AI and Art: What Is Creativity For? (with Brett McCracken)

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0:00:08 – (Christopher Watkin): Welcome to Silicon Spiritualities, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition about what it means to be human in the age of AI. I’m Christopher Watkin. In each episode, we’re unpacking three crucial questions. What can AI do for us? What is AI doing to us? And what is it showing us about who we really are? And to explore these questions today, I’m delighted to be joined by Brett McCracken, senior editor at the Gospel Coalition and author and editor of multiple books about faith, culture, media and the church.

0:00:51 – (Christopher Watkin): So, Brett, welcome to the podcast.

0:00:54 – (Brett McCracken): Thanks so much, Chris. Great to be here. I’m excited for this conversation.

0:00:57 – (Christopher Watkin): So am I bet. And I would like to plunge you right into the midst of the AI conundrum. At the beginning, I’d love you to imagine with me the following scenario. Imagine Sarah. Sarah’s a 17 year old who goes to your church. She loves drawing. Art is her passion, and she dreams of being an illustrator when she grows up. And then she discovers AI image generation. She can type in a few words, and in seconds she gets an image far more sophisticated and accomplished than anything that she can currently draw.

0:01:40 – (Christopher Watkin): And she can get it in whatever artistic style she chooses. She notices that her Instagram starts to blow up with AI generated Bible verse art. And she starts wondering, why am I going to spend years learning anatomy and color and technique when already AI is better than I am and it’s only going to get better in the future? And then she comes to you after the service one Sunday and she says, brett, you’ve written on these things.

0:02:11 – (Christopher Watkin): What is the point of me continuing to draw? And why would I ever think of going to college to study art?

0:02:20 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say to her, sarah, I get it. I’ve had these same kind of existential crisis moments myself as a writer, as someone who’s a creator. And I think anyone in the creative fields of any kind is having these kind of wake up call moments, thinking about AI and experimenting with it and seeing how it can, you know, conjure up pretty good quality stuff already. And we’re in the early stages still, so I would first of all just express solidarity with her.

0:02:58 – (Brett McCracken): But then I would say it’s not all about the end result when it comes to creation and the arts. It’s not even mostly about the end result. I would argue it’s about the process. I think we need to recover a robust theology of process. What happens between kind of an input, the idea, kind of something that is the precipitating idea and the output, the eventual Output, process matters. AI can eliminate that. It can go from input to output instantly.

0:03:33 – (Brett McCracken): And that can kind of mess with our heads a little bit. But I think we need to recover the value of process and all the things that are valuable about it. Art is not just about the end product, it’s about the process. And I also would say art is not only about kind of pretty polish and kind of a kind of perfect, pretty ornamental, you know, thing it’s about. It’s something personal. And the personal is oftentimes messier.

0:04:03 – (Brett McCracken): It’s unpolished. Great art comes from a personal place and it often is expressed as a form of praise. I would, I would argue to be an artist is kind of to give expression to the direction of your loves and the object of your loves. And that’s something AI can’t really do. And so as an artist, Sarah, I would tell her, you know, retain those distinctly human things about that have always been true about art making, which is, process is a big valuable part of it, not only for your, your eventual audience, but first and foremost for you and who you are becoming in the process of creating.

0:04:41 – (Brett McCracken): And then the praise element, the kind of effective love element that is behind what you are creating and why you are creating it, those really matter. So I would just encourage her also. This is something that we can talk about later or debate a little bit, but I think that arguably AI is always going to depend on original human creation. It currently is only pulling from basically human ideas and human creation and synthesizing it.

0:05:16 – (Brett McCracken): And in the future, you know, if, if, if there’s no new things being created, let’s say if everyone just starts using AI and throws in the towel on originality, eventually there’s going to be diminishing returns in terms of what AI produces because it’s relying on an ever smaller pool of human, original human inputs. So for the Sarahs of the world, I would just say maybe in the future you will have even greater value as a kind of original human innovator artist who is giving AI that source material that it can actually create something with.

0:05:56 – (Brett McCracken): But I think there’s things we can debate about that as well. There’s counterpoints to that because in a sense, you know, even what we call original human ideas or original human creation is in a sense just remixing, you know, a variety of inputs that have come into that author or that artist’s life. So we in our most innovative moments are doing what AI is doing, which is just synthesizing inputs. So is it really all that different?

0:06:24 – (Brett McCracken): So, but Those are a few things I would say just to encourage Sarah, but I get it for sure is this is a hard moment for artists. And I interact a lot with artists and it’s a big topic of conversation.

0:06:36 – (Christopher Watkin): Certainly is. You. You have laid Brett a banquet before us in that answer, you started off with, with process. The process matters, not just the product. And then very helpfully and alliteratively you used. You went to praise. Art is about praise. Can a machine do that? And the third point, that AI can only build on what we’ve done, we could perhaps label that parasitism. So we’ve got process, praise and parasitism.

0:07:04 – (Brett McCracken): Oh, I like it. Yeah.

0:07:05 – (Christopher Watkin): And in a sense, we’re going to spend the whole rest of this episode exploring those ideas that you’ve laid out. So thank you for putting that so crisply and thank you as well, for just acknowledging that these are difficult times for people in the creative industries. There is a sense, and I hope we’re going to be able to explore it richly in this episode, that AI is not coming for the creative industries, if we understand them correctly. But I think there is also a very deep and real anxiety.

0:07:39 – (Christopher Watkin): And I really appreciated the way that you acknowledged that in your answer. I want to back up just a little bit, and I’ve been listening to other interviews that you’ve done, and two or three times you’ve said of books that you’ve written, say the Wisdom Pyramid, where you were talking about Christian wisdom, or the book you co edited, Scrolling Ourselves to Death. I’d probably need to update this for the age of AI.

0:08:07 – (Christopher Watkin): And so I just want to give you the opportunity to think out loud about how the work you’ve done on social media and the importance of church and so forth. In what ways do you think AI is just continuing to make those problems you’ve already identified worse? Or to what extent do you think AI is actually, actually bringing something new into the mix that we haven’t had to grapple with before?

0:08:36 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot with regard to my recent work. When you’re writing about technology, the danger is it can be out of date very quickly as technology changes rapidly and there’s new dynamics. And even Scrolling Ourselves to Death, which came out just a year ago, I feel like we need to have a book called Prompting Ourselves to Death is like looking at the AI situation.

