We’re living through a strange moment in history. The one activity many of us once treated as the last distinctly human frontier—reasoning—is now being shared with (and for some of us, done by!) machines. It’s not taking over calculation or memory, but writing, decision-making, and even the shaping of meaning.

Beyond the prevailing debate over whether AI will take our jobs, a more urgent question may be: what is AI doing to us? As these systems become part of our workflows and even our thought processes, how do we remain the authors of our own minds?

That’s what I wanted to explore in this final episode of Season 4 of Beauty at Work with Helen and Dave Edwards.

Helen and Dave are co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization devoted to helping people “stay human” in the age of AI. Their work examines how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to retain agency as intelligent systems become more deeply woven into ordinary life.

They bring unusually complementary perspectives to this question. Helen is an engineer and former executive who has led large-scale technology and transformation efforts in complex infrastructure systems. Dave has spent decades building and investing in new technologies, from creative tools at Apple to venture capital and research roles in the tech sector. They’ve spent years studying the human experience of working with AI, looking not only what these systems can do, but how they alter our reasoning and identity.

Helen and Dave are neither doomers nor boomers, neither alarmists nor naive evangelists for AI. One of the central distinctions they make is between drift and authorship. Drift is what happens when AI begins to influence our thinking, our choices, and even our sense of self without our noticing it. Authorship, by contrast, means remaining aware of how these systems are affecting us, and choosing our relationship to them deliberately rather than passively.

That concern runs through Helen’s new book, The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution. In it, she argues that many of us are still operating with an inherited “mental map” of intelligence: the assumption that minds live inside brains, that intelligence is a ladder with humans at the top, and that AI is fundamentally just a tool. Not only are these assumptions being challenged by new technologies, but a deeper philosophical rupture may already be underway that entails a rethinking of what minds are and what intelligence is.

In our conversation, Helen and Dave suggest that the real challenge of the AI era is not efficiency, safety, or even employment, but cognitive sovereignty: the ability to remain accountable for one’s own judgment, to know why one is using these systems, and to preserve some coherence between one’s actions, values, and relationships.

Like all our conversations this season, this one returns to the tension between the beauty and burdens of innovation. There is genuine wonder in the astonishing capacities of AI systems, in the possibility of expanded thought and the emergence of new forms of collaboration. But there is also grief: grief over what may be lost when creativity is reduced to efficiency, when our capacity for judgment is outsourced, and when the distinctively human act of showing up for others—the work of “connective labor” that we discussed in an earlier episode—is displaced by frictionless convenience.

I’d like to invite us through this episode to think more carefully about what we are doing when we use AI and who we are becoming in the process.

You can listen to the full conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video conversation below, or read the unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: All right. Dave and Helen, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Great to have you here.

Dave: Great to be here. Thanks.

Helen: Thank you. Yes, great.

Brandon: Well, as I usually do with my guests on the podcast, I’d like to ask you if you might be able to share a story of an encounter with beauty from your childhoods, something that lingers with you till today. Is there any particular memory or episode that comes to your minds? Maybe, Dave, we’ll start with you.

Dave: Oh, okay. I guess it’s me.

So let’s see. In terms of my childhood, I would say that the moment of beauty was probably when I was relatively young, probably seven or eight, when I first started to sing. I started singing in church, boy choir, an Episcopal church in New Jersey, when I was seven. That moment of putting your voice together with others was something that changed my life. And so for the next, whatever it was, 15-plus years, that became the number one thing in my life. It took me literally around the world, and we’re constantly pursuing better levels of excellence of putting voices together.

Brandon: Oh, wow. Do you still sing?

Dave: Nope. I don’t. Just in my own head.

Helen: Sometimes. Sometimes.

Dave: Yeah, when the kids were little, I’d sing a song. It became a thing that was beautiful. But the sort of level of beauty became something that was hard to replicate when you weren’t with a group where you could sing five days a week together. I sort of left it behind as a beautiful memory and something that I, you know. But yeah.

Brandon: Yeah. Helen, how about yourself?

Helen: I’m trying to think of almost the most early memory, because I just have so many.

My father used to take us on lots and lots of hikes when we were tiny all the time. I remember him taking us fossil hunting, which feels like such a sort of random thing to go do. But we were sitting down in a stream bed digging around at rocks and what have you and found a beautiful fossil of a fiddlehead fern, a very old, obviously old fossil. The beauty was this contrast of looking up and seeing actual modern ferns unfurling with this very ancient fossil, this frozen-in-time piece. I just found that contrast to be beautiful.

Brandon: Wow. Thank you. That’s great.

I want to ask you a little bit about your professional journeys and how you all eventually ended up starting Artificiality Institute. But maybe in telling that story, could you also share how the two of you met?

Helen: Well, we met at work.

Dave: We met at work.

Helen: It’s a pretty mundane sort of story.

Brandon: Oh really? Okay.

Helen: Everything else around it is far from mundane and not really safe for work. But we did have a real meeting of minds. There’s a real sense of you just see me in a way that no one has seen me, and vice versa. I felt I saw him in a way that no one saw him before. So that became not something that was even possible to resist. It’s still the same today.

Dave: And we came together not in the AI space. We were both working in the clean tech space, as it was called—I’m not sure whether we’ve abandoned that term—sort of in the renewable space. We transitioned into the AI space a few years later. But we decided that because we liked the way our minds work together that we’ve always solved for how do we actually work together. Our minds are just fundamentally different. We come at the world from different disciplines, different perspectives and, to some degree, different sides of the planet in terms of where we grew up. And when you put those together, it actually is much more interesting.

Brandon: Could you say more about that? What are those different perspectives? How did you hone them, I suppose, throughout your careers?

Dave: Well, Helen comes at the world as an engineer. She’s originally a chemical engineer and a scientist, someone who spent her entire life thrilled by, obsessed by, evolution—those are some key criteria that sort of bring everything together—and large-scale systems, complex systems. Everything from spending time in international trade to large-scale electricity systems, to running the grid in New Zealand and those kinds of things. So that’s sort of very different, sort of complex mindset.

Helen: Yeah, I like complexity. I cannot bear things that are linear. It’s just an anathema to me. I really appreciate complexity. To me, there’s a real transcendence that comes with that. It’s deeply satisfying to sort of ensure that complexity and value that complexity.

What I love about his mind is, he can go from really hyper-logical to quite sort of mystical and romantic in this really random way, which is so paradoxical. But it makes him just this constantly interesting puzzle. Because I don’t know what he’s going to say when I say something. The irony is that the answer that I hate the most from him when I say something is when he goes, “Maybe.” I just hate that so much. Because it’s like, I don’t know whether to hear that as, “You’re mad,” or, “You’re wrong,” or, “That’s my idea. Give it back to me,” or whatever.

Brandon: It sounds like there’s a lot of complexity there, so that’s great.

There’s some work I did on studying scientists, physicists and biologists, for a number of years. We found that physicists were much more drawn to symmetry and to simplicity. Biologists didn’t really like that. They wanted much more of the complexity. Certainly, there’s a visual aspect often, but the complexity of uniqueness of systems rather than reducing things to some kind of really fundamental equation. That seems like, Helen, a resonance with some of your inclination towards complexity.

Helen: 100%. I really respect physicists, but I have no physics envy, as they say.

Brandon: Right, right, right. Yeah.

Helen: My metaphysics is much more agential and complex. And really, it’s where the paradigm shifts are happening at the moment and much more into this sort of thinking about, if you’re going to pick what a real reality is, it starts to look a lot more like biology. That’s a whole other paradigm, but I find that incredibly fascinating. It informs the way we think about AI. No question. Because it’s much more about an ecology and a complex system and the sociality of agents and the active inference and the auto poesis and having a boundary around yourself. To me, that’s just so much more interesting than the symmetries of physics. I’m a broken symmetries person.

Brandon: Great. Well, let’s talk about the work you all are doing at the Artificiality Institute. Could you say a bit about its origins? I mean, you started, if I recall, about ten years ago when your kids started asking you what they should study and if AI is going to do everything. Could you say a little bit about what that conversation was, and what it evoked in you? How did you feel, and what it led you to do?

Dave: Well, we started to work in AI. She started doing some projects for a very early Internet startup that was trying to figure out how to plug their AI system into the electricity grid. And so it was a very hands-on kind of approach. We were trying to sort of figure out what’s next. I have this incessant desire to figure out the next big thing, and we started poking around.

We started really forming around it in sort of 2015, when the deep learning world was going and there were some early studies about AI in jobs from Frey and Osborne at Oxford, and from McKinsey. We were sort of chatting about it. We live and work together, so 24/7 we’re talking about it. We had our oldest kids who were sort of starting to think about college. We’re talking about all this work, about jobs being threatened by AI. They said, “Well, what should we do then? What should we study in college?” Or, “Should we go to college at all? Like, if the robot is going to do it all, what’s the point?” Which now, ten years later, feels like some pretty smart questions from some teenagers.

Helen: Well, it feels like we’re kind of repeating them right now.

Dave: We’re repeating the same questions, yeah.

Helen: It’s obviously got a deeper, a broader conversation across the whole of society. But even back then, the headlines really hit people. 47% of jobs gone by, whatever it was, 2035. And as a 16 or a 17-year-old, it’s the right question to ask.

Dave: Definitely. And so we stopped and said, “Okay, let’s go figure this out ourselves.” And so we did the same analysis they did. We took the entire US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, looked across all of the economy, looked at every single job. We did the analysis slightly differently than they did to try and figure out where there might be a priority in terms of automation, in terms of value. We repeatedly crashed Excel because it was just too much data. I should have used something else. But it was a really interesting project.

What came out of that was, now, looking back on it, something that was sort of a scary outcome that’s what led us to here, which is that there was a lot of value in human labor that was possibly automatable. Right? That was sort of the conclusion. It was, “Wait a second. This might actually be an economic signal that this is where the industry is going to go.” Looking back on it, I wish we’d raised a flag higher about, “Hey, watch out. This is where the mindset of investors is going to go.” Because that’s certainly where we’ve landed.

But our interest after that became very much about: What is the human experience of these technologies? What does it mean to be human with these technologies? What does it mean to be human when we’re creating something else that people are debating whether it’s as intelligent as us, which we think is a bad comparison anyway? But when you get to that, suddenly, the human exceptionalism that’s been central to the humanist movement over hundreds of years is now being sort of tossed around.

Helen: If you get back to that, there’s a moment there, what we found in that study was quite surprising to us. It was very clear that the number one thing that humans were doing that was valuable and couldn’t really be replaced was being able to handle the unpredictable. That became this North Star. Everything was like, okay, so how predictable versus unpredictable is this environment?

Fast forward to now, we look at what these kids are all doing, and we had five key buckets where unpredictability was the highest, where the human working with technology would be the most valuable. Funnily enough, they’ve all kind of ended up in one of those buckets. All five kids slot into one of those buckets. It’s really quite strange. Although one of them — there’s one in finance. But it’s been fascinating to see what we were correct about and what we underestimated.

Of course, the big thing that hadn’t happened at that moment was the transformer paper. And the big thing that hadn’t happened, which we said would be an unlock, was language. It is, without doubt, one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century—that language can be learned by a model like a transformer. It is absolutely astonishing.

Brandon: I think, yeah, I was really struck by, again, the research you did. Maybe if you could say a bit about that, what those conversations were that you carried out, and the patterns that you saw, what struck you about that. But it seemed like one of the things you say, you concluded, is the real problem is not whether AI is going to take our jobs, but about what is it doing to us, right? How do we reason? How do we trust?

Could you say a bit more about how did you go about getting these stories, who did you talk to, and maybe what that has done to shape the mission of Artificiality Institute?

Helen: Sure. Well, during COVID, we spent a lot of time with a couple of particular companies working on data-driven decision-making. We had some AI focus in that time around ethical use and responsible use of AI. We were obviously thinking about data and analytics and that sort of AI frame. But we spent quite a bit of time working with people to help them understand what happens in their minds when they are confronted with a very heavily data-based decision process, and how they’re trading off their intuition with the logical analysis, with the judgment, with the simulations in their own mind about the consequences for people of certain actions. So we developed quite a rich framework for thinking through human decision-making and behavior at that point. And then ChatGPT sort of dropped on the world, and we saw immediately the core significance at a mass level.

