Pints With Aquinas - Unpacking Pope Leo's AI Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas | Michael Gormley | Last Call Ep. 23

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

It’s Last Call! And Michael "Gomer" Gormley is here with hot takes on some of Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Pints: Last Call Ep. 23 Enjoy these episodes and exclusive conten...t ad free, one week early with DailyWire+ : https://get.dailywire.com - - - 📚Resources Mentioned: More from Michael Gormley: https://www.layevangelist.com Catching Foxes Podcast: https://www.catchingfoxes.fm Every Knee Shall Bow Podcast: https://app.ascensionpress.com/podcasts/8f60ee88-7f3d-40a2-a877-3fe7f53dbb0e?utm_source=ascension-shopify&utm_medium=website&utm_content=podcast-library Truthy 30 Day Free Trial: https://get.truthly.ai/TlbX/MATT30 - - - Today’s Sponsors:  Exodus 90: Download the Exodus 90 app today, or visit https://Exodus90.com/matt St. Paul Center: Start your 30-day free trial today at https://StPaulCenter.com/pints . Or become an Annual Member and receive a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. Catholic Herald - Subscribe to Catholic Herald, and enter promo code FRADD for 30 days of free access: https://thecatholicherald.com/subscribe?plan=us-digital-monthly&coupon=FRADD Catholic Match: Visit https://CatholicMatch.com or download the app today. It’s free to get started. - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:26 The Pope is right to like really spotlight the financial component of what is pushing these AI. Most people who build AI are stone cold atheist materialists who think that human nature needs to be replaced aggressively more and more with technology. The fight is actually with the transhumanists. Theologians and philosophers need to start drawing lines and going after it. Cold showers, holy hours and 2 a.m. night vigils join Father Columba Jordan's CFR and the Exodus 90 Brotherhood for the St. Michael Lent Challenge. We start August 12th. We start August 12th. Download the Exodus 90 app today or visit Exodus90.com slash Matt.
Starting point is 00:02:10 All right, Magnifica humanitas, yay or nay. Mm, yay. Good. I have five. Nice. Did you read the whole thing? Yeah, it's exhausting. You didn't have the eye to read it for you?
Starting point is 00:02:21 I did several times and several different AIs. It's very exhausting. It's very long. It is. Unnecessarily long. Yeah. So this is what I tell people. It's not an AI encyclical.
Starting point is 00:02:31 It's a social justice encyclical that mentions AI. Antiqua. at Nova under Pope Francis' papacy was more of an AI encyclical. Or it's not an encyclical, but document. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have five quotations, which I did not have AI source, but sourced myself. Sure.
Starting point is 00:02:47 Sure. To share with you to get your take. So the first one is the sort of opening part where he says, quote, humanity created by God in all its grandeur is today facing a pivotal choice, either to construct a new tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Your thoughts? Yeah, so I love the motif of the two cities
Starting point is 00:03:11 because he's Augustinian, right? And so St. Augustine is the city of God, which is built. City of God is that city characterized by man who glorifies and adore God even to the contempt of self, whereas a city of man is that which gives glory to man
Starting point is 00:03:26 even to the contempt of God. Right? And so when you look at the Tower of Babel, I mean, what symbolic building or construction project that could evoke such a perfect understanding of like, man, apart from God, man separate from God, than that. And then he uses, he doesn't just use Jerusalem. He uses the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. And I love that because they're both construction projects, right? We're both building something.
Starting point is 00:03:53 One was Nehemiah, which has no, in the book, it has no miraculous anything in it. I don't know if you're aware of Nehemiah in that regard. I love Nehemiah. But the context of these things is the Tower of Babel is, it comes after the flood, and it's all the people of the earth saying, we are going to build something that God can't flood out, that is going to go up to the heavens,
Starting point is 00:04:14 and that we get to meet God on our terms. Right? That's kind of this idea of the temple, where we get to summon God. We're going to build one into the heavens. And the best line in Genesis, when it talks about this, is God looked down on the tower.
