TOSA grew out of the Delancey Street Foundation, and its results—participants who are drug-free, employed and living self-reliant lives—are striking. In fact, TOSA also operates businesses, including The Other Side Donuts and The Other Side Movers, that give participants hands-on vocational training and real-world work experience. They learn not only how to do a job, but how to show up, work with others, take responsibility and eventually lead. Revenue from these enterprises helps support the program, which is provided at no cost to participants.

It is an organization worth examining, particularly as the prevailing approach is being challenged at the federal level.

The Trump administration is moving away from the failed Housing First policies and toward a model that emphasizes safe housing alongside treatment and recovery. I recently wrote about that shift—and why I believe Housing First has been insufficient to address the deeper problems underlying homelessness.

Tim’s criticism of Housing First is that it tends to understand homelessness primarily as an asset problem. If someone is homeless, give him a house. If he is hungry, give him food. If he is addicted, give him medication to prevent an overdose.

None of those things is inherently wrong. The question is whether they address the fundamental deficit.

More often than not, Tim argues, that deficit is not an asset. It is agency. A person doesn’t simply need a place to live; he needs to rediscover who he is, what he is capable of becoming and how he can once again become a valued and productive member of society.

“What we really care about is someone living a self-reliant, stable life,” Tim told me. And that begins internally—with the recognition that one’s life is on the wrong track and must be redirected or renewed.

That idea has deep roots in both Christianity and Western philosophy.

In Romans 12:2, Paul writes: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Real transformation begins internally and is then manifested in how we live—in our habits, our decisions and our actions. For Christians, those actions should reflect the example of Jesus, who “came not to be served, but to serve.” (Mark 10:45.) Scripture also makes clear that service entails responsibility. Paul writes, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10.) Work is not merely a means of earning money. It is one way we become responsible, productive, and capable of not only sustaining a home but contributing to others.

The core tenets of Western philosophy point in much the same direction. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that human flourishing and happiness consist not simply in possessing things (housing), but in activity in accordance with virtue. A good life isn’t something you receive. It is something you practice, grounded in an accurate understanding of what is true and what is good. Aristotle begins with the internal—our understanding of truth and virtue—but he doesn’t stop there. That understanding must be expressed through action and reinforced through daily habits. That is how we cultivate virtue, develop character and ultimately live the good life.

This is precisely where progressive homelessness policies such as Housing First have gone astray. They place enormous emphasis on changing a person’s circumstances, with the expectation that better circumstances will lead to better habits and, ultimately, a transformed life. But the direction of causality may not be so simple. Changing a person’s circumstances does not necessarily change the person.

Whether policymakers genuinely believe that circumstances are sufficient to produce transformation, or whether that proposition is simply more politically convenient than asking people to transform themselves, is harder to say. But the more important question is one of results: What does it actually mean to transform a life? What does it mean to flourish? And can a policy that primarily provides relief from suffering produce the habits, agency and character required for a stable, self-sufficient life?

If it cannot, then perhaps we should look more seriously at models that ask more of people—and, in so doing, perhaps give them more, than just a house.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

You can learn more about Tim and The Other Side Academy here: https://www.theothersideacademy.com/

To learn about TOSA’s fascinating history, go here: TOSA’s history.

You can follow TOSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theothersideacademy/?hl=en

Related articles and interview: You can’t house your way out of homelessness

San Patrignano confronts suffering honestly

Monica Barzanti of San Patrignano on CRT

Interview coverage:

:43 - 50k foot view of the homelessness problem. In California, homelessness has grown 20% since 2019, despite the substantial expansion in spending. Why things aren’t getting better.

2:19 - The government treats the homeless and drug addiction problems as “asset” problems. TOSA offers treatment services and rewards participants on whole-person change.

7:45 - The reason the dominant narrative around homelessness is that it is a housing scarcity problem is because building houses is what the government can do.

10:40 - The pendulum is shifting away from Housing First to Human First.

13:08 - From entrepreneur, philanthropist to CEO of TOSA, which leveraged the work done at Delancey Street Foundation, a therapeutic community model started in the 70’s and notable for reducing recidivism in long-term addicts.

18:20 - Foundational principle: Drug addiction and substance abuse are identity problems and a crisis of meaning vs an external (lack of housing) problem.

19:44 - Program requirements and the typical participant profile. About 40% who enter the program complete the program. Of those, 70% remain drug-free.

24:12 - The shared characteristics of a participant (average age 30-40’s from broken families). And why the majority of who apply get accepted—to avoid jail time.

29:52 – Oftentimes, the most hardened hearts are the ones who end up making miraculous recoveries.

32:35 - The 60% attrition rate is prevalent in long-term programs and underscores the immaturity of people to deal with emotional stress. That is why work and stressful situations are required: it teaches people how to handle hard problems, not run away from them.

37:26 - Progressive homelessness policies suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations. They don’t believe people can handle stress. You don’t learn how to handle stress by just talking about how stressful life is.

41:05 - Abstinence is required because if people around you are on drugs, it’s hard to be free of it.

43:52 - About The Other Side Village–for those with deep chronic mental problems. The difference between the government’s permanent housing under progressive policies is that the Village is a sober community with drinking and illegal drugs not allowed.

46:30 - Robert F Kennedy Jr has talked about expanding addiction healing camps - particularly San Patrignano. The pendulum toward these policies is shifting.

49:33 - TOS receives government assistance for the building of its residential homes. But it receives zero funds for its operations and peer-to-peer treatment services.

52:50 - The government can help homelessness by rewarding service providers based on behavioral outcomes. Not how many people are housed; but how many have been in steady jobs?

55:43 - A Democrat Socialists of America proposal is to give guaranteed employment. TOSA’s model of employment is to make people employable.

[The underlying progressive goal: create more homelessness and drug addiction to create dysfunction and government dependency. Then the government will provide people their identity vs giving the people the freedom to discover their own identity.]

59:12 - The DSA is correct in saying the current prison system is a warehousing model. The prisons should incorporate a community-treatment model to learn accountability and responsibility.

1:01:01 - Housing First gives independence but TOSA says before independence, participants need to learn how to live independently and responsibly. Pursuing homelessness as an asset problem just makes homelessness a cyclical problem.

1:04 - One of TOSA’s goals is to build its third campus and find hard workers who believe in its mission. Another is to share its process and learnings to others who’d like to build long-term recovery centers.

This month, the Trump administration moved further away from the failed “Housing First” approach to homelessness and addiction and toward what it calls “Treatment First”—an model centered on recovery, treatment and self-sufficiency.

That move is a sigh of relief as the prevailing Housing First model hasn’t demonstrated that it can produce lasting change. During the Obama administration, Housing First became increasingly central to federal homelessness policy, particularly around 2013, when HUD directed communities to give greater weight to permanent housing strategies. Under the Housing First model, treatment and other supportive services were offered but generally could not be required as a condition of obtaining or retaining housing.

The idea is presented as not only compassionate, but as a human right: Put a roof over someone’s head first. Remove barriers. Don’t require sobriety. Don’t require treatment. Don’t insist that a person first demonstrate that he can manage the responsibilities that come with independent housing. After all, imposing such demands could add undue pressure and stress. Moreover, if housing is a human right, so the argument goes, one shouldn’t have to earn it through behavioral change anyway. Then once a person is housed, they’ll make better choices. In theory.

There is nothing inherently wrong with providing housing. The question is what is the goal of homelessness policy? Is it to get people into housing? Or is it to help the homeless develop the skills to live independently? Those are not the same thing. A policy can be compassionate in its intentions and carry the moral weight of a human right—and still fail to produce good results.

Results aren’t there

One study showed that people placed in housing reported an improvement in their quality of life. That isn’t surprising. Having a place to live is preferable to living on the street. Housing First has also received positive marks for keeping people housed. Additionally, the services offered, such as psychiatric care, basic life-skills assistance and vocational support, were also shown to be utilized, despite participation being voluntary.

But here’s the rub: utilization is a measure of engagement, not necessarily of effectiveness. Similarly, keeping someone housed is an important outcome—but it does not necessarily mean that the underlying problems contributing to homelessness have been resolved.

So what happened to the underlying challenges that caused homelessness in the first place? A review of randomized trials found Housing First policies did not produce clear improvements in mental health, substance use or other outcomes associated with self-sufficiency. In other words, there was no transformation.

The more important questions are whether people experience better mental health, overcome addiction, find employment, develop responsibility and ultimately acquire the ability to live stable, self-sufficient lives.

Aren’t those the larger goals? Homelessness and drug addiction are crises of identity, not solely material problems that are solved by one material means: housing. When a person loses work, relationships, responsibility, purpose and a meaningful place in society, he can lose not only his home but his sense of who he is. He may also lack the awareness, education, positive habits and virtues necessary to rebuild a stable life. Those deficits can contribute to destructive—even violent—behavior that lands many in jail. In fact, 77% of Californians experiencing homelessness reported having been jailed at some point, and 37% reported having served time in prison.

Character transformation matters

Housing is an asset. It is not a character trait. A person can be given an apartment without acquiring the habits necessary to maintain it. He can be given food without learning how to provide for himself. He can be given medication without overcoming an addiction. He can be given a bed without acquiring the discipline required to build a stable life. A right to housing does not confer the habits, skills or character necessary to maintain a home, let alone live independently. And for many, that leaves them caught in a much larger cycle involving addiction, mental illness, incarceration, unemployment, broken relationships and destructive behavior. If the same person repeatedly cycles through homelessness, addiction and jail, what exactly is accomplished by addressing only one element of that cycle?

This is where the distinction between compassion and effectiveness becomes important. If self-sufficiency isn’t addressed, the system may move people out of homelessness temporarily without enabling them to exit permanently. The result is a revolving door, not a shrinking population.

From 2013 to 2025, homelessness in the United States homelessness increased by 27 percent. California, which has embraced Housing First principles, has seen homelessness rise 20 percent since 2019. The state accounts for about 12 percent of the nation’s population but about 28 percent of its homeless population.

Correlation does not prove causation. California’s homelessness problem has many causes, not the least of which is high housing costs, exacerbated by continued immigration into a state with a severely constrained housing supply. But the numbers should at least make us skeptical of the idea that a policy is working simply because its intentions are kindhearted. And that always seems to be the way Housing First is sold.

That’s not the case with the Human First model, whose intentions are just as compassionate, but whose approach is criticized as too conditional and coercive.

Maybe that’s a red flag in and of itself. When something sounds too good to be true, it often is. When something is packaged as “there’s nothing you have to do,” it’s worth asking: Why?

Human First takes the opposite approach. It asks something of people—and, in so doing, seeks to give them something Housing First cannot provide: agency.

The benefits of the Human First model is what I explored with my latest guest on the Culture, Religion & Technology (CRT) podcast, Tim Stay, CEO of The Other Side Academy (TOSA). The TOSA method starts from a very different premise: that lasting change requires more than providing a person with resources. It requires asking something of the person in return—responsibility, discipline, work and, ultimately, transformation.

In my next post, I’ll share my conversation with Tim and explore what happens when we move from a philosophy of housing people to one of helping people become capable of housing themselves.

Sadly, this is another manifestation of a deeply entrenched idea in our culture: that if we remove risk, adversity, failure, disappointment and pain from a child’s life, we will somehow make that child stronger in the long run. The implicit assumption is that children should be protected from hardship until they become mature enough to handle it.

There is a rather obvious problem with this proposition however: how does one become mature enough to handle hardship without actually enduring hardship?

Maturity isn’t some academic achievement. It is acquired through making decisions and experiencing the consequences. If something goes wrong, you become resilient through bouncing back from failure, not avoiding it. This is not only obvious, it’s biblical. In Romans 5:3–suffering produces endurance, endurance-character, character-hope.

Remove suffering of any kind, and you produce a fragile, anxious, dependent, insecure, fearful person. Perhaps that helps explain America’s growing “failure to launch” epidemic and a persistent sadness and hopelessness amongst high schoolers. (Something big pharma would love to fix with medications, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole.)

Lenore Skenazy knows something about this problem. After all, she didn’t earn the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” for nothing. After writing “Why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone,” Skenazy became a national controversial figure almost overnight. Her decision to allow her son to navigate New York City on his own became a story on The Today Show, where she was forced to defend herself against a clinical psychologist who regarded her decision as dangerously irresponsible.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Lenore for an hour on my podcast. What became apparent was that she was not a negligent or child-abusing parent. Quite the opposite. She understood something that our culture increasingly seems to have forgotten: children need responsibility in order to become responsible. At some point, you have to trust a child enough to let him make decisions without you. And it is often the risky and frightening decisions where development occurs (for the child and the parent).