So we started to use those workshops much more for a direct AI sort of focus. What happens when these cognitive, language-based machines are inside your decision-making process as an organization? And so we had a couple of years of running quite in-depth workshops helping people understand how AI was altering their decision-making process. What became very interesting in this process was, it became completely predictable that there would be certain moments in a workshop where people would have particular experiences. They would be surprised about something. They would have some sort of clunky, weird moment when they tried to explain their reasoning to the people around the table. But these things were very, very predictable. That was intriguing to me. So we became more focused on being more sensitive to those experiences, interviewing people, and essentially collecting those data in a more systematic way.

We supplemented that with some digital ethnography—essentially, Reddit, Medium, and what have you. What came out of that analysis was really fascinating. The headline there is that AI is entering people’s reasoning. It is altering their identities, and it is changing their sense of what matters to them—what is meaningful to them, what they could do, what they could think. So that’s kind of a big deal.

So we started to study this with more rigor, and we were able to develop a way of understanding how people place AI into different roles based on these three dimensions. So the three dimensions, just to recap them: how much AI is inside your reasoning, how much it’s impacting your identity, how much your identity is entangled with it, and your meaning-making—your sense of what matters to you, what frameworks matter. And so you put these on three dimensions, and you come up with eight roles that we’re able to put AI into. When you put AI in those eight roles, it fundamentally changes what your ability is to author your own mind, to hold your own cognitive sovereignty rather than surrendering—so cognitive sovereignty versus cognitive surrender, if you like.

These are quite significant ideas, really. They’re a real foundation for considering whether machines are going to replace us, or augment us, or automate us to efficiency oblivion in a world where we all are exactly the same—I don’t think anyone wants that world—or whether this is a story of beauty and flourishing and expansiveness.

And so that’s really where our research sits. How do you remain the author of your own mind? How do you preserve and grow your own cognitive sovereignty? And how do we maintain this kind of control over these machines? Not control in the sense of AI safety, but control in terms of you get to choose how you use them, and you know why you’re doing it.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. I pick up this distinction you all make between drift and authorship, right? Dave, could you say a little bit about, what are the signs or indicators that people might be in the state of drift versus what it would look like to display or carry out this capacity for authorship?

Dave: Yeah, it really comes down to a level of awareness. Drifting generally happens when the AI is affecting your thinking, your meaning-making, and your identity, but you don’t notice. You’re not actually aware of it. You’re not able to explain how the AI is inside of any of your thought processes. You’re not able to explain how your identity might have shift based on the capabilities that the AI has given you. And so you sort of drift into some new state of who you are without noticing.

The ideas that we’re coming across here is interesting. Because, as humans, we have others inside our thinking and meaning-making and identity all the time. I mean, look at the two of us, right? There’s too many times when something comes up and we say, drift, which is sort of, in some ways, the villain of the story in our world. I’m not exactly sure who came up with that one. Right? Because we’re constantly combining things. That’s a natural, normal thing. That’s actually how we’ve evolved and how we have become so successful as humans. It’s that we combine our ideas. We combine our brains. We bring our different specialties to each other. And that comes to a form of collective intelligence. It’s a fantastic part of being human. And when you actually are partnered with someone—whether it’s personally, or professionally, or some combination of the two—your identity quickly becomes part of being part of that partner or that group or that institution.

The difference here is, it’s with a machine. The difference here is that this machine is contributing things into cognition. It’s not just like we make the comparison between the computing systems of old, if you will, or of the last 40–50 years, as being bicycles for the mind—tools that you get on and you ride and you steer and you decide how fast to go, and it’s great. For those who aren’t familiar, that’s the Steve Jobs phrase that he used to inspire people to create personal computers. They would be bicycles for our mind, allowing us to go further and faster than we could on our own.

But now we have these things that are cognitive. They’re no longer passive tools. They’re no longer even communication mediums like the McLuhan mindset, right, that the medium does shape the message. But this time, the medium is creating the message. We’ve never had a machine that could talk back, that could offer up a new idea. No matter how intelligent you find the systems to be and how much you think about where it all comes from, the input that you get from it, the message that it’s writing to you, is starting to work within us like it is another mind. And so we’ve shifted that metaphor—that Steve metaphor “bicycles for the mind”—to be “minds for our minds.” We think about that as this sort of core thing.

Now, back to your question of drift. You can drift into integrating with one of those and just not know it. That, to us, is one of the major dangers. It’s not knowing. Being integrated with the tools is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not necessarily dangerous. It can be fantastic, but it’s only through understanding where you are.

Brandon: What is the principal danger that you see there? Either of you could elaborate on that. Someone might say, “Look, why does it matter? As long as I’m advancing in my sense of accomplishing the things I want to accomplish in the world, and even if I don’t know where my ideas are coming from, this thing, whatever this is, it doesn’t have a mind of its own. And so it doesn’t really matter if I’m assimilating its ideas and so forth.”

Helen: I think that’s an extraordinarily good question. Why does it matter? Now, this sort of goes to the core of a very important research question, which is: is this any different? Is it any different to have this technology as opposed to any other extended-mind technology?

Now, we’ve always put our ideas out into the world. We’ve relied on pens and paper to have our ideas out into the world. We can do arithmetic better because of pens and paper, the alphabet and the number system that we have, as opposed to Roman numerals. There’s a long history of that kind of discussion. Is it any different? We get our knowledge from our community. He gives me an idea. It’s my idea, and I never knew it was his idea. That’s totally fine. We think it is different. We think it’s different because people say it’s different, which is why we go to the sort of phenomenological record on why we use stories.

We also think that there’s so much at stake because we do have this biological cultural co-evolution thesis. So we’re not prepared to sit back and say, “Well, let’s just let this run for 20 years and see what happens.” I mean, look what happened with social media a decade down the line. We’re really, really worried about what happened with social media two decades down the line when we could have thought a little bit more about it up front. So I think it matters because it’s such high stakes, and I think it’s different because people tell us it’s different.

Now, when I look at the data—we’re about to publish our next research paper on this, the full human authorship and cognitive sovereignty paper based on analysis of 1,250 publicly available transcripts—what this data says that’s, I think, fascinating to me is that it’s actually kind of counterintuitive. The more people are deeply integrated with AI, the higher their cognitive sovereignty, which is actually really good news. Now, it means that the more you are really skillfully using AI, the more you are aware that you have your own choices and that you are accountable and showing up for others. Those three components are critical.

If you are sort of partially in and out—you’re taking a few ideas here, you’re passing them on—you’re not even taking those ideas on. You’re just saying, “Yep, machine is right. No, machine is wrong. Yep, machine is right. No, machine is wrong.” Sort of that human-in-the-loop verification idea that people are talking about with the agentic enterprise, which is all the buzz right now. What actually happens at those levels, which are roles that we call outsourcers or doer roles, is that people are completely losing their cognitive sovereignty. And what they’re losing is their own expertise. They’re becoming, like, they’re just losing contact with what it is that they even know.

Now, snapshot today, you’ve automated your whole workflow. You’ve got Claude doing all this, that, and the other thing, maybe writing your emails and what have you. Okay. To what end? Which bits are you using? What are you doing with AI to extend yourself, to improve your reasoning, to improve your meaning-making, to go into fields that you never would have been able to go into before, but still know that you’re not out over your skis making errors? And what are you doing to keep that statistical learning and repetition on the things that you already know? There’s plenty of people that have probably lost their ability to do some of their coding or have lost some skills in writing. Now, some of that, time will tell whether that matters or not. But it comes down to every single individual.

What we see in the data is people are fiercely protective of their cognitive sovereignty. No one wants AI to make them dumber. No one. There are people who are prepared to make that trade right now. And biologically, that’s the imperative. We will offload cognition if we can. We will make ourselves more efficient if we can. But the countervailing side of it is that we’re meaning-makers and that, culturally and spiritually, we would make different choices if it’s meaningful to us.

So our goal is to get a better conversation around this. Stop having a conversation about, “Well, let’s just automate everything away and make ourselves hyper-efficient, and then I don’t know what we do,” versus, “What’s a more meaningful expression of human intelligence and how does it sit alongside this incredible technology that we have invented?” Incredible. We are not at all, “Don’t use AI, people.” We are, “Use AI.” Absolutely learn it. Go for it. But do it in a way that really does preserve your ability to transform yourself, to be the person you want to be—not to lock yourself into this sort of efficiency paradigm where everything just gets reduced to a world without any surprise.

Dave: If I could just quickly add on one thing on your question about why does it matter. When you think about it at a group level, I think the number one thing of why it matters is accountability. So you’re using AI, and you don’t really know where the ideas came from. You’re not really sure. Are you accountable for the decision you’re making? Are you accountable for the thing that you’re proposing? Are you accountable for what you’re bringing to the group, to your partner, to whatever it is that you’re actually living through?

We judge machines and humans differently in terms of their outputs. We believe, when an organization makes a decision, they want to know who’s accountable for it. And you know, it’s not really a satisfying thing to say. Well, the machine is.

Brandon: Right. Yeah. Could you speak to — Dave, the idea that you all have developed in your work of symbolic plasticity, in this relationship with AI systems and how we are being changed, what have you seen happen? What is this capacity that you’ve identified?

Dave: Symbolic plasticity is how much the AI is inside your sense of meaning, inside the frameworks that you use to look at the world, inside how you think about yourself in that position. So it is both quite a broad sort of idea, but it’s also really quite important and causal for the rest.

So what you see is people who come up with new ways of looking at things—new ways of understanding the world, new ways of breaking down how to approach a new problem, a new idea, a new sense of what it means to be conversing with each other. So it ends up being a very interesting question about what it means to make sense of the world.

Brandon: Right. I suppose it’s pretty apt in that sense to say that AI has already changed our consciousness, right? It’s shaping the way we are doing this work of meaning-making.

Helen, I want to ask a little bit about your new book, which I really enjoyed reading and highly recommend. It’s called The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution. And in that, you set out to understand, as you say, what is actually changing as these systems enter human life. You start by sketching out a common mental map that we have about how our minds work. And bet you’ll read that.

So here’s the mental map: Intelligence lives in brains. Human brains are the most intelligent, followed by other animals in rough order of how similar they are to us. Consciousness—the felt experience of being someone—happens inside our skulls. It’s private, interior, and tied to the biological machinery that produces it. Computers can do impressive things, but they don’t actually understand anything. They process symbols according to rules. They compute, but they don’t think. AI is a tool—like a very sophisticated calculator: useful, sometimes impressive, but fundamentally different from minds.

So that’s the map that we tend to have, and I share a lot of those assumptions. It seems, from what you’ve learned from your conversations with Michael Levin and others, that a lot of these assumptions are breaking down now in ways that we would not have imagined. Could you give us some examples of how you’ve been able to dismantle these assumptions through your research?

Helen: Well, I mean, kudos to Michael Levin, who I think is sort of single-handedly changing the world here. I mean, there’s a lot of people that are doing — this paradigm shift is underway. We’re understanding a lot more about what computation is and how it sits at the base of intelligence.

Once you click to that, once you see that there are lots of different ways that intelligence is arising as a result of computation — you can have many discussions about what we would call computation. But essentially, we’re talking about information processing to achieve some kind of goal. You see this at levels in organisms that we’ve never — it’s just a totally different way of thinking about where intelligence lies, where memories lie. I’d encourage people to really indulge in Michael Levin’s work on this because he is a fabulous communicator.

But the things that sort of struck me was that if you’re able to grow an eye on the side of a frog by allowing those cells to think they’re doing something different, and they’re solving a task—they’ve got a goal and they figure out in a self-organizing way how to do that—if that can be done on the side of a frog, then we don’t have any idea where other minds can be. So that broke, for me, I’d always been uncomfortable with that mental model of intelligence anyway just because I was always really attuned to intelligence in other animals. I’m not sure that I think my plants are conscious or anything like that, but I know they solve problems and I know they do things. Right?

