our mind just doesn't want to do it. We don't want to memorize addresses. None of us know telephone numbers anymore like we did when we were kids, all that sort of stuff. So I could see if I was maybe a therapist recording And I would, I would, that first time I ask, you know, ask a question like, did they say such and such, you know, 10 sessions ago or whatever, I would start to find myself less, you know, likely to remember it. Um, on the other hand, like you said, getting up to 98% is pretty powerful, you know?

Yeah.

And you go, what is the trade-off there for me and for the way I love my, my client? Um, I do think too, just it's worth noting that there's more and more, um, of the local model stuff, you know, people buying You know, a Mac Mini and doing everything on that. So it never hits the cloud. So it's doing the recording and the analysis locally and not going out. So there are, you know, some options out there if the security is the primary, you know, question. But yeah, I appreciate you both reflecting on why you would use it, why you wouldn't, what the trade-offs are. I think that's what we're all trying to do.

Yeah, I think the hill that I'll die on kind of right now at the moment is I do believe that human connection, person to person, will be really critical, even more critical in the future than it is now, that we take it for granted. That I think that there will be a time and place where this face-to-face is really valuable and really important. And I want to keep doing that work face-to-face. I may figure out different tools to use for things, but I, I want to be in the room as much as possible. Sometimes I do telehealth too, but in the room with people face to face, I feel like that's kind of going to be a really critical, important piece of, of our sense of humanity in the future. Um, that just— that's the sense I have. I mean, that's how God's wired me, but that's what's important to me.

Um, it's good.

I have a question. I want to see what you guys think would happen. This is a curiosity to me that I don't know what will happen in the future. Okay, so I think that people, when they're in front of their, um, you know, computer, they're a little bit more likely to share things that they wouldn't say to a person face to face. So we've all talked about this on the internet, that people say angry things, they say mean things. They bully, all that sort of stuff. And but now we're seeing in the therapy world that people are willing to share with Claude, like, or ChatGPT or whatever, like deep, deep, deep secrets, you know, sometimes intentionally forming, you know, AI girlfriend type relationships, but even in just the sense of all these things that we're talking about with therapy, help me with my, you know, arguments with my spouse, that we might not say in person. And I think sometimes when there's a a face in front of you, there's a kind of shame, maybe, that it takes a lot more effort to say something to a face than it does to a keyboard, or even to a disembodied voice machine. And so I'm wondering, if you have a humanoid robot at your house, will you feel that same sense? Like, will you— are you as willing to share with your humanoid robot at your house that does your laundry and your dishes These same things about family history or whatever. And particularly if it's been listening to all your arguments with your spouse, and it actually knows, like, actually, you— this is what you said. So my sort of thought is like, do you want your gardener to be your therapist?

Hmm.

Will you be able to do that or not? Or will we ultimately say, man, I really want to look, you know, Rhett and Lance in the eye, Or I want to lay on the couch and not look at them, but at least be in the same room as them. How will this play out? What role does embodied AI play in the different things that we will or won't share with it? I don't know. What do you guys think?

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to go from a theological lens, and I always go back to that scripture in James where it says, you know, confess your sins to God and you will be forgiven. And I think it's basically like a living, moving journal that we're creating when we confess, um, or when we— excuse me, when we, when we ask. And I think that's like, like, but it's not— there's something amazing about that moment when we confess, that, that it being in the presence of— like, I remember when I was in college, I had done something I was really ashamed of, and I finally, like, you know, this is like the secret I've been holding on to for like the longest time, and then I confessed, right? And in the scripture it says, confess your sins and then you will be healed.

Yeah.

And like, even hearing Rhett's like moment of peace was not in like the feedback that Claude gave him, but it was in the moment where it became confession. Um, you weren't confessing to, um, you know, Heather in the moment, but like it was a moment where you're sharing with with that human body. And I still think, like, you know, if I'm— if I have like an imaginary friend or something like that that I'm talking with, it just doesn't have that same experience as when I put it in a place of confession. So I don't know, that would be my— yeah.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I mean, like, you sometimes make that thing of confess to God and be forgiven in a sort of salvific theological sense, but confess to people and be healed, right? And I love that you draw that out. And you even like the— not like you said, it's not confessing sin, but sort of like a confession of something that's true. Saying it out loud has a real powerful effect. And we all know about, you know, how words really matter. You know, we say, I now pronounce you man and wife. We say, I declare bankruptcy. And then it happens. You know, the things that we say have— Michael Scott. Yeah, yeah. Wayne Gretzky. Yeah. So I think, I do think you're right that saying something out loud to a human really is a healing thing. And I don't think that it— that, like, just like journaling can be healing, that someone's putting it out that no one reads, there are places for that. And there's places for consuming content that can be particularly healing, whether that's Holy Scripture, or that's some other, you know, a book by Brett that's almost holy, you know, something like that. There's some positive things there. But I think doing that with a real person Ultimately, all those things I think should move us to that actual relationship with God and other people.