0:09:04 – (Brett McCracken): But with the Wisdom Pyramid, the first line of that book, I talk about how we live in a world with more and more Information and less and less wisdom. And a crucial distinction that I make throughout the book is that wisdom is different. It is categorically different than knowledge and information. And in the information age, when knowledge and information are at our fingertips and AI is just making that even more significantly the case, we have to understand that distinction.

0:09:35 – (Brett McCracken): So I think if anything AI is going to make, it’s going to blur that distinction. It’s going to kind of confuse people and kind of confuse our categories. Because the answers that AI gives might seem to some people as wisdom. They’re quite sophisticated answers. They’re only going to become more sophisticated. And so as we kind of start to rely more and more on AI and the, quote, wisdom it provides, I think we have to remember, no, no, no, no, no. This is not wisdom. This is still just information.

0:10:08 – (Brett McCracken): It’s information synthesized and presented to us in an unprecedented kind of way, which is very sophisticated. It feels. It looks a little bit like what we think wisdom is, but I think we have to just maintain that distinction. This is not wisdom. Wisdom, and I argue this in the wisdom pyramid, has a fundamental kind of affective dimension to it. It’s not just cerebral, it’s not just facts in your head.

0:10:38 – (Brett McCracken): It’s not just amassing knowledge. It’s the orientation of your loves chiefly to God, the Wisdom incarnate, the source of all wisdom. Wisdom is worship. That’s like a line that I repeat all the time. Wisdom is worship, Worship is wisdom. They’re one and the same as we are proximate to God as we are in a loving relationship with him. And this is a theme the Bible just underscores repeatedly the proverbs, you know, elsewhere, Psalm 1, kind of the tree in proximity to the river flourishes like you are wise not by virtue of amassing the most facts and knowledge, but by virtue of your posture and position before the Almighty God. Right. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

0:11:27 – (Brett McCracken): Fear is an emotion. It’s something only humans can have, that emotion. Robots, AI can’t have that emotion. It’s humility. You know, that’s something. I don’t think AI can necessarily express that. It can’t practice fear and love and the emotions that are so crucial to what we call wisdom. So, yeah, so I would say it’s gonna. AI is going to make that distinction more and more important between wisdom and knowledge and information, but it’s also going to make it harder and harder. Those categories are going to feel more and more blurred.

0:12:02 – (Brett McCracken): But I think from a Christian point of view, we really need to kind of be clear on what wisdom is and the distinct human contours of it.

0:12:12 – (Christopher Watkin): I think the allying wisdom with emotion is a really rich line of thought, isn’t it, that our emotions are integral to our wisdom. I just want to push you a little bit. Are you saying that you are confident that AI will never have the capacity to feel emotion?

0:12:32 – (Brett McCracken): I mean, I think it would definitely have the capacity to act in a way that looks like emotion, very much in the way that actors, Oscar winning actors can approximate human emotion. I think AI is going to be very adept at mimicking human emotion. You’re already seeing it with AI companions who are programmed specifically for the purpose of being kind of emotional, relational friends and significant others.

0:13:08 – (Brett McCracken): So. But I think acting at emotion is a different thing than having emotion. Right. And to have emotion, I think, is to be an embodied being. And I don’t think. I think we. We can’t divorce any of this from embodiment. Emotions are not something that can ever be divorced from the way God created us as embodied beings. Right. Head, heart, soul, all together in this cohesive way. So, yeah, I would. I would probably plant my flag on that claim that AI can never actually feel what we call emotions, but certainly it can play at them and act at them and, you know, give convincing portrayals of human emotion.

0:13:55 – (Christopher Watkin): That’s such an important distinction because I think it allows us to say AI can look to all the world as if it is experiencing a whole range of emotions and can pass for a sophisticated emotional being while not having those emotions in the way that we have them. And I think we recognize that in our own lives, don’t we? We’ve all at some point acted out having a particular emotional. It was the right thing to do in a particular circumstance. So we simulated that emotion. And that’s not always wrong in human context. Sometimes when everyone around us is mourning and we don’t feel it, it’s right to seek to mourn with those who mourn.

0:14:41 – (Christopher Watkin): But that is profoundly different. And we will all recognize this in our own experience, won’t we? That is profoundly different from being in that position of being uncontrollably overcome with grief. And there’s a world of difference, I

0:14:56 – (Brett McCracken): think, with the emotion question is also suffering, which we could have a whole podcast talking about the, the. The value of human suffering as kind of a school of what forms our wisdom. And that’s something that AI don’t think can experience either. Right? True suffering is such a formative thing in terms of who we become and, and how we gain wisdom. Think about Job. You know, that with the wisdom literature of the Book of Job and so many other examples, God uses suffering to instill in us wisdom. And it’s tied in with that fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, kind of our creatureliness and our limits and what we can’t do and how fragile we are.

0:15:42 – (Brett McCracken): You know, Psalm 90, that whole idea of, you know, teach us to number our days because of our finitude and our limits are such a crucial part of our wisdom. And I just don’t think AI will ever, even if it could come up with a self conception and maybe like approximate consciousness, self awareness, it doesn’t have that creaturely embodied finitude that is so crucial to wisdom and suffering, which is so crucial to wisdom.

0:16:12 – (Christopher Watkin): And I can hear the skeptic of what we’re saying listening to this and saying, yes, but you’re being so naive. We could make AI that suffers. But I think we need to come back to the point that you’ve so helpfully raised in your last answer, don’t we? That there’s a world of difference between passing for a being that suffers, simulating suffering, imitating suffering, and actually participating in the human condition that that brings suffering as a necessity.

0:16:43 – (Christopher Watkin): And this distinction between imitation and participation, I think is really key for Christians to hold onto because it helps us to see that AI can look as though it’s feeling love or suffering or grieving in a way that I cannot distinguish from a human and it yet still be different. And I think, I think that will become increasingly important perhaps over the coming years as AI gets more sophisticated.

0:17:15 – (Christopher Watkin): I know, Brett, that you’re a big fan of the Thinker, Neil Postman and his Amusing Ourselves to Death was the inspiration behind your co editor volume scrolling Ourselves to Death. Postman has this really interesting and profound reflection on new technologies. He says something like every new technology brings us and it also takes something away from us. And I’d love to ask your reflections on that in relation to AI. What do you think AI gives us?

0:17:51 – (Christopher Watkin): What are its positive contributions? How is it helping us? And what is AI taking away from us as it does that?