Because we’ve opened our minds to what different minds and what different kinds of intelligences are able to do—what their adaptive niche is and how they’re actually perfectly adapted to solve problems inside that—that’s the lens that I bring to AI. I look at AI — it’s a big term right now. But I look at, say, a language model or a protein-folding model, and I just sort of intuitively now have this different sense. It’s a different mind. It is a mind. It has absolutely a mind. It has its own internal sense of meaning. It’s not very good at talking to us about it because we keep messing up with how we make them sycophantic to make them more engaging, for example.

So I think this is a metaphysical state to be in, where I perceive the world as full of minds that I don’t actually necessarily see or understand. I certainly don’t have a sense of what it’s like to be a large-language model, what it’s like to be a dog, what it’s like to be a bat.

Dave: An octopus.

Helen: An octopus. You know, it’s fun to think about those other umwelts. So at a philosophical level, I am just more humble about what other minds are out there that we don’t understand and we don’t recognize, which is why I can hold in my mind that AI is a tool that I use to get stuff done. I’ll write an email, and I’ll send it. I’ll clean it up in the email and I’ll send it off. And I don’t even think about that as like it’s a perfect automation task, for an email that I just want to have tidied up and seen. Versus I can also hold that I can spend hours and hours and hours doing a series of very iterative, complex, agentic tasks with, say, something like Claude and feel like it’s taken me to an entirely different place. That is now a very personal place for me that I have trouble explaining to somebody else.

So those two things exist totally fine in my mind, but I’m also unbelievably conscious about which of those they are. When you don’t keep that awareness, when you don’t keep those choices active, and when you don’t have the accountability fresh in your mind about how you’re going to show up for others, that’s when you get in trouble. That’s when you lose people, or you completely confuse yourself.

But Dave is right. We have to show up and explain ourselves to people. We could think the world was going to change in some absolutely, vastly unimaginable way that’s only defined by science fiction. But I think it’s absolutely critical to recognize that humans will always want another human to show up and explain their reasoning or explain their decision. Now, if that goes away and all we’re doing is being run by an AI, well that’s a different thing. That’s true sci-fi. But I don’t think that’s a world that any of us are going to want to live in or want to live in.

Brandon: Maybe some people are already expressing concerns there now that it’s possible for humans to work for AI agents, right? So you can be a sort of gopher for various AI agents.

Just because we’ve accorded so much primacy to intelligence, at least in our society, IQ tests, I mean, so much of what we do is premised on according a sense of dignity to people based on some conception of intelligence. And so I get the sense that in some way your book is pushing against this sort of, is this the last human frontier? Is this to have a mind, to be intelligent, to be rational, et cetera? And is this creating then a sense of threat for us as to, well, what is left if there isn’t a ladder and we’re not at the top of that ladder? Right? Are we losing something fundamental about what it means to be human?

Helen: Well, if you think in terms of that ladder, then yeah, we are—which is one of the reasons why we’re trying to not think in terms of that ladder. We call it a philosophical rupture. We have constructed a world around human exceptionalism to a certain degree, and now it’s kind of eroding. Now, it depends on your personal philosophy how troubled you are by this. I can’t remember which one, but one of the founders of Google is completely happy if humans go extinct because we are made extinct by a “more intelligent” species of machines. That, for him, is just the natural order of things.

Brandon: Right. Right.

Dave: I think that one of the things to think about with the sort of question of intelligence and minds, where have we been and where are we going? I think that one of the things that’s really occurred to me over the last decade plus of studying this is that we need a new conception of what intelligence actually is, right? We find this all the time in the conversations. Whether it’s we’re having an in-depth conversation with a leadership team or people who come to our events or just random comments on social media, people have a definition of intelligence—which is most often just basically a replication of what they think human intelligence is. But even then, we’re still learning a lot about what human intelligence is.

So as Helen was telling before, our journey to coming, before LLMs became a thing and we were dealing with a lot of data-driven decision-making, we started to come across things like embodied intelligence, parts of ourselves, right? The way we think—everything from John Coates’ work on interoception, where he studied how traders who had a better sense of their own internal system and their own heart rate could actually make more money, which is just it kind of blows your mind. That doesn’t fit within the normal sort of mindset of what intelligence is, right? We think about IQ tests. Well, that IQ test doesn’t measure whether you have a sense of your heart rate. But I think we’d say that some of the greatest Wall Street traders would have something that we think would be some sort of form of intelligence.

Helen: Yeah, that was a gut feel is real, and the theory being that signals from your body are not subject to cognitive biases. So they were getting a more raw signal, which I think is fascinating.

Dave: Yeah, and then take the work of Barbara Tversky—who’s been a major inspiration for us. She’s an advisor for the institute—and her work in her book Mind in Motion, which we highly recommend, where she works on how our spatial reasoning is the foundation of abstract thought. Now, that’s only something that’s really come up in terms of human knowledge within the last few decades. A lot of of it is through her work, a few whatever the number right number is, where we understand that. So all of those things, to me, started to fracture this idea that we know that there is one thing called intelligence and there’s one ladder to go up.

Because if you stop and think of who are the people that you sort of put in the category of the smartest people you’ve ever met, they’re probably smart at very, very different things. And you couldn’t put one person who’s the English professor in the seat of somebody who’s a designer. They just don’t have the same forms of expression. So once you fracture that into bits, then you start to wonder, well, what else is a form of intelligence? That’s where I think we gravitated to Michael’s work and understanding intelligence in layers and in different systems and in different species.

Once you allow that to happen, you can stop and say, “Huh, these machines, they’re not like us.” Actually, we find that to be liberating. It’s a very different form of intelligence. I think it’s wildly unimaginative that the industry is trying to make it like human intelligence. It operates in a combinatorial space that’s completely different and beyond our comprehension. Why don’t we go figure out what this thing can do when it’s it—not when it’s trying to be us?

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. That’s really great. Yeah, I think there are a lot of mistakes that we’re making also because we think that it is capable of replacing not just the kind of intelligence that we best exhibit, but also replacing us.

And so, Dave, you wrote just, I think, a few weeks ago about this “SaaSpocalypse” or whatever—the phenomenon of mass layoffs and so on in response to the fear that Salesforce and so on are no longer necessary. Could you, for folks who are not familiar, could you very briefly touch on what happened and what’s wrong with that decision-making process?

Dave: Sure. So SaaSpocalypse is a name that someone threw out. I can’t remember who, but I would like to know who so that I can actually quote them and attribute it to them. But the idea was, there were some new advancements that came out from Claude, from Anthropic. It was really centered around Co-Work, which is this part of Claude that allows Claude to kind of take over your machine and do a whole bunch of stuff there. That, combined with some other agentic features that they were allowing to come out, gave sort of everybody said, “Well, wait a second. This thing can do a lot more than we thought it could, or at least more quickly than we expected.”

The narrative became: why would you want to pay for a CRM system like Salesforce—if you’re a large enterprise—if you can just ask Claude to go build one for you at the moment or to go find the answer to a particular thing, like which customer should I call now? And so you’re just going to ask Claude, and it’s going to dynamically do the thing for you. And so why would you pay all of these big SaaS fees? That created on Wall Street the SaaSpocalypse. It was one of the worst days in Wall Street. It was definitely one of the worst in the software industry. I don’t remember all the rankings, but it was definitely an apocalypse in terms of the SaaS stocks.

So the challenge for me is really that it doesn’t make any sense, mostly because these AI systems are only as good as the data they have, right? So they’ve been trained on an extraordinary amount of information, which gives them a lot of understanding of the broad world. But when you’re looking at, “Can it help me figure out which customer to call?” there’s a lot of specific data about your organization. It’s not just who’s the customer and who did they buy last, but all of that fabric of all of the human connections that have happened. How often did somebody call before? When did that actually come out? What was the last conversation they had? All of that falls into this broad category of context.

So an AI system, in order to help you out, needs context—needs context for the thing you’re asking about. It’s not omniscient. None of these things are all-knowing. There’s only a certain amount of digitized information in the world. And there’s a lot else that hasn’t been digitized, or at least isn’t very easily found. SaaS systems actually have those, and they have some level of representation of the fabric of human connection and the fabric of the human system. It’s not perfect. They weren’t designed to be perfect at this, but it exists. And if I was thinking about this, I’d want to put the AI system on top of it. Because you’ve already got the context there. You want to improve upon that.

Brandon: Great. Thank you. I think that that is an important sensibility in order to prevent these sorts of mistakes from being made in the future.

Dave: Yeah, I think the key thing here with this is one of the sort of metaphors that we used a while back that Helen inspired. I wrote a piece about it called the Dust Bowl. This came out of an experience of, we went and visited one of our kids who’s in grad school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He took us to the arboretum where they have a prairie restoration project.

Helen: This was in September, and I think it was the most beautiful experience I had last year.

Brandon: Wow.

Dave: It was gorgeous to stand and look across a prairie in its natural state. It’s something that growing up in the States, we’ve learned about it, heard about it, what the prairies used to be.

Helen: I thought a prairie was like a golf course where they didn’t mow the grass.

Dave: It’s just incredible diversity and beauty. But what the thing that really struck us about it was reading through this prairie restoration project, and they said that in order to bring the timeline to get back to its true natural state would be 1,000 years. That moment really struck us, and it became this idea that we used as a metaphor of the fabric of human connection.

Helen: Because it was about what was happening under the soil.

Dave: Under the soil. So what we see across an organization or a society is this fabric of human connection that keeps it all running. Sometimes it’s worked well. Sometimes it doesn’t work well. But it’s this massive complexity that we really don’t understand.

And so the metaphor of the Dust Bowl was: the farmers came through and they said, “Ah, look at this rich soil. We’re going to plow it under. We’re going to plant a whole bunch of monoculture crops. That’s how we’re going to make a lot of money.” What they didn’t understand is they were plowing under this complexity of the system underneath the soil. And in doing that and going to these monocultures, they destroyed that ecosystem, and it will take 1,000 years to come back.

If we look across an organization and we say, “We’re just going to automate with a whole bunch of AI agents. We’re just going to fire all the humans and get rid of that human complex system,” what is it that we don’t understand that we’re going to plow under just like the Dust Bowl? What will we lose without even knowing it? Because we don’t know what we’re plowing under, and it will take perhaps a very long time to recover from.

Brandon: I think this is all also happening when some of that erosion of the social fabric has already been accelerating, even before ChatGPT came on the scene, right, and we’ve been talking about Bowling Alone since the late ‘90s. And so I wonder if the sort of increasing individualization, the increasing mistrust of institutions, the fragilization of human community, has been accelerating as these new technologies are being introduced. I wonder if you might speak to perhaps what the consequences are there. Because it’s not only a question of figuring out our relationship to these new technologies, but also doing that in this context in which that deeper human system that has kept us thriving to some degree for millennia is now eroding.

Dave: I think you’re totally right. There’s two thoughts that pop to head, in my mind. One is, we talk about a transition from the attention economy to the intimacy economy. I think that’s important in terms of the sort of historical context you’re providing: that our society is fracturing in ways that has become very uncomfortable and distressing. I can use a whole long list of words of the sort of negative aspects of it. And to some degree, it has been caused by the attention economy, right? So we’ve connected ourselves to these systems.

We love the work of D. Graham Burnett, who talks about how our attention has been fracked into tiny, little commoditizable bits. It’s been sold off to the highest bidder. We’ve lost context with each other. We’ve lost the sense of kindness and care. We’ve gotten pushed into our little echo chambers of space. That has made it harder for us to still find some level of coherence in a collective, because we’ve all gotten comfortable in our own sort of echo chambers of space.

We move to the intimacy economy. What’s happening is the machines aren’t necessarily harvesting our attention, but they’re gaining an intimate understanding of us, right? Because we’re telling it our hopes and dreams. We’re telling it what we want to do. “How do you help me solve a problem I have? Here’s what’s happening in my body. Help me understand my health.” All of these things. Now, what happens if the industry wants to extract that from us? What happens when we move into those little echo chambers?