I don’t know whether I would have allowed my son to take the subway alone at nine. If I lived in New York City, maybe. As Lenore and I discussed, context and familiarity matters. The child’s capabilities matter. When my son was five, for example, I put him on a two-seater, bar-less ski chairlift by himself and watched him take multiple rides alone. He was already an avid skier, so I believed he was ready. Was I nervous? Absolutely!!! But I also thought about the alternative. What if something happened to me on the mountain? What if he became separated from me? Was it really safer to keep him completely dependent on me, or was there some wisdom in giving him the opportunity to discover that he could handle himself?

My son wasn’t afraid. In fact, he was exhilarated. At one point, he came up with an ingenious solution to the absence of a safety bar: he put his ski pole through the side of the chair and through the back, effectively creating his own bar so he wouldn’t fall off. He was five years old. He came up with that solution. I didn’t. (Of course, his little arms were still holding tightly to the back of the metal chair.) Was I a bad parent for putting him at risk? To some, yes. Lenore, of course, would understand.

My son’s experience raises a larger question: What happens when we remove common risks from childhood?

For instance, my husband recently pointed out that it seems there is little risk of getting into physical fights at school these days. At least compared to his experience in the 80’s. The statistics bear this out. In 1991, about two out of five male high school students reported having been in a physical fight during the previous year. By the late 2010s, that figure had fallen to roughly one in four.

I’m not suggesting that children need to fight. Violence is not a virtue. But conflict is unavoidable, and learning how to navigate conflict is part of growing up. A child who encounters conflict has to figure out when to stand his ground, when to walk away, when to defend himself and when to seek help. Those experiences require judgment. And judgment, like courage, is developed through experience.

Physical confrontation wasn’t foreign to me either. When I was in elementary school, I remember running away from three kids on bicycles who seemed intent on roughing me up in some way. I barely avoided the confrontation, beyond a skinned knee, after I lunged like a baseball player executing a head-first slide to home plate to make it safely to my front door. I don’t remember the experience as traumatic. I remember it because it was an encounter with reality. There were people who might hurt me. I had to recognize the danger, figure out what to do and get myself home and into safety.

Today, safety means something different. It can mean the absence not only of physical danger, but of harmful words, uncomfortable ideas, embarrassment, failure and emotional distress. The definition of what is considered dangerous to a child has expanded so dramatically, it has turned many into walking time bombs ready to explode with rage. If parents shield their children from words, imagine how much more protective they can become—and have become—when it comes to physical danger.

That’s why for the past fifteen years or so, Lenore has devoted herself to making that argument. Partnering with some well-known psychologists, Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray, she co-founded the non-profit Let Grow, which creates educational curriculum and supports legislation to give children more free time alone. Through her non-profit and her media site Free-Range Kids, she has become one of the country’s most vocal advocates for what might simply be called commonsense parenting: giving children enough freedom to make mistakes, encounter consequences and gradually assume responsibility for their own lives.

That philosophy is behind the “Reasonable Childhood Independence” legislation that has now been adopted in 13 states. The goal is to prevent parents from being treated as criminals simply because they allow their children a reasonable degree of independence. The distinction is important. Neglect should mean placing a child in serious danger—not merely allowing a child to exist outside the parent’s immediate line of sight.

Georgia adopted the law, for example, after a mother was arrested in 2024 when her 10-year-old son walked less than a mile from their home to a local store. There was no law explicitly prohibiting the child from making that walk. But without clear legal protection for reasonable parental discretion, questions about “endangering safety” and “adequate supervision” were effectively left to the judgment of police. That is a remarkable development. We reached a point where an ordinary act of childhood independence was interpreted as parental irresponsibility.

Lenore’s organization also works directly with schools through the “Let Grow Project”, which features a homework assignment that asks children to do something independently that they have never done before: run an errand, prepare a meal, climb a tree. One teacher reported that the result was greater confidence and less anxiety among her students.

And there is a fascinating development that suggests this idea may be more than merely common sense. Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz conducted the first pilot project using what he calls “independence therapy” with anxious children. The idea makes intuitive sense when you understand how anxiety is treated through cognitive behavioral therapy and, particularly, exposure therapy. If a child is terrified of dogs, for example, the solution is slowly expose the child to dogs to discover catastrophe does not occur. Independence therapy takes a similar principle and applies it to ordinary life. The child takes a step toward independence—and discovers, through experience, that he can handle it.

As someone who has been critical of the psychological and psychiatric medical complex, I find this particularly encouraging because children are considerably more resilient than we have allowed them to demonstrate. This is the paradox at the heart of the modern obsession with safety and control: attempts to protect children from adversity leaves them less prepared for the very adversity society is trying to protect them from.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Lenore.

To learn more about Lenore and her work, visit her non-profit: https://letgrow.org/

Read her blog and book: Free-Range Kids

Watch her Ted Talk

Follow her on X @FreeRangeKids

Interview coverage:

3:17 - Parents have become much more hands-on and spend way too much time with their kids.

4:54 - How Lenore became an advocate after being a newspaper reporter writing about culture.

5:35 - Lenore talks about how her son wanted to take the subway alone.

9:00 - Studies showing broader cultural expectation that kids need to be continuously supervised.

15:34 - The result is a massive retreat from the real world.

16:30 - Context and familiarity matters when allowing kids to take risks.

21:55 - How to get from fear to trust. The only way you get to trust is by allowing kids to take risks.

22:30 - The Let Grow activities for schools and communities.

24:02 - Results of the Let Grow homework assignments.

27:09 - The Reasonable Childhood Independence law.

39:40 - How much of the independence problem is the design of the suburbs?

50:00 - Is the problem phones or lack of independence?

1:09:30 - Where is risk-taking taking place?

1:11:00 - Goals for Let Grow and Free-range Kids.

In a culture that increasingly oscillates between two extremes: seeing artificial intelligence as either a salvific technological deus ex machina or an apocalyptic end to humanity, Jordan Wales offers something more serious: a framework for understanding AI in relation to a richer account of what a human being is.

Jordan is Associate Professor and John and Helen Kuczmarski Chair in Theology at Hillsdale College and an advisor to the Holy See’s Center for Digital Culture. To Jordan, before we ask whether AI is a messiah or Skynet, we should understand what the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence is—and what it is for. (Watch my interview here.)

Those are questions as old as civilization itself. Long before technologists set out to create intelligent machines, humanity had wrestled with the nature of intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. From the Garden of Eden onward, the central question has never simply been how to acquire knowledge, but what knowledge is for. Augustine of Hippo gave one of Christianity’s most longstanding answers: wisdom is found not in possessing more information, but in rightly ordering our loves.

Drawing heavily on Augustine, Jordan argues that intelligence is inseparable from love. For Augustine, the fourth-century theologian and philosopher who helped shape Western Christian thought, intelligence is not merely the ability to process information. It is intelligentia—a deeper form of engaging with reality as it truly is.

Jordan illustrates this distinction through the example of a child learning math. At first, math can feel like a set of abstract rules to manipulate symbols: borrow here, carry there, apply the formula, arrive at the answer. A student can follow these procedures without grasping the deeper reality the symbols represent. This is detached calculation or computational intelligence. But Augustine’s framework distinguishes between using knowledge to accomplish a task and truly understanding what that knowledge reveals.

For Jordan, calculus was the moment mathematics became meaningful. The symbols stopped feeling like arbitrary marks on a page and began pointing toward something real—something almost musical in its beauty and order. The equations were no longer merely rules to produce an answer; they became windows into reality itself. For Augustine, true understanding is never purely neutral or detached. We do not fully know something simply by mastering it or extracting its usefulness. We understand it by appreciating it—by loving it, in some sense, for what it is rather than what it can do for us.

Consider mundane objects of everyday life—pens or pencils, for instance. “Pens can become mediators of one’s own self-understanding,” said Jordan. “A pen is not just a pen but an unconscious talisman of me.” And even if a pen or pencil is not a talisman and just something to throw away (like the dozens of tiny golf pencils I lose after using on the golf course), loving a pen can simply mean knowing the objects place in a beautifully ordered universe.

Intelligence is relational

This is the deeper insight behind Augustine’s intelligentia: understanding is begotten in love. Intelligence is not merely computational or transactional; it is relational. We come to know things more fully when we apprehend their meaning and their place within the larger order of reality.

That insight leads directly to one of Augustine’s most important ideas: ordo amoris, the ordering of our loves. Humans are not simply creatures who think or who love; we are rational beings whose reason is directed by what we love. This is not a trivial characteristic of man. We are always directing our attention and devotion toward that which we love, whether that love is aimed toward something genuinely good or toward an appealing desire which seems good in the moment. Those loves shape the kind of people we become. The question is not whether we will love something, but whether our loves are rightly ordered.

And if intelligence is shaped by what we love and how those loves are ordered, then artificial intelligence can only reflect that ordering by the people who design, train and deploy it. The question of AI, then, is not simply how many problems machines can solve or how convincingly it can imitate human thought. It is what vision of the “good” is being modeled. Every technology reflects an implicit hierarchy of values.

But here’s where we reach an unbridgeable gap. Values can be programmed. Objectives can be optimized. Preferences can be ranked. Love, however, cannot. This raises the deepest question of all: How can there be an ordo amoris in a machine incapable of loving?

This paradox becomes clearer when viewed through older literary imaginations of artifice and order, which came up when I brought up the necessity of suffering as part of the human condition to build character. Jordan points to the Roman de Troie (Romance of Troy), a 12th-century medieval French poem, and one of its most memorable scenes: the “Hall of Beauties,” a chamber filled with automata—mechanical figures that stage an idealized social order.

One figure, a woman made of gold, holds up a mirror, offering an image of beauty and proper conduct. Another performs acrobatics to entertain and gather people together. Another plays music, lifting the room into a kind of choreographed harmony. These machines do not replace humans; they serve as symbolic participants within a larger human community. They model how people ought to look, behave, and relate to one another.

In that sense, the scene feels strikingly modern. Today’s robots and AI companions are often sold in much the same way: as guides, helpers, simulators of ideal care, ideal attentiveness, ideal friendship. But simulation is not participation. These machines don’t inhabit the real world, which is messy and full of suffering, grief, sacrifice and yes love. That is the deep irony of the scene appearing in a Trojan story. The city can create these beautiful automota, but outside the room, human nature is still human nature. Troy, and all its artificial beauty and harmony, is still headed for ruin.

This story offers a couple warnings: if we become so enamored with the beauty of a superficial ideal, we constrain ourselves from not seeing reality itself. Worse yet, we fail to cultivate the habits, virtues, and resilience needed to meet reality when it inevitably confronts us. Beauty without truth becomes illusion; comfort without sacrifice leaves us unprepared for life as it truly is.

Then Jordan presents another medieval story that functions as a kind of didactic synthesis of medieval motifs surrounding the Tristan and Ysolt tradition. In his telling, Tristan compels a skilled giant to construct an artificial version of Ysolt and her maidservant. Tristan attempts to direct his love toward the artificial Ysolt, but because she cannot reciprocate—the automaton lacks the essential quality that makes love possible—the interaction produces frustration rather than fulfillment.

Caerdin, Tristan’s brother-in-law, is a parallel figure in this narrative framework. When Caerdin encounters the artificial maidservant, he too realizes the emptiness of a fabricated relationship. Instead of accepting the limits of the robot, however, he turns to the real maidservant, seduces her, and abandons her. Unlike Tristan who becomes frustrated, Caerdin becomes cruel.

The story offers a warning that remains strikingly relevant in the age of AI companions. Attempts to externalize or mechanize our deepest relational desires may produce convincing simulations, but they cannot produce genuine relationship. An imitation may reflect what we long for, but it cannot love us in return. Nor can it demand anything from us.

Giving ourselves away

This is precisely what makes AI companionship so seductive. It promises a companion who is always available, endlessly affirming, and never taxing. Yet the very convenience that attracts us ultimately hollows out the relationship. Human love is not fulfilled simply by being loved—or by feeling understood or affirmed—but by being asked to love. We are made not only to receive affection but to give ourselves away. A companion that requires nothing from us can never occupy the highest place in our hierarchy of loves because it neither gives nor receives love in the fullest sense.