0:17:59 – (Brett McCracken): Yes. Yeah. I mean, that is a great question and a big question. And I do appreciate the Postman approach and McLuhan before him. You know, kind of like technology has pros and cons. Every new technology, you know, affords us new things and maybe complicates other things and brings new challenges. And I think that it’d be great if Christians kind of adopted that approach to Technology where we’re neither, you know, so doomsday that we kind of willfully ignore any potential positives of a technology, but also neither so naive or uncritically optimistic that we don’t, you know, anticipate or foresee some of the negative ways.

0:18:47 – (Brett McCracken): So with AI, I think, you know, it’s still so early, so a lot of this is speculation, but I do think that some there’s going to be real positives with how AI can kind of streamline a lot of grunt work type tasks and more of the menial tasks. Everything from scanning, you know, 90 page legal documents and providing kind of helpful summaries of that. I was even thinking about like terms and conditions when you’re signing up for a new subscription service. None of us actually take the time to read that. But what if we could like ask AI hey, could you quick, quickly read every word of the terms and conditions and let. And let me know what I need to know. Like if there’s anything that you would flag in here that I should be concerned about, like, let me know. That would be really helpful if AI could do that.

0:19:37 – (Brett McCracken): So I think a lot of the kind of admin assistant level with AI is a real potential plus even in the realm of art making, which is kind of the topic we’re focusing on in this conversation, I would say not necessarily on the ideas kind of level or like the creative inspiration or the visionary level, but more on the implementation level. AI could be really helpful. I was talking to some folks in the music industry recently and they were saying like already AI in the kind of on the sound engineering level of like mixing songs and kind of editing songs, is proving to be super helpful in cutting costs a little bit.

0:20:22 – (Brett McCracken): Now I get a little bit leery of like the slippery slope kind of dynamic of when artists start to use AI in small ways, it invariably will probably lead to bigger and bigger ways. But I think if you focus on more of the menial tasks that don’t kind of involve the high level human visionary thinking, then that’s a great use of AI. And then in terms of the big negatives that I worry about with AI, I think what it takes away is kind of a value, a robust value of process, which we’ve already talked about a little bit.

0:21:01 – (Brett McCracken): The importance of seeing value in what appears to be inefficient, which is time that it takes to go through the process. I also think AI will potentially take away what is already an eroding virtue, I think, which is patience. We are an ever more impatient People in this frenetic digital age. And I think that that’s a biblical value that we really need to fight hard to retain this kind of patience, which goes along with the process idea.

0:21:36 – (Brett McCracken): And then also just thinking, like the muscle of thinking. Well, I worry about that going away. Like, when you don’t use a muscle, whether physical or otherwise, when you don’t use it routinely, it kind of atrophies. So as we outsource more and more of our thinking muscles to AI it will be the case that we will start to atrophy our ability to think critically. We’ve already seen that with the Internet age. Nicholas Carr, in his books the Shallows, he’s laid out the case that that’s already happening.

0:22:14 – (Brett McCracken): We’re losing. Our brains are changing because of the Internet. But I think AI runs the risk of accelerating that. Where we pass off the hard work of thinking enough that we start to just. It becomes impossible for us. And that’s a dire predicament if we get to a point as a human race where no one’s left who’s actually able to take a step back and critically assess things on a deep level. Because we’re just like a lot shallower people in our thinking.

0:22:49 – (Brett McCracken): So there’s a lot there. But that’s. That’s kind of my. My quick response to pros and cons.

0:22:56 – (Christopher Watkin): That would indeed be a nightmare scenario, wouldn’t it? You be in 1984 territory. Very chief.

0:23:02 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah. Who would you think? Anyone? Anyone?

0:23:04 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah. Yeah. No. Seriously? Yes. So. So what you’re saying is great administrative help, really bad creative inspiration, that it’s a case of using AI wisely?

0:23:18 – (Brett McCracken): Yes.

0:23:19 – (Christopher Watkin): I want to press a little bit further into this idea of creativity, and I want to explore something that will never happen. But just for the sake of a thought experiment, let’s imagine this thing happened, because I think it helps us to get at the idea of. Is this actually just a prejudice that we have against AI like, give it a generation. Will people be much more relaxed about AI Being creative? And this is.

0:23:43 – (Christopher Watkin): This is the thought experiment. Imagine this. Take your favorite work of literature, whatever it is. I’m thinking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Okay. And imagine that one day we woke up and the headline on the front page of all the news sites was shock horror. We’ve discovered that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was actually written by AI all along, exact same words, everything’s the same. But now we realize that it was generated by a machine.

0:24:16 – (Christopher Watkin): What difference, first of all, would that make to the way that you personally, Brett McCracken would experience that work of art and more broadly, should that make a difference to the way that we experience it?

0:24:30 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, personally, it would make a world of difference. I would. I would say part of the beauty of watching a play like Hamlet or reading it or experiencing any art is just knowing that there’s a real human being, there’s a human soul behind this. And as a film critic, there’s different kind of approaches to film criticism. In grad school at UCLA Film studies, we learned about all these different approaches.

0:24:59 – (Brett McCracken): And there’s kind of the text criticism approach where you focus almost entirely on the end result and like, deep analysis, textual analysis of, like, the film itself. But there’s also the. The auteurist approach to film criticism, where you kind of focus on the personality. And that’s always been my approach. When I’m reading a film and writing about it. I pay a lot of attention to who are the people behind this product and what’s their story, and why are they making this film? Why are they making it in this particular way?

0:25:33 – (Brett McCracken): For me, that’s always been the more important and interesting aspect of the arts. You know, who was Michelangelo, right. And what would lead him to make the masterpieces he. He made? Who. Who was Handel? You know, the story behind the Messiah is just. Is so compelling. So, yeah, I think if we found out Shakespeare was a. An LLM, you know, and everything he made was a soulless thing, I think that would make a huge difference with that example. In particular, I don’t know if you’ve seen the new movie Hamnet.

0:26:08 – (Brett McCracken): That is kind of. It’s. It’s being nominated for a lot of awards, but it’s kind of the. The story behind Hamlet, what was going on in Shakespeare’s life. And his wife, Anne Hathaway, they had lost a. A child in a very tragic way to the plague. And. And his name was Hamnet, which is kind of another kind of way to say Hamlet. So the. They. The movie Hamnet is such a beautiful example of how great art comes from a personal place. You know, to go back to my.