Starting point is 00:04:30 like, it's, oh, what's this little speck down there? That's cute. It is. And so I love the fact that the Pope used this motif of like, it's biblically grounded. Here's two different things of building and rebuilding, two construction projects. But one is dedicated holy to the glorification of man and the other one to God. One is the rebuilding of Jerusalem, an earthly city that is oriented towards the good of the human person. Do you know the story of Nehemiah and what happened?
Starting point is 00:04:57 So the context is he's a cupbearer to Attic Zirke. and he says he's weeping over these reports that are coming in of Jerusalem not having walls that's surrounded. So he goes in and he's given leave to go do it as the governor. And he goes and before like he walks around the city, he understands the people's problems. And the problems are multifold and I think this is very important. It's not just the walls are down. It's the walls are down which enables foreigners to harass them. The walls are down, but then the elite in the city are extorting the poor of the town.
Starting point is 00:05:28 And he actually, when he reveals himself as governor, he's like, and you're keeping them down into slavery of debt and you're destroying them. So that all needs to be forgiven. And they do. And then basically the rebuilding of the walls is march out to the end, like whatever's in front of you. Like, because rebuilding the walls that surround a city can be overwhelming. So he says, just walk out of your home. Rebuild the section of the wall that's right in front of you. That's all you're responsible for.
Starting point is 00:05:54 When you think about the Tower of Babel, what are we doing there? It's the height of human ingenuity to glorify man. And I love that he used these images because with AI, we have an opportunity to serve humanity or to serve members of humanity for themselves. And it kind of culminates in C.S. Lewis from the abolition of man and that hideous strength where it's like, it's not really about man's power over nature. It's man's power over other men using nature as the weapon. And I fear that's where this is going.
Starting point is 00:06:27 I think the Pope is right to caution. All right. Well, to that point is a quote from Pope Leo from paragraph 9. In practice, however, technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a yes or no to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem between a power that claims to dominate the heavens, and a people who work together in the presence of God rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence. Yeah. A hammer doesn't act on us.
Starting point is 00:07:04 A robot does. Chatbots do. A bot network does. AI, what we call AI, which I think is a misnomer, does. It acts on us. It forces us to respond it. You have a famous statement that you said that I think is perfect. I use it all the time.
Starting point is 00:07:24 A friend of ours, Emily, and you, you were reading a newspaper or you were reading a book and she was reading something on her phone. And she says, well, what's the difference between that? And you said, well, I act on the newspaper or the book. That's acting on you. And that's the very big reality that we need to understand where we have technology that's not just passive. It is pinging us, notifying us. It is changing the way it presents information to us through this funnel. And that's the thing that becomes very dangerous about AI is when it sounds so.
Starting point is 00:07:54 so human that in certain sense it passes the touring test. This feels human. The famously touring devices test on whether robotics and whatnot can become human. It feels human and what it's saying, but behind it, there are people with motives. They have a financial motive. They have, you know, all these different motives. I mean, Elon Musk recently just became the world's first trillionaire, taking his SpaceX AI public. And, you know, it's a space program that's also a social media platform that's also artificial intelligence, all three combined. And it becomes this very bizarre thing where there's so much money behind it, it's almost unfathomable. The $2 trillion IPO, like what does $2 trillion even mean? Like, that's more than most countries have. And it's
Starting point is 00:08:42 just one company's worth in the stock market. Like, this is crazy. So the Pope is right to like really point a spotlight on, especially the financial component of what is pushing these AI. It's not altruism purely. You know, oh, we're going to solve cancer. It's like, okay, okay, then how come I'm able to chat with it? Like, shouldn't it be off and all those cycles and computes be used to solve cancer? But there is this consumer aspect because the billions are to be made there. And everyone wants to be a billionaire. Everyone wants to be that elite. And that's what scares me, right? Well, to that point, He says in paragraph 15, in the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. And this is what I think a lot of people are afraid of. They feel like I'm being repatriate. It's not just machines that are doing manual labor that I would otherwise not wish to do.
