Christians, AI, & Tech Stacks

Philip All right, welcome to All Are Yours — episode twenty-three, but video episode two. So, we looked so good last time that we’re back.

Sean Yeah, I told you that one of the pieces of feedback I got on the video was that the audio sounded better. Now that I think about that, maybe that was just because comparatively the audio sounded way better than needing to look at us.

Philip There you go. That’s right. When you could see the person talking.

Sean Yeah. No, I saw somebody commented somewhere, where you posted the link, that they liked being able to see the faces that were saying the words.

Philip Okay, I missed that one. But there you go.

So, here’s our faces. And yeah, we’re doing this with technology — with video. This is brand new tech for us; video hasn’t been out for very long. I’m kidding. We’re late to the game.

But yes: Christians and technology, that’s what we kind of wanted to talk about this time around. How should Christians approach technology? What should they be thinking about it? Specifically even in our world today, with AI and MCPs and AI agents and all of that — how should Christians think about it? Should they be scared, wary? Should they dive right in, gobble it all up?

Sean Are they already late?

Philip Are they already late? Right, exactly.

So that’s kind of the overarching theme of what we’re talking about this time. And both Sean and I dabble with tech — and I do think you probably do so a lot more than me. Some of your interests seem to lie more in that direction, with a little more coding-type stuff, web development or design.

Sean I like saying those words.

Philip That’s right.

Sean I mean, amateur, you know. The love of the game.

Philip Yeah.

Sean Some of those things are interesting to me. I mean, coding is language — and coding, in order to get a thing to work, actually has got to be very precise language.

Just like a password. People are regularly letting themselves off the hook when they’re talking. But you can’t let yourself off the hook with your password. If your password is five characters or twenty-five characters, doesn’t matter: one character wrong means the whole thing doesn’t work.

And in coding, one bracket out of place, an extra space depending on what coding language you’re using — those kinds of things absolutely just mess up the whole app. Might not make it work, might not make the page on the website run.

So I like language in particular, and syntax and grammar — and coding languages have their own kind of grammar. I’m not excellent at most of those coding languages, but I’m interested in them.

And vibe coding — I’m not trying to already get us into the meat and potatoes of the discussion, but vibe coding also depends on very specific language. One of the things that I have learned is that I might not be an excellent delegator via a sentence. Because if you don’t give some of these tools the exact — you’re wanting it to write the JavaScript or the HTML or whatever, you’re wanting it to write those things that you don’t know. But if you don’t know what you want it to do, and if you can’t accurately say in English what you want it to do, well, it can’t guess.

And that’s actually made me realize, even in terms of telling other persons — how much do we depend on them to fill in what we think they should know from what we’re saying?

Philip Right.

Sean But the robots are not as good yet at being able to fill in what the human person thinks they want that they didn’t say.

Philip Right.

Sean So —

Philip Well, even with coding specifically, how you’re talking about coding and language and words. What’s interesting is that DNA is a type of code — at least, that’s the way it’s referred to. And so it’s very precise, it’s very unique. When you’re looking at creation, it has been coded, so to speak, in that way.

But the way it came about, and what is sustaining it, is God’s word. So God’s language, God’s word, is even that DNA, that code, in all of creation. And I think that’s very relevant even in our being sub-creators in the coding technology world — connecting it with language, and even having the ultimate source of the first code be God’s word. I think that is very, very relevant to what we’re doing.

Sean Well, and in the metaphor of even our thinking being according to lines of code. I think it was an article I read recently that talked about, you know, “update your” — I don’t think it said worldview, but I would use it in those terms. Like, you update your worldview. Not like they did in The Matrix, where they stick the pin in the back of the hole in your head and upload a program. But reading actually is a kind of uploading the software. It is uploading the lines of mental code.

So you throw junk or slop code into your thinking, well, then you’re going to produce slop, junk, cotton candy coming back out. That’s not necessarily technology, but I suppose even in terms of how we think about technology —

Philip Right.

Sean — if we’re depending on technology to do the thinking for us, well, how much of that is okay? How much is supplementing your thinking? How much is correcting your thinking? How much is making it so you don’t have to think?

And to the degree that we’re trying to get out of the responsibility of thinking, that use of technology is probably way more dangerous. To the degree that it can help us and update our own mental lines of code about how the world is working or what we’re trying to accomplish — that actually seems pretty fantastic.

So far, though, we’ve hit the Platonic clouds in terms of our abstract discussion about it.

Philip Yeah. Well, I think it just goes to say that in a big way, technology, coding, everything that that world entails, isn’t just something that Christians should dabble in, or hijack, or take over.

I think the source of it is rooted in a biblical worldview — in the view that God’s word is what created it all, is what coded this into existence. And when we are thinking about that, when we’re participating in it, we are being image bearers in that way. So it’s not just something that is the world’s and we can maybe borrow it or use it or take it. No — it actually belongs to God. And Christians who understand and believe in that true God, who know his revealed nature, are able then to, and ought to, start off with that foundation.

Sean So this is not Christians plundering the Egyptians for their technology.

Philip Correct.

Sean This is the Egyptians having used our principles — Christian, the one true God who’s the creator of the world.

Philip Exactly right.

Sean They had to borrow our stuff to do it. So our being able then to appreciate it, and our being able then to do something with it or make more of it — that is actually then ours. We should start by thinking that. It’s like our podcast name: all are ours.