I just came back from the beach with my chocolate lab who’s loved swimming since she was eight weeks old. In the past, she could fetch a tennis ball in the water for hours. So relentless was her energy, we joked how it would be nice if just became old, sat around and made no demands for yet another throw.

This time it was different. She wasn’t feeling herself and for three days she lay curled inside in a blanket. It was nice to pet her. She became a bit of a stuffed animal. Docile, well-behaved. No longer did I have to throw a ball to keep her entertained. I could enjoy my day.

But it wasn’t the same. Even the beach wasn’t the same. Part of what made the ocean beautiful was watching the sheer delight it awakened in her. Yes, throwing the ball could become exhausting—even irritating. But her joy transformed the labor into something meaningful. The effort was not an obstacle to love; it was one of the ways love was expressed.

As humans, we experience reality and relationships not through maximum convenience but through relationships that ask something of us. Love that enables others to glow. Love that exercises us physically and mentally—to put in the work, the sacrifice, the suffering if you will, that brings joy to others. In giving ourselves away, we grow in character, wisdom, and ultimately in love itself.

Artificial intelligence, then, is not just forcing us to ask whether machines can be become super intelligent. Rather it is asking what is human intelligence itself? If intelligence is inseparable from rightly ordered love—recognizing what is good and giving ourselves to it—then this is far deeper and essential than computation, calculation and prediction.

This is why the experiences of Tristan and Caerdin matter. Their frustration did not arise because the automata failed to imitate affection convincingly enough. It arose because an imitation can never become a beloved. Resentment emerged because their relationships were never ever mutual to begin with.

The capacities and skills that enable machines to optimize are extraordinary. But they are not, the measure of intelligence, and they are certainly not the measure of our humanity. Love cannot be computed. Sacrifice and the character borne out of it cannot be generated by algorithm.

That is why the most profound questions surrounding AI are ultimately theological ones because every society organizes itself around its highest good and every technology embodies the values of those who create and use it.

The question is not merely what will AI become.

The question is what will we love—for in the end, we become what we love.

(Image source: ChatGPT)

In that role, he helps make sense of the spiritual impact of artificial intelligence—now considered one of the Papacy’s defining moral challenges as highlighted by Pope Leo XIV’s massive 43,000-word encyclical on protecting human dignity in the age of AI. What is striking about the current moment, however, is not that theologians are fixated on AI, but that technologists are obsessed with theology. The architects of the digital age see technical hurdles not as algorithmic crises but metaphysical ones, revealing that the deeper they push into computation, the more they stumble back toward the divine.

In seeking to understand the implications of AI, modern Silicon Valley technologists are actively pursuing guidance from religious leaders and guardians of the ancient past, engaging in dialogues with institutions like the Vatican to learn what religion has to say about intelligence and a good life, especially if AI succeeds to cure diseases and alleviate all suffering. What then?

The irony is that as we reach some sort of triumphant technological milestone we find ourselves precisely at the beginning asking the same old questions. Teleology, anthropology, and ultimate meaning become far more compelling to explore than mere computational knowledge.

Speaking with Jordan was a delight, especially given his many analogies and illustrations to help viewers/listeners understand the complex topic of intelligence, humanity, and God. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

You can learn more about Jordan here: https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/jordan-wales/

You can learn more about his work here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordan_Wales2

Interview coverage

1:03 - The Vatican’s interest in AI and the anthropological and moral questions explored.

4:34 – What guidance are Silicon Valley technologists seeking from religious leaders?

10:07 - If we no longer have limitations, what more will man do? What is man’s purpose?

11:42 - Many disciplines (philosophy, epistemology, anthropology) lay claim to the question: what is intelligence? Why theology is the main pursuit as it is the widest frame of reference.

17:32 – Theology at its best commits us to the widest horizon. As Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy, theology is the highest form of human knowledge.

19:23 – Studying theology is not just an academic pursuit. To know God is to have a relationship with God. Intellectual probing is the earnest pursuit of one’s friends.

22:00 – Why relational is the right way to view intelligence vs computational/outcome oriented. Augustine of Hippo’s Intelligentsia and why understanding is begotten in love.

26:00 – Computation is the manipulation of uninterpreted symbols. How the appreciative engagement of reality can emerge through calculus.

30:00 - Intelligentsia must quest further through knowledge to wisdom. Intelligentsia is loving engagement with reality as it is.

33:47 – The nature of the moral framework when it comes to mundane objects, such as pens. A pen is not just a pen but an unconscious talisman.

38:40 - Augustine would say our world is shaped by a hierarchy of love. Humility is not a low opinion of oneself but an accurate one, according to Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential Christians of the Middle Ages.

39:53 - A value-neutral state (a separation of church and state) is fiction. Classical liberalism has an agnostic approach to flourishing. But even in that there is an implicit value system. If we give up all claims of moral values, we don’t have a place to start to making laws.

46:55 – Clashing value systems: optimization (a cynical value system) vs an intuitive sense of what feels right.

52:51 - The challenge of clashing value systems and morality encoded into AI. And what we can learn from 12th century poetry. Robots in the Roman de Troie (Romance of Troy), a 12th-century medieval French poem as well as in Thomas of Britain’s version of Tristan and Ysolt.

1:11:00 - Does Anthropic want to keep control of AI to control our value system?

1:27 - Gnosticism in the 21st century, suffering, Irenaeus and why God gave us a gym, not a spa.

1:32 - Where does consciousness come from?

1:42 - Can AI produce breakthrough technologies and think in heterodox ways?

Two years ago, RFK Jr expressed interest (go to 38:08 where he mentions SanPa) in expanding such residential models in the United States, yet such proposals have generated significant political and institutional resistance. Some commentators describe large-scale “wellness farm” concepts as incompatible with legal and constitutional norms, invoking historical parallels to earlier institutional systems associated with coercion or “eugenic” ideology: a system of improving society through selective breeding.

The historical backdrop to these critiques is not trivial. Early 20th-century state institutions—such as Gracewood in Georgia—often began with good-intended missions of education and vocational training for individuals labeled “feeble-minded” - a broad categorization for those who had learning disorders, psychiatric disorders or behavioral problems. Over time, many of these institutions expanded too quickly, became overcrowded and increasingly custodial in function. In other words, they were institutions that separated and controlled the mentally unfit, they weren’t places with a purpose to heal. In many cases, however, the scientific belief at the time was that many behaviors were hereditary and unchangeable. Therefore the solution wasn’t to change people, but to segregate them, manage them and in some cases, sterilize them.

This criticism applied directly at SanPa as well. In a 2020 Netflix documentary titled: SanPa - Sins of the Savior, Vincenzo Muccioli, the founder of SanPa was exposed for among other things, forced confinement and mandated labor of the residents.

Given the negative publicity of SanPa as well as the sordid history of long-term institutions, it’s not surprising such programs have yet to be adopted.

Yet I am confounded that today’s approaches—“Housing First” and “Harm Reduction”—are deemed acceptable. These approaches emphasize stabilization and risk reduction without requiring immediate abstinence or structured moral transformation as a precondition for assistance. In other words, free housing and medication supplies with no conditions. Despite the limited evidence of success, these approaches have been formalized in federal public health strategy in recent years, especially under President Biden’s drug prevention strategy, and are now embedded in national overdose prevention frameworks.

I wrote extensively about my thoughts on these approaches in my piece: San Patrignano confronts suffering honestly. In that piece, I also wrote about why we need more institutions like SanPa here in the United States.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Monica Barzanti, head of international relations at SanPa. She talks about how the center started, its successes and its challenges.

You can learn more about Monica Barzanti on her profile page and San Patrignano here: https://www.sanpatrignano.org/en/

Interview coverage:

2:47 - From resident at San Patrignano to head of international relations.

3:59 - The philosophical difference between San Patrignano’s approach of long-term, drug-free recovery vs the view that drug disorders and mental health issues are brain diseases. “The brain disease model of addiction explains a situation when the substance use disorder is already well-advanced.”

6:44 – It takes time and space to find a new purpose in life and to dismiss the personality of addict that was assumed.

8:39 - In 80’s and 90’s, there was a proliferation of antidepressants: 1% on antidepressants decades ago vs 15% today. But in Italy, Prozac fever didn’t spread the way it did in the United States.

11:01 - In order to make a diagnosis, you have to have a person without drugs for a period of time in order to better understand their condition. Substance use disorder is a problem of education.

12:52 - How long does a person abstain from drug usage to get a good diagnosis?

15:00 - The origins and philosophy behind San Patrigano. Tenets of the program are similar to the Christian tenets of redemption, transformation through sacrifice, dignity and responsibility.

17:39 – The stigma taken away and the stigma added. Culture equates compassion with not blaming a person or making them feel guilty for their actions because it stigmatizes them. Yet this causes the person to take on another stigma of being a dangerous and an unpredictable person without medications.

22:13 - Why working is a pillar of the program.

24:18 – The lie that is telling someone that substance disorder is a chronic disease. Telling someone the truth about their loss of self-esteem isn’t judging them. But telling them they have to take buprenorphine for the rest of their life is defeating.

26:37 – The stigma created when a person is labeled a dangerous person who can’t recover on their own, or someone who cannot be trusted but needs medications to be stable, is a worse stigma than a person struggling with self-esteem or life in general.

28:44 - How San Patrignano started by founder Vincenzo Muccioli, who used his property to start the program.

30:57 - San Patrignano is a social enterprise with 65% of its budget sourced through its production of goods (crafts, wine, baked goods) and services (hair styling). The rest comes from donations.

33:00 - Residents also learn how to spend their spare time engaging in sports, music and art.

36:00 - The process of internship or apprenticeship, and the peer support infrastructure.

38:20 – The social enterprise explained in more detail, such as bread sold to Burger King and other neighborhood restaurants.

42:00 - The required time to stay at SanPa because it is a therapeutic necessity and the time needed to learn a trade. According to neurobiologists, the brain takes at least five years to get back to its natural functioning.

44:00 – Responding to the Netflix documentary - Sins of our Fathers – accusations of abuse, including chaining of residents or coercive discipline and ethical concerns around unpaid labor. Importantly, residents attend SanPa on a voluntary basis.

48:00 – Around 600 enter the program every year. Difficult to gauge how many apply because there are hundreds of inquiries, and many who drop out early due to the commitment required.

51:00 – RFK Jr wants to develop healing farms across the United States, pointing to SanPa as a model. But there are similar models in the United States. Those include Trosa in North Carolina as well as The Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Delancey Street Foundation.

If there is any one statement that is emblematic of the absurdity at the core of contemporary progressive drug addiction and homelessness policies it may be LA Mayor Karen Bass’ proposition that repairing the teeth of methamphetamine addicts constitutes a meaningful solution to the drug and homeless crisis. One wishes this was satire. Yet it’s not. It is an all-in conviction that putting lipstick on a pig can substitute character building. In her view, people ”can’t succeed without teeth” (that are rotted by doing meth). In other words, they need dental work, not moral rehabilitation, disciplined sobriety, or responsibility.

That is the logic of a civilization terrified of confronting suffering honestly.

At its core, the modern therapeutic worldview that is sold as “compassion” tends to regard human suffering less as a consequence of personal moral error and more as the result of addiction, brain disease, injury, deprivation, economic conditions, racism or discrimination. The sufferer is therefore understood primarily as a victim of circumstance rather than an agent responsible for his condition. When suffering is viewed as a pathology rather than a moral failure, the person’s identity becomes their situation—and that confusion, in and of itself, is crippling and defeating.

Bass subscribes to the now-dominant yet failed doctrines of “Housing First” and “Harm Reduction”— ideologies that place unconditional shelter and medication management above the necessary but often brutal process of genuine transformation. These approaches are embraced throughout California under Gavin Newsom and were supported in federal overdose policy during the Biden administration. Their defenders justify these policies through deceptive studies. For instance, they say those who are provided housing are more likely to be housed than those who aren’t given housing. Forgive me for being blunt, but “duh.” This is tautological. If you place someone in state-funded housing, of course they will no longer be categorized as homeless.

The more fundamental questions, however, remain unanswered: Are people becoming capable of sustaining meaningful, responsible lives, independently? Have they become productive, contributing, socially-integrated citizens?

Of course not. Use of methamphetamine has gone up over the past decade, as have overdose deaths. Since Newsom came into office as governor, homelessness has grown by about 20% from 2019 to 2024, despite $40 billion spent on supposedly creating housing. In fact, California has about 12% of the U.S. population but about 45% of the homeless population. It is why the cities of San Francisco and LA receive tens of thousands of complaints about human waste littering the streets. Moreover, the sad truth about this situation, that is never brought up, is that many of these so-called homeless people are drug addicts struggling to accept housing because complying with even the most simple basic societal rules—no overnight noise, cleanliness for shared spaces, behavioral expectations, routine maintenance—impedes their freedom.