Starting point is 00:09:54 It feels like it's replacing my intelligence. Even in little ways, if you ask me, you know, who won the basketball game last night or who won the last Olympics or, you know, how many people live in such and such a country, it's like, well, what's the point? Like, just, just look it up. Yeah. Father Gregory Pine had the best take on this, where he talked about what is lost when, in the art of conversation, when we say things like, who was in that? movie, oh no, it was so and so and so and this. And you're like, you go back and forth, but now the guy with the smartphone is like, I'll just Google it. And the conversation ends there. There is something that's lost. And what do we lose in those moments?
Starting point is 00:10:32 Right? That's the thing that I don't think we're asking is what honestly is being lost from fun, delightful, surprising human conversations that come about, even though we have access to like a Wikipedia at the, you know, at our fingertips. How does that enrich human life? To a certain extent, it can, because we can get the right answer. That's great. But to another extent, it is robbing us of something that we're not really paying attention to. And it's usually the case that when a technology advances, we see all the benefits and we don't yet see the side effects. This was certainly true. I remember having an iPhone and walking down the street, realizing this is at the very beginning of it all, like 2008 or so, realizing, I can email people,
Starting point is 00:11:14 male people while I'm walking around and fast forward. And I think a lot of people had that kind of awe over what the iPhone could do. Fast forward today, I don't think there's any serious, thoughtful person that doesn't see the many negative side effects of having the phone, even if they think on, you know, it's better to have it than not to have it. Yeah. You don't see the negatives until down the road.
Starting point is 00:11:36 It's almost like marketing is really good at marketing. Like we believe the hype. Right now what we're witnessing is a giant AI hype machine. It's not that AI is not incredible, but there's so much hype around it because people are marketing. They're marketing their IPOs. They're marketing their new careers and new jobs and new companies around it. Oh, AI is going to change everything. It's like a lot of senior programmers are like, yeah, it's going to make my life hell because instead of coding, I'm having to check AI weird code that it did a million lines of code.
Starting point is 00:12:09 Now I've got to figure out if it's going to work or not. Like, this is the number one complaint of senior engineers. Is they're like, now I have to find why that button is blue and on the wrong side of the page. But I didn't, no one wrote, like, no one wrote this. And AI wrote this of someone speaking a prompt into a machine. And now I got to vibe code my way to the solution. It's very bizarre. And so the human component of these things, you could even say the right brain component of these things is being lost aggressively.
Starting point is 00:12:39 I've noticed that for a lot of Catholics, there's a moment when the faith finally clicks. The mass starts making sense. The sacraments start making sense. The church's teachings start making sense. And often that moment comes through sacred scripture. Because once you begin to see the story God is telling throughout salvation history, everything starts connecting. The Old Testament isn't random. The New Testament isn't disconnected.
Starting point is 00:13:06 The whole Bible tells one unified story that. reaches its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. That's one thing that the St. Paul Center does exceptionally well. Through world-class teaching from Scott Hahn, John Bergsma and others, they help Catholics discover the unity and beauty of Scripture. And the result isn't just more knowledge, it's deeper faith. Start your 30-day free trial today at St. Paulcentor.com slash pint or become an annual member and receive a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. Again, that's St. Paul Center.com slash pints. Most men have some picture in their mind of the man they hope to become,
Starting point is 00:13:49 a husband who is fully present, a father who listens, a friend people can rely on, a disciple who knows how to hear God's voice. The question is, what's standing in the way? Sometimes it's not some dramatic sin, sometimes it's just noise, constant distraction, constant stimulation, constant busyness, a life so crowded that there's very little room left for God. Exodus 90 is an invitation to make that room, to step away from the things that keep us distracted and creates space for prayer, brotherhood, and a deeper encounter with Jesus Christ. Because freedom isn't merely the absence of bad habits. Freedom is becoming the
Starting point is 00:14:29 man God created you to be. St. Michael's Lent with Father Colomber Jordan begins August 12th, download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-day free trial or visit Exodus 90.com slash Matt to learn more. That's Exodus 90.com slash Matt. Become the man you are created to be. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us. Let's talk about just war theory because Pope Leo said something in the encyclical that some people latched onto, and I think we're completely wrong about, namely saying that
Starting point is 00:14:59 Pope Leo is abandoning Catholic tradition denying just war theory. in principle. Here's what he said. Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the just war theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness, the use of force, violence, and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations. What's your thoughts on this? I think the civilians had it coming to him. Yeah, they should die. No.