0:26:43 – (Brett McCracken): My opening statements about, like, process matters and also, like, personal praise and kind of the personal love behind something. It really matters. Like, you know, I think that can we enjoy something that is AI made? Like, can we. Can we as the viewers or readers experience real emotion when we encounter something that AI made? Certainly, I think that that’s absolutely possible. But does it also matter that there’s no soul behind it?

0:27:16 – (Brett McCracken): Yes, I think that also matters. There’s A recent. A recent example in my world is the. The rise of AI made music. And there’s even like Christian music that you can find on Spotify that is very popular and it has a lot of streams, but it’s AI made. It’s. You know, one example is this artist, you know, quote unquote, artist named Holy Groove. And, you know, if you look. If you look up the songs from Holy Groove, they’re. They’re beautiful. Like, in terms of the nuts and bolts, it’s. It’s very easy listening. It’s enjoyable until you find out that it was AI Made. For me, when I discover that it. I just kind of lose any interest.

0:28:03 – (Brett McCracken): Like, I’m. It feels like a waste of my time to engage with something, however pretty it is, however. However emotionally engaging it might be. I don’t want to spend my time as a listener, my precious. My precious few minutes that I have available to give myself to. To give my attention to something that has been created. I want to give my attention to another human being’s output. It’s an act of love for fellow human beings. You know, it’s. For me, engaging with the arts and being kind of an appreciator of the arts is a way that I love my neighbor. It’s a way that I, like, live the greatest commandment to love God and love my neighbor.

0:28:53 – (Brett McCracken): And so I don’t want to spend my few minutes of attention on something that isn’t an opportunity to love my human neighbor.

0:29:04 – (Christopher Watkin): Amen. You said in the course of that answer that whatever AI produced artistically would have no soul. Is it perhaps not also the case that it would, in a sense have too much soul? In the sense that what AI does is it sucks up so much human production, so many human artistic works, and in very sophisticated ways, sort of averages them out and then is able to predict what creative humans would write in a particular case. And so it’s, in a sense, the whole world talking to you at once rather than one particular human being. And it reminds me of that Charlie Brown cartoon that often gets quoted.

0:29:48 – (Christopher Watkin): I love humanity. It’s people. I can’t stand individual people. So it’s giving you a humanity written poem or play, whereas we’re not called as Christians. And I love the way that you landed that answer with the idea of love. We’re not called to love humanity in an abstract way. We love individuals, human beings, and that’s what it’s robbing us of, that individual human expression.

0:30:14 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of Great kind of complexities there in that dynamic, Chris. Because I even think about how some art forms are more collaborative to begin with. Like, a film usually has, you know, hundreds and hundreds of humans behind it. So when I’m. When I’m watching a film, like, it is kind of in. In the way that AI pulls from a bunch of different, like, human inspirations to create something. Like a film is doing that too.

0:30:42 – (Brett McCracken): And yet the difference is, like, there’s. There’s usually like one or two nameable creatives that I can, you know, actually, like, have in my mind and, like, say thank you to, like. And it’s not like I get the chance to, like, physically say thank you to, like, Steven Spielberg when I watch his film, but occasionally I do in my profession, which is fun. I get to meet these creatives. But at least in theory, there’s someone I can name who is a flesh and blood human who was behind this beautiful work, and I can say thank you to them. In the same way that our vertical relationship to God, it matters that when we look around at the beauty of creation and we have an impulse to give thanks for matters, that there’s someone with a capital S that we can think.

0:31:34 – (Brett McCracken): I can, like, actually name him. I can, like, praise him. And it’s not just this disembodied, ethereal kind of reality that created this world. It’s a specific, you know, nameable God. And that makes a world of difference. And so I think the dynamic is a little bit similar with, With AI Made art. We have an impulse to want to be able to commune with the Creator and give them gratitude, even if it’s just kind of a prayer worth thought of like, oh, this. Thank you for this amazing thing.

0:32:10 – (Christopher Watkin): That is such a powerful analogy. I’d never thought of it that way before. The same way that it’s so precious as Christians for us to be able to say, thank you, Lord, for making the world like, we can name God. We can have that relationship with him that is also. There’s an echo, there’s a shadow of that in the way we relate to art. And perhaps that’s one thing that we could say to Sarah, like, your art matters because you matter.

0:32:37 – (Christopher Watkin): You know, you’re not just a cog in a machine producing content. Your experience of the world is, you know, God has numbered every hair on your head, and therefore what you produce artistically matters because it’s produced by you. Um, I want to return to this question of struggle and process that you’ve raised a couple of times. And it’s something that we often hear Christians talk about in relation to AI. And I think it’s one of the key ideas for us to really get our heads around the value not simply of the final product, like the final sermon preached or the final artwork sold or created, but.

0:33:22 – (Christopher Watkin): But how you get there. And I guess this is such an acute question at the moment, because AI is coming for that process, isn’t it? It’s promising us, I can get you to the product without a huge amount of the grunt work that you usually put in. And so, as you see, what’s the value of process of that grunt work? And let me just play devil’s advocate. Cause I think most of us would say, oh, that’s so incredibly important. But let me try and make the question a little bit harder for you.

0:33:57 – (Christopher Watkin): So, you know, back in the Reformation times, people might have complained potentially that, you know, the printing press is making, acquiring and reading books too easy compared to copying manuscripts. We’re losing the precious grunt work of copying it out by hand, and therefore we’re losing its preciousness. You know, books are too easy to make these days. Is the arguments that we’re having about AI today, are they just a 21st century version of the arguments that we’ve always had about technology?

0:34:30 – (Christopher Watkin): Oh, this is taking all the magic and mystery out of creating art. Or do you think that something different is happening? Different dynamics are at play with AI today?

0:34:42 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, that’s a great question. And I don’t think it’s all that different. I think that it’s actually a pretty good comparison. But what I would say is friction. First of all, it’s not necessarily a good thing in and of itself. Right. It’s about. It’s about how the friction forms you. So if there’s friction, that’s just like a meaningless friction, and there’s not. There’s no good kind of formation happening, then by all means, like eliminating that friction. Simplifying is a great thing. That’s why I think the kind of some of the menial labor aspects, if AI could do that for us, that’s great.