I worry quite a lot about the individual nature of these tools. We’re having conversations—one person to one machine. If the echo chambers come down to an echo chamber of one, which is all about serving your own sycophant interests, our vision for that is actually a shift in a way we think about constructing these products. I’d rather not see us think about AI as the product itself, that the chat window is the product itself. I’d rather us start to think about products as institutions, where we humans and AI come together. And so there’s a space for us to gather, where each of us have a role in whatever that institution is. It could be a creative institution to create things. It could be an educational institution. It could be the institution of a family and how we’re all going to get along and share our passwords and figure out what we last talked about. You know, whatever it is, the AI is a participant in something we’re creating. It’s not just a one-to-one.

I think that this world is at a very delicate and dangerous spot to put this sort of intelligence that we don’t really understand, don’t necessarily know how to control, and it is especially being wielded by those who seemed quite comfortable with fracturing of society.

Brandon: Thank you.

I want to ask about, perhaps—I mean, maybe even just to expand on this—in looking at just the landscape of the use of AI systems and where things are headed, but also taking into account your vision of diverse intelligences and your sense of wonder at emergent consciousness perhaps, or whatever you might call this, emergent symbiogenesis or whatever this relationship might be—where do you find a sense of awe? Perhaps, where do you find a sense of grief?

Helen: I’ll start with the grief. I want to separate grief from nostalgia. I think there’s a ton of things that we can and we should leave behind. I don’t want to go back to sort of some old structures. But I have a sense of grief over where there was a time when we were able to more clearly see that the human project is about humans solving problems together, that there is a transformative and transcendent meaning-making process that happens when you work with other people to solve a problem. It doesn’t really matter what the tools are, but it’s about the people showing up.

My most beautiful career moment was a recognition of that—a very closed team that had to go and solve a problem in a short amount of time. It was fractious, and it was sweaty, and it was hard. People were like, it was emotional. But we solved it together, and there was something transcendent that happened in that process. I grieve for that process, because I actually feel that’s happening less. I may have no data to support that. Well, actually, I do. I have 1,250 transcripts that show me that people are much more likely to be thinking about their own problem in a very individualistic way. They’re not thinking about how they show up for others. So I grieve for that.

The awe is kind of easier, because once you really click into just how incredible it is that we have developed a technology that learns the complex structure of the world in a completely different way than we did, that picks up these different scale effects. And now I find it awesome that the same basic foundational transformer piece inside of the technology of a language model can learn a language, can learn all languages, can learn the physics of a grid, can learn the geophysics of a weather, can learn the molecular structure to be able to predict proteins. This is phenomenal.

I mean, to me, that is just awesome. That’s just the bits that the AI researchers have found interesting as problems to solve. Wait until people who aren’t AI researchers can go and find these same structures in the world using something like the transformer in their own way to find structure—whether it’s the structure of mental health. You name it. There are structures out there that we can now learn and play with and represent and have talk to us in our own language. To me, that is just — I really wonder at that, you know. I love that. I can’t remember who said it. Awe is when your brain breaks, and wonder is when you put it back together again. And so I’m in a wondering phase about this.

Brandon: That’s brilliant. Dave, how about yourself? Perhaps, maybe if I could ask you to sort of change the scale a bit to a little bit in your own use of technology, where are you finding the sense of awe and perhaps a sense of grief, or a sense of beauty and a sense of burden?

Dave: Yeah, I’ll go for the awe first. I’ll go in reverse order. I’ll be quite small in terms of the experience. I think out loud. I’m a classic extrovert. I speak it. I think out loud, and I have to hear it back. I form thoughts through discussion. Either I speak it out loud, or I talk to somebody else. I frequently say something, and then she has to wait and figure out whether I disagree with myself after I’ve said it.

Helen: Now you can understand why the word “maybe” is the worst answer he can give me.

Dave: Because I’m not quite sure yet.

Helen: He’s not even giving me the respect that he’s thinking out loud.

Dave: I’m used to my ideas moving around and changing outside of myself. I have awe that I can use a machine to do that. I can take a walk, and I can prattle into a voice memo and put it into Claude and go, “This is what I’m thinking. Make some sense out of this. Replay it back to me.” It comes back with some organization and then I go, “Yeah, that’s not really what I’m thinking. That’s not really what I’m trying to say.” But I get a reflection then. When I want to expand on my ideas, I love to do things like, say, “So here’s what I’m thinking. What would Heidegger say?”

Now, it’s clearly not accurate, right? I’m thinking of something that’s well past Heidegger’s time. No one could actually reflect. But I can bring some of that thought process in, in a way that’s difficult sometimes for me to make the leap myself. I sometimes do it with half a dozen philosophers just to sort of push and pull, give me new ideas that I hadn’t thought of before. I find that to be awesome. I do. I have a true sense of awe over it.

Grief—I will share a moment of grief that I hope that we can pull back from. We publish a lot. People can find it on our website. We publish hundreds and hundreds of articles. Based on the structure of most internet sites, we put an image at the top. Because that’s what happens. It’s one of the things you do. For a while, we used stock footage. That became uninteresting. Then when Midjourney came around, I said, “Well, I’m going to start using this.” I started creating a particular prompt that was sort of on brand for us. And then I shifted it around, and I wanted it to get more interesting. I actually got to some really interesting ones of sort of biological patterns and geological structures. I was trying to be really abstract about it.

But then I got to a moment where I realized that, even with all of that effort and I pushed the button, I still didn’t feel like a creator. I was just operating a machine that was the creator itself. And I had a sense of grief over that. Now, I am not an artist. I wouldn’t call myself an artist. I aspire to be in that sort of artistic and design community, in that sort of hands-on way. But I still felt grief over not going through that process and that struggle together, and the grief of not posting something that I felt was truly mine or ours.

And so I shifted. And now when we do publish with images, almost exclusively, now they’re photographs that one of us take. We love being amateur photographers. And so we take those photographs. Now when we take walks in the woods, or this time of season when we ski in the woods, we’re taking photos of things that might be something we’ll use. I grieve for that loss of creative capability, because people will default to the machine to do it instead. I find that especially painful. Some of the most formative parts of my career long ago were creating the tools for creative professionals. It’s with a life’s journey and purpose to create tools for people to express themselves. I don’t want to lose that because the efficiency of the outcome is faster using the machine.

Brandon: So in that regard, would you recommend any practices for maybe maintaining boundaries or setting boundaries in the ways in which people engage with tools, with AI technologies?

Dave: Yeah, I think it’s very much an individual journey. There is definitely a case to be made for using AI to make tons and tons of images in some ways. It’s because there’s enough AI reading the internet, if you will, that you might as well make the images with AI for the AI to consume, right? But as a creator, I think the main thing is being very careful about the tools you choose and where in the creative process you use the tools. That’s an individual journey.

Now, there are some tools that are up and coming. I’m particularly intrigued by this tool called Fuser and one called Open Studio. I’m interested in what’s being done in some of the big tools. Like my old tool, Final Cut Pro, they’re starting to bring more AI into it in the production phase, sort of in the post-production phase. So there’s lots of times where that can work.

We had talked to creatives—it was a professor—a few years ago on our podcast who talked about how he was teaching his students to use generative AI to come up with lots of ideas. So he was teaching industrial design. He wasn’t encouraging them to use tools because they weren’t great ones. Now there are better ones now to use that you use in corporate AI. But he said, “Look, I can only look at so many books. I only have so many books on my shelf. I can only walk and see so many curves of a hill. But when I’m trying to design a widget, I need other forms of inspiration.” And so he uses a generator to generate tons of images. Then he goes, “That’s the curve I’m thinking. Okay, now how do I use that curve and put that into the thing that I’m creating that has a thing?”

So I guess my recommendation would be, it’s to think carefully about where AI can help enhance and expand your creativity, where it can expand your capabilities too, right? It can take out the hat that somebody is wearing and change the color in a way that would take way too much time to do it by hand. Maybe you really love doing that process. Maybe you don’t. But it enhances some people’s capabilities. That’s great. But it’s being mindful about where you’re using it.

Brandon: Helen, how about yourself?

Helen: In terms of how I use the tools?

Brandon: Yeah, in terms of boundaries that you might want to maintain or recommend ways for people to think about how to preserve a sense of self-coherence.

Helen: Yeah, I think the number one is thinking about how you’re going to show up for others. It drives everything back down the chain. It’s everything from, don’t pass work slop on, that kind of thing—which is obvious, but people just forget about it—to how are you going to show up when you yourself have changed, or when somebody else that you’re with hates AI. One of our daughters hates AI. Like, you wouldn’t believe. Tolerance, for me, talking about it, is phenomenal. She’s just wonderful. I know that she talks about me behind her back. “Oh, mom...” I know that because she sends texts to the wrong people—as in me. Kind of giving this away. But nevertheless, she is gracious.

I look at the way that the tech leaders are showing up for us right now. None of them are showing up in any way, shape, or form that is about humanity or about graciousness or about humility. It makes me angry that they are placing a narrative into our culture that is destructive. There is absolutely nothing constructive here except for their own valuations. People are anxious, and people are rejecting this technology when they shouldn’t. It’s really, really cool. It’s part of us now. We made it. It’s part of us.

And so the boundary I always make—because I learned the hard way, as I put out in our new book on Stay Human, which is a very accessible chapter-by-chapter portrayal of our research with our personal stories woven into it. The biggest mistake I made was when I showed up in the wrong way. So I think the way you show up for others matters the most.

Brandon: Yeah, I think that’s critical. I mean, I want to go back just very briefly, as we’re closing, to the comment you made at the very beginning about what drew you to Dave, and that capacity to see another and to reflect back to them that they’re seen. I mean, that is what the sociologist Allison Pugh calls the last human job. It’s this connective labor. It’s not intelligence, but this is the frontier that we have to be really careful about not losing. This is the thing that, if we have to, as you say, fight to stay human, that maybe this is the real thing we need to learn how to protect and to cultivate. Because I don’t think, as you’re saying, our leaders are not doing that. Our society is forgetting how to do it and not really valuing it.

So I just wonder, as we close, if you have any thoughts about how we can still preserve that fundamental human capacity to see the other, to reflect to them that they’re seen, to center this sort of mutual relationality as we move forward in this new age.

Helen: Yeah, well, I think there’s two answers I have here. One is the obvious, which is the thing that makes us feel like we matter is when someone sees us, and that they see that because we feel like we matter when we know that someone else feels like we matter. So there’s that. That’s really obvious to the point that we sometimes overlook it.

The other one is a little bit more of a science answer. Because one of the things that I love that AI does is that, once we start to try and mathematize things, and then we find the hole where the math doesn’t work—because there’s a frontier and the math can’t go past that frontier—that our values are ephemeral. They resist that codification. They resist that putting into math. And we’ve seen this. We’ve seen that when you mathematize things, you’re able to reason more precisely about them. But then there’s the slippery frontier that moves away and becomes ephemeral.

So in sort of 2018, when everything was about AI bias and how the vision models were treating people of color and women and what have you, that we started to reason more precisely about the way that we as a society saw these other groups. This will happen with AI. We will constantly be — that’s why we’re talking so much about intelligence. Because it’s made the line mathematized. And then there’s this bit after it that says, well, what’s intelligence?

The next thing that this is going to happen on — I don’t make many predictions, but I’m going to make this one. The next thing that this is going to happen on is care. The reason I say this is because there is already a new sort of science forming in psychology around the science of care. What does it mean to care? Alison Gopnik, from UC Berkeley, has started to talk about this. She talks about the explore–exploit trade-off. That as a child, you’re exploring; as an adult, you exploit. Your job as an adult is to take care of that child so that they can explore, so they can gather data, so that they can make all these mistakes.