Starting point is 00:15:47 Okay, so just war theory essentially is three principles of justice, three principles of prudence. The three principles of justice, St. Thomas Aquinas more or less originates. Three principles of prudence are more or less 150 year innovation. And a lot of people have justified various wars by saying, well, it's up to the person who has the legal authority to declare war to declare war. Which is true. It is true. It's one of the first principles. Right. But then what ends up happening is they say, so therefore the church has no right to say, or to weigh in on the subject, or those other principles no longer matter because the person with the authority. Now, in America, it's weird because the war.
Starting point is 00:16:27 War powers have been given to Congress. Congress should declare war. Why do you think that is? Because they are the representatives of the people. Unlike the executive, even though he's popularly elected, the executive is not supposed to be the representative of the people to the federal government. And so when we have this notion, it's like, who goes to war? Do you think the president is going to war?
Starting point is 00:16:51 No, it's the people that go to war. Honestly, the poorest people go to war. And so the people closest to them in government that represent them should be the ones with the War Powers Act. But we've ceded that to the executive power so often. And even our ability to try to correct them with the stipulations after the Vietnam conflict. Congress added the War Powers Act and different things that kind of rein it in. But what we're witnessing today, this is the dangerous thing. There is a book written by, I think his name's Daniel Suarez.
Starting point is 00:17:20 It's a fiction book called Kill Decision. And it's about what happens when we use drones and we take away the button pushing of a human? That's terrifying. And we already had systems like that. We had automated, you know, gun turrets that would scan. No prudential human intervention. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:37 And no just human intervention. Like prudence, justice. What happens when a machine gun fires at movement? And that movement is a shepherd boy who got away from it, who's finding a lost sheep. And all of a sudden he's in Afghanistan. And now he's getting gun down. Having that human that pushes that button is absolutely important. And right now there's an Australian company that sells drones that are made out of cardboard.
Starting point is 00:18:05 And Ukraine is buying them, tons and tons. They're buying them because the problem is when you fly a drone, they get susceptible to jamming from various radar and jamming things. So then you have to tie a fiber optic cable to them. And there are whole Ukrainian towns that are covered in this gun. awesome earth earth. It looks like spider web from G-Lobb and Lord of the Rings. You should Google it. Of thousands of fiber optic cable lines just draped everywhere from miles and miles. Because now they have this point of contact with the drone that's always connected to the operator. So the idea is, what if I just put a rugged iPad in there with a GPS and AI that knows when to pull the trigger
Starting point is 00:18:43 when I've arrived at my location and blow up? And it's like, well, what if an innocent person arrives at that time and it but it's like hey i got the GPS it can't be blocked i'm traveling this route this is very dangerous because those drones cost two hundred dollar or two thousand dollars and can they have almost no radar cross section and can go for miles and miles and miles and ukraine's using them against russia all this stuff so what happens when we can kill people without people intervening that is the true end of just war theory and it's an end of just war theory not because just war theory doesn't matter, but because it becomes so easy
Starting point is 00:19:21 to murder people on the other side of the world, that the cost of doing war becomes so cheap. I'm not putting a human soldier on the ground. I'm not even putting a plane in the air that never interacts with soldiers, you know, just flying bombing missions. I'm putting an autonomous drone that doesn't even have a pilot in the U.S. navigating it.