0:35:19 – (Brett McCracken): But also there’s a type of friction. There’s a type of kind of slowing down and having to go through a process that is deeply valuable for us in cultivating virtues like patience and diligence and just an awareness of our limitations and what we can’t do and what we have to go through. And that’s. I think it’s important. Even if. Even if we can reduce the friction and have technology help us with that I think it’s important that we never strive to kind of eradicate all friction from our lives.

0:35:56 – (Brett McCracken): You know, with pastors and AI. Like sermon writing, for example, like, you know, crafting a sermon for a pastor is not just about the end product for the congregation. That’s an important part of it. But it’s as you wrestle with the text yourself and as you kind of labor to craft a sermon that is internalizing the truth of the text for yourself and then thinking about applying it to everyday life, that’s a valuable thing for you and your spiritual formation, right?

0:36:32 – (Brett McCracken): So that’s a friction that forms you. And it would be a real loss, I think, if you kind of got rid of that altogether in your Reformation example. I think there’s a similar thing with the manuscript copyists as they’re doing that really time intensive labor. It was no doubt deeply spiritually formative for them. The process of copying things by hand. Even teachers today will sometimes instruct students to copy things by hand because you retain things differently in your brain. So you know, getting rid of that is a loss, right? Because there’s something, there was something spiritually formative about that.

0:37:13 – (Brett McCracken): At the same time there’s a new friction introduced with the printing press in a way because like reading a book for a lot of people, you know, that’s a hard thing. There’s a friction to have to sit with a book and read it in a, in a bit of a more solitary format, you know, uh, that can be with the Bible. We know that’s a, that that’s challenge, right? It sounds easy, but sitting by yourself with a Bible trying to make sense of it is hard. And that’s, there’s a friction with that, but it’s a good friction, right? And I would hate to see people use AI to bypass that friction of like personal Bible study. Like if we ever got to a point where people were routinely like, you know, let’s say they’re doing a Bible reading plan and like, like for me this morning I had to read like three chapters in numbers, you know, not the most stimulating reading.

0:38:06 – (Brett McCracken): And I could have asked Chad GPT, you know, could you summarize this for me in like 30 seconds and just give me like the, the main bullet points. But obviously that would be a deprivation, right, of like something good in the process of me kind of having that friction of reading the Bible and trying to kind of have a sense for what God is saying there. So yeah, I mean, I think friction, it’s good to reduce it, it’s good to Solve problems. I think that’s part of the creation mandate that Adam and Eve had and that we all have.

0:38:43 – (Brett McCracken): Bringing order out of chaos is a good thing, and reducing friction in certain areas of life is a good thing. But I don’t think the mandate is to eradicate all formation that is deeply tied to the process and the challenge of doing the work. But, yeah, I mean, this is a huge topic, so we could talk all day about just this question.

0:39:09 – (Christopher Watkin): But yeah, I’d love to do that. I fear that TGC may not appreciate us if we. If we did that. I remember John Dyer. I think once I heard him say, for almost all of human history, we’ve had one problem, which is how to get enough calories into our bodies to keep us alive. And then in the last few decades, we’ve suddenly had a second problem, which is how not to have too many calories in order to make us ill.

0:39:41 – (Christopher Watkin): And adapting to that is proving hugely problematic. And he made the analogy with friction. He says, for almost all of human history, our one problem is how to make things easier and more streamlined and how to take friction out of life. And we’ve got really good at that. And AI is poised to make us exceptionally good at that. But that’s bringing a second problem alongside, which is, hold on. What’s the right amount of friction to have in a human life?

0:40:10 – (Christopher Watkin): If I can potentially reduce it to close to zero, that’s just like, I can have all the calories that I want and let’s just eat chocolate cake all day. That’s not going to go well. And so we’re having to struggle to cope with this new reality of hold on. How much friction do I want to retain in my life? How much should I be sweating over the sermon that I’m writing? Or how hard should writing an article be for me, what’s the optimal level of that? And I think that’s such a hard question, isn’t it, because there are so many pressures on us to get things done and so forth, that it’s hard to adjust to that.

0:40:53 – (Christopher Watkin): I’d love to give you the opportunity to sing the praises, if you want to, of three particular liturgies of the modern age. So I’m assuming that most people listening to or watching this would say, I do not want to sit under a preacher whose sermon was written by AI. And most preachers listen to this, will be saying to themselves, I don’t want to be the preacher who has AI around my sermons. But there are some more sort of almost edge cases of is this really helpful for me is this a friction that I do want to eliminate. And the three cases that I’m thinking about in particular are solitude and just being by yourself.

0:41:37 – (Christopher Watkin): Boredom and randomness in life. Do you think those are precious commodities that we need to keep? Are we good to get that fiction out of our lives? Where do you stand in relation to solitude, boredom and randomness?

0:41:55 – (Brett McCracken): Yes, I’m a big fan of all three of those. Yeah, I think boredom, solitude, randomness, serendipity, unplanned encounters in life are where the magic happens. Honestly, like, if we reduced the world entirely to what we could plan and control, what we could optimize, what we could make more predictable by algorithms, more efficient, we would lose a meaningful connection to the world. We would lose what Hartmut Rosa calls resonance.

0:42:32 – (Brett McCracken): You know, he talks about resonance as this thing that you cannot engineer. It is unengineerable. And that goes against the logic of modernity. And in the AI age, it’s really going to go against the logic of AI, which is optimize everything, reduce inefficiencies, but especially in the arts, I think that the magic happens in those unplanned encounters where you can, if you’re a filmmaker, for example, you can, like, micromanage every little detail.

0:43:02 – (Brett McCracken): You can kind of plan everything that you can plan, but there’s like X factors that you can just not control. You know, the weather when you’re out doing a shoot outside or a performance dynamic of one of your actors that, like, is even greater than you could have ever scripted or planned. That’s where the profound beauty in life happens, the serendipity, the kind of randomness. My favorite filmmaker is a guy named Terrence Malick and his approach to filmmaking. I feel like Hartmut Rosa must like Terrence Malick films because basically he just turns on his camera, you know, shoots for hours and hours and hours in nature.

0:43:46 – (Brett McCracken): He lets his actors improvise, so there’s an openness to that kind of holy moment of encounter where, yes, he plans a little bit, he controls some aspects, but he likes natural lighting. He likes. If there’s a bird song that he likes, he’ll turn on the audio and record it. If there’s a thunderstorm, he’ll direct his camera crew, go capture that thunderstorm, and it usually winds its way into the final product.