Now she has started to talk about this third part of our lives, which is about care and what we do now as we become older adults. Actually, our job is care and what that means. She’s thinking about that very scientifically. Of course, as soon as you start thinking about it scientifically, someone’s going to want to make an equation about it. And as soon as someone makes an equation about it, we start to reason more precisely about it. And then as we do that, we start to see that, oh, there’s actually something here we don’t quite understand, so let’s go study it.

So I think that we’re going to start thinking about this idea of care in a much more precise way. We’re going to start valuing it. My hope is that we will start to see that where we care for others actually has real value, that we can think about much more in a sort of an economic frame. That might break us out of this sort of automation of thought, as opposed to automation of anything else. So that’s sort of where I sit as a sort of frontier.

Brandon: Dave, do you have anything you might want to add there on that note?

Dave: Yeah. I mean, I guess back to your question on being seen, there’s a possibility that AI systems will see us in some way. Right? There is some level of recognition that you feel when it has a memory of a last conversation. There’s definitely a sort of question about whether there’s a possibility for an AI to have a theory of mind about humans, or a theory of mind about other AI systems. So there’s a certain level of that. But there is something about being seen that I think is something that, A, we don’t really understand. What does it mean? Why do you feel like some people really see you and others really don’t? Do they not see anyone, or is it just something about the combination of you two as individuals, or in that moment, or in that context or something, where it’s like, that person just doesn’t get me? Right?

Brandon: Yeah.

Dave: We have no explanation for that. Nothing. Right? But it’s something that’s so fundamental.

Helen: We only have attention, which is a very surface level part of this.

Dave: Exactly. It’s so important to being human. Machines in the tech industry have been able to find that point of attention and have been able to monetize that. Maybe there’s something else there that the machine will be able to do. But I think there is a great mystery in the meaningfulness of being seen. I think that that is incredibly important one-on-one. That’s incredibly important as organizations, as groups, as a society. That’s what holds humanity together in a lot of ways—that we just feel seen by each other.

So if you abstract everyone and you put everybody in their own little cube that’s only talking to the machine, and you’re not talking to any people anymore, how are you ever going to feel seen? How are you going to feel that sense of attachment? How are you going to feel that bonding with an organization? How are you going to feel connected to a community and to a society? And so my hope is that we don’t abstract that away. Because that’s where the true meaning is. That’s where the true value is.

Brandon: Brilliant. Well, David, Helen, thank you so much. This has been really fantastic. We’ve learned a lot. Where can we point our viewers and listeners to learn more about your work?

Dave: So our website is artificialityinstitute.org. We have all of our publications on a subdomain there called journal.artificialityinstitute.org. You can find us on all the socials. Connect with us on LinkedIn. You can watch lots of videos, especially right now from Helen a lot, on YouTube, TikTok—

Helen: And Instagram.

Dave: —and Instagram. All those links are on our website. We love communicating with people. I’d encourage people who want to go deeper into these conversations. We have a digital community which we host. It’s using a product called Circle, if people are familiar with it. You can find a link to that on our website. It’s just slash community. Fill in a little form, because we try to keep it somewhat managed. Join us, because that’s where our community comes together to talk about these things much more deeply.

Brandon: Amazing. Well, thank you so much. It’s been really a pleasure.

Dave: Thank you.

Helen: Well, thank you for having us on.

This is part 2 of my conversation with Helen and Dave Edwards, co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization that helps people stay human in the age of AI. They explore how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to be human. Through story-based research, education, and community, they help people ch…

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Artificial intelligence is not only changing what we can do, but may be changing how we think. As AI systems increasingly participate in writing, reasoning, and decision-making, it becomes more urgent to ask what it means to retain human agency and ensure we’re not losing our fundamental capabilities.

My guests today, Helen and Dave Edwards, have been working seriously on this question.

Helen and Dave Edwards are co-founders of the Artificiality Institute, a nonprofit research organization that helps people stay human in the age of AI. They explore how AI changes the way we think, who we become, and what it means to be human. Through story-based research, education, and community, they help people choose the relationship they want with machines, so they remain the authors of their own minds.

Before founding the Artificiality Institute, they co-founded Intelligentsia.ai, an AI-focused research firm acquired by Atlantic Media. Helen previously led large-scale technology and transformation efforts in critical infrastructure, while Dave spent years shaping creative tools at Apple and investing in emerging technologies as a venture capitalist at CRV and an equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley and ThinkEquity.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. The origins of Artificiality Institute

2. How AI is already reshaping the way we reason, write, create, and make decisions

3. What happens to human reasoning and decision-making when AI becomes part of our thinking process

4. The difference between “drift” and intentional authorship when working with AI

5. Cognitive sovereignty as the central challenge of the AI era

6. How can people use AI deeply and skillfully

7. The concept of symbolic plasticity and how AI can reshape the frameworks we use to understand the world

To learn more about Helen and Dave’s work, you can find them at:

https://artificialityinstitute.org/

Books and resources mentioned:

The Artificiality, AI Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution (by Helen Edwards)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

How do they navigate this process? Is it right to call this process “innovation”? And besides religions adapting internally, how do they contribute to what we ordinarily consider innovation, say in business or technology? And has “innovation” itself become a quasi-religious criterion of worth today?

My guest in this episode has done considerable work to address these questions.

Dr. Marco Ventura is Professor of Law and Religion at the University of Siena, and has long worked on questions of freedom of religion or belief in European and international law. He’s advised the European Parliament, the OSCE, and several governments on religion and rights; directed the Center for Religious Studies at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento; and chairs the G20 Interfaith Working Group on Religion, Innovation, Technology, and Infrastructures. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including From Your Gods to Our Gods and Nelle mani di Dio: La superreligione del mondo che verrà. Over the past decade, he has helped shape an emerging field examining the encounter between religion and innovation.

In our conversation, Marco argues that innovation in a religious context is not simply about adopting new technologies. It is about the deeper question of how traditions renew themselves. One of the metaphors he turns to is the famous story of St. Francis of Assisi hearing the call to “repair my church.” Francis initially interpreted this quite literally, setting about rebuilding a crumbling chapel with his own hands. Only later did it become clear that the deeper task was not architectural but spiritual: renewing the life of the Church itself. For Marco, that story captures the dynamic of religious innovation. Sometimes renewal begins with repairing a small structure. Sometimes it leads to reimagining the entire mission.

Marco pushes back against the idea that innovation is simply synonymous with technology. Many of the most important forms of innovation in religion are social rather than technological: new ways of organizing communities, new forms of dialogue across traditions, and new frameworks for engaging global ethical challenges. That is why he and his colleagues chose the language of “innovation” rather than simply “technology.” The point is not only to track new tools, but to understand how religious actors themselves participate in shaping the moral and institutional frameworks that govern emerging technologies. And they argue that it is important, when studying this relationship, to look at not only innovation “in” religion, but also religion “in” innovation, and innovation “as” religion.

In a world where global agendas around technology and infrastructure are increasingly set by corporations, Marco argues that religious communities have an important role to play. They bring traditions of moral reflection, long historical memory, and deep concern for human dignity to help guide innovation toward more humane ends.

You can listen to the full conversation in two parts (here and here) wherever you get your podcasts, watch the episode on YouTube (click image below), or read the unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: Hi, Marco. It’s really great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Marco: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Brandon: Yeah, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. So I usually like to ask my podcast guests, when we start, to share a story about an encounter with beauty from their childhoods. And so I wonder what kind of story came to your mind when I posed that question.

Marco: Well, this is probably not early childhood, but slightly later, when I was an early teenager. I grew up in Perugia, which is a city in Italy, very close to Assisi, the place of St. Francis. Growing up in a Catholic Church, we used to go to Assisi and visit the place. At the time—say, mid- to late ‘70s—there were a lot of newly-established, pretty spontaneous Christian communities on the mountain of Assisi, which is called Monte Subasio. I remember one visit which really struck me and which was really defining for my life. It was a visit to this place—a very simple, a very spontaneous community, not definitely Catholic even, more generally Christian, sort of into denomination. There was a little chapel, sort of a Romanesque chapel style of the place.

Within this chapel, which was just enlightened by a few candles, there was a painting by a contemporary painter. So in that sort of traditional environment, Romanesque church, very much of natural surroundings, all of a sudden, I saw this image of Christ in a contemporary art style. Very colorful, very bright, very modern, even postmodern, really avant-garde contemporary art. This was, to some extent, to me, I felt it. I really felt there was something which was complete and perfect in that experience, which I would now consider—well, of course, also for the sake of our conversation—a sort of perfect balance, a moment of grace about the balance between something old and traditional, made of man genius, in a way, the Romanesque architecture going back in centuries, but also naturalistically very powerful in the context of Monte Subasio. And at the same time, you also had the modern and contemporary genius and the idea that a very modern painting could fit in that place, which really spoke to both my need to be in touch with my time in the future, while feeling that my spiritual quest could be rooted in a long-lasting effort of mankind.

Brandon: Wow. Yeah.

Marco: This is the episode that comes to my mind.

Brandon: Yeah, that sounds fantastic. It seems to integrate not just tradition and innovation, but also the sense of a future-minded, like a longer-term, sustainable way in which the tradition can adapt and survive and extend itself in some kind of creative way.

Marco: You remember that one of the early experiences that changed the life of St. Francis was the encounter with a church in ruin. In my imagination of the time, it would have been exactly more or less the same case. You know, this little chapel somewhere, that very place, or a few meters away. When St. Francis had this experience, it is said to have heard a voice, a voice telling him, “This is the church. This is my church. We have to repair my church.” So there’s a sense of something broken to be repaired, something ruined to be restored. The fact that this could be done in modern times—not just by recreating the things exactly as they might have been in the past, in a sort of pristine state, but as they can be, imagining a new way for the future—this is also, I believe, very powerful. So “repair my church,” in that case, which of course can be a metaphor of a much broader meaning, it doesn’t necessarily point at just looking at the past. It’s really about looking at the future, in a sense, which is what the spirituality of St. Francis was all about, by the way. So that’s where I grew up. That’s where I grew up in all senses—not just geographically, but also spiritually.

Brandon: Wow. That’s profound, yeah. Thank you.

Talk a little bit about your career trajectory. I mean, what drew you to the study of law and then to that relationship between law and religion and then eventually to this topic of innovation? Could you just trace for us a little bit of that journey?

Marco: Yes, I’ve always been interested in the technological challenge to religions in general, Christianity in particular—and, being Italian, the Catholic Church even more particularly. Of course, my generation in Italy was strongly impacted by the debate on abortion and legalization or decriminalization of abortion in Italy. Catholics were somehow divided about the issue. So this was a time of debate and even renewal in the Catholic Church. In the end, the law was adopted and even voted for confirmed in a referendum. I’m not going into any legal technicalities here. But there was really a strong popular support in a country which was, at the time, at least formally much more Catholic than today—which means that Catholics were in favor. This was a crucial distinction at the time, not necessarily of abortion as such—this was not the point—but on the right to choose protected by the state. Well, in that context, of course, abortion was not that much about technology. It was about medicine. At the time, some early already emergence of bioethical discussions. So, of course, that was a time after the Second Vatican Council where bioethical and sexual moral issues were very much under discussion.

But when I then, in ‘89, started my PhD in Strasbourg, in France, I thought that the debate on assisted reproduction, which was exploding at the time, could be the ideal place for me and the ideal subject for me to develop that investigation, that research. So it was going back very much to developments in especially Western Europe about abortion rights. But technology was now playing a very relevant role in assisted reproduction. I mean, in 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church adopted a document which basically condemned all forms of assisted reproduction. So there was a reference. I was doing my legal research, my legal studies. So that was very interesting from a legal perspective. Plus, I was in France. France was starting the discussion, which then led, in 1994, to the adoption of the bioethical laws. In that context, I started taking this strong interest for the encounter of technologies—in that case, the human body and religion. So this was really the starting, the initial point. Then I developed it through biotechnologies. So this traveled after my PhD into biotechnology. Little by little, digital technologies became more and more relevant. One example of that transition, that journey, in terms of interest and investigation from technologies applied to the human body discussion of the ‘80s, into a more general interest about technology. And I think that’s where my interest in religion and innovation is really rooted. That was the train to experience. I don’t know if you want me to already take that or you want to ask me something.