Starting point is 00:19:44 It's just delivering payloads and all this stuff. This is where, The danger of drone warfare and AI is the cost is essentially nothing to wipe out populations. And that's terrifying. So if just war theory is outdated, it feels like we need a new just war theory. It's not that we need a new just war theory. We need a just war theory that can encompass autonomous weapons. And we need, honestly, we need a new Geneva convention that bans the firing of a weapon, the dropping of a bomb without a human intervention.
Starting point is 00:20:16 We need the kill switch to be a human person. So someone somewhere is making a rational decision, not the calculation of a robot that I've arrived at my destination. Yeah, that's the dangerous part. And I suppose the retort to that would be, as technology advances, AI will be able to do a better job determining what to attack, whether it's a civilian or a combatant, than a human would, no?
Starting point is 00:20:41 Cool. Let the AI make that thing, and then feed that to the human who then pushes the button. Do not take the human out of the killing of human life. When we do that, when we do that, it becomes so easy to go to war. We're going to fire a million drones off a battleship and never think again. All right, well, let's switch gears here. Leo, Pope Leo said something that I've heard of them. I've heard of them.
Starting point is 00:21:06 I used to give a lot of talks to parents about the dangers of pornography. And this was a long time ago. This was back in like 2012 where I was begging parents not to give their children phones. And I was looked at as really weird. Yeah. And I kind of think I've been vindicated here. You have. Pope Leo says, having a personal mobile device at too early an age and using it without adult supervision
Starting point is 00:21:29 can exacerbate young people's vulnerabilities, foster addiction, and expose them to isolation, bullying and cyberbullying, as well as to pressure to share intimate images or sensitive information. Yeah. Yeah. Here's what's tough about this. I homeschool my kids. Maybe you do or don't. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:21:51 You do. It seemed to me a while back, and I think I was right, that if I was to send my children to a Catholic school, nothing wrong in principle with that, that they would be a social leper by the time they were eight or nine, because everybody else in their school would have a phone and would be communicating via that phone. I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, maybe not everybody, but a lot of them would. And then the child feels like weird. They feel awkward. So one of the things that's blessed us is homeschooling our kids, knowing a couple of other
Starting point is 00:22:23 homeschool families who agree with us about technology, all of a sudden they're interacting with children their own age who also don't have phones and so they don't feel like alienated. But it must be very difficult to send your kids to a public or a Catholic school and not give them a phone. Yeah. You know, there are whole movements of people now. I mean, number one, governments are realizing how dangerous social media plus smartphone is for young people. So Australia, the state of Texas, I did not know this.
Starting point is 00:22:54 If you're under 18, you can't install apps on your phone without parental permission. You can't do stuff like that. That's being fought in federal court right now, but during the interim. So it's not just having a smartphone. It's having a smartphone with social media. That's the real double whammy. But you're right. But there are schools that in public schools and private schools that forbid phones.
Starting point is 00:23:16 Like, you have to sign a contract. You will not buy a smartphone for your kid. If it is, it's confiscated and gone. You should absolutely never give a smartphone to a kid. I knew a parent when my daughter was six years old. The parents bought their daughter for their six-year-old birthday, a brand new top-of-the-line iPhone Plus, like the big boy. And then you think about all the iPad kids sitting at restaurants with an iPad in front.
Starting point is 00:23:38 Here's what I learned recently, which is a little. totally broke my heart. Strollers are now made with a little insert for the iPad to go in. Yeah. Did you know that? No. Doesn't that make you want to? Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:51 Yeah. So I get, like, screens are intoxicating to kids because you have agency. You push a button, a thing happens. Whereas in the real world, you're clumsy. It doesn't happen like that. And it's constant entertainment, right? So I was teaching third through fifth graders, Shakespeare. And at one point I brought my laptop and I would put on a Disney song from like Aladdin, right, Prince Ali.
Starting point is 00:24:15 And I push play and all the people, oh, I hate the movie, I hate the movie. I turned the screen around and it was like everyone got quiet and everyone gathered around. It's mesmerizing to children in a way that's not for adults. It mesmerizes them. And that is important because when you give that to kids three and under, you are warping their brains. You are like really hurting them. And then when they're older, they find you, you're constantly giving them iPads and so I was at, you know, like, you used to seeing parents at, like, a restaurant.