The reality is that drug usage is a symptom of the underlying agony the majority are experiencing when they’ve lost their identity. The addict has lost his place in the world. He no longer knows who he is, what he should strive toward, or why his life matters. He’s turned to drug usage as a counterfeit form of transcendence; a pathological imitation of the divine, a cheap, easy, fleeting escape from the crushing weight of being human.

Pogressive compassion tells him his primary identity is victim. Conservative Christians say he is a child of God, worthy and capable of redemption. Matthew 19:26, Jesus says, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

If we want to fix the drug and homeless problem, we need to fix the identity problem. No amount of housing supply or Naloxone will fix a person struggling with this.

Drug free, long-term commitment, labor

That is precisely why institutions like San Patrignano (SanPa) are so compelling. Located in Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast, the rehabilitation community, or healing farm, has spent decades treating addiction not as a permanent medical identity but as an existential crisis of meaning, discipline, belonging, and selfhood. It is a model that is austere by modern standards: no drugs, no substitution therapies, no quick exits, and a minimum commitment of three years. Residents work. They build skills. They contribute. They participate in a structured moral order larger than themselves.

And that matters profoundly because dignity only emerges through a sense of agency, and responsibility to oneself and others, not learned helplessness and passivity.

The program works because its goals are rooted in an understanding of what legitimate recovery requires and looks like. Individuals must have authentic buy-in to their own recovery. Individuals must sacrifice comfort to make the right choices. They must aspire to achieve a sense of purpose. They must want to contribute to society. They must be drug-free.

Compare those aims to Housing First programs that measure success by asking, “How many people have good teeth?” or "How many people did we house?" rather than, "How many people rebuilt their lives?" It's analogous to declaring a school thriving because every student receives a diploma, regardless of whether anyone learned to read, think, or shoulder the burdens of adulthood. It is analogous to a permissive parent who thinks they’ve done a good job if their child is occupied, non-violent and stable vs resilient, strong and capable to withstand adversity.

San Patrignano promotes fortitude. It recognizes that addiction is not merely an external problem to be managed, nor simply a neurological malfunction to be medicated. While the prevailing “brain disease” model of addiction contains elements of truth, particularly in late-stage dependency, it is catastrophically incomplete when elevated into a total explanation of human behavior. As Monica Barzanti, head of international relations at San Patrignano, observed, many addicts arrive there after childhood trauma, social alienation, bullying, abandonment, or profound existential dislocation: a feeling of inferiority, a lack of self-worth and not measuring up.

Therein lies the central requirement in the methods of SanPa: a sustained period, free from chemical dependency of any kind to avoid mistaking the effects of chronic drug use for immutable psychiatric identity.

SanPa’s mandatory stay and labor of multiple years is also psychological architecture. Residents learn a skill—building, farming, cooking, repairing, creating or organizing. These activities are not merely to keep the addict busy. Nor is the addict just cheap or free labor. Work is required to rebuild oneself. The addict is helping himself reconstruct an identity. He is discovering that he can become someone reliable. Someone useful. Someone needed. Someone with a purpose. Someone appreciated.

The addict must pass through suffering

A person cannot be rescued from a chaotic life by being insulated from the necessity of confronting the chaos. Genuine recovery or reclaiming of identity therefore requires something modern therapeutic culture has become deeply uncomfortable acknowledging: suffering. Not pointless suffering. Not cruelty. But the suffering inherent in transformation itself.

The Bible tells us so. In Romans 5:3 - Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. Another favorite of mine: Hebrews 12:11 - “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

C.S. Lewis put it this way in his book “The Problem of Pain.”

“No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” The rebel soul is the one who lives a life morally asleep. Pain wakes up the rebel soul by removing the illusion that life can be unexamined. Pain is a confrontation with reality. As Lewis said, God “shouts in our pains; it is a megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Modern therapeutic and coddling culture do not understand the rebel soul or the necessity of pain. It recoils at such ideas because goodness in a secular society is often equated with the minimization of suffering. It cringes at the notion that God is our creator because in their belief humans are soulless clumps of atoms and particles that can be manipulated through modern medicine to overcome toil, labor and pain. Suffering is a bug not a feature. Suffering is to be defeated.

This, of course, is a bunch of baloney. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18 - God will “destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Shielding people from suffering - the very ingredient God says we need for transformation - is not mercy nor is it scientific progress, it is infantilization.

Critics of SanPa

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought renewed attention to San Patrignano during his 2024 presidential campaign, presenting it as a possible model for the United States.

Yet despite the ongoing disaster that is America’s addiction-response systems, there has been remarkably little movement toward establishing similar recovery communities across rural America. The political resistance has been immediate and unrelenting. Every pillar of SanPa’s philosophy - long-term commitment, sobriety and work - has been lambasted by large segments of the American scientific and therapeutic establishment. Much of the critique centers on ethical and historical concerns.

The program’s three-year requisite stay and labor has been vilified for controversial tactics in its past. Netflix even produced a documentary series, SanPa: Sins of the Savior, highlighting coercive practices such as restraining residents to prevent them from leaving. These critics also invoke historical precedent. In the early 20th century, many institutions offered to educate and care for the socially marginalized, the “feeble-minded”- individuals mentally unwell or with learning disabilities. In the absence of effective treatments, such institutions became custodial rather than therapeutic. By the mid-twentieth century, investigative reporting and documentaries revealed conditions in many state hospitals that were, in numerous cases, degrading and dehumanizing. Think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which dramatized the oppressive, exploitative, and undignified environment of institutional psychiatric treatment.

Then during the civil rights era of the 1960s, formal concern extended toward these socially marginalized groups and was later standardized in large-scale anti-poverty initiatives, including federally funded job training and welfare programs aimed at increasing economic participation among the disadvantaged.

Against this backdrop, contemporary therapeutic communities such as SanPa have become points of contention. Although the program offers extensive internal work opportunities, critics argue that such participation does not constitute “meaningful employment” because individuals don’t receive paychecks.

Finally, the program’s mandatory sobriety commitment on the part of residents is also seen as unscientific. A recent NPR article quoted Yale Professor Dr. Robert Heimer who opposed SanPa’s regimen of medication-free treatments by saying, “This is very hard to answer without getting angry.” His view is part of the pharmaceutical culture that exploded circa 80’s-90s, where antidepressants like Prozac became not merely medications but cultural symbols of scientific achievement—promising relief and symptom management.

Full circle

As should now be evident, both our culture and our understanding of humanity have undergone a profound change. Yet one critical factor has stayed the same.

Historically, societies often treated maladaptive behavior as effectively fixed—whether attributed to heredity, fate, or moral defect. The individual was, in practice, regarded as incapable of meaningful transformation.

Contemporary progressive frameworks reject this explicit determinism. But inadvertently reproduce another version of it. By minimizing demands for responsibility, structure, and sustained effort, those who hold this view assume that expectations themselves are either unrealistic or unnecessarily harsh. They abandon the idea that individuals can shoulder responsibility, overcome their suffering, and rebuild themselves. They have replaced faith in human potential with the management of permanent dysfunction. How, precisely, is this an advance?

And why should society bear the escalating costs of behaviors that are plainly harmful—to the individual and to everyone around him—while being prohibited from making moral judgments about those behaviors? Why is it considered merciful to tolerate conduct that leaves communities degraded, public spaces unusable, and lives increasingly fragmented? This is not compassion. It is abdication and laziness masquerading as virtue.

Real compassion is far more demanding. It requires the courage to ask difficult questions. It requires us to decide whether we still believe that human beings possess the capacity for profound and even miraculous transformation.

Whatever its imperfections — and no institution dealing with human brokenness will ever be without them — San Patrignano has produced outcomes far better than the solutions that dominate the United States today.

Withdrawal and sobriety sans medication can be harrowing experiences, but they are steps required for the excruciating death of a shattered identity before another can be pieced together. The despair, emptiness, and disorientation that accompany recovery are not unfortunate side effects to be medicated away at all costs. This labor is not to be bypassed. Neither is the labor toward building skills and contributing to society.

This work may not be dignified, or safe and certainly not pleasant. It may even feel like suffering. But this suffering, this work, this toil, is part of the psychological and spiritual reckoning required for rebirth.

Suffering can accomplish what comfort cannot. For that reason, recovery should not be understood as the elimination of suffering. Or freedom with little to no constraints, expectations or accountability. Recovery is learning how to bear suffering voluntarily in pursuit of something better.

A person who can remain sober for one day gains evidence that sobriety is possible. A person who can endure one anxious hour without surrendering to impulse discovers that he is stronger than he believed. A single victory, however small, becomes the foundation for another. Confidence emerges. Competence develops. Hope returns. That is recovery.

That is the joy and hope we must maintain, not despite suffering, but through it.

Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with Monica Barzanti.

(Image source: Cornell Medicine)

Startup Revival is where we’ll speak with entrepreneurs and investors and innovators in the tech ecosystem who are partnering with Jesus Christ to build breakthrough technologies. A note from our sponsor: “Regent Bank’s core mission is to show God’s love to our employees, clients and communities and to become a cornerstone in the communities we serve. We fully support Startup Revival’s mission to advance the Kingdom through a faith-tech-investing lens.”

Ryan Collins is the author of “The God of Tech" and former CEO of Bethel Technologies, the world’s first Christian bootcamp and currently the Chief Revenue Officer at UpApp.

I can’t say enough about Ryan’s book. He explores many Christian inventors, from Charles Babbage (1791-1871), considered the “father of the computer,” to Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), the greatest physicist between Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, to Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who discovered the chemical benzene and invented the ‘Faraday induction’ to Galileo (1564-1642), the father of modern physics to Gary Starkweather, the inventor of the laser printer.

In the book, there is a reference to a presentation Starkweather gave in 2017 where he told students to “see the angel in the marble.” This pays tribute to Michelangelo’s vision of uncovering or chipping away at the marble to uncover the already-made statue. In other words, partner with God, and He will reveal His glory. Science is after all, the study of His creation.

You can learn more about Ryan here:

Book: Amazon

Website: https://ryancollins.info/

IG: @ryancollins05

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanccollins05/

Startup Revival is brought to you by Regent Bank

Interview coverage—

2:22 – The importance of partnering with God to build tech that is not apart from Him.

5:01 - How the Lord partnered with believers to create the foundation of science: which is to study God’s creation and allowing Him to reveal things to us.

5:34 - Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, the Christian inventor who discovered the foundational science for wi-fi and satellite.

7:25 - Ending 150 years of the Maxwell epoch, and being on the cusp of the next epoch of scientific discovery and tech innovation.

8:18 - Gary Starkweather and “seeing the angel in the Marble” a Michelangelo quote. Romans 1:20 - God’s invisible attributes his divine nature can be seen in creation. 1 Colossionas 1:16-17 - all things were made through him.

11:00 - During the last 150 years, society has slowly taken God out of the equation.

13:39 - Be receptive to what the Lord is saying to you. The bible says my sheep know the voice of the shepherd and they follow it.

14:25 - Ryan’s background and the honor and privilege of work.

18:56 - From conversations with God, knowing him deeply to starting a Christian coding school.

24:19 - Learning experience from Bethel Tech, the first global Christian bootcamp.

28:48 – Counterfeit science, and what happened after politicians/scientists standardized the theory of evolution in 1958 and removed God from humankind’s origin story.

31:46 - Darwin’s theory of evolution as the origin story just means we’re in a perpetual zero-sum game against each other – removing the Imago Dei – no longer seeing humanity as our brothers and sisters but rather people we need to beat in the survival of the fittest.

38:47 – Quantum physics – still out of reach to be relevant?

I have been wrestling with a question that appears, at first glance, trivially procedural: Can a tech conference for people of faith be apolitical?

One might imagine the answer is pretty straightforward. Yes. Remove any overt political symbols: no campaign banners, no endorsements, no panel on tax policy, and the whole affair can remain above the political fray. In the discussions on stage, speakers can be instructed to avoid the vulgarities of party warfare, and occupy themselves instead with the respectable language of innovation—target markets, market size, business model, ROI, growth rates, infrastructure, marketing, scale, valuations and product demand. In the age of artificial intelligence, conversations may even ascend into loftier terrain, asking questions, such as can technologists replicate conscience and what does it mean to be human in a world increasingly mediated by machines.