Yeah, I like the idea of like Emmanuel, God with us, something about in human flesh being in— there's something about— I have to like think more through this, but there's something about shame and like the healing of shame in that face-to-face encounter. You know, that you quite don't have through a mediated source or presence. Um, I guess I speak of shame in, like, in particular because, yeah, I don't know. I just, I guess to answer your question, I still, I think there will be huge value in that face-to-face and a person.

Well, I think it's because there's risk, right? Um, yeah. There's vulnerability, absolutely zero risk in sharing something with, with a, with a chatbot. I mean, maybe a little bit, maybe like they'll share your data somewhere. And that, that kind of security—

Blackmail you.

Yeah, blackmail you. Yeah, exactly. So maybe that, but there's, there's no risk of like, lack of love, you know. And I think you probably all in the therapy world know that there's some level of different risks sharing it with somebody, with a therapist versus actually then going and talking to your your spouse or your friend or your brother or whatever it is, that risk level is calibrated differently there. And I think when we're sharing with AI, or when we're sharing with our therapist, we're eventually all trying to get to talking with the relationship you're trying to work on, right? And I think that, but that one's so much harder because there's a real chance of rejection there. And that's why I don't think that confession to AI is ever going to really push you along until you're willing to, willing to not be loved.

Yeah. John, let me ask you a question.

I'm looking at the time, bro.

I know.

What do you want to

do? I want to ask—

I want to like hang out the rest of the day with John.

I know. We'll have him back on. Is there one question, just— there's a lot, I'm sure, but one that you think, you think we as therapists should just be thinking about, just to be thinking about and like, be curious about in regards to therapy, AI technology? Just, you know, just one thing you kind of want to just say, hey, be thinking about this.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you guys are professional listeners, I think. But almost nobody else is, you know, we're professional talkers, we're professional consumers. And it just seems like, can we encourage people to be radically countercultural by being able to listen themselves, you know, that skill of, can someone listen to another person for 30 minutes without feeling the buzz in their pocket, without thinking about something else to do? I feel like if we all could work on that discipline, we would be healthier ourselves. And we would be more healing to the people around us by offering, you know, you want to be the kind of person that someone can confess to. You want to be the kind of person that's, you know, willing to take the risk of confession. I think if we can figure out how to encourage people, and maybe that's AI reminders sometimes, but hopefully, the reminder is to actually do the thing. But I think the value of what comes naturally to you all of listening, helping our people do that seems pretty huge to me.

Yeah. Well, John, we'll have you on again. I really appreciate you, your friendship. I'm glad Lance gets to meet you too. Maybe a wall.

I'm really impressed. This guy's— this guy's got the stuff,

man. Thanks, Lance.

Durham University makes some good people there. Yeah, definitely takes down those Blue Devils on the other side of town, right?

Close.

This is Durham, England, right? Yes. Not north— not north—

other side of the world.

Yeah, yeah, you put some shrimp on the barbie, Lance.

I love it.

I grew up in the South, so your y'all Bible gets to me, bro.

Yeah, that's fun.

And, you know, for people listening, like, our— one of our goals, Jon, is like, I'm working with, um, Eric Salwyn to have— we're gonna host the Restoration Therapy Summit at DTS in 2029, most likely. So that's

great.

Oh,

we may have some future interactions.

Come on down. That's great.

AI and therapy might, might be an important, important collision course here. So again, I'll put all the show notes up, um, at Spotify, Apple, you know, Substack, YouTube, all the places this goes. You can also visit John's website, which is j.hn. Very clever, like it. I see all his resources, but we'll have all that up. Cool. And, um, again, John, just thank you for taking the time today, and we really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, guys.

All right,

cheers.