Starting point is 00:24:42 They give their kids an iPad so the adults can have an adult conversation. Bothers me to no end, but whatever. But I was at mass one time. And these two people were at mass, and they just handed their kid an iPhone on telotubbies or whatever. And I hit my kid and I elbowed my kid. And I was like, do not watch that screen. Go on the other side of mommy if you're attempting to do. We are building a culture of zero attention span.
Starting point is 00:25:08 This is so bad. But on top of that, like the Pope said, cyberbullying, this always on target. It's not like that way for us as adults. Especially if you're married, you have like a family life going. It is that way for kids. And it's awful. So if kids have social media accounts when they're that young, there is a lasso around their attention that's pulling them to this world. Like, for instance, I let my kids have email accounts and they turn 12.
Starting point is 00:25:37 email accounts, you know, whatever. Can I get on email? Can I get on email? Can I get on email? Can I get on email? And they're all like obsess over it. It's because then they start chatting back and forth like a social media account, like a text message, like whatever. And then I found out when I kind of like, okay, we're being a little obsessive. They created this Google Doc where they're creating this fun short story where everyone's contributing to the short story. I was like, oh, that's cool. Until you find out that there's a chat function in Google Docs and then two people are having a chat. And I'm like, this is the craziness. Like the teenage mind and the, you know, like, They want to be with their friends all the time always.
Starting point is 00:26:09 And that's totally appropriate, but it could become very destructive electronically. It's not appropriate, is it? Because they should be with their parents. Like, their source of identity is ultimately going to come from my wife and me, knowing them, loving them, speaking, blessing to them. And if you're continually interacting with school friends, then they become, you know, the ones who are telling you who you are. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:31 If you have a problem with your car, do you want to find the dumbest mechanic to work on it? No. You want to find the smartest mechanic you can to work on your car. Why is it that we let the dumbest people about life educate our kids, namely other kids? They don't know anything about life. They don't know anything about, they haven't thought deep thoughts and blah, blah, blah, and this is the argument of the book, Hold On to Your Kids. Brilliant book, where they basically say, we're leaving life's most important lessons to be taught to our children by other children. So what's your advice to someone who's watching and they're like, your friend? and then I gave my kid a phone two years ago when she was six.
Starting point is 00:27:11 What do I do? Yeah, you take it away. There's no in between here. And they will fight and they will rage because it's a social, it's a status. I think you should apologize to your child. Like, I was wrong to do this. And let them be angry with you. And then break it with a hammer.
Starting point is 00:27:25 Yeah. I sometimes wonder what G.K. Chesterton would make of modern media. Actually, I don't wonder. He'd probably write three essays, a poem, and a devastating paragraph. that made everyone look silly, which is one of the reasons I love that the Catholic Herald still exists. Chesterton wrote for the Catholic Herald, so did Evelyn War, so did Monsignor Ronald Knox. This isn't some publication that showed up three years ago because somebody discovered
Starting point is 00:27:53 substack. It's been covering the church since 1888. And what I appreciate is that it's still committed to the same thing, thoughtful reporting, intelligent analysis, and seriously, commentary from a traditional Catholic perspective. The world doesn't need more hot takes. It needs people who can think. And it needs publications that respect their readers enough to give them substance instead of outrage. I actually have the Catholic Herald at my house. I peruse it often. It's excellent. Really excellent. Not just the articles, but the quality of the magazine is excellent. Visit the Catholicherald.com and use code frad for 30 days of free access. Summer might actually be the best season for dating. I mean, think about it. Parish festivals, coffee after Sunday Mass, hiking groups, lake days, cookouts, longer evenings, more opportunities
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Starting point is 00:29:35 Send the message, say yes to the coffee date, pray like it depends on God, and follow up like it depends on you. Visit Catholicmatch.com or download the app today and it's free to get started. Final thoughts on the Pope's encyclical? And maybe to that point, have you heard criticism that you think is almost legitimate? Like one of the things I heard was, fair enough if the Pope wants to say a few things about AI, but don't be trying to get governments involved to start regulating things because then things get much worse. What are you saying to it? Okay.