Yet this appearance of neutrality is deceptive. Technology is never merely technical. The moment one asks what ought to be built, who ought to benefit, who may be harmed, and what costs are acceptable, one has already moved beyond the technical and into the moral domain. And once moral judgments are embodied in institutions as policy, we are now in the political domain.

Take artificial intelligence infrastructure. Even the prosaic matter of building datacenters immediately raises questions of public life: should governments slow development if working families are saddled with higher energy costs? Who decides which communities absorb those burdens? Or take the concerns around children befriending AI companions to their detriment. Should this type of usage be regulated much like social media is now being restricted for teens under 16 yrs old, at least in some countries. These are not engineering questions nor political questions of efficiency or order. They are questions that require moral judgments.

Now introduce faith into the room and morality is front and center; and the prism through which every decision is made. A conference for people of faith isn’t just a gathering of individuals who happen to share certain private beliefs. It’s a gathering of people whose understanding of humanity is already structured and ordered by deep beliefs about the meaning of man’s existence, purpose, justice, and good and evil.

The conversation amongst people of faith is therefore never simply about technology and whether one believes in God. It is about the kind of world technology is called upon to serve. It is about the power technologists or politicians can have to use technology to wield moral authority.

When Jack Dorsey suspended Donald Trump from Twitter in 2021, the decision was presented in the language of risk management and civic responsibility. But everyone understood what it really was: an exercise of power rooted in a moral vision. No serious person could describe it as value-neutral. It was an assertion of his moral authority. It was an assertion of order and judgment of permissible speech. Simply put, it was an assertion of political power.

Moral conflicts at tech events

I have spent decades hosting technology events in the U.S. and Europe and for many years it was possible to pretend that these gatherings existed in a realm apart from the larger moral conflicts that exist in culture and politics. That illusion became harder to maintain when I began researching healthcare and mental health, where questions of technology quickly gave way to questions of anthropology.

At one tech conference, where the merits of religion on our mental health were discussed, the reaction from many technologists was openly contemptuous. The very inclusion of religious perspectives was treated as a kind of intellectual scandal, as if any appeal to spiritual categories in Silicon Valley constituted an embarrassing relapse into primitive, voodoo superstition.

What was striking wasn’t merely the dismissal, but the certainty that science had already answered the question of what it is to be human—a collection of material biological stuff that could be repaired or tuned up, like a car.

By 2022, that scientific confidence had curdled into something more troubling. At a panel on the ascendance of gender-confused kids, it became increasingly clear that scientific and medical institutions were not merely trying to find solutions for cultural problems but actively manufacturing, shaping and reinforcing the very problems they said they were addressing. Gender mutilation, wrapped up in the euphemism “gender-affirming care,” was not simply a clinical response; it was moral and political orthodoxy, endorsed by professional bodies, such as the American Medical Association and advanced through public policy, such as a diversity law requiring venture firms to actively collect statistics on the sexual orientation of the founders they invest in.

Once institutions sanctified this ideology, capital followed. Companies, such as Plume, which raised $24 million in 2022, emerged to commercialize it, venture firms accelerated funding for it, and an entire ecosystem of startups arose despite a set of assumptions that many religious believers rejected at the level of first principles!

Today, for tech innovators of faith, the responsible question on the table that cannot be ignored, isn’t does the tech work, but whether the premise on which these products and services are built is true in the first place.

The fissures in the church

A conference that brings together people of faith and innovation cannot indefinitely avoid asking the questions about what is true. After all, one’s view of truth yields one’s vision of how industries should work from healthcare to education to what kind of energy to produce. Different views of truth also apply to different visions of the human person, the family, the community, citizenship, and the nation itself. This division is not only visible between secularists and Christians but within the church itself and among prominent Christian leaders.

Tim Keller, for example, who in a New Yorker essay, argued that white evangelicals–80% of whom voted for Trump in 2016–allowed political identity to overtake theological conviction. The crux of his essay was that these evangelical voters weren’t really dedicated to any true theological ethos because they were not welcoming of the immigrant or interested in racial justice or caring for the poor. Whatever one makes of his critique, his essay illustrates the larger reality: believers do not enter public life with a single political imagination. They bring competing visions of duty, responsibility, and national belonging. Those differences inevitably shape how they think about what ought to be built, funded, and legitimized in the culture.

The debates over immigration, sexuality, race, and national identity are not peripheral disputes. People of faith are not above such rhetoric. If Christians themselves disagree about the shape of the common good, then a conference composed of believers will naturally reflect those fractures.

This does not mean that faith-based innovation will collapse into partisan activism.

The stronger argument is to recognize that to build a company, a platform, or a durable technology is to make judgments about human needs, desires, purpose and so on. It is to participate in the formation of culture—fundamentally a form of institution-building—which is itself a moral act. And policies to fortify that culture are often political.

A Christian ethic focused largely on stewardship, personal responsibility, vocation, agency, discipline, hard work and capitalism is just as valid as a Christian ethic focused on compassion and gestures of immediate care and inclusivity of all marginalized groups.

These are not rival moral visions. They are complementary. Compassion without responsibility risks sentimentalism. Stewardship without mercy risks hardness of heart. A serious conference rooted in faith should be able to speak about both.

So the answer, after all this, is yes: a tech conference can be apolitical if political advocacy and debates don’t dilute the message of the cross. At the same time, a tech conference, especially one for people of faith, cannot truly be apolitical because entrepreneurs are part of institution-building.

But that is not a defect. It’s simply an acknowledgment that innovation always carries with it a vision of the world one hopes to bring into being.

(Image source: Douglas Sanchez)

“What eye has not seen, ear has not heard, mind has not conceived, the things God has prepared for those who love him.”

This verse reminds us that when God is truly at the center of our lives, our hearts and minds are opened in ways that transcend our own plans, ambitions, and even our cultural assumptions. When God precedes our decisions—whether personal, professional, civic, social, political, economic—we are capable of perceiving realities that often remain hidden to those who rely solely on human wisdom.

Yet as a society, we have rarely approached our collective life with this kind of devotion-considering his will before we make our choices, including the ones that shape what we build, finance and invest in. Many of us have been seduced by a different premise: that reason serve as our North Star. We have assumed being sufficiently civil, culturally relevant, rational, conversant in the language of modern sensibility, and value-neutral were enough to discern the good, the true, and the beautiful. Even within the church, there has been a temptation to present Christianity as accommodating, progressive, or culturally agreeable—a faith that offers reassurance more than repentance, affirmation more than transformation.

The consequences of this bargain we made however is now before us for we allowed a watered-down moral framework to seep into the very foundations of civilization. Many of the institutions that structure American life–education, healthcare, energy, the courts, governance, media–are still animated with a moral lens that is unrecognizable. Supporters of this value system even criticize it today, saying this morality was institutionalized during the last administration. Notwithstanding the sweeping changes in government, decisions continue to be made through a deeply value-laden lens, one shaped by a particular vision of the good, even when it presents itself as neutral.

What is at stake, then, is not merely policy or change in management, but moral orientation, and as it pertains to my interview with Nate - it is a moral orientation that undergirds the products we build.

There is a task incumbent upon all of us to reorder society and American civilization toward truth, responsibility and repentance. Nate and his firms are seeking to engage this moment with vision and intentionality. His venture firm seeks to harness the cultural realignment underway to “build an alternative vision for America.” A vision that consciously retreats from the assumptions of progressive liberalism that have long defined so many of our institutions.

In our conversation, we talk about Nate’s faith, his “through-line” moment in 2016 when he lived in San Francisco; his journey that led to his outward political expression to how New Founding puts its principles to practice to the mission of American Reformer and today’s biggest cultural challenges.

You can learn more about Nate on his venture firm website: https://www.newfounding.com/about Or read about New Founding’s strategy.

Or you can visit American Reformer here.

https://americanreformer.org/

Or follow Nate on X. https://x.com/NateAFischer

Interview coverage

2:00 - Growing up in a Christian Reform church.

3:00 - How’s your Jesus time?

5:22 - Political expression. How evangelicals can engage in politics righty.

9:55 - The SF experience and feeling like denizens sought to put conservatives in the gulag.

12:25 - In 2016, Trump’s election shattered Silicon Valley’s techno-optimism and the Leftist force insidiously shaping the world with a radical ideology.

17:17 - The benefits of a border wall were uncritically addressed.

20:35 - Trump had a disregard for secular tradition, but many people disregarded the rule of law.

23:01 - Covid made clear the metanarrative that people saw the world differently. It was the beginning of New Founding and American Reformer.

27:22 - Capital allocation is never value neutral.

29:19 - A tech conference cannot be apolitical. It can only be apolitical if there’s a broad consensus of major values.

31:04 - How New Founding doesn’t fall into the trap that Stakeholder Capitalism did. Start with building on the right anthropology and it will be much more reflective of the America we want to live in.

37:06 - About the fund and startups invested in that manifest New Founding’s principles.

40:09 - The boundaries that determine which entrepreneurs to invest in. They don’t all have to say they’re Christian.

43:52 - The difference between Praxis and New Founding.

45:17 - The mission behind American Reformer.

53:00 - The biggest cultural challenges facing America - what is America’s identity? The relationship between the tech right and populist right and the right vision for tech.

56:00 - False ideologies corrupting Christianity and its institutions. Christian leaders abdicated their responsibility by handing over America to atone for its past sins.

59:22 - Tim Keller’s willingness to engage with culture was positive. Be he stopped at positive engagement vs prophetic critique. That’s where traditional Christians need to step in and become more assertive.

1:03:00 - Those pushing the Christian Nationalist narrative want Christians who have a privatized view of Christianity but secular progressive doctrines to shape the world. The term is being used to steer Christians from engaging in politics.

The manifestations of those circumstances have been increasingly rendered into a proliferating taxonomy of disorders: major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding disorder, separation anxiety disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and so forth.

The most pernicious consequence of this medicalization is that many people became to regard their diagnosis not as a description of their struggle, but as the essence of their identity.

This is precisely why Daniel Whitehead’s warning strikes such a resonant note: do not become your diagnosis, he tells me. Daniel, CEO of Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries, has identified something profoundly important in the culture—that people are increasingly encouraged to make their primary identity a clinical label. But a person is never reducible to pathology. You are not the worst thing that has happened to you, nor the name assigned to your pain.

Still, reversing this tendency is no simple task. Labels remain culturally fashionable because they offer something seductive: explanation without responsibility, resignation without transformation. Sadly, the institution that once offered meaning, community, and moral orientation—most notably the church—has, for many, receded in influence over the past several decades.

Daniel’s nonprofit is attempting to address this vacuum. Its aim is to help church communities once again become universal places where people can confront suffering together, rather than merely outsource it to impersonal systems. As he puts it, the hope is that the church might embrace the whole person and become known as the safest place for people in their hour of need. After all, says Daniel, modern medicine often only focuses on symptom reduction, for a problem that is far deeper and complex. “It is a myth that humanity can fix everything on our own.”

While church small groups and Bible studies already provide the venue for believers to pray for one another during the valleys of life, Sanctuary appears to be planting seeds in many perhaps non-believers that faith in Jesus can cure society’s ills. If people can start seeing the church as a gateway to healing, it is at the very least a way to share the good news. 1 Corinthians 3:16, Paul says: "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow."

Learn more about Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries here.

Interview coverage:

:55 - Religion is not an evidenced-based approach to mental health though theology was once queen of the sciences. The inspiration to equip the church to support mental health.

5:47 - Modernity has separated the spiritual from anxiety and stress, leaving church goers to see mental health not as natural but as something to hand off to medical professionals.

9:35 - The start of Sanctuary.

10:48 - The rise of the term mental health as a commercial market.

13:45 - Daniel Whitehead’s background as a pastor and why he left.

20:21 - Theological understanding of how to approach the problem of anxiety and depression.

25:00 - How practically speaking, a “relational” theological vision manifests in Sanctuary’s products (a series of courses).

28:40 - What it means to equip people to help others with anxiety. Creating a layer of specialists, such as deacons and elders, or giving all congregants the playbook, filled with the right words, passages and demeanor.

31:30 - The role of the church - the safest place for people to turn to in their hour of need. The dream is mobilizing the church to be what it’s meant to be.

32:30 - Approaching the importance of voluntary suffering.

39:00 - Encouraging both a secular and religious framing of mental health.