Brandon: Yeah, feel free to say a bit more.

Marco: I had the opportunity to write a report to the European Parliament on the perspectives about the patentability of human materials. That was in the early 2000s. So it was already transitioning, as I mentioned, from assisted reproduction to a much broader work, on the patentability of the human.

Then we can jump almost 15 years later. I was appointed as the director of a research center in a northern Italian research institute, which is called the Fondazione Bruno Kessler. My task was to actually rethink the mission of a small center for religious studies in the context of a pioneering institution for research on ICT, technologies of information and communication, in Europe. Because FBK was one of the early places for even artificial intelligence in the late ‘80s in Europe.

The work that had been done in this Center for Religious Studies was already very strongly focused on a conversation with engineers and computer scientists. So it was a pretty easy task from my side to make it more relevant, to give some shape, because that’s what I did with the group of researchers. We just gave a different shape to what had been done already in advance. And when it came to find a way, an efficient way, to describe what it was all about, the idea came not to just focus on technology—not technology and religion, not internet and religion—but rather to broaden the scope of the investigation, I think, of innovation as the key word and concept. So the center was reframed as a center for the research and action on the encounter of religion and innovation.

Brandon: You said a bit about what the term innovation means in that sense and how did you all define it. Were there any controversies around the use of that term and the choice of that term?

Marco: Well, of course, technology is important. To some extent, the term “innovation” was adopted because it clearly pointed to technology. But at the same time, we didn’t want to just take technology, which seem to us to be very flat and somehow superficial in terms of where we wanted our research and action to go. Innovation is technology, but innovation is also beyond technology. And so our understanding of innovation as we then worked it out was, on the one end, innovation in science and technology for the business—the more sort of traditional understanding of innovation—but also social innovation. This was very, very important for our group.

Now, these two concepts are still conventional concepts of innovation, both of them. There’s a, of course, community of reference, of course, with strong differences. The way social innovation is understood at the University of Stanford is not the same as it is understood at the Commission of the European Union, of course. But it is a sort of technical expression. It’s a conventional expression. Social innovation refers to a debate, to a community, to literature. And even more so, of course, innovation in science and technology for the business. So this really was the core of our work. But because of the, I’ll say, social and cultural salience of this use of the word innovation, we know then that that word travels. That word is then looked at as a reference in linguistic and conceptual from communities, research communities, and people, and possibly organization, which do not focus on innovation as it’s specifically defined. So we can then think of theological innovation, or legal innovation, or spiritual innovation. This was also a part of our mission to some extent.

So we divided—this was our approach, to divide—the understanding and definition of innovation in two categories. One category is conventional innovation, which will go from innovation of science and technology to social innovation. On the other side, innovation as a term which is used without a specific accepted meaning in a given context, which is still used significantly so.

Brandon: Your group convened a number of workshops and experts from really a variety of domains. And then you came up with a position paper that really, I think, is quite influential in setting out an agenda, mapping a conceptual framework, as well as an agenda for research on this theme. Would you be able to summarize perhaps some of the key highlights of that position paper and the conclusions that your group arrived at?

Marco: Yeah. Well, first of all, as myself a legal expert on religion, my work is strongly influenced by policies on religion—public policies or governmental policies of religion. Just think of religious freedom issues, for instance, to policies of religious authorities and religious organizations, faith-based organization. I wanted this sense of strategizing and positioning to be center in our work. In other words, our work was not understood as a merely speculative work. Our interest was to engage actors, to be able to talk to actors.

Brandon: To inform policy primarily?

Marco: Yeah, in terms of listening from actors and engaging with actors. This is why the Sustainable Development Goal agenda was important. Because, of course, the framework at the UN level and, of course, in other contexts had emerged by that time as a framework of reference based on innovation. At the same time, we were observing an increasing and growing mobilization from the religious actor’s side to have a voice at that table in that context. So we really wanted to start our position paper by the acknowledgement that we were observing both trends—a trend which puts innovation at the center of growth and at the center of the SDG’s challenge and, on the other side, religions wanting to play a role in that context.

So this is how we formulated our central question. If religions want to have a voice at the SDGs, in the effort towards the SDGs, that effort needs to be based on innovation. How will we connect innovation and religion? That’s the first image, the first graphic figure, that we wanted in the position paper. Then the second step was: How do we conceptualize the encounter of religion innovation? We adopted a triangular shape to express this encounter, starting with how religious communities and traditions understand and experience innovation within—through their resources, through their capital, through their dynamics. And then moving to the second corner, the second dimension, which is how then religions contribute to innovation in society, in the market. And third, a third corner, a third dimension: How does innovation per se can become a faith, can become a quasi-religion or a religion?

Finally, third step, we offered 11 recommendations. We tried to sort of concentrate the outcome in a set of recommendations which are methodological recommendation, possibly guiding reflection, but also the encounter of actors. One very important point for us, which is probably very telling in terms of the work, was the 11th recommendation. So a sort of closing close, which is: when you engage with innovation and when you engage with religion, let’s keep it as open-ended as possible. You don’t need to be the progressive pushing religion to necessarily change in one direction of the other. So let’s make room for conservatives in this discussion. Let’s make room for the language of tradition. At the same time, you don’t need to be an innovation guy. You don’t need to be an enthusiastic, if not, a fanatic of innovation, to be involved in this discussion. We want the discussion to be critical of innovation. So this was our closing recommendation: Let’s make room for a critique of innovation. Let’s make room for a critique of religion from all possible sides.

Brandon: Great. Could you perhaps share any of the tensions within the group that emerged, any points of disagreement, maybe especially around the use of the term innovation? Because certainly, there are, in some religious communities, I think, a lot of suspicion around the concept of innovation. But it would also in the European context, just because of its baggage, that it’s tied to the world of business and capitalism, particularly Americanism around it. I’m curious to know what kinds of tensions emerged in critiques of that concept of innovation?

Marco: Well, Brandon, I would use an example here, okay?

Brandon: Sure.

Marco: Let’s think of any high-tech lab in Germany, or France, or Italy. Let’s figure out, let’s imagine the people at their desk or at their screens and the people who do innovation in their different capacities and roles. Let’s assume that that lab is an industrial lab, without any faith orientation at all at any level, okay? Can we imagine that someone in that workforce, in that lab, has a spiritual view, has a faith orientation? Well, I suppose that there will be someone. Not all of them. All of them would have their orientation, their worldview, however you categorize it. How do we categorize that person?

Well, this would be the more easy example to give. Let’s imagine that one of them is a Muslim, or that she is a Hindu, or even beyond that. You don’t need that person to be clearly belonging to any official faith. How do we make sense of their presence in the lab? Can we categorize the contribution of that man or that woman to that lab, to that enterprise of innovation, somehow connected to religion and innovation? This is the challenge. This is the challenge that we face in my group, which is a challenge of categorization. Because of the novelty and challenge of this categorization, it’s a challenge in terms of lack of state of the art, in terms of lack of literature. Because if you don’t frame your research in those terms, there’s no literature. And has this not been done, there’s no literature.

Serious researchers will somehow stop at that, simply because it’s not being done. And when you work out a deduction — because mind is a deduction. Of course, we have various hobbies. I’m not saying that nothing has been done. But very little has been done. You really need to look for that little, starting with some assumptions from some hypothesis. This is the biggest challenge. But I’m extremely grateful to my group of researchers—extremely, extremely serious. Because they were really challenging me at this level in terms of even the reputation of our lab, even the reputation of our research group. How can we move in that direction with no literature, with no state-of-the-art? How can you do that?

Well, in the end, we were somehow able to move forward. We used some references in digital religions sometimes, some projects, some partnership with the tech guys within our institution. Then we also ran ourselves some interviews. So when we wrote a policy paper for the EU, we referred very much to interviews that we had run with respondents, with faith-based respondents. Some of their statements were actually in the paper. I remember a statement from a Jehovah’s Witness person, a scientist, a scientist who qualified himself as a Jehovah’s Witness, who said, “Of course, what I do with artificial intelligence as an engineer belongs to my faith.” He gave some theological explanation on how this was playing out. And so we were able somehow to go beyond that difficulty. But we needed to fully acknowledge that objection, to fully acknowledge that challenge. Because that’s a serious objection and that’s a serious challenge.

Brandon: I suppose when you’re building a field that doesn’t exist, this is going to always be the state of affairs, where there really isn’t an established body of work. Yeah, I mean, I think perhaps Benoît Godin was one of the few scholars who had been working on this theme, but not very many others. I think it still remains a challenge, even in a number of disciplines, to see this as a fruitful lens through which one can study religion. Aside from the question of literature, there do seems to be a number of other obstacles. I think, yeah, there’s still an uphill battle to try to build such a field.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everyone, that’s a great place to stop the first half of our conversation.

In the second half, we turn more directly to: the beauty and burdens of this work, the difficulties of building a new field of study, the way markets and technologies function as rival meaning systems, the tensions between resistance and retrieval in religious responses to innovation, and the risk of political polarization. We also hear why Marco thinks that artists should be crucial partners in reimagining our economic and religious futures.

See you next time.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Beauty at Work. This is the second half of my conversation with Professor Marco Ventura on innovation and religion. Please check out the first half if you haven’t already.

In the second half, we’re going to turn towards the burdens and pitfalls of focusing on innovation, including how markets and technological change can act as competing religious systems, the ambivalent responses of religious actors. We’re also going to look at how practices on the ground, like offering phone charging towers at a papal youth gathering, could reveal more about the future of religion and technology than even the most sophisticated ethical statements.

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Do you see this as worthwhile overall in the face of, again, the conceptual baggage associated with the term? It’s very clear when you’re talking about technological innovation and trying to say, well, how do religions or spiritualities contribute to the furthering, or even maybe propose obstacles to technological innovation, et cetera, one can certainly examine that kind of work. But once you’re looking at religion as itself, the domain in which innovation happens, the big question is: Is that really the right category, or are we talking about something else? I wonder how you all had made sense of that, or what you think about the scope of that kind of inquiry. Is it worthwhile?

Marco: Yeah, of course, you have a language which is a specific language—the language of innovation—and then you have the alternative language of that specific tradition you’re examining. This is something that we absolutely wanted to take into account. So we invited a few experts on Islam to provide us some insights and references about the use of terms like bid‘ah, which is usually associated to a very negative connotation, as a departure from the path that God has indicated to mankind. But I still think that innovation as its heuristic, in the sense that to some extent, innovation is the modern and contemporary reference out there. You can oppose it. That’s my point about opposition. But your opposition cannot ignore that innovation is the language and the concept of what happens out there. Out there, of course, I mean, once again, in the market, in the lab, in the society, basically.

Brandon: I mean, even if you’re doing a doctorate in theology, you have to make an argument as to why your argument is, your dissertation, is innovate. I mean, that becomes just the taken for granted criterion of worth.

Marco: Yeah, exactly. I think this is very important. It is really an exercise in awareness and control as much as possible. So once again, it’s not an exercise in buying into something. It’s quite the contrary. It’s being aware of the need to position yourself, and explain, if you adopt innovation, why you’re adopting that terminology. So that’s how I would see it very much. In order to do that, you really need to build your field and expertise and, at the same time, a conversation with the world, the community of experts on religion—religious studies and theology, of course, but also sociology of religion, anthropology, philosophy, history, of course. But at the same time, you also need the other guys, to bring the other guys into the conversation. This is why it was so important—well, for me, personally and the group in Trento—to be a small group devoted to religion in a bigger organization, where we would come to be acquainted day after day with engineers, computer scientists, physicists, or sociologists also, and philosophers. So you really need both, in my view. You need the religious people. Well, of course, also the religious people, in the sense of the believers.

Brandon: Sure.