Philip Correct.

Sean These things are given to us who worship God. And yeah, some other people who don’t worship God have done some pretty significant things, even as responsible image bearers. They’ll actually give an answer to God for having used his gifts without giving him credit for it. So they will be judged for that. We don’t have to be judged for it, if we can be thankful and then be good stewards of it.

Philip Right.

Sean Definitely not then running away from it. So this isn’t a question about whether Christians can use an iPhone, like “can Christians read Harry Potter or not.” iPhones are ours. They only work because of how God made the world to work.

Philip Exactly right. And so it’s a whole different starting point. The starting point there is: this is yours, you ought to own it and use it and be productive with it — as opposed to, oh, I could maybe be okay with tinkering with it a little bit.

And then the other point about technology as well: technology was from day one, whenever Adam figured out — or his sons, or whatever — that they could dig a hole without their hands, they could form some kind of tool for that. Or even, I think specifically, the sons of Cain: it lists the different technological innovations that they had, with agriculture, music, or whatever that is.

And that sort of technology is also image bearing, because it is productive, it is putting our skills to greater use in that way. But what’s unique about digital technology, or computer coding, is that it’s not just a tool outside — it’s very close to the way God created us, and then we’re trying to put that into something else. And I think that’s also why it becomes scary, because that kind of sub-creation could lead people to think that they are like God, or that they want to be like God in that way.

Sean Or the AGI — they’re creating a god.

Philip Right, exactly right.

So, seeing it that way — even originally, and even now, the way computers are designed is to mimic the human brain and how that works, and maybe even to exploit certain areas of it. Things like holding long equations in your mind are hard to do, but the source of that skill is there. God put that in there, and then we’re able to just exploit that in a computer, because we could have it focused just on that. So again, we’re still borrowing from how God designed the earth, how God designed our mind, and then we’re using that in there.

Sean Including, from the start, the binary — zeros and ones. Yeah, male and female. It’s one or the other. It’s not something in between.

In fact, if you tried to — I don’t even know what that would be. I’ve never taken a computer science course, so all of mine has been tinkering and trial and error. A lot more error, and occasionally something works out the right way.

But what would that even be like in computer science, if it wasn’t a zero and a one? Non-binary coding — I don’t know. I would have to ask an AI if non-binary coding even is a thing that exists.

So where it starts, the building blocks, the basics — it needing to be put together in the right way, right order. This is how God runs the cosmos.

Philip Right. And so there have been technological breakthroughs — seasons, eras of new technology changing the way things are done. Not just gradually or a little bit, but over the course of five to ten years completely changing the entire landscape of the way work is done. So you had something like the Industrial Revolution —

Sean Printing press before that.

Philip Printing press, right. There are certain things like that that have completely changed the course of history with technology.

And then with computer technology, everything that that did in the sixties, seventies, going into the eighties, and then that leading into the internet, and all the work that that uncovered. And then today, I think, being kind of right in the middle of the — whatever you want to call it — AI revolution.

It still is a very Wild West world, different companies trying to grab onto different parts of it and seeing how they could make more money out of it, a lot of different pseudo-companies popping up, the same way that there was a dot-com bubble when the internet started coming out. So everybody’s trying to figure out and see what piece of the puzzle they could grab.

And so, Christians being in that situation — maybe seeing that technology in general is image bearing, and then specifically with digital technology, coding, language models, all of that being image bearing even more closely to the nature of how God speaks into creation — how should Christians think about the world that we’re in right now? And even balancing some of the fear of uncertainty, and holding that in the paradigm of what we’re talking about?

Sean They should probably build their rapture bunker right now.

Philip Perfect. Exactly right. Do it all by hand. No robots allowed.

Sean Yeah, no technology. No bulldozers, no gasoline-powered engines to help with that.

Philip Yeah. No, but — I’ve heard even people that, and again, I think a lot of it is uncertainty, like you’re not sure. And even reading guys like C. S. Lewis. I think he was definitely on to some stuff about deep technology, or science, being really connected even to the demonic. He had that in That Hideous Strength, where ultimately it was some sort of demon behind all of that work.

So I think high, intense levels of science, where that’s connected with that — you have Christian thinkers warning people about it throughout the decades, and even today as well.

So, how should we hold all of that? You being the tech amateur, the lover — what are your thoughts on that?

Sean Well, even with That Hideous Strength — that’s a phrase from a poem that is about the Tower of Babel. And one of the things about the Tower of Babel is that on the surface, in Babel, they were doing image-bearer activities.

In order to accomplish building the tower that they wanted, which was going to reach up into the heavens and make a name for themselves — this was going to protect them from any potential worldwide flood that would come again. So they were going to outsmart nature, or outsmart God. They were going to show that they were better than — again, it doesn’t say they were trying to be like God, but ultimately making a name for themselves. That’s what was happening.

But in order to accomplish that sort of project, they obviously had to be talking with each other, communicating, making plans. That’s very taking-dominion kind of work. And they had to be doing that together. That’s the community, communication part. So they were in relationship. It was a group project, not even just one individual who was trying to pull it off.

So they were doing those very distinct image-bearing things — taking responsibility, doing it in relationship. They were doing that without respect to God. And that strength then was ugly, hideous, and actually destroyed them. Because they used what God had given them for themselves, and again, without reference to God.