0:44:15 – (Brett McCracken): And he’s also a filmmaker, by the way, who takes his time. Right. He’s been editing his new movie, which is a Jesus Bible movie called the Way of the Wind. He shot that film in 2019 and you know, seven years later, he’s still working on editing and kind of fine tuning that. That defies the logic of the AI optimize, you know, optimization. Like everything should be done fast, everything should be done efficiently.

0:44:43 – (Brett McCracken): But that’s not the logic of beauty. And you know, even, even God as a creator, you know, I think it’s good to reflect on how the world he created doesn’t always operate on the logic of hyper efficiency. He created us to have to sleep a third of our lives, for example. You know, what does that. There’s a, there’s a meaning to that. He, he created like thousands of species of hummingbirds. You know, that seems gratuitous to me. That seems like unnecessary.

0:45:14 – (Brett McCracken): Like he’s not a God of brute efficiency. And the Bible, his chosen mode of revealing himself to us is not a super efficient document. Right? There’s, you know, he could have revealed himself in like 10,000 bullet points. Like he, he delivers this manual of like, here are 10,000 takeaways. Instead he, he like assembled this book of strange genres and apocalyptic genre and poetry. And, you know, it’s just a confounding document if you look at life through the lens of efficiency and like getting. From getting the, the nugget, the takeaway in as efficient a manner as possible.

0:46:01 – (Brett McCracken): So, yeah, I think all of that to say, Chris, I think boredom and solitude and randomness are great things and we would do well to practice them in our lives instead of just using our phone. Using AI to kind of optimize every spare moment of life, having kind of open space, breathing room in life, to encounter this gratuitously made world that God has given us, I think is a good thing for our spiritual health and for anything of substance that we might want to contribute as creators, as thinkers.

0:46:38 – (Brett McCracken): You know, we need that meandering time. We need daydreaming, we need to be bored so that those epiphanies can actually have a chance to bubble up inside of us.

0:46:50 – (Christopher Watkin): And the fact that we don’t intuitively think that, the fact that as I look at my own life, I go to lengths to engineer boredom and probably solitude out of it as well. That is a precious insight into ourselves, isn’t it? Because it’s showing us a way in which we’re out of line with God and the grain of the universe. Now I love how you anchored that answering, hold on. Look at how God does things. Look at the Bible he’s given us. He’s not efficient. Look at the hummingbirds. They’re not Efficient.

0:47:22 – (Christopher Watkin): And so as we realize I’m slightly uncomfortable with boredom or I don’t like randomness, that’s an opportunity for us to grow and to get in tune with the way the universe actually is, which is the. The universe created by God, and to embrace these things, because, you know, by all appearances, it looks as though God embraces these things in his creation and in his Word as well. So thank you for anchoring that back into the two books of God’s Word and God’s world.

0:47:57 – (Christopher Watkin): A lot of people today say that we’re living in this thing that they call an attention economy. There’s a war for our attention. And I’d love you to think out loud about how Christians should relate to that idea in particular. So we’re faced with this fire hose of AI content, all its slop, all its deep fakes. It’s endless repetition, and that is shaping the way that we see the world. It’s not just content on our screens. It’s forming us as individuals.

0:48:35 – (Christopher Watkin): How do you think that is forming us? And how is the Bible seeking to form our attention differently? What are the two sort of paradigms of attention that we get on the one hand from AI and on the other hand from dwelling deeply in the Bible?

0:48:53 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, it’s a great question. I think part of the answer resides in the name, the attention economy. It implies money is at stake. And so a key thing for us to recognize that has spiritual significance is so much of what we open on our phone or scroll across is simply an attempt to commandeer our attention to make money for someone. Right. Like the more addicted smartphone users, AI users can get to these devices, to these programs, to these subscription services, the more money is being made.

0:49:33 – (Brett McCracken): And so we have to realize and be honest about the fact that we are. This is not just about us being entertained or served something valuable. It’s really about our attention is being commandeered for these companies to make money. And when money is at stake, there’s a lot of, you know, in incentive to. To create things that are highly addictive. And, you know, AI is essentially just the next level of sophistication with algorithms in terms of figuring you out as a consumer and figuring out what your.

0:50:10 – (Brett McCracken): What your weak, weak areas are, like, what. What do you have a hard time resisting when a certain sort of image or a certain sort of content comes across your eyeballs? You know, what do you have a hard time resisting? And, of course, there’s huge spiritual side effects there, because attention is a spiritual currency. It’s where we Give our attention is where our loves go, right? The desires of our heart follow the direction of our attention.

0:50:42 – (Brett McCracken): And one thing that I really worry about in the smartphone age, and I’ve already written a lot about this, is just so much of our attention is being commandeered that we have precious little of it left to give to God and just to give our attention to His Word, to give our attention to him in prayer. You know, it’s hard for people in the digital age to like, carve out any amount of time to be unmediated for five minutes, to just be still and know that he is God and to, to sit with him in quietness and to sit with His Word and to contemplate it.

0:51:23 – (Brett McCracken): And I’m speaking, you know, for myself as well. You know, I struggle with this too. So I think there’s huge spiritual issues going on in the attention economy. And I think a big step that a big first step we can all make. And this is getting into kind of practices. And some advice that I often give is carve out some unmediated time in your life, you know, where you’re phone free, where you’re computer free, where you’re AI free, and have it be designated for that spiritual attention that you need to give to your God, to the Creator.

0:52:01 – (Brett McCracken): Sometimes I do this on walks. I like to kind of hit two birds with one stone in the sense of like, it’s good to go outside and enjoy the beauty of God’s creation, but I often feel like it’s easier to commune with him and to pray and to express gratitude to him when I’m out in his creation. So going on phone free walks is like a practice that I try to do. So it’s some measure of unmediated time in my life that I can kind of intentionally focus my attention on God.

0:52:32 – (Brett McCracken): And then also just like for me, I try to do the first like half hour of every day when I wake up. I try to be phone free and device free and use that time to read my Bible or pray. For some people, it might be the last hour of each day. That’s not a bad idea. You know, there’s studies about how, like, looking at your phone right before sleep isn’t always the best thing anyway, so you probably will sleep better if you decide to go analog in that final stretch of your day.