Marco: But of course, that’s an additional layer to what is needed in terms of methodology. But it is really a way to open up the field. And of course, I have nothing against those who prefer to adopt a different terminology. So, at the time, when we had this discussion about how to define terminologically our mission, Vienna University was somehow changing its initiative on religion. They ended up adopting the transformation word. So they redefined the endeavor in terms of looking at the transformation of religion, which is perfectly fine. But there’s a difference there of course. Transformation is probably more neutral, whereas innovation means that we want to engage directly and openly with the way the contemporary world of science and industry and the market and society and public policies is framed. That’s the difference

And the FBK, I want to mention this, under the fantastic leadership of my successor, Massimo Leone, who is an expert in semiotics, has got a great deal ahead and has developed — there’s a recent special issue of religion devoted to artificial intelligence, a religion which has been co-directed by one of the researchers. Actually, the one who made the link with Benoît Godin, his name is Boris Soreme. I wish to acknowledge his great contribution. But it’s everybody, everybody there. There have been fantastic workshops and research activities around new topics all related to innovation. And so the experience is going on.

Brandon: Okay, that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, it seems that the category of innovation as religion is a very fruitful area of inquiry, and is for us to understand how just — I mean, maybe even 100 years ago, the term was seen pretty much universally with suspicion, right? Not just in a tradition like Islam, but even certainly in Christianity, and just generally even at the political level there. Whereas I think King Edward VI or VII, I can’t remember. Maybe Edward VI in the UK had issued a proclamation that thou shalt not innovate, because religious innovation is a threat to the political establishment, right? So going from there to this sort of pejorative understanding of innovation as just being a fad, or unserious, or certainly not something that one should see as desirable to now being the prime modality of expressing something as valuable. That shift seems really quite remarkable.

Marco: Well, you can ask the big question to religious individuals and communities, traditional organization, which is, how do you change? How will you understand change? How do you decide what kind of change is desirable and what’s not? What you add to that question when you formulate that in connection with innovation is: how do you want to change by reference to market-led change? How do you want to change by reference to how technology is changing? This is the additional layer which, in my view, is absolutely necessary.

Of course, it’s a challenge because is very demanding in terms of engaging the economy and engaging economics. At the same time, it’s demanding in terms of engaging technology and engaging the market. Of course, while engaging with those dimensions, religions might also feel — well, religions as an actor is not very accurate. But for the sake of clarity here, religious actors might also feel that the contemporary market, innovation-based market, innovation-based research, science, technology, they represent a competitor. They represent a competitor of a system of meaning, a system of faith, a system of reference. This is where the third corner of the triangle, this innovation as religion is so important. It is yet another layer to our conversation which makes it very fruitful in my view. Of course, it is difficult to categorize it. This is not a question of formulating the market as a church.

Brandon: Certainly—

Marco: Although, well, one of the early guests that we had in 2016, or 10 years ago, was Harvey Cox. Harvey Cox is a theologian at Harvard Divinity School. At the time, he had just published his book, The Market as God. That was very important. That’s a thorough study about the equivalence of market items, market elements, market ingredients, and religion and faith. There’s a lot which has been done already also in that direction, in the direction of a competition—a sort of religious competition, to some extent—between the market, science, technology and religious actors. Of course, a competition. But for someone, it might also be a partnership. Who knows? This is where we then differ to actors. Of course, engage with actors. But as a scientist, as scholars, what we do at that level is that we open up the field. We offer some reflections. We are happy and available for discussion. But then I think that you have reached a threshold where you really need to know—this is also fascinating task—where you if you want to stop there, or if you want to go past that threshold, which would imply that you have an agenda. You have an agenda to push actors in a certain direction or another agenda. For instance, how to reconcile the business and churches, or the business and what in the Islamic world, how to reconcile those. And then under which conditions you want that reconciliation to happen.

Brandon: And for what reasons, right? I do think that there’s a worthwhile question to ask around the ways in which this sort of, and I really like this, this recognition of the market and technological innovation as meaning systems, as competing religious entities perhaps. Certainly, it’s true. There’s research showing that once you have the abolition of blue laws—at least, in the United States, the businesses used to be closed on Sundays, and once the businesses are open, then people can go shopping instead of going to a church or to religious service, right? So that’s a direct competitor. Sports, perhaps or another, another competitor for a lot of people as a meaning system, even for families. You used to go to church, but now you go to the soccer game, and your kids are playing. So those are competing as well. And then certainly, technological innovation, where questions of whether spending time on screens or new gadgets is a substitute for religious practices such as silence or prayer, et cetera.

And so in the face of all of these challenges, certainly, you do have a resistance. Like with now, with the rise of AI systems, a lot of religious actors who say we need to resist this. We have Paul Kingsnorth has this new book, Against The Machine, saying you need to push back against all of this stuff, this surveillance capitalism, and the kind of techno utopia that is trying to be built, and to maybe return to forms of tech-free life. I wonder how you see those sorts of responses the return to, in some part, growing pockets of the Catholic Church, the Latin mass. So these movements of trying to reclaim something from the past, to return to the past, or as sort of a mode of retrieval or mode of a retreat, now, do you see those also as types of innovations, or are they reactions to innovation? What scope is there for making sense of those concepts in relation to innovation?

Marco: Well, that’s a part of the investigation, that this to be a part of the investigation. The most relevant distinction I would draw here — I hope I’m not eluding your question.

Brandon: That’s fine.

Marco: The most interesting distinction I would draw is between—well, very old fashion kind of putting it—leading by word and leading by example. So what we observe, it’s probably very European. It might be less so in the US or elsewhere. But in Europe, there’s, of course, churches, for instance, or other faith-based actors. They are very reluctant to cross the line and become actors in the economy, for instance. Although German churches are the first employer after the state. Well, once again, it very much depends on categories and assumptions. But in general, this is not where you go in Europe as a religious authority.

Very often, what religious authorities tend to do is to offer—sometimes dictate. Let’s say, offer—a normative framework. So when the European Union Commission consulted with religious actors in general on its, at the time, effort to build a normative framework on AI in particular, policy of Europe for the ecosystem of the trust, the ecosystem of excellence—these are the European categories—what they got from churches was basically an ethical framework. So this is normative ethical framework. I don’t want to be dismissive in this regard. I don’t underestimate the importance of their contribution and its conceptual depth, because that’s very interesting to go through. Great effort, by the way. But this is still in the paper to some extent. It’s leading by principles. Whereas what the real challenge, in my view, or the core challenge, would rather be answering the question, okay, that’s your ethical reference. But then, what do you do? What do you do with your capitals? What do you do with your human resources? What do you do in Catholic or Protestant universities, in your labs? This is something I have developed almost an obsession for. So the question is: what do you actually do? What do you offer?

Recently, during the Jubilee, there was a huge gathering of the youth in Rome. The decision was to put at the disposal of the youth, in this big, big, big open space where thousands of youths gathered, ways to recharge their smartphones. So towers were available to plug in for your smartphones and recharge your smartphones. I interviewed for an Italian newspaper. I interviewed a young Franciscan sister about that experience and without me asking the question. For once, I refrained myself for advancing the innovation. So I was silent on that. She picked that example. She picked that example, and she said, “I know that this might be debatable from a Christian perspective, but I think that at the end of the day, that was a sign of welcoming people.” So you see how she read that decision. She understood the decision, first and foremost, in terms of we are inviting people to feel well here, to feel welcome here. So it also depends. Well, this is a great lesson in terms of which meaning do you attach, which meaning do you want to be attached to some step, to some action. And for me, this kind of decision, understanding these debates, possible contrary voices, this is much more telling—I’m not going to be exaggerated. I’ve overstated here—much more important than a fantastic, elaborate, articulated statement about the ethics of AI. Also, because this is more challenging for actors, this is really where you push actors to come out, also to compromise themselves with reality, in a sense. You really need to show who you are. I know that this is difficult, but I think that this is where research, as well, needs to go.

There’s another, if I can mention this, there’s another aspect why I think that this is crucial. This is also where our discussion on freedom can be better placed. That’s where we can have our discussion on freedom, including religious freedom. If you understand innovation in these terms, innovation and religion can really be very beneficial for a renewed discussion of: What’s the meaning of religious freedom? What’s religious freedom for? How do you connect religious freedom to responsibility? Of course, there’s a danger that religious freedom is transformed into something utilitarian. I’ve written about this. I’m totally against a kind of understanding of religious freedom and condition to qualify in the sense that if you don’t show me that you are useful, you don’t deserve to be protected. This is a danger we need to avoid. But we also need to avoid the danger that religious freedom is not attached to responsibility from the religious actor side. I think that a discussion on innovation is very beneficial in this sense.

Brandon: Thank you. Perhaps, can I ask you a little bit about the downsides or the pitfalls of focusing on innovation—the burdens of innovation, as it were? Is something lost when we privilege this term? Do we lose, perhaps, an attentiveness to stability, to maintenance, or to some other modality that is really important to recognize? Yeah, I’m just curious to know. Or any other sort of downsides you see to this concept?

Marco: Well, if we are careful not to make that confusion, I mean, not to falling into the misunderstanding that innovation and religion is about pushing religion to innovate, I don’t really see this danger. I mean, quite the contrary, religion and innovation is an invitation and encouragement to religious actors and other actors to come out with ideas and commitment to stability, as you say, to tradition and stability and permanence.

I would rather see the politicization as a danger. Of course, there’s a lot with this strong polarization around the capitalistic model, about consumerist society, about the market. It’s very difficult to engage in a meaningful discussion, while keeping oneself from being lost in the polarization, to actually being polarized. This is where I really see a danger. Because these topics, if you take them seriously, if you engage with them, they are so polarized that it’s very difficult. Even when you are very aware of what’s at stake, it’s really very difficult not to fall in the trap of belonging to one tribe or the other, one pole or the other. So this is really very difficult—very, very difficult—when you engage with the economy.

I recently interviewed a French Jesuit, who was for some time an economist actually, was a chief economist of a public agency for development in France. His name is Gaël Giraud. He’s written a very interesting book from a Catholic theological perspective on the commons. Very strong critique of private property, strong critique of state property, and some opening with a theological basis to commons. Of course, very strongly rooted in Pope Francis’ thoughts. Now, the reason why I interviewed him was that the book has been translated. The first part of the book has been translated by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, which means the Vatican publisher. So just to one author, it’s something institutional to some, to some extent. We had a very interesting discussion around this conceptualization of the commons as a possible future way for communities to own goods. That is time about rethinking private property. The discussion world is extremely, extremely stimulating for me. At the same time, how do you keep the discussion free from political polarization, from politicization? That’s very difficult. Very difficult. That’s where I really see the danger.

Brandon: Thank you.

Marco, to close, do you have anything you want to add about where you see the promise of your own research, or where the field should go, in terms of this topic of religion and innovation? Anything else you want to add that you’ve not mentioned, in terms of what you’re excited about working on in the future or what needs to be done?

Marco: Well, I would go back to this memory that you asked me.

Brandon: Yeah, sure.

Marco: I think that artists might be a great partner for this research. Artists might be a very, a very great partner. We might want to hear from them and associate them to our research, which also implies engaging with their own way to understand the tradition in whatever art and new means of expression. So to close our conversation, I’ll really go back to that little Romanesque church in ruins, where contemporary arts could shine. It’s probably a good image for where we might go with our religion and innovation, with the ambition—that’s very ambitious as a statement—of repairing our economy, repairing our market, and repairing our religious communities as well. Artists might give us a pretty crucial contribution.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you. Marco, where can we direct our listeners and viewers to your work if they want to learn more about what you’re working on?

Marco: Well, I would say that they can look for religion and innovation position paper, FBK, 2019.

Brandon: We’ll share that in the show notes. Yeah, we’ll share that.

Marco: Yeah, that’ll be, still six years later, pretty seminal. I like to point at that document especially, as this was a collective work. So this is really a way from my side, once again, to credit all this work to the fantastic researchers that I had the pleasure and honor to work with in Trenton—which as I mentioned, was still very active. So you might also check FBK-ISR Institute, Center for Religious Studies. There’s still a lot of fantastic work and initiatives. Then, of course, we also have, at my university, University of Siena, something new especially also in the field of cultural diplomacy, which is another side to it. So you might also want to check the website of our initiative which is called The Cradle, which is a partnership funded under the German scheme of the European Union for cultural diplomacy, which is also a nice framework, a very stimulating framework, for directing the investigation of religion and innovation towards the future.