And that seems to me to be still applicable to any kind of project that people are building with any kind of tools. I think that a lot of the large language models, the algorithms that have figured out how to do things a lot faster — they can accomplish what we tell them to do, and faster than we can. The nature of that work can be awesome. The motivation for that work, and what you want from that work, which I guess would be tied to the motivation — that makes all the difference. That’s making all the difference as to whether then it’s a hideous strength or a glorious strength.

And we definitely have — from what I can tell, most of the CEOs of those major AI kind of companies. I don’t know, what do you think? The big three — well, I guess four, maybe — would be Google and OpenAI and Anthropic, and I think we could probably say xAI, so Grok. Those are at least the four biggest ones that I’m familiar with.

Philip Meta. To what extent Meta is trying to do something, I don’t know, but yeah.

Sean Yeah. Well, Apple Intelligence is just way —

Philip Late. Right.

Sean And it seems like their story is coming out late on a variety of technologies, but actually doing it well. So I’m not mad at them that they haven’t figured it out yet. Would I want to use Apple’s if they finally got their stuff out? Maybe. I don’t know.

But none of those companies have a good track record of doing it in Jesus’s name.

Philip Right.

Sean They seem to be motivated not just by money, but by some kind of power and control. So that part could be dangerous for sure.

Philip Well, even — yeah, Sam Altman, right, that’s the CEO of OpenAI, with ChatGPT. I saw him posting something on X about how the new model or whatever that they have is allowing kind of just more adult permission, for people to do what they want with it. So if they want to pursue some kind of erotica or something, they’re able to do that.

And people gave him a whole bunch of pushback on that — like, why does it always have to lead to that? But that is true. It does; they bring that out.

And so he’s saying that in the name of freedom, in the name of liberty, we’re giving freedom to adults to act like adults. But if you’re promoting erotica, if you’re promoting porn through this, what you are doing is enslaving people. You are trying to control them. You are trying to be the tyrant. And so he’s showing his cards, even, by saying that — what the ultimate motivation there is.

Sean Well, right. Even in terms of — even if it’s moral content. Daily and unstoppable cat videos, but made by AI instead of actually somebody’s cat. And a person just has that on all day long, distracting them.

So I wouldn’t put watching cat videos on the same level as watching porn —

Philip Right.

Sean — softer, or let alone homosexual porn or whatever it might be. So there are different ways of being enslaved. But even just being distracted with cute —

Philip Right.

Sean — cute fake things all day long is actually not image bearing either. It’s still making you easily able to be manipulated.

Philip Right.

Sean A pushover, in different ways.

Philip Right. So there’s this point of sin with technology, with — maybe not necessarily the perpetrators, but the ones inventing it, the ones driving it, the ones behind the reins of the tech. In what way are they building with the hideous strength? They are sinning through building technology, through utilizing it.

But then on the other flip side of that coin is all of the consumers of it, all of the users of it, then also sinning through participating in it. So that technology opens the door, or has a lot more opportunities, for much more sin, much easier access to sin in different capacities. Whether it’s very direct and explicit, whether it’s just numbing yourself through being distracted all the time, or promoting your own laziness, or whatever that is.

I saw an ad — it was like, get an AI girlfriend. So you just chat with somebody who is constantly reinforcing how great of a person you are, so you don’t actually have to go interact with real people. So there’s that approach to it.

So, just sin all over. It does become scary, threatening, dangerous, in that way.

Sean Like a chainsaw. Like a car. Like an airplane. These are — I mean, there are different distractions. I suppose maybe cars, in terms of always tinkering on your car. Always trying to mod it, or play around with the engine, or whatever it could be.

In addition to the actual speed that you can get — where if you mess up going fifty miles an hour, it’s way more damaging than if you mess up walking down the street and falling into a small pothole. The ease of being able to actually ruin yourself or other people.

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean Again, if I’m walking down the street too fast, I probably am not going to kill anyone. If I’m driving down the street too fast, well, my chances of killing somebody are exponentially higher. So those tools are dangerous.

A chainsaw can definitely accomplish even — a shovel, like we were talking about earlier, in digging our rapture bunker. These are definitely things that could cause and inflict a lot more pain, and a lot faster, but that with skill and self-control enable a lot more to be accomplished.

So the internet allows the spread — and this is just an obvious observation, I’m not acting like this is brand new — but of course the internet spreads both crap and gospel. The internet is spreading both good and bad things a lot faster than just through the US Postal Service.

That said: because it can be used for bad, does that mean there’s never any way it could be used for good? Probably not. That is a lack of imagination, to think that you couldn’t do something good.

It is also a lack of maturity. You don’t give your two-year-old a chainsaw and go ask them to cut down the cherry tree. You probably wouldn’t give your two-year-old a hatchet. Maybe when they’re three. Hopefully YouTube doesn’t take us down because I just said you could give a three-year-old a hatchet.

Philip Nobody’s going to find us on YouTube.

Sean Nobody can find us on YouTube. We’ve got to give them the direct link, direct click, right?

So you need some amount of maturity, some amount of training, some amount of rules, guardrails — whether self-imposed, or you get tips from other people on how to keep things arranged. But it doesn’t mean that you have to run away or bury your head in the sand when it comes to some of the options.

Philip Well, I think even — in particular for men, just kind of contrasting the calling, the nature, the created order of men and women. Not even necessarily masculine and feminine, not those roles, but the actual manhood and womanhood.