0:53:03 – (Brett McCracken): But whatever it is, I think for our spiritual vitality, we just have to fight the impulse to fill every moment of our lives with content, even good content, even like great podcasts like silicone. Spirituality is like if I go on walks and I dry all of my, if all of my intermediate time in life, like going from point A to point B or like waiting at the bus station for the bus, if I just, if my instinct is just always to fill it with more media, whether a podcast or an audiobook, or scrolling on my phone for an article, like, even if it’s the best content in the world, like, even if it’s like nutritious content, it’s still not going to do good things for my soul because it’s eradicating that open space. Right. That, what we were just talking about, that boredom, that solitude that is so important for our spiritual health to flourish within that kind of breathing room space.

0:54:02 – (Brett McCracken): So, yeah, so find unmediated time in your day. That’s my quick AI summary version of what I just said.

0:54:13 – (Christopher Watkin): And I love the way you talk about being intentional about that because it’s the case, isn’t it, that if we are not focused on making that happen, the drift is always towards filling our life with content. And I’ve heard you say elsewhere, and I found this so powerful when you said IT, that these AI companies employ rooms full of behavioral psychologists with PhDs to work on hacking our attention. Like their job is to get us on the platform for longer and longer and longer because then they make more money and they’re very, very good at it. They have PhDs in this.

0:54:53 – (Christopher Watkin): And therefore when we do fill our lives with content, I think it’s worth us remembering, like, that’s not simply my inputs. I haven’t decided to do that. I’m being hacked by very clever people for the purposes of earning money for a corporation that I don’t have a deep interest in. And so we often think, don’t we, that the way we use our phones or whatever, that’s a very private thing to me. But it’s worth being reminded as Christians that that’s not simply my choices. I’m being played often when I’m spending all this time on social media and there’s a whole infrastructure, there’s a whole industry, the aim of which is playing me effectively.

0:55:40 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah. And I think there’s at least one good thing about it, which is that it can be a good mirror to your own kind of sinful tendencies. The algorithm is so good, and these sophisticated companies that learn us so well, it can actually be pretty eye opening in a wake up call when you start to see, oh, this is what I’ve clicked on a lot before, clearly, because they’ve started feeding me more of this. So there’s aspects of our discipleship that I think can be redeemed through these technologies where you can kind of be honest with yourself, like, oh, this is not great. You know that, like, when I open, when I open my social media feeds, like, this is what I’m getting.

0:56:31 – (Brett McCracken): So sometimes even black mirrors, you know, even the dark mirrors can be helpful for our sanctification.

0:56:38 – (Christopher Watkin): I love that. I’d never thought of it that way before. The. The algorithm doesn’t lie. It feeds you what you have actually clicked on rather than what you would like to think you have clicked on.

0:56:48 – (Brett McCracken): Right, right. We would all kind of like. Like if our feeds looked maybe a.

0:56:52 – (Christopher Watkin): They do.

0:56:53 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah.

0:56:54 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah. I ask each guest on the podcast to bring along one or two Bible passages that have really helped you to think about AI and to understand humanity in relation to it. Brett, what passages or what verses have most helped you in relation to your reflections on AI?

0:57:17 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, one would be James 1:5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously. And it goes back to just the important distinction between what wisdom is and in relationship to knowledge and information. AI can give information and knowledge really well. But if what we are seeking is wisdom, and we should be seeking wisdom, we have to remember that AI is not great for that. And we need to ask God, right? He is the giver of wisdom. Prayer, pray for that. Seek his presence.

0:57:53 – (Brett McCracken): I think when it comes to the church and discipleship with AI, it might become tempting for people, for example, to ask AI, ask Chad GPT, like, questions they should be asking their pastor or questions they should be praying about and wrestling with God about. It might seem easier to just get that quick answer, like, hey, Chad, gbt, what do you think about, like, the wisdom of me, you know, in this romantic relationship that I’m in, like, probably it’ll be better to not go to chat GPT for those questions. So I think James 1:5 is just a good reminder that, like, wisdom is from above. Right. It. It is a God arbitrated, God given thing.

0:58:38 – (Brett McCracken): And as AI kind of simulates wisdom and starts to come across as this ultimate sage in. In our world where the sum of all human knowledge is like, what it kind of conjures up in an instant, we just have to remember, you know, what wisdom really is. And then I think the other verse that has been helpful, similar to the wisdom conversation, is just. I’ve already referenced it, but the verses, like Proverbs 1, 7 and 9, 10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. You know, the beginning of wisdom is not the summation of all human knowledge.

0:59:17 – (Brett McCracken): If that were true, then going to ChatGPT would be a great avenue for becoming wise because it has the sum of all human knowledge. But the scriptures tell us that wisdom begins with a relationship and a posture before our creator of humility and deference and worship and awe, you know, and fear, you know, these are emotions, these are effective dynamics that are important for us if we want to become wise. And I think in the AI age, we just need to remember that, like, we. We don’t want to bypass God in our desire to be knowledgeable and infinitely capable. That’s actually what Adam and Eve tried to do in the garden, right?

1:00:08 – (Brett McCracken): They bypassed God in their desire to become godlike. In terms of omniscience, AI, I think, dangles that forbidden fruit in front of us in an eerily similar way. I’ve written about this before, but in a sense, contemporary digital technology approximates omniscience, omnipresence in terms of eradicating spatial limitations and omnipotence. Right? Like the smartphone. There’s an app for that. It’s about having the power to do anything in your fingertips. Right?

1:00:46 – (Brett McCracken): And AI is only going to become a more exaggerated sense of that. But. But true wisdom is knowing. That’s folly. To try to, like, bypass God on my own path to omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence is just a path to destruction. So better to have my right posture of reverent fear before the Almighty God and pursue knowledge as a way to glorify him, not as a way to glorify myself.

1:01:17 – (Christopher Watkin): Knowledge is part of a relationship. It’s not an end in itself. It’s a means of worshiping God. That’s such a beautiful and such a challenging and true thought. Thank you, Brett. You review movies and series for TGC and for other outlets as well, and I don’t want to let you go without having asked you. What are the movies we might watch or the series we might consume that you think can best help us to understand?

1:01:52 – (Christopher Watkin): I don’t know, the AI age we’re living in or the posture to adopt emulation to AI. Are there any particular movies or series that have helped you to think these things through? And the only condition I’m putting on this question is that you’re not allowed to mention the Terminator franchise.