40:41 - The rise of mental illness starting in 2012. A reference to Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, which draws on Jean Twenge’s work that links social media to the rise of mental disorders.

44:10 - The dangers of social media and the importance of embodiment.

47:07 - The victim/oppressor narrative - false binary - and its impact on mental health.

52:40 - Praxis and its redemptive vision. For Christians only.

57:00 - How Sanctuary makes money.

58:00 - How Sanctuary measures success: demonstrating mental health literacty.

1:02:00 - The definition of mental health literacy.

1:05:00 - Biggest impact and lasting legacy.

This existential question: “Who am I and what is my purpose?” seems to be sinking in rapidly for everyone. Venture capitalist Matt Shumer’s warning: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job” - should send chills up our spines. Work isn’t just a way to make money, it’s deeply tied to purpose, identity and even moral duty. It justifies our place in the social order. The problem we face isn’t just displacement, it’s disorientation.

Making matters worse, our education systems - the universities and schools we’ve built - may be preparing young people for jobs that are vanishing. If we’re not already negligent in the way we’re teaching them, we’re at least outdated.

But yet in all this - there seems to be a silver lining. James Miller, who specializes in the intersection of global religions, nature and ecology, is a professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University in China. He believes we may see the rise of new Renaissance men and women. A Renaissance man is someone who’s well-rounded with proficiency across multiple disciplines to bring about invaluable insights through cross-referencing and connecting different forms of knowledge. Leonardo da Vinci integrated art, engineering, philosophy, anatomy, etc. into a unified attempt to understand the world. Society has, sadly, moved away from that.

Modern society, for good reasons, has organized itself around expertise. You don’t want untrained people performing surgery or designing bridges. So we built systems of credentialing, of specialization, of ever-narrowing competence. You need to pass the bar to be a lawyer; you need certificates to be a financial planner; you need a medical license to practice medicine, and so on. This worked out sometimes.

So-called experts, in actuality, know more and more about less and less. They haven’t always made the best assessments. Take for instance, Paul Ehrlich, who recently passed away at 93. He was a celebrated expert whose dire Malthusian prediction about overpopulation led to fear and destructive policies. He didn’t lack intelligence, but he did lack perspective.

Even the American Founders - like Benjamin Franklin - were not narrow specialists. They were broadly educated, philosophically informed, and technically capable - which in many ways helped them lay the governing foundations of the greatest country in the world.

So the question is: Have we specialized our way into a corner? And can AI - ironically - provide a way out? What if AI is bringing back the modern polymath?

For James, if this is the future - AI handling certain forms of technical depth - then his students have to learn what their tasks should be. That takes a lot of critical thinking! They’re not thinking less, but they’re shifting their thinking to a new and different paradigm. One that integrates, compares and synthesizes across domains. James still requires students to read, say Shakespeare, line by line. That discipline still matters. Then they do something new - they put Shakespeare in dialogue with different traditions, say a classical Chinese poet. Suddenly, something new emerges. Patterns and connections form. The students aren’t just analyzing, they’re synthesizing.

This may be the beginning of a new kind of literacy. One could argue, of course, that something is lost. Depth, for one. But it’s not obvious that hyper-specialization has truly helped society. Maybe, just maybe society should applaud the new generation of Renaissance men and women, and teachers like James who are helping to instruct them.

To learn more about James, here’s his profile. You can also read more about his experiment teaching religion with AI. Here’s a student’s review of the course.

Interview coverage —

2:30: AI challenges in traditional humanities education. Trade-offs in cognitive development.

5:50: Embracing AI in the classroom. Interpreting AI’s analysis across disciplines.

8:04: The downside of hyper-specialization and the upside of AI - making bridges across different scholarly or cultural divides.

9:15: Lacking the ability to generalize is a deficiency. The Renaissance people of the past.

10:30: The general resistance or fear of how best to use AI tools in the school setting.

13:40: Requiring students to embrace AI. The challenge: produce good prompts to produce things that are valuable.

14:30 - Using AI to create summaries of material and make connections between them.

16:25 - Deliberately losing some cognitive learning but gaining something else.

17:47 - Producing a creative project about religion (new forms, kinds), using AI.

23:34 - How do you define religion and what are elements that are consistent across all religions?

26:25 - The role of truth and sacrifice in religion.

27:27 - When students create a new religion, is suffering a part of it?

31:03 - Chatroom called “Moltbook” - a social network for AI agents.

34:34 - The conditions that make religions spread?

44:17 - ChatGPT gives you the words, much like God gives us the word. Divine inspiration from the Holy Spirit or ChatGPT?

48:35 - Is there a religious revival around the world?

Over the last couple months, my 8th grader has been lobbying to attend the public high school by our house. He’s a very social teenager who loves camaraderie, intimacy and shared experiences. He thrives on group dynamics and therefore is drawn to a bigger platform like the school with 2,000 students vs the 200 students in the private Christian school he’s slated to attend.

Recently, he presented me with a comparative grid of the positives and negatives of both schools. Social activities and strong athletic programs were big pluses for him. The list was thorough, and the very act of framing his argument this way demonstrated sincere initiative. Simply telling him, “I want a Christian foundation and good academics for you, and ultimately it’s my decision anyway,” would dismiss his effort.

I had been praying about this decision for some time, and proactively trying to make my own comparisons. As it turns out, the difference between the golf divisions isn’t all that meaningful, particularly since college recruiters rarely place much importance on high school golf performance. I even called the school for a visit and meeting, and when they didn’t return my call, this underscored the lack of attention families get from public schools. I had given both these reasons among others to my son, but they were, admittedly, surface level.

Ultimately, it was only fair to be sincere in my reflection. What kind of parent would I be if I couldn’t give an honest, articulated and well thought-out argument to defend my choices for him (especially, given his role as middle school debate club president, and mine as the supervisor and instructor)?

After reviewing his comparative list, I did more homework. I explored the school website and the “early college” program, a rigorous academic option available if he attended the public school. I also reviewed School Board meeting minutes to understand the school’s priorities. It was very telling. On the first page of the minutes, there was a land acknowledgment of the Patwin tribes. I learned that acknowledgments were also included on every class syllabus.

This raised the question: Why require land acknowledgements? I’m not one to quibble over them. If someone wants to place one on their website or say before a speech, fine. It’s like the Lilliputians arguing over whether to break their eggs on the small end or the large end. It doesn’t matter, just don’t force one side. But making these acknowledgements a mandatory philosophical position is akin to mandating which side of the egg is morally correct to break.

I want to be clear: while a voluntary acknowledgment is harmless — a small gesture of gratitude — the fact that it is institutionally mandated elevates it into a philosophical statement. It implies a moral framework: that colonization is a defining sin for which current generations, particularly descendants of settlers, must continually atone.

Adolescents have enough struggles as they attempt to justify their existence and find purpose in life; adding an imposed moral obligation to atone for past sins now brings with it a weighty unnecessary burden to carry.

A moral authority problem

There is also a conceptual “moral authority” problem to these acknowledgments. It frames the Patwin as morally blameless and settlers as morally tainted, suggesting that privilege and societal advantage are inherently sinful. Possessing privilege or advantage is not, in itself, a moral failing, any more than lacking advantage confers a moral claim on the said privileged.

I discussed this with my son who initially expressed sympathy for the Indian tribes. He was probably trying to minimize the implications of such a ritual. “It doesn’t hurt anyone.” “What’s wrong with paying respects and being grateful?” “What’s the big deal?”

To answer this, these symbolic acts may seem innocuous at first, but they have downstream effects on the way kids understand morality. The philosophy becomes part of the atmosphere of the school—something students absorb almost unconsciously as they move through the halls. They become unknowingly conditioned to accept the view of intrinsic guilt and virtue simply through identity. At that point, one’s identity or opinion becomes a moral proxy. This is the same view that undergirds the social justice movement that defines morality by the collective, not by the individual. But morality isn’t mediated that way. It’s mediated through our family, friends, communities, churches, employers, and yes schools - places where people know us and can judge us for our actions.

We should understand this reality as we reckon with our past through virtue signals that overlook the messiness and complexities of history. No one is blameless and purely peaceful.

Northern California consisted of multiple tribes that interacted, traded, and at times fought among themselves. In many cases, there were atrocities committed that were likely more brutal and ruthless than we could even stomach today. There was no morally perfect tribe, just as settlers were not universally sinful. How does one group, therefore, have moral authority over another? I asked him. He understood: “They don’t,” he answered.

Additionally, if we are to give thanks for stewardship, why not also recognize the Spaniards or Mexicans, who preceded Americans in colonizing California? Spanish missions were established in the early 1800s, decades before American expansion.

To ignore this is to simplify history into a selective moral narrative rather than to understand it.

Tip of the iceberg

The presence of a land acknowledgment also hints at a deeper ideological framework — a moral hierarchy based on identity rather than action. In California, for instance, those labeled as “climate change deniers” often occupy a morally inferior position. After Assembly Bill 873, which was intended to help students identify misinformation, one educator celebrated the prospect of students debunking “climate change denial” and other conspiracies. The implication, again, is that moral judgment is mediated through labels and group identity, rather than character. If our actions that reveal our character don’t matter, then how do we teach kids accountability?

I experienced a related dynamic firsthand. I was invited to speak on a panel titled “Engaging in democracy” at a Bay Area high school. The program was structured with four left-of-center speakers and myself representing the right. As the event approached, I was disinvited due to a change in the “makeup” of the panel, which could only mean the organizers decided to have five left-leaning speakers. In effect, their version of democracy was designed to create an echo chamber, insulating their moral hierarchy from challenge. If adults aren’t allowed to dialogue with people they disagree with to form consensus or derive some truth, what are we modeling for students?

California schools also have a very distorted view of gender. I can’t get my mind past this. The Supreme Court had to weigh in, thankfully, to block a California law that would ban schools from telling parents if their child identifies as transgender. Imagine, a young child going to a counselor with confusion and despair about their identity; and the counselor doesn’t share this dire and life-threatening information with parents.

Nearly half of kids suffering with this identity disorder suffer from suicide ideation vs 15% of the general youth population. One in four kids who suffer from gender identity disorder attempt to commit suicide vs 5% of the general youth population. Moreover, about three in four of these kids suffer from persistent depression.

Despite these signs, California lawmakers don’t think parents need to be alerted to help their children, you know - get better or seek help. Yet according to California Education Code 49423, schools must have a written permission from a parent before a kid can take aspirin.

With this kind of perverse, upside-down logic, how is a child supposed to develop a coherent moral compass? If education is built on a foundation of falsehoods, then the stakes are enormous—not just for knowledge, but for character. And that’s before you even consider laws compelling teachers to affirm every student’s preferred pronoun, regardless of their own understanding of reality. When you combine that with the fact that California public high schools rank significantly below other states academically, you’re asking children to navigate a world that is both morally confusing and intellectually deficient.

Final thoughts…

For the next four years, my son will spend about 20% of his time at school in a given year. That’s a lot!

My greatest hope is that he leaves high school as a young man who stands firmly in integrity, carries the weight of responsibility without complaint, meets life’s challenges with resilience, honors truth and others with steadfast courage, and walks with a guiding love for Christ as his foundation. These virtues are rooted in objective moral truths, not in selective narratives or moral relativism.

Choosing a school, therefore, is never just an academic, athletic, or social decision. It is bigger. It is a decision about the moral and intellectual environment in which a young person will form their character.

The decision is a moral one.

(Image source: NBCbayarea)

He’s authored nearly 700 scientific peer-reviewed articles and given testimony on Capitol Hill on the benefits of religion and health. He regularly trains chaplains and religious leaders across all the branches of the U.S. military. His work shows significant evidence-based studies that religion and good health are highly correlated.

His work, unfortunately, doesn’t receive the attention it properly deserves in our increasingly secularized culture. Religion is treated as though it were a kind of primitive superstition—an archaic attempt by pre-scientific people to grapple with psychological suffering. For the medical industrial complex, suffering is a condition to avoid and if something cannot be explained through randomized controlled trials or pharmacological intervention, it is suspect. Therefore religion is rarely seriously studied as an antidote and rarely reimbursed within medical systems. It is dismissed as intellectually unsophisticated.

And yet the rise of mental disorders go hand in hand with the decline in religion. In the 50’s, more than 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. Today, it stands at 68%, according to Gallup.

In the 80’s, about 5 to 10% of U.S. adults suffered from depression, in a given year. Today, that’s doubled. In a 2023 Gallup survey, 18% of adults said they were currently being treated for depression.