God created men ultimately, in that sense, to go tame the wild, to go subdue the earth, to take dominion. Where the woman is there to glorify that which was tamed. So the man tames the wild, builds a house; the woman glorifies it. He goes into a dangerous environment — the man is built, designed, to be in the danger, in the wild. God created Adam and then placed him into the garden. And in that tamed garden is where he created Eve. So Adam’s first breath was in the wild, in that way.

So I think specifically for men, to understand their own nature: what they’re meant for is to go tame the wild, to go out into the danger and win. You can’t do that without stepping out into the danger. But you also can’t — you can step into the danger, into the wild, and become wild with it. Your goal is to get into the wild and then tame the wild, to control it, to subdue it.

And so where that starts is with a young man’s own self-control. Like Paul tells the young men to have self-control. Until you can tame your own mind, yourself, you’re not ready to then go out into the wild and tame the wild. It will overtake you.

But that is the goal: to be able to control yourself, to rule yourself, and then go rule out there, tame it, subdue it, conquer it, and then rule over it.

You’re not going to have any of that sort of approach if your starting point is fear, is being scared of what’s dangerous. “Oh, this thing can lead me into a wrong area, or I could hurt myself, hurt others, die, whatever that is. And so I’m just going to bunker down and stay and not participate in any of that.” That’s again the wrong starting point, where you’re starting with fear. You’re starting with, maybe, your ultimate goal being safety.

And even there, in the spiritual sense, I think our primary goal is not to not sin. Our primary goal is to worship God, to love God, to glorify God. We’re meant to do that. That includes not sinning — we cannot be sinning and glorifying God. But our ultimate focus is not “I need to do everything to put all the guardrails in place to not sin.” It’s, how can I align my life in order to glorify God, to worship him? Not sinning is a piece of that puzzle. It’s a part of it. But I’m setting myself up toward God’s glory, directing my attention to that.

Sean So we should try to take dominion by going and conquering and watching every possible YouTube video that there is. Go out into the sphere and take dominion by watching all of them.

Philip Correct. All the cat videos.

Sean None of them unwatched.

Philip Right.

Sean Are you using — well, I suppose everybody to one degree or another is using it, by even just text messaging, let alone social media stuff. But obviously you’re using some things for business. Are you using any for more personal?

Philip You’re talking about AI, or technology, or —

Sean Well, yeah, I mean we’re using our technology right now to be recording remotely. So look at us, subduing. But any AI stuff personally?

Philip Yeah. I don’t usually talk too much about how I’m wired, the direction I build my stuff in. I’m scared I’m going to scare people away.

Sean The new Excel —

Philip There you go.

Sean — makes your spreadsheet, you know, dance for you.

Philip But I enjoy automations. I enjoy getting from step one to ten in one click, as opposed to having to go around. I enjoy getting rid of friction and resistance in my workflow.

So yeah, I’ve spent a good amount of time in my tools — how I can program them, how I can design them, write a little bit of code — in order to allow my workflow to be well suited to equip me to produce more. That’s kind of the goal, the output that I’m trying to get. I want my administrative discipline, so to speak, to be strong, where it has a good load-bearing capacity, and also to be well fitted for the work that God has for me to do.

So if I could get more work done faster for the kingdom, I want to utilize technology for that.

Sean What’s helping you do that?

Philip The specific programs?

Sean Yeah. Do you like a brand of shovel better than another one?

Philip Yeah, there you go. I am totally sold out. I geek out on Obsidian.

Sean Okay.

Philip So yeah, I’ve been using —

Sean Obsidian is an app that — I guess bottom line is, you put notes in there.

Philip Correct. It’s just notes. It’s just letters and words.

Sean Yep. Their tagline — and I read an article about this a couple weeks ago, comparing a bunch of them. What does their webpage say that they are? Like Roam, or RemNote, or whatever. Do you know what Obsidian’s tagline is?

Philip I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen it, if you say it.

Sean It’s actually “sharpen your thinking.”

Philip Oh yeah. Yeah.

Sean So most of them just say, you know, it’s a note-taking place, or it’s a note-taking place with AI to help you organize your whatever.

Philip Right.

Sean But Obsidian’s is specifically “sharpen your thinking.”

So anyway, you can use it for a lot of different things. I’m anticipating that at least some of our listeners will not have heard of Obsidian.

Philip Correct.

Sean I say that because maybe some of our listeners are drawn in because of me, not because of you. All of our listeners that are drawn in because of you, they would already have heard you talk about it. Obsidian.

Philip Ah, no, probably not. Some of them maybe.

So yeah, I think you were the one who pointed me to Obsidian.

Sean I think I probably was, yeah.

Philip Five years ago, maybe?

Sean Yeah, it was 2020. We were in lockdown, and it was home, taking notes.

Philip Yep. And then —

Sean Taking notes of how we’d never do this again.

Philip You gave me a book.

Sean Yeah. How to Take Smart Notes, by Ahrens.

Philip Yeah, on the cover it’s printed like a Russian book is — it’s upside down, so you face it the other way.

But yeah, so — linking your notes. It’s a lot of like wiki links. And it’s all in Markdown, so I like that a lot. It just saves as text files in a folder on my computer. So I don’t have to depend on Obsidian or any program in order to read my files. I could open them anywhere. And they’re local, so they’re not out on some server. They stay local.