1:02:10 – (Brett McCracken): Yes, that’s a great question. And there’s so many movies in my mind that I think of even the. The movie called AI that Steven Spielberg made back in 2001. In a lot of ways it was very prescient and kind of prophetic 25 years ago even to some of the things we’ve been talking about with kind of a Can AI feel emotion? That question. So the movie lands in a certain place on that question. But it’s a thought provoking film that I keep going back to when I think about AI in movies.

1:02:52 – (Brett McCracken): But a more recent example that I think is the single best thing that I’ve seen about AI is a show called Pluribus on Apple tv. It’s by the guy who made Breaking Bad, the TV show, Vince Gilligan. I have to give the caveat that it’s kind of like for mature audiences only type show at times. So, you know, use discernment if you’re a Christian. But it’s, it’s kind of a dystopian movie or show TV show where there’s this.

1:03:28 – (Brett McCracken): It’s kind of about a mysterious alien infection that turns all of all of humanity into basically one shared consciousness. But it functions very much like AI in terms of all the cumulative knowledge you know that exists is instantly, you know, can be conjured up by any given human that’s connected to this hive mind. But there’s a few characters in the show who are immune to this infection and so they’re, they’re like old fashioned humans in a world where now to be human is to basically function like machines and robots that have this kind of infinite knowledge and intelligence.

1:04:11 – (Brett McCracken): So the creator of the show has said in interviews it’s not about AI but it certainly has like a lot of like pertinent kind of themes and questions for our AI Age. I have found it to be a really like thought provoking show to, to think about what AI is and what it could be. So Pluribus is the name of that show.

1:04:35 – (Christopher Watkin): Wonderful, thank you. Two closing questions. What’s one inefficient habit that you’re committed to keeping in the age of AI and if AI is a mirror, what’s one thing that it’s revealed to you personally about your own heart?

1:04:56 – (Brett McCracken): Inefficient habits is daydreaming. I’m a big fan of like just kind of sitting on a park bench without a device to look at or scroll through and just letting my mind wander. There was an article that Christine Rosen wrote. She’s the author of the Extinction of Experience, just kind of the embodied experience as being kind of a dying art form. But she wrote an article with the headline the Death of Daydreaming and she was getting at this deprivation of the digital age, which I’ve alluded to, you know, several times already. But when we fill all of our time, all of our open space with optimizable activity, you know, sending that text message, catching up on email, you know, watching that YouTube clip, I’ve been meaning to watch, listening to a little bit of an audiobook or a podcast, we lose something really important, which is like, what your mind does in that kind of open, meandering space.

1:06:03 – (Brett McCracken): And in fact, there’s a lot of cognitive science about. About this mode. It’s called the default mode network, the dmn. And scientists increasingly think it’s actually a really important mode of, like, mental cognitive health, where your brain actually has kind of space to not. You’re not doing anything else. So there’s no, like, task that your brain is tackling. It’s just kind of gathering itself and creating an agenda for later work and processing.

1:06:36 – (Brett McCracken): And it’s a really important thing for our cognitive health. And I would also argue for our spiritual health, right? As Christians like to have open space to just, like, listen to the Lord and see. See where he directs our thoughts. Some of my best thoughts in terms of what would eventually become articles I want to write or books have come from that kind of daydreaming space. So that’s probably my inefficient habit that I want to hold on to.

1:07:06 – (Brett McCracken): And then your last question is about what AI is it about what it mirrors to me about my own spiritual condition of my heart. I think what comes to mind is, I think the way that I overestimate my. The value of my outputs and kind of overvaluing my own ability to produce something in my field, something written, a written output that is brilliant and helpful. AI just is really humbling with that, right?

1:07:43 – (Brett McCracken): Because the outputs that AI can come up with in five seconds are oftentimes almost as good or better than what I spend days, you know, crafting and writing. So I think it’s a good humbling. It’s a. It’s a good reminder to myself that, again, like I’ve been saying, it’s not just about the end product. You know, being a writer and being called to this is as much about how God is forming me in the process of writing and how I’m wrestling with ideas and trying to come up with something that is not only helpful for readers, but helpful for me, you know, in my own sanctification.

1:08:25 – (Brett McCracken): So I’m trying to look at my vocation of writing more and more like that, like it’s not just about the end product and what does or doesn’t happen. You know, how many people read it or don’t. It’s about what is God doing in this process for me, you know, I just finished writing my new book and I had that mentality as I was writing it. It’s a book on sleep. It’s kind of about sleep in the age of AI and technology and the physical limitations and inefficiencies of sleep.

1:08:58 – (Brett McCracken): Kind of a theological reflection on it. But the process of writing it has been the most fun, like intellectually, spiritually stimulating process. And so I feel like I’ve already won before the book has come out. Whether or not anyone reads it, I hope that people read it. But I know that God, you know, called me to write this book. He met me in the process of writing it. It was a really enriching experience.

1:09:25 – (Brett McCracken): And so, yeah, that’s what I’m learning as a writer in the age of AI, that there’s something really rich and beautiful about the process, that AI can’t take that away from me.

1:09:38 – (Christopher Watkin): Wonderful. Congratulations on finishing the new book. That is very exciting news. What is it called and when will we be able to read it?

1:09:45 – (Brett McCracken): It’s called the Wisdom of Sleep. So kind of following off of my wisdom pyramid book. It’s. Yeah, it’s. Yeah, it is what it sounds like. It’s a deep dive into the physical, biological reality of sleep. Why did God make it? You know, what does it mean for us theologically? It’s kind of a two books approach. So what does science say? What does studying nature say about sleep? And then what does scripture say about this topic? So it comes out August 4th, so later this year.

1:10:17 – (Christopher Watkin): Wonderful. Thank you. And if as you’re listening to this or watching this, you want to take these ideas further or dive deeper into them, do please join us on the Stilichan Spiritualities Discord, where we’re going to be learning together how to follow Jesus in a tech saturated world. On the Discord, you’ll find practical experiments that are linked to every episode of the show and you’ll also find details of an upcoming online cohort as well. The link is waiting for you down in the show notes, and we’d love to see you there.

1:10:53 – (Christopher Watkin): But for the moment, Brett, I just want to thank you so much for the wisdom that you’ve shared with us, the many things you’ve given us to think, meditate and even daydream on park benches about over the coming days. So thank you so much.

1:11:09 – (Brett McCracken): Yeah, yeah. My pleasure, Chris. It was so fun.