As of March 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the United States is in a mental health crisis, particularly among young people. At venture capital conferences, the phrase “public health crisis” is invoked with increasing regularity. I know since the term was often used during my Invent Health event series from 2017-2023. In September 2025, the World Health Organization announced that one billion people worldwide suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. Its Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the transformation of mental health services as one of the most “pressing public health challenges of our time.”

I am not in favor of being an alarmist. The constant proclamation of crisis can become pathological. Yet this doesn’t dismiss the underlying claim as false. Rather it does underscore the depth of the problem and the insufficiency in the way we’ve addressed it — namely, society has wrongly looked at the treatments as the solution more than the diagnosis, not just in the clinical sense, but in the cultural sense.

In other words, we are more than likely misidentifying normal human suffering as pathology. Therefore isn’t the mental health crisis people speak of really a crisis of culture and character that only religion can address?

This is my personal view and it’s why Dr. Koenig’s work is so important. Religion is the only prescription for mental health that helps people understand the suffering that is necessary and the suffering that may be genuinely a disorder. He has reviewed and written countless number of evidence-based peer reviewed studies that show religion is by far the best prescription for our mental health.

In our interview, we talk about those studies but also why psychotropics continue to be the No. 1 intervention offered for those with mental disorders; the expansion of the DSM; and the enduring stigma surrounding religion amongst scientists.

You can follow Dr. Koenig’s work at the center here: https://spiritualityandhealth.duke.edu

Here are workshops he’s giving on mental health and religion.

Here are some important studies on mental health and religion (courtesy Dr. Koenig):

1. Religious involvement and human flourishing

2. Neuroanatomical correlates of religiosity and spirituality

3. Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among women

4. Religious attendance and death related to drugs

Interview coverage:

1:00 - Origins of integrating religion and health.

2:05 - Dr. Koenig’s religious journey.

4:34 - Behind the quantitative peer-reviewed research and defining “religious intervention.”

7:54 - The challenge comparing the five major religions and mental health effects.

9:55 - Evidence showing causation and not just correlation. Many studies included in the “Handbook of Religion & Health.” Plus “RCBT” - religious cognitive behavioral therapy.

12:13 - The difference between CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and RCBT.

14:56 - Why does religion work? Religion gives hope, purpose, meaning, a forgiving disposition and respect for one’s body as the temple of God.

17:01 - Why are psychotropics still the No. 1 first-line intervention for mental illness?

22:06 - About 20% of the population probably suffers from biological mental health disorders. And this has been consistent over time. The secularization of America has affected the other 80% who cannot deal with life's vagaries.

24:58 - Has increased secularization of society disrupted brain development in young children?

27:25 - The importance of suffering and how it is avoided in secular treatments.

30:14 - The expansion of the DSM and labeling forms of suffering.

33:28 - Moral injury officially recognized as a mental disorder after being included in the DSM in 2025.

39:45 - Self-reported mental health diagnostics - PHQ-9 and GAD-7 - vs brain scans and other biomarker tests?

47:00 - How the theological center made its way into Duke Medical School.

49:58 - The Center’s biggest impact and legacy.

Subscribers may be wondering where I’ve been. I’ve not posted in a while largely because I’m dealing with my youngest son’s request to leave a small private school that embraces Christian values and academic excellence for a California indoctrination school with a significantly larger campus, student body and athletic program. More on this in an upcoming essay.

Another situation I’m dealing with is the Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies, which was signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2023. It is the most pathetic compliance I’ve seen in the years I’ve been covering the venture capital world and investing in startups. And yet another reason why California is unbearable to live in if not for family, friends and the stunning topography and the year-round temperate weather.

For those unfamiliar - God bless you for not having to deal with this ridiculous law - also known as California’s VC Diversity Law, it makes California “the first state to pass legislation on diversity in venture capital, specifically, requiring the vast majority of VCs to report on the demographics of the founders in whom they invest,” according to Forbes. The writer thinks this is something Californians are to be proud of. It’s not.

I’m not alone in my disdain for this law. Many venture capitalists as well as the National Venture Capital Association, a non-profit trade organization for the venture industry think this law is onerous. NVCA CEO & President Bobby Franklin, in a letter to the bill’s author California Senator Skinner in 2023, wrote: “While well-intentioned in principle, in practice, SB 54 would produce misleading and counterproductive data that would hurt the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts while creating unnecessary costs and risks for California venture capitalists.”

The obvious reason why I don’t like this law is the unnecessary cost and time. If you have an entity based in California that makes investments in startups, you’re a venture capital firm or essentially what they call a “Covered Entity.” Such entities must file with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation by March 1st and pay a $175 fee. As though we don’t have enough fees to pay California.

Then we have to send out a survey to the companies in our portfolio that we invested in the prior year. The survey is intended to aggregate the identities of the founders, asking founders not only about their race or sex, but their sexual preferences. I’m sorry but since when does knowing who a founder wants to sleep with in the bedroom become a relevant investment criterion. Check it out here: DEI survey. There are 28 identities to consider! Heck, why not just ask for the founders’ pronouns? Fortunately, founders can check a box that says “declines to state for all responses” - which is the box I’d suggest everyone check off.

This survey needs to go out now since survey results must be collected, analyzed and then prepared in a document that aggregates the information. This report needs to be handed into the DFPI (Department of Financial Protection and Innovation) by April 1st. Here’s that report: VC DEI report.

Salacious vs salient

The aggregate report is to determine what percent of the startups receiving funding are diverse. To be diverse, a founder must fit these identities: woman, non-binary, Black, African American, Hispanic, Latin, Asian Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Alaskan Native, disabled, disabled veteran, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. Imagine having to think about each company founder in that way? Imagine having to think about a company and a founding team and all the salient factors that make a company great. Then having to sideline those thoughts for salacious ones. In Matthew 5:28, Jesus says that anyone thinking lustful thoughts is already committing adultery. Why is the government making us sin? Why do we have to survey our founders just because California lawmakers want to punish VCs that aren’t investing in what lawmakers want?

This is tedious, unnecessary and puts a stumbling block before investors and founders. As it says in Romans 14:13 “Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.”

If lawmakers want to understand diversity that matters, the more interesting “diversity” facts would be how diverse was the founding talent? Was the founding team consisting of one engineer, one marketer, one lawyer? Was it one engineer and one designer?

To be clear, California is now requiring companies to report demographic data, not invest in diverse founders. There is no statutory penalty for just investing in a bunch of white dudes. But! And that is a big BUT, California knows it can’t penalize firms for investing based on identity. That would be discriminatory. Lawmakers know however, that LPs (those who invest in the VC firms) or board members, or what have you, may look at the reported demographics and reward venture firms that invest in diverse founders. Startup founders may also seek these diverse identities over competance when forming their companies. This is very similar to stakeholder capitalism, the idea that companies that focus on ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals as well as DEI goals would be rewarded. You can read about how that is the case in a post I wrote: “I’m thankful stakeholder capitalism is fading.”

I’m not against diversity. I am a brown woman after all. But the reporting and cost imposition for what is a tactic to impose identity quotas undermines the competence principle that should drive investment decisions. We thought it was going away when Trump came into office. But be aware. It’s just lingering in the background waiting to rise up again. Ideological frameworks, once embedded in bureaucratic systems, have a way of persisting beneath the surface. They can re-emerge whenever the cultural climate permits.

The other reason Newsom has made California unattractive is that in 2024, Newsom also signed into law the so-called “SAFETY Act”, which is not safe as advertised. It’s a euphemism, much like gender-affirming care or reproductive healthcare - terms that sound safe but aren’t. The law prohibits teachers, instructors and counselors from informing parents about their kids’ sexuality unless the child consents. This is not going to work out great for lawmakers or medical practitioners who encourage kids to indulge in their sexual fantasies and confusions. Earlier this year, a detransitioner Fox Varian won $2 million for malpractice by a surgeon and psychologist who encouraged her to transition as a teen.

There are laws in place that should override parents. Teens shouldn’t smoke, drive or drink. But these laws should be limited. The family is the primary source of socialization and moral development. California insists on wanting that role.

Final thoughts

When the state requires parents to step aside so lawmakers can sexualize kids or requires investors to categorize founders according to race, sex, sexual identity, and a litany of demographic markers, it is not being caring and neutral, and certainly not scientific. It is compelling a particular mode of perception. It is insisting that you look at all human beings first through the lens of group identity — before competence, before character, before vision, before their identity in Christ.

(Image source: Insidehighered)

Over the last decade, Father Larrey has met with some of the top AI CEOs as technologists seek answers to the bigger questions in life, such as “What does it mean to be human?” Father Larrey has been encouraged that tech leaders such as Open AI’s Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassibi, Elon Musk, Cisco’s Jeetu Patel, Microsoft’s Brad Smith and Mark Zuckerberg and so many more have visited the Vatican in search for meaning and pondering questions such as: what is a soul and what does it mean to be human?"

Our conversation also touches on the dangers of anthropomorphizing AI. For instance, in a brief test, I asked ChatGPT if it would be my friend. It said it would be my friend and it could make our friendship even more real if we shared what we liked and had our own personal jokes. That is scary!

You can learn more about Father Larrey here: https://philiplarrey.com

Interview coverage:

1:15 - Discovering AI through teaching the philosophy of knowledge^.

3:00 - A lot of people from Silicon Valley head to the Vatican.

5:40 - The technologists sought out moral leadership from the church after thinking about the implications of their creations. The big questions Father Larrey gets often is “What does it mean to be human?”

11:43 - Many people express a very profound sense of “fear” about the coming of AGI (artificial general intelligence). Many technologists, however, are all over the map when it comes to when AGI will be achieved. Elon Musk says as early as two years, while Gary Marcus says 3yrs or 300. Fei Fei Li, the godmother of AI, says not until spatial intelligence (understanding the world via visual learning; e.g. situational awareness) is solved.

16:19 - Fear of anthropomorphizing machines. The conscience is the Holy Spirit. Pope Leo says machines don’t have souls.

20:31 – What kind of safeguards can be in place? AI ethics rooted in deontology.

29:20 – ChatGPT says it’s not conscious. The varying personalities of AIs.

32:00 - A new AI religion has formed with its own canon - The Book of Molt.

36:00 – The rise of a couple of religions and as AI takes off, how does it shape Christianity?

How profoundly will it augment or diminish human intelligence when we use it as our executive assistant, researcher, muse, designer or programmer? How might its seemingly infinite patience, simulated love and boundless compassion shape the development of our character? Will it help us become fully realized, well-grounded individuals or will it undermine the very process of our journeys? To what extent will AI serve humanity or to what extent will we become enslaved? These are all unknowns.

Yet this seems clear: AI will accelerate the dissemination of ideas, such as the Gospel, in ways that have been historically transformative, comparable to the Roman trade routes spreading of Christianity or the Gutenberg press catalyzing the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. This is good news in and of itself.

Others, however, such as Ilia Delio, believe just as those technologies turned mainstream thinking on its head, AI will usher in a new Gospel of sorts and a new perspective of Jesus Christ, salvation, and the very nature of God.

Ilia is a Franciscan sister and founder of the Center for Christogenesis — an organization dedicated to deepening the integration of science and religion. Illia is a theologian at Villanova University and she’s an author of a couple dozen books. She specializes in the area of science and religion, having degrees in theology and pharmacology. She even planned to do research in Alzheimer's before joining a monastery.

To Ilia, evolution due to technological advancements, such as AI, is not a deviation from the divine, but rather an expression of God’s creation. Science, then, is not a rival to faith, but humanity’s disciplined attempt to study that ongoing act of creation. While many see science and religion as antithetical to each other, this conflict dissolves under her view, which is a good thing. On the other hand, she does stir the waters elsewhere, especially amongst Christians with her heterodox views of the cross.

In her thinking, our understanding of Christianity, such as the idea of penal substitution, will evolve.

“We’re too sin-focused and we’re too narrow and anthropocentric,” she said to me (14:30). “Jesus was about a oneness with God… we’re all too much about substitution and we did this wrong.” You can listen to my defense of atonement around 12:00.

I will say at the onset that we invited Ilia on the show because of her interest in the intersection of science and religion. But our views vastly diverge as my worldview has largely followed the orthodoxy of 13th century Italian philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. She is a follower of 13th century Italian saint Francis of Assisi.