And it’s actually pretty crazy how powerful that is. So those few combinations — Markdown, the wikis, the local — and then the other part of it is it being open source, where you have a lot of other people much smarter than me creating different plugins for it that then you could utilize.

So yeah, I have — I call it my —

Sean Obsidian has no AI built into it.

Philip Correct.

Sean I mean, because we’ve been talking about automation and AI. So Obsidian does have some plugins to help with various levels of automation, but in and of itself, Obsidian does not include any AI.

Philip Right.

Sean I do want to keep hearing you rant about what tools you like. Two questions about Obsidian.

One is — so it is local. The files are likely to last forever, compared to somebody’s proprietary format sort of thing, like Evernote. It’s really easy to get things into an app like Evernote; very difficult to get them back out in a usable form.

Microsoft Word is potentially the biggest thing where people put their notes, and then they don’t open that note for ten years. There have been five different updates to Microsoft Word, and then the file is corrupted.

Philip Right.

Sean So the files that Obsidian uses don’t have that capability. They don’t have a bunch of other things that are hidden that get corrupted, like in a Microsoft Word document. So those are things.

But first question is: how does Obsidian help you get more things done faster? And secondly, how many people do you think should be using Obsidian? I’m guessing — I don’t think you have your wife using Obsidian yet.

Philip So, yeah. I resist pushing my stuff onto other people.

Sean Sure.

Philip When I was younger I didn’t, and I got burned. So yeah, I do it, I love the thing, and if somebody sees me loving it enough and they want to try it, great. And if not, it’s up to them.

So I have not pushed it onto my wife. She started doing it because she was looking for a way to easily make plans for her garden beds.

Sean Okay.

Philip And so I showed her the Obsidian Canvas plugin, and she liked that a lot, because she could put text in there, could embed links — instructions for certain things, pictures, whatever that is.

Sean Kind of like a whiteboard.

Philip Correct, yeah. It’s very much like a whiteboard.

Sean Yep.

Philip And so she’s starting to play around with it a little bit, but not using it consistently in any way. And she’s wired way differently than I am. And that’s great. That’s one of the reasons why I married her.

So kind of with that — maybe to answer your second question first.

Sean Yeah, who would you tell to use it?

Philip I don’t think everybody should be using it. You don’t need to. I think if you see a need for it, you should. You could try it.

But for a lot of people, it might be stupid. Like they would think that it’s stupid — because I use it so — my folder, my vault, is called my ID Life System. So, “life system” in that way from Abraham Kuyper’s kind of life system; he uses that word. And “ID,” apart from like your identity, but: interest and dominion.

So, what I’m interested in — all the things that I take notes on, all of the different categories, topics, everything I’m interested in — and all of my dominion-taking effort. Those two things are in there, and that kind of incorporates my entire life.

So apart from just notes, my daily plans are all in there. My weekly notes, my thirteen-week kind of advance notes. All of my plans, all of my thinking, everything is in there. And because I could connect all the thoughts, it’s all in this big scheme of things there as well.

So yeah, the more I use it, the more I love it. The more excited I am by it. I utilize a lot of the metadata, a lot of that front matter — in Obsidian they have it as properties. And so then you could query that metadata in different tables and views. So I pull that into my notes: tracking what I’m reading, tracking my different habits, my tasks. All of my task management is all in Obsidian.

So kind of everything I do is all in there. And so far it’s been working really well. It has enabled me to, I think, not just get more stuff done, but bring more order to the maybe vast expanse of the different things that I’m involved in. Whether it’s business or church or Comeford College or family or future plans or whatever that is. It’s a lot to wrangle in. And so for me that’s helpful, to put it all into one — and it being very flexible, where I can design it the way that works for me.

And sometimes that takes a while, again because I’m less of an amateur than you are. Not on the spectrum toward professional, but on the other side. So, a weaker amateur. So it takes me sometimes a while to figure out how to query this thing. But there’s a community on Reddit, or you ask questions within the Obsidian community, where you could get help with different queries.

Sean For the half of a person other than you and me who is going to understand this question —

Philip The one person we haven’t lost yet.

Sean Yeah. Have you switched from Dataview to Bases?

Philip I have not. No. I’m still in Dataview. And Bases — I’ve tried to play with it. First, I’d have to rebuild a lot of the stuff that I’ve spent a lot of time building. But Bases does not yet — it’s great, I think it’s awesome, but it seems to not yet have all of the query capabilities that I need it to have. And so — but they keep upgrading it, they keep making it better. So that is good.

But so far, kind of with the way my tracking is set up, Dataview is what I’m still using.

And I’ve seen people kind of release, like Mike Schmitz — I know both of us have seen some of his stuff — kind of transitioning your vault from Dataview to Bases. So I haven’t yet looked at all of that stuff there.

Sean So one of the principles — if Obsidian is a particular method, some of the principles you’re saying that Obsidian helps you be faster with include: one, canonical source. If you have the idea, or you have the reference information, you know where you put it. It’s in one spot.

Philip Right.

Sean You also have confidence that it’s in that one spot, and that you can find it in that one spot — whether that’s through searching, or some other way of folder organization, or even just linking, which Obsidian does allow. But you have confidence it’s going to be in there. You’re not going to lose anything. So you’ve got one spot, and you’re going to be able to find it.