Starting point is 00:30:08 Final thoughts about it. I'm happy that the church is engaging. I don't know if you know this, but one of the founders of Anthropic, which is Claude AI, gave an address at Rome and was one of the speakers there. This is what I find.
Starting point is 00:30:21 I find that it is good that the church is weighing in on this. I tell people, it's a social justice encyclical more than an AI encyclical, which is good. Mariram Navarum, Pope Leo the 13,
Starting point is 00:30:31 like that's kind of the point. And there are graven injustices that will come with AI when it's just left in the hands of the elites. On the other hand, I wish the church, and I don't know how it would do it, but lay down more precise guidelines. Because you can almost anticipate from Antiqua at Nova and all the others, a lot of us is the same kind of stuff where it's like, hey, this is powerful, but it's technology. So it's not evil, but it's not good.
Starting point is 00:31:00 It takes the shape of the person who wields it. And it's like, okay, this is, there's some elements of the same. I'm glad you're bringing the caution into the sphere of social justice where it's like how we organize society matters. So that's good. The problem is, I think, I don't really know how to put this, but most people who build AI are stone cold atheist materialists who think the human body is nothing more than wetware that serves consciousness. And it's fine. They're all transhumanists. None of them care about redemption in Christ.
Starting point is 00:31:34 None of them care about the Amango Dei. All they care about is, look, we evolved here. And so the next step in evolution is computer, it's artifact, it's this, it's that. And that's where I think we need to speak into. That's where the actual fight is. It's not just general social concern, although it's important to have that. I think it's an important piece. The fight is actually with the transhumanists who think that human nature needs to be replaced aggressively more and more with technology.
Starting point is 00:32:03 I think that what that will create is a future of self-alienation, even in our bodies. And I think we see that now with surgeries and all that stuff of attacking our own bodies. C.S. Lewis had the greatest line where he talked about an abolition of man, that it's not man's conquering nature. The real play is man conquering other men using nature as the means or the instrument of the weapon. And you see this in the final stage, right? This is the final stage when my humanity is just the man. matter of experimentation and augmentation. And that's all that's going to be. It's not about health. It's not about, oh, your heart's, you know, arithmetic. So we're going to give you a pacemaker.
Starting point is 00:32:43 It's about like, oh, no, you are not what you should be. So we're going to edit you, edit your genes. We're going to edit everything. We're not just getting rid of disease. One thing if it was enhancing human nature, you're saying it's going to try to replace it. Yeah. And it's going to do this, you know, we, have you heard of the enhanced games that people sponsored. So it's like, hey, you know how you're, you're kicked out if you have steroids. Well, we want everyone who uses steroids to be. We want to push human potential to the max. And these people actually did worse than even they did prior in years prior when they were clean. It's a disaster because it's not the best of human achievement. And I think
Starting point is 00:33:17 the transhumanists have had the microphone for too long. And the papacy, I shouldn't just say the papacy. In fact, I won't say that. Theologians and philosophers need to start drawing lines and going after it. And I don't think maybe it is even the realm of the popes and the bishops. And these be the realms of thoughtful Christians who are engaging this stuff with a lens to, this is dehumanizing. And you think it's superhuman. It's actually anti-human.
Starting point is 00:33:48 And we need to be aware of that. Germa, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people learn about you? You can't. Okay. I'm not online at all. No, just go to layevangelist.com. All right.
Starting point is 00:33:57 We'll put that link in the bio in the description. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me. Now playing on Netflix, The Hawk. From the mind of Will Ferrell. Oh, Mama, I'm back. Comes a new original series. Get ready, get ready.
Starting point is 00:34:19 That's it. Did I stutter? When an iconic pro golfer. Lonnie. Hock! Takes one last swing of greatness. You were a big shot golfer. I still am a big shot golfer.
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