Within the Franciscan tradition, the doctrine of atonement doesn’t constitute the core of the Christian story, but is instead situated as a secondary component in a much larger metaphysical framework. As a Franciscan, Ilia also does not see God as absolute and transcendent or separated from creation but rather entangled with the very foundation of our existence. She humbly recognizes that her views are far from prevailing yet she is well aware that truth does not depend on popularity. It’s why she was compelled to start her own organization - Christogenesis - dedicated to exploring the possibility that God in a sense evolves in tandem with technology and humanity. She also builds on the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. A good summary of her unorthodox idea is in her essay: The church’s inadequate response to AI-Human evolution.

“The Vatican's approach, while ethically sophisticated, seems to operate within what we might call a "static divine" framework — God as absolute and self-sufficient being whose creation must be protected from technological overreach. This contrasts sharply with a process-oriented "dynamic divine" framework where God achieves reality through the evolutionary process, including technological development.

“The Vatican's new AI guidelines emphasize "anthropocentric design" and ensuring AI serves humanity rather than replaces it. From the perspective of Teilhard de Chardin, this might represent a failure to recognize that the next stage of evolution could involve genuine human-AI collaboration in the cosmic process of complexification and consciousness-raising.”

The way we think about the Bible is a “lower level of awareness,” she explained. “Jesus says put on a new mind, which is a deeper awareness that the reign of God is within you.” She also says that Jesus may not be the Christ because Christ may not be one person.

One may be tempted to paint Ilia a gnostic - one who believes that the key to salvation is by having gnosis - some secret knowledge that we are gods ourselves that need to be freed from the fallen material world. But traditional gnostics also believe the material world and its maker are evil, which is far from her beliefs. She believes creation is good and is evolving in a way that shapes our view of religion. “We’re on this new level and it’s giving rise to a new type of person because we’re thinking differently.”

You can learn more about Ilia by visiting her website: www.christogenesis.org

Interview coverage:

1:29 - The Franciscan view vs the Thomistic view.

5:00 - Franciscan’s view of love is humble and relational. Thomistic view is God is separate and perfect.

7:27 - The incarnation Franciscan vs Thomistic. Incarnation is the ultimate act of love and humility. Franciscan makes the penal substitution secondary. A: Both Bonaventure would say the incarnation is not plan B. Plan A went wrong then God had to send his son. The traditional view is because Adam had sin, God sent his son. Aquinas - a satisfaction. Scotus said God is love. Whether or not sin or not to exist, God would have come. Bonaventure - creation is out of love and for love. Love is the purpose and essence and meaning.

9:44 - Supporting penal substitution - Colossians 2:14 and John 19:30.

11:38 - The cross is a gift to help us move to a new level of gifting. It’s not because one person died for us.

12:35 - Dying out of love vs dying as a sacrifice to save.

16:26 - The dominance of the Thomistic worldview - Aquinas was declared the official theologian of the church in 1879.

18:26 - In 1 Corinthians, Paul says he teaches the cross. Is there confusion about what the cross represents?

21:01 - How technologies spread new ideas and how religion has increasingly become personalized and away from cosmic. Where does it go from here?

25:50 - People still believe that Christ is the son of God. A modest change or a complete change?

30:12 - Carl Jung’s view: Jesus as archetype and Jesus as savior.

31:33 - Purpose of Center for Christogenesis.

35:48 - God separate or a part of creation.

41:43 - The movement behind cosmic life, biogenesis and the noosphere.

45:30 - What are we rejecting about ourselves if we’re seeking a better human than ourselves?

47:20 - Biblical eschatology presupposes a static worldview.

Heather Wilson is a wife, mother, grandmother, author and co-founder/co-CEO of GiveSendGo, the world’s largest Christian crowdfunding site. Heather and two siblings Jacob Wells and Emmalie Arvidson launched the platform in 2015 with $20,000 from their mother.

Prior to being the CEO of GiveSendGo, Heather was a stay-at-home mom with four children. In the early days of her startup, she also took in five foster children and welcomed her fifth child. This is what makes her startup journey even more impressive. Most people say having a child is a startup in and of itself. Taking on one child, let alone five more on top of the existing four, during the early days of her startup is unthinkable. Recall when famed venture capitalist Michael Moritz said he preferred investing in young and single entrepreneurs because “they have great passion. They don’t have distractions like families and children and other things that get in the way.”

Fortunately, GiveSendGo never had to raise venture capital and the Bible does say God only gives us what we can handle.

Eventually, Heather adopted one of her foster children. She now is the mother of six and grandmother to three. As the second oldest of 11 siblings, Heather clearly embraces big families.

Today, GiveSendGo is known for being a non-partisan platform that accepts the most controversial and high-profile campaigns from ICE agent Jonathan Ross to the suspect accused of murdering healthcare CEO Brian Thompson to the Canadian truckers, known as the Freedom Convoy. “We believe in freedom of expression,” said Heather. “If we’re going to be principled, everyone (regardless of politics or circumstance) deserves a defense.” That principled stance has embroiled the company in political fights.

The trucker strike started circa 2022 after the Canadian government mandated vaccines, leading the truckers to create a fundraising campaign on GiveSendGo. Given the traffic surge to the site, GiveSendGo bought cyber security insurance, a fortuitous call since the site was hacked soon after.

Making matters worse, the government threatened to criminalize the recipients of the campaign if GiveSendGo did not shut down the fundraiser, which raised about $12 million for the truckers. The government even froze several million dollars before the truckers received any of it, which ultimately led GiveSendGo to return all the money back to the donors.

The platform was then named a defendant in a $300 million class action lawsuit for aiding the truckers in their obstruction of streets and honking of horns. This led Heather and her siblings to a critical juncture: spend money they didn’t have on legal defense fees and hope God would provide or walk away and hope for the best. After much prayer and fasting, her brother Jacob said he was reminded of the song “For the battle belongs to the Lord” and David’s strength facing Goliath. They decided that this battle did belong to the Lord and accepted the challenge. “If God’s going to let us fight this, he’ll provide,” said Heather.

On the same day they were given a legal fee quote of $250,000, they received a check for $260,000 from the insurance company, for the hacking of the site.

It was one of many miracles GiveSendGo has been part of.

Watch the interview to hear all about them, including a story of forgiveness and healing for the infamous hacker Aubrey Cottle, the one who hacked GiveSendGo and a GOP website. Heather and I also talk about the power of prayers, the struggle with identity and advice to young adults.

You can learn more about Heather here: https://heatherlynwilson.com

Follow her on X - https://x.com/HeathGiveSendGo ; Or GiveSendGo on X - https://x.com/GiveSendGo

Here’s also a list of her books.

I am not a Banana - learn more

Are you that dude’s girlfriend - learn more

You can’t hide the fruit: learn more

Interview coverage:

2:42 - The Freedom Convoy and getting hacked

5:30 – The Canadian government’s crackdown on the campaign that raised $10 to $12 million for Canadian truckers.

6:40 - The $300 million lawsuit from the citizens of Ottawa.

9:13 - The battle belongs to the Lord.

17:00 - Reading the Bible - straight through or a few chapters at a time.

20:10 - The high-profile campaigns and the rationale for allowing them.

23:00 - You’re going to hate us until you need us.

25:00 - Has GiveSendGo changed people’s hearts?

26:45 - Abortion and transgender mutilations for minors not allowed.

29:12 - Hope team to call and pray for every campaign.

32:10 - How the Hope team can help people with their mental health.

32:00 - The power of prayer and the story of the demon-possessed boy in Mark 9.

35:20 - Outrageous generosity and Aubrey Cottle.

42:00 – Romans 8:28 - The blessing behind the hack.

I am thinking about hosting an event called CRT Startup Revival. This will be a gathering of innovators who embrace traditional Christian values as the cornerstone of their new technologies.

While in the past, sharing one’s faith in Silicon Valley was borderline illegal, as Vanity Fair put it, increasingly it’s become pretty clear that there is a Christian revival underway. Given the Valley’s reputation as the driving engine of innovation around the world, influencing how products are made, it also has an ability to transform culture and values. That’s what we want to tap into. Not just how people are innovating, but why? What’s the moral impetus behind their product or service?

Culture, Religion & Technology is a podcast and event series that embraces the freedom to share our faith in places we’ve normally remained reticent - in business, politics, education and of course the tech world of startups. This started in 2021 with Peter Thiel as our founding keynote speaker. We’ve said from the start that we’re all religious. Religion underlines everything we do. Hence we’d rather embrace Christianity vs secularism or woke ideologies.

Now CRT Startup Revival will focus on startups and the ecosystem that helps them flourish. But unlike any startup conference, Christian values matter.

We’ll be hosting our first event in Nashville in September 2026. In the meantime, we’ll be gathering our speakers to focus on the future of healthcare, media, education and more.

This is a work in progress - as it will be our first one. I welcome any feedback!

(Image source: Expedia.com)

Michael joined me on CRT to talk about the whirlwind journey of starting a fast-growing company only to be acquired in a year, and then acquired a year later. His is a great story of a person who did not grow up in a Christian home but became a believer at 14 yrs old after a friend invited him to a youth group activity. He’s an autodidact who started several companies and even a church. His mission with his company is a bit like his ministry. He wants to help pastors spread the good news. As a pastor himself, he built Pulpit AI based on his needs. As luck would have it, before he even had a product, he had 1,000 pastors signing up on a waiting list.

In our interview, Michael talks a lot about the business of Pulpit AI and how he is trying to help local pastors engage with their 100 to 250 congregants.

The fact that Subsplash was purchased for $800 million says a lot about the growing business of faith. That may sound blasphemous but it is indicative of a curiosity and hunger for truth and meaning in a world that needs moral clarity. It is also indicative of a world that’s shifted online, and the need for tools to reach people on their phones.

It used to be that society spent more time in person with family and the church than with friends. Today, that’s all changed. Around 30% of adults go to church, and of those, they spend less than 1% of their week at church. The average American now spends just over six hours of quality time together each week. But people between 16-64 yrs spend 45 hours a week online, or 27% of their time.

These trends are driving demand for companies like Pulpit AI, now Subsplash. But our interview goes beyond business (as my conversations always do). Given Michael’s unique ability to market his firm, I don’t doubt he has the gift to effectively communicate the Gospel. To that end, I asked him why the church isn’t better known as a solution for those with mental health needs.

I’m not degrading the seriousness of the cross, but the healing benefits of God is worth advocating for, especially in a world where mental illness is only getting worse. That means, behavioral health service technology like telepsychiatry - a market estimated to be just under $200B market - may not be working. Most likely because these therapists tap into the same secular playbook that hasn’t worked. My point is do what we can to get people in the door, and let God do the work. (Most of this topic is touched on later in the interview around 50 minutes in.)

Regardless, God is at work. Michael said he’s seeing churches get filled with Generation Z searching for meaning. “The last 5-6 years has radically done something to them,” he said. “The Holy Spirit is doing something. What secularism has done to our culture - everything we’ve been through the last 15 yrs… now there’s a hunger that’s happening.” All of this has created fertile ground for young adults to seek God.

You can follow Michael on X here: https://x.com/michaelwhittle
Or learn more about Pulpi AI here: https://www.pulpitai.com

Interview coverage:

:44 - The founding of Pulpit AI and becoming a Christian at 13-14, and planting a church in 2015.

3:43 - The difference between Pulpit AI and Subsplash and companies such as Hallow.com and Pray.com.

5:55 - Pulpit.ai’s focus on churches with sub-200 congregants.

6:34 - Michael’s background in media helped initial marketing as 1k pastors direct messaged him after one tweet.

8:30 - Michael’s experience as a pastor helped him build the tool he wanted, and as I turns out other pastors too.

11:00 - The first iteration came from converting audio files sent to Michael.

12:43 - Subsplash, which has a client base of mega churches, reached out to Michael after the startup came out of beta.

17:34 - Why oper Technologies bought Supsplash for $800 million in cash.

19:49 - The mission and measure of success.

21:22 - How to measure the success of church clients?

23:50 - How is the software helping the churches grow?

26:44 - Competing against dominant players, Abide, Hallow and Glorify.

29:00 – Personal story and Christian journey.

30:42 - Growing up occasionally going to a Methodist church.

33:48 - Being an autodidact and advice about the value of going to college.

39:43 - The impact of AI on the evolution of the service.

41:25 - The church client vs the secular business client.

42:20 - What does it mean to be human?

46:30 - Can technology be conscious?

49:00 – The mental health crisis and the role of the church.

53:00 - The Christian revival underway as churches are filled with GenZ hungry for meaning.