In your case, you actually wear a lot of hats, so you are wrangling a lot of different kinds of information for different groups of people. And because of that, I do think you need a little bit more sophisticated, or complex, or mature system. I think probably most of the people that are around need to just pick an app and put their things in there.

Philip Right. So, Apple Notes — and they’re making it even better. They do have links now; they allow links in Apple Notes. For a lot of people, that is more than enough. If you’re interested in any of that, starting with something like that is great.

Sean Yeah. More so now than ever, I would tell people to put reminders in the Reminders app and notes in the Notes app.

Philip Right.

Sean And I’m not opposed to handwriting things, or physical notebooks, and lots of people think that those are cool. They’re not quite as ubiquitous.

One of the principles from Getting Things Done, from however long ago, was ubiquitous capture. When you have a thought, or when you come across that piece of information that you’re going to need, you’ve got to put it into your system. Maybe that’s into an inbox for processing later, but you’ve got to capture it somehow to begin with.

And if almost everybody’s carrying their phone with them nowadays — because in 2000 or 2001, when the book Getting Things Done came out, smartphones were just right at the beginning. Like BlackBerry.

Philip He mentioned, I think, Palm Pilots.

Sean Yeah. And I’ve loved that kind of thing since Palm Pilots. I got a Palm Pilot as soon as I possibly could. And then for a while I actually did get a phone that was a Palm Pilot. That was rare, and I loved it. So, an early kind of smartphone.

But initially, you needed ubiquitous capture in a bunch of different ways, but all back to then one inbox. These days, the Notes app or the Reminders app — they’re just with you, because your phone is with you, and there’s no reason not to use them.

Philip Right.

Sean So — because we Christians are, what do you think, eighty years behind the world in our use of and understanding of technology?

Philip Yeah, right. Sadly, yeah.

Sean So I think recently we were part of a conversation, or at least I heard afterwards, somebody’s like, “yeah, I don’t know how to use the Reminders app.” And I thought to myself, okay, well, that’s a low bar. Learning to use the Reminders app probably actually could really help. I genuinely think that that would help, compared to “I don’t capture what I need to do anywhere.”

Philip Right.

Sean So somebody who is living a life where they can keep it all in their head is not going to rule ten cities in the kingdom to come. They’re going to need some external supports to help them with their reference material and the reminders of the to-dos to do.

So Obsidian is great, and can do a lot of those things.

Philip Yeah.

Sean Most people need to have one place, and a trusted place. Something like Apple Notes or Apple Reminders.

I think another principle that we should include is: don’t ever use Android.

Philip Correct. Yes.

Sean No — we have some Android users around us who —

Philip Yeah, we love them too.

Sean Yeah.

Philip But yeah, so some of that sort of capture, notes or whatever — again, in some sense to each his own. But in another sense, I do think that there’s a place to want to rule your own mind, to tame your mind, to control it in that way and to direct it toward productivity. Toward actually sharpening your thinking. So there’s a place for that, for even a certain kind of discipline to learn.

And I do think that Jesus gives us the vision to aspire to rule ten cities — to get a certain kind of responsibility, a certain kind of authority in eternity, in the new heavens and new earth, in that way. It’s going to take substance to do that. And in some sense, even then, our time here is like a testing ground, or an interview, so to speak — kind of like a working interview. Okay: how much return can we bring with what we’ve been given here? And then Jesus says, “Well done. Now I’m going to put you in charge of all of this.”

He gives that to us to aspire to. And then on top of that, he gives us, in different seasons — but I think specifically in our season, it’s a very exciting time to live, where there are so many tools that are easily accessible, that no other time in history has been like this. And we’re on the cusp of even more.

Sean Well — again, compared to doing nothing, the Notes app, Reminders app: awesome. Amazing.

In terms of going to the next level of, okay, well, can I get some of them to do some work for me? Or automation, like you were describing previously — so far, the automation capabilities of things like Notes and Reminders are not amazing. That’s one of the benefits of moving up in a system like Obsidian: then, through the plugins or through some other ways, you can get it to do some things for you, and help you push the button and get from one to five, if not from one to ten.

So the Notes app is kind of like having a servant and you say, hey, remember this for me.

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean And that’s really powerful.

Philip Right.

Sean Think about when people used to have servants. I think it’s probably better to be able to do it when — you know, the phone does need to be charged. What a hassle. Well, that’s less of a hassle than paying to house and feed a servant.

Philip And having to whip them if they disobey.

Sean Yeah. My phone, I can throw across the room if I’m upset with it, and I’m just hurting myself, because I have to pay to get it fixed.

So, having those kinds of digital servants — it’s great to be able to say to my servant, hey, remember this. And for it to be accurate. Good.

But if I could also have a servant who could remember that thing, and then at the right time bring it back up. Or at the right time find the three other servants who remembered other things I told them to remember, and put it together to make a project. Or even, “I’d like you to remember this, and then I’m going to ask you some questions later, and I want you to give me feedback based off of what I told you to remember previously.” Sort of like a mental editor, helping you edit, sharpen the thinking.

Philip Right.

Sean So for me — it’s probably been within the last year that I’ve even tried it at all, but I’ve given a rough draft of a sermon to various AI tools. And I have not even really given good prompts yet. I basically just said things like, “Analyze this for me, tell me what you think.”

A few times I’ve said, “I want you to pick this apart and tell me what the objections would be from the position of an unbeliever.” Because I haven’t been an unbeliever for a long time. And I’m not saying that it would be bad for me to think about that in my own mind, to try to expand my imaginative efforts: okay, let me complain about what I just said. But that’s hard to do. And time is limiting sometimes as well, for me to just sit there and try to criticize myself. And we miss things; we have some blind spots as well.

So, getting a servant to criticize you — in this case, again, an AI tool. Read this. It reads it pretty quickly. And more than just the grammar and the spelling — I mean, that is helpful as well, to get corrected if it’s wrong — but the “well, this phrase I don’t think people are going to understand.”

Okay, well then I still have the choice to decide: I’m going to leave that in, because I do actually know my specific audience and they’re going to understand it. Or: well, no, you’re right. There are five-year-olds who are listening to this sermon, and they might not actually get that more inside joke or twist of phrase that I think is clever, that I think is going to be spicy.

So, to get that kind of feedback, to at least then have another level of meditating on it. So it’s not having it make the content for me. But it is saying: criticize the content I have made.

Philip Right.

Sean I actually find that super useful. That doesn’t — go ahead.

Philip Yeah, like using it as a sounding board in that way. And again, giving it the right context even makes it a better sounding board.

So yeah, I’ve started tinkering, utilizing — so, Claude. My wife calls it Claudius. And that’s relevant also because I’m reading some Roman biographies.

Sean Excellent.

Philip There you go.

Sean Yeah — how did ChatGPT — what committee approved that as a name?

Philip Right.

Sean It is the most impressive thing to me about ChatGPT: that OpenAI got people to use the name ChatGPT. Because I have to look up what GPT means every time I want to remember. I’ve looked it up ten or twelve times. I still can’t remember GPT.

Philip Yeah.

Sean Something processing text, or whatever. But like Claude, or Grok.

Philip You know, because —

Sean Grok — and a lot of people that I have run into don’t know that “grok” is like a verb that means to understand something, to grasp it. If you grok a situation, you know what’s happening. If you grok the code, you know how the information is supposed to get processed.

So I think Grok is a super clever name. I guess it’s kind of inside baseball for computer nerds. But Grok — it’s a great name.

Claude: I haven’t researched why Claude is the name. Maybe it is Claudius.

Philip Oh, there you go.

Sean But you’re using Claude some.

Philip Yeah. Some of it is as a sounding board. I have my entire productivity system kind of written out, and all the different levels — we’ve talked a little bit about this early on in the All Are Yours episodes — and kind of everything I’m doing. So I’ll load it in as a project context and say, hey, you’re my productivity coach. What do you think about this? And so I’ve programmed it, or given it —

Sean “Take a nap.” You put it in and it’s like, “No, you can’t have a hundred different plans.”

Philip Right. Yeah, because kind of in its programming, on the back end when you give it — you set its parameters. So I would say things like, don’t flatter me, give it to me like it is. Give me pushback. I want to hear what the weak points are, or whatever.

So there was some of that where — the different tasks or projects that I have, I have these rolling notes of “not working on this yet, not working on this yet,” or “had to stop working on this.” And so it’s like, hey, you have a lot of that. It said something like, “It seems like your system is designed with the assumption that your problem is execution discipline.”

Sean Weird how that is actually what you say. Yes.

Philip That’s exactly right. So I was like, oh, that’s interesting — because that is my whole system; it’s designed around execution discipline.

So, a sounding board in that way. The other thing that I’m learning about right now, and I think there could definitely be a big utilization with this, is MCPs. So that stands for “model context protocol.” And this is where you use a large language model, like an LLM — Claude or Grok or whatever — to do stuff for you on third-party tools. Because the LLM cannot read the user interface; it has to go in the back to connect with the actual code. But that’s difficult to do through your normal language. The MCP then connects it with that.

And so you’re able then to control a lot of other platforms just through your LLM. So I’m working on this: connecting a lot of the things I’m doing in Obsidian just through telling my servant what to do in it. So it could create notes, edit notes, do things, connect things, through just me telling it what to do. And so again, that level of not one to ten, but one to twenty, so to speak.

Another thing you can start doing is connecting your LLM to your calendar, or your email, or whatever, and start utilizing it that way. And so then what that would lead to — these are open tabs in my mind, and in Obsidian, that I’m working with — is figuring out how to utilize AI agents in the work that I’m trying to do. So, beyond just automations, but setting up agents who could, with the parameters and context that you give them, make decisions and do things on your behalf.

So, again, trying to expand my output, my capacity, and seeing what I could do with that. Those are just some of the things that I’m currently working on and trying to see if I could make more productive.

Sean Yeah. I read a guy who writes just about AI and LLMs. That’s like everything on his blog. He’s not a believer. He has some skepticism and some concerns, and keeps trying out a bunch of the different things. So not just some of the big ones that we’ve mentioned, but different local language models that you can actually download and run on your computer, so it’s completely private. I have not tried that yet myself; probably am not going to.

But one of the observations he made is that if you don’t think there’s anything you can do with an AI, you’re not trying to do very much. You’re not actually very imaginative. So there’s probably something that you could do.

Now, I do have a friend who is adamant that if you let AI do anything for you, it’s going to make your brain rot. There’s a Christian lady — and I appreciate that. But if there is some feedback, some augmenting, some automation — I just don’t actually think that there’s anything wrong with programming that then accomplishes your goal. I just don’t think that’s wrong.

Philip Right. Well, I don’t know — did people have pushback when the dishwasher came out? So, invented a dishwasher, or a clothes washer and a dryer. “It’s going to make people lazy. Now women aren’t going to have anything to do.” They came out with a microwave, or whatever it is.

And yes, in one sense, it did. I think that’s part of the whole — I think maybe Becca Merkle mentioned that kind of thing in her Eve in Exile.

Sean Good.

Philip She’s the one, right. So, like, the fifties led to the sixties, with homemaking technology giving women a lot of free time that they did not bring a return on, but instead got to doing stupid things.

So for sure, technology can and does lead to those things. And it’s the same thing that we covered regarding these being scary things, dangerous things — the way a good tool, a necessary tool, is dangerous as well. But then to be able to utilize that in order to bring a bigger return is a different approach.

Sean Yeah, this is kind of related. I started a TikTok a couple weeks ago.

Philip Yeah.

Sean And I started a TikTok — it’s not a personal one. It’s for a newsletter kind of thing. It’s supposed to be connected with the newsletter.

Philip The Marysville Sun. So if you’re not following, follow the Marysville Sun.

Sean Yeah, I wasn’t trying to —

Philip I promoted it for you.

Sean But I had only seen people post TikTok videos on other platforms until I got the TikTok app myself a couple weeks ago. And man, TikTok is the most relentless stream kind of thing I have ever seen.

Philip I’ve never even been on TikTok.

Sean Yeah. Well, I’m not encouraging anybody to actually go get it. I am doing it because I knew it would challenge me to edit myself and see if I could do something that I usually would not want to. So it’s an uncomfortable thing that I’ve been testing out.

Philip Man in the arena.

Sean Sure.

But you open TikTok and immediately a video is playing. So you just go to a setting that at least opens the video on mute. But as soon as you swipe anywhere, a new video is playing. A new video is playing. A new video is playing. You have to go out of your way to just try to get it to pause, to stop. So it is just relentless movement, a new thing, and it’s all crazy.

Philip Force-feeding you the spoon.

Sean Yeah. There’s no way to open up the app in a different tab that’s like your profile — so, open the app in my profile so I can just then make my own new post. No, you are getting the stream shoved at you right away. And it actually takes a little bit of discipline to not be like, hmm, I wonder what this dumb video is about, while I go over to then try to record and make something to post.

I’ve done a whole two posts on my TikTok so far.

But recently, a married woman that we know, that we actually care about her soul — she has over 51,000 posts on TikTok that she has liked.

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean I haven’t done any math on that yet. Just in terms of sheer number of seconds it would take: if it was one second per video, fifty-one thousand seconds. I haven’t done the math to figure out how long that is, but that is a crazy amount of just wasting your time.

Philip Right.

Sean Are there even 51,000 things that I like in the world? Let alone 51,000 short little videos? Even if they were all videos on how to make a good meal for dinner — because there are some of those. Sure, fine. But how many other things have you watched that you didn’t like?

So this is an area where that tool is becoming at least a master of distraction.

Philip Right.

Sean If not a master of filling that person’s mind with code that can’t then conclude in other good things coming out. There’s just no way that you can consume that much and not have that affect ways that you’re thinking in other ways.

Which is why Psalm 1 continues to be so relevant. Meditating, delight in the law of the Lord, meditate on it day and night, so that you’ll be like a tree planted by streams of living water, so that your leaves will be green and you can produce fruit in season.

Otherwise, getting stuck in technology without reference to God, without being consecrated to him in the use of it and the consuming of it, is going to be a hideous strength. It’s going to gut the soul, gut the affections — or even turn them to idols, turn them to the love of the world, those kinds of things.

So, absolutely amazing tools have to be the servants rather than the masters. The tools have to be the servants.

Philip Right.

Sean And we have to be the masters. Or it’s going to overpower us, enslave us, like you said earlier.

Philip Right. So we start with delighting, immersing, in God’s word — before even we can put our own words to use. And whether those words are us creating that code, or whatever other kind of words, or even consuming other people’s creation, other people’s posts or content — for us to have the foundation of God’s word before we’re trying to do something with whatever it is that’s in front of us.

Sean Yeah. So, Obsidian and Claude, though — these are two big ones for you currently. Any other big ones that people you think at all should be interested in, care about?

Philip Yeah, I mean: check your email. Respond to that. Don’t leave emails hanging. Calendar.

Sean If you sign up for something with your email address —

Philip Correct.

Sean If you never got an email address in your life, don’t try to check your email. But if you signed up for something with your email, where they anticipate they can send you information, you should read it.

Philip Correct. Exactly right.

Sean I like email.

Philip Yeah. It’s useful.

Sean Yeah.

Philip Yeah. No, I think that’s about — I think that’s enough.

Sean Obsidian, Claude, email, and your calendar.

Philip Correct. It’s all you need.

Sean This is it.

Philip That’s right. You could do a lot with that.

All right, well, there it is. So: God’s word, then your words to action.

Sean We’re going to run this transcript through an AI and have it tell us what was good, what we emphasized, what we missed.

Philip It’s a good idea.

Sean We’ll run it through there and fix it next time.

Philip I’ll give it to Claudius.

Sean Yeah.

Philip All right. All are yours. Out.