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. Marco, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure.

Marco: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Brandon.

This is part 2 of my interview with Dr. Marco Ventura, Professor of Law and Religion and Religious Diplomacy at the University of Siena in Italy.

Trained in bioethics and biolaw at the University of Strasbourg, Marco has advised the European Parliament, the OSCE, and various governments on the intersection of religion and rights. He directed the Center …

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We usually talk about innovation in the language of labs, markets, and technology. But can religions innovate? And can they contribute to innovation? What is the relationship between religion and innovation?

My latest guest has spent many years tackling these questions. Dr. Marco Ventura is Professor of Law and Religion at the University of Siena, advisor to the European Parliament and OSCE, and chair of the G20 Interfaith Working Group on Religion, Innovation, Technology, and Infrastructures

Marco directed Center for Religious Studies at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research institute with deep roots in ICT and early AI. There, he and his colleagues made a deliberate choice to focus on inquiry into “religion and innovation.” Why? Because innovation points to technology, but also extends beyond it, including social innovation and the broader ways the word travels into theology, law, and spirituality.

Their framework uses a triangle: (1) innovation in religion, (2) religion in innovation, (3) religion as innovation.

He also speaks candidly about the challenge of building a field with limited “state of the art.”

To learn more about Marco’s work, you can find him at:

• https://credo.unisi.it/about/secretariat-and-experts/person/marco

Links Mentioned:

• Religion, Innovation, Position paper, FBK 2019 - https://isr.fbk.eu/en/about-us/position-paper/

• Fondazione Bruno Kessler – https://www.fbk.eu/

• G20 Interfaith Forum – https://www.g20interfaith.org/

• Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) –

  https://www.osce.org/

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

We’ve entered a strange moment in which the most basic questions about being human are being reopened—not just by philosophers whose profession it is to care about these things, but by the technologies that increasingly mediate our relationships. As AI and automation spread, we’re finding ourselves asking not just what activities can be outsourced, but what must never be.

That’s what I wanted to explore in this episode of Beauty at Work with two guests who come at the problem from strikingly different angles.

Dr. Allison Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Last Human Job, an award-winning book that names and defends what she calls “connective labor”: the profoundly human work of “seeing the other” and reflecting that seeing back. This form of work generates dignity and belonging, and is increasingly threatened by pressures toward scripting, quantification, and efficiency.

Louis Kim spent decades leading innovation at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as VP of AI, before resigning to pursue an M.Div. at Duke to work in hospice and palliative care. His story is shaped by death and accompaniment—standing for hours at his father’s open casket funeral, hearing “a thousand versions of condolences,” and learning what presence can (and cannot) do. He also participates in Vatican-linked conversations about AI and healthcare, asking what forms of human encounter must remain non-negotiable.

In our conversation, Allison distinguishes connective labor from the better-known idea of “emotional labor.” Emotional labor is what happens when you manage feeling for a wage. Connective labor is different: it’s a “two-way street,” a mutual moment in which someone is seen and feels seen. It’s also everywhere: therapists and chaplains, but also baristas and dry cleaners and managers.

And yet, the pressures bearing down on this kind of work are real. Louis describes what it means to deliver layoffs in large organizations: scripts, euphemisms, procedural safeguards, and then the slow realization that what matters most is the ability to go “off script,” to be present without defensiveness, to honor dignity with a kind of nonverbal readiness. Systematization in such contexts is “an artifact of scale,” Louis argues, and depersonalization is already baked into modern life. What do we do about it, and what does it take to not become a perpetrator inside the system?

Allison identifies three drivers behind the wider push for scripting and quantification: systems-management thinking that wants to control the uncontrollable; institutional self-protection through performative box-checking; and the desire (sometimes understandable) to reduce the “chaos” of human unpredictability. These forces make the adoption of AI seem “inevitable” — but Allison pushes back against inevitability talk. Sometimes adoption is fast not because it’s destiny, but because people don’t really get to choose. And that’s why agency, regulation, and culture matter.

This episode is an attempt to name what is most fragile in us—our capacity to see and be seen—and to ask what kinds of institutional and technological futures protect that capacity rather than replace it because of its messiness and inefficiency.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), or watch the video of our full conversation or read an unedited transcript below.

Brandon: Hey, Allison. Hey, Louis. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. It’s really such a pleasure to have you with us.

Louis: Thanks, Brandon. Hi, Allison.

Allison: Thanks, Brandon. Hi, Louis.

Brandon: Great. Well, I thought this would be a really wonderful occasion to have a conversation on the relationship between technology and connection. This season of the podcast is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation. We’re looking at a lot of innovations that are happening in relation to how we connect with each other, how we relate to each other. So that’s one of the reasons I thought of bringing you both together into this conversation.

But before we go there, I want to ask you, as I do with all my podcast guests, to share a memory of a profound beauty from your childhoods or your early lives that remains with you till today. It doesn’t have to do with connection or relationship. It could. But any memory that comes to your minds? Perhaps, Louis, I’ll start with you, and then Allison.

Louis: Photography. So my dad gave me a camera, I guess, in third grade. Then later, I read books in photography. There are still images I remember from those books. I’m a photographer to this day.

Brandon: Do you have a particular image that stays with you or a memory of taking a particular kind of photograph?

Louis: Yeah, there’s a particular image in one of the books that was very geometrical. The lesson of the book was that we stopped seeing as adults. As children, we just delight. We don’t attach labels and words to things. It starts as children. And as you grow older, you lose that ability. So it was just a very simple thing, and still a lesson about seeing deeply.

Brandon: Wow. Great. Allison?

Allison: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this. I grew up in New York City, in a very large Catholic family. So the beauty, when you said beauty, actually, there was the ocean or that ballet class or something. But really, I was thinking about the kind of boisterous, kind of climate of our family dinners that were very ritualistic every night, very long. But that culminated in the kids all doing the dishes together to loud 1970’s music, that I still remember and cherish. So I think that it was a kind of, I want to say relational beauty, or I would say kind of climate of beauty, of relating to each other and doing this thing together. Yeah.

Brandon: Did you all get along at the time? When you say boisterous, was it just the volume, or were there tensions? I mean, I asked because I’ve got six kids. So it’s not a pleasant—

Allison: Oh, you do?

Brandon: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the constant bickering, the name calling, you know?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, there’s plenty of stories. I remember there’s one famous story of my oldest brother. He threw a knife at my oldest sister when there was a babysitter. I can remember them. My next oldest sister and I used to have long fights, that we would write long letters to each other about why the other person was wrong. So there’s plenty of conflict, but also a lot of good times—camping, various things.

Brandon: Well, I’m glad your memory of that environment is beautiful. It’s something I hope for my children. But presently, it’s not something that could be, yeah.

Allison: Yeah, I mean, I still love doing the dishes with my siblings.

Brandon: Wow.

Allison: I did that with my own kids. We had a thing, where the person who’s in charge of the pans gets to pick the music. We had this whole culture that I 100% was just copying my own parents—who were nowhere to be found. Like, as soon as there was dishes going on, they were somewhere else.

Brandon: That’s right. Yeah, that’s what we do as well. That’s amazing. I mean, the focus of our conversation is this brilliant book, Allison, The Last Human Job, on this concept of connective labor. Tell us how you got here. Because your trajectory is pretty interesting. You started as a journalist and then became a sociologist. Then now you’re exploring this particular modality of connection and why it’s at risk. Could you say a little bit about your trajectory, and what led you to this book?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I think this book was the dissertation I should have written—even though it took me 20 years to get there. Because it’s what I really deeply care about. The kind of proximate cause or the kind of immediate thing that led me there was actually a fight that I was embroiled in sociology about the value of in-depth interviewing. So when I do an in-depth interview, which is how I do my research, it often involves kind of just sitting and trying to elicit the other person’s truth through a kind of careful reflection of what I’m hearing, even if it’s not what they’re saying. So it’s like if I’m sensing some ambivalence, or unhappiness, or something underneath what they’re saying, I might name that thing. Then it actually opens them up. It opens up the experience. I do think it is like a kind of profound seeing. It does affect me just as much as it affects them. It’s exhausting, but very rewarding also.

After I was embroiled in this intellectual conversation about what is the value of in-depth interviewing, and are we just getting people’s rationalizations after the fact, I was like, “No, no, this is a valuable experience.” Then I was like, why is it valuable? Also, how do I teach it to others? How do I make it more systematic? How do I kind of scale it up as the, I don’t know, Silicon Valley people would call it? So all those questions really led me to thinking more deeply about what kind of work that is. So thinking about seeing it kind of everywhere—seeing it in the hairdresser, seeing it, of course, in the therapist, but also in your kid’s soccer coach, just in your everyday life, all over the place. So in that, I basically embarked on a journey of discovery, of like, oh, look, underneath all these wildly disparate occupations, people are kind of doing this same thing, this seeing of the other and kind of, I don’t know, co-producing this truth between people. I started to think not just about that, but how do we systematize it? How do we scale it up? Is it possible? Do you ruin it? How far can we go down that path? But you have to be able to teach it to others. It’s not something that you can just automatically assume someone is going to be born doing well. Anyway, those kind of tensions and questions were what fed me, what sent me, on this path.

Brandon: I really appreciate that you’ve named it as this same sort of process that’s happening for therapists, teachers, and chaplains and a lot of other contexts too. I think you say it’s not necessarily always a positive thing, that it could be perhaps manipulative, right? And so it’s not always just an authentic seeing of the other for the sake of the other. So, yeah, the concept of connective labor, I think, is really generative for us to sort of explore across these domains.

Louis, can I ask you to share perhaps your own trajectory and what drew you to — I think it’s pretty rare to have a corporate career in a company for as long as you have at Hewlett-Packard. I studied corporate professionals for a number of years, and would find people switching from firm to firm very quickly. That was almost an expectation that you would not really stick to one environment. There’s a sense of almost stagnation if people stay in one place too long. And so I’m curious as to what led you, first of all, to this field, to working in tech, what your experience was like there. What’s led you now to switch to something very different in terms of committing your life to do chaplaincy or hospice care, that sort of very connective modality of valuing human dignity?

Louis: I’ll keep the the HP part shorter. I think it’s probably the less interesting. But the quick answer for the longevity is I had a lot of different jobs. A good part of the tenure was leading teams with businesses that I had created. So it’s hard to leave. I’ve been in three different cities, including international posting. So it was very different cultures and very different companies in some ways.

As you referred to, I resigned from HP in August. I’m currently enrolled at Duke Divinity in their M.Div. program. That decision was a culmination of four or five years of discernment when I got exposed to end of life and palliative. I started volunteering for hospice about two or three years ago. Of course, the M.Div. sets you up for chaplaincy. So I’ll be done in about three to four years. The more chaplains I meet, the more I’m not as confident that I may be cut out for it. But it’s something that’s still drawing me as a calling. I apologize, by the way, if you hear a bell ringing. It’s our well-trained dog trying to get out.

Brandon: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Could you say a bit about what drew you to this field? Were there any people, any moments, that sort of influenced you? Because it really is such a stark pivot for somebody in the corporate world to consider, and I’m wondering what might have been some pivotal influences for you.

Louis: My parents died when I was relatively young. So that was a formative experience in terms of dealing with death. Then about three or four years ago, I met Lydia Dugdale—I think you both know—who wrote The Lost Art of Dying. So that book exposed me to the systemic issues around end of life and dying. Then I went through some hospice experiences with relatives, including being at the final breath of a very close relative. I just felt very grounded in those experiences. The cause itself just felt large, unaddressed relative to other things I had been exposed to. The choice inevitably, it just felt inevitable at some point. I guess that’s the definition of a calling.

Maybe one last thing that was a formative experience is: my father was killed in a car accident. He was a parish priest. He became a priest after my mom died. And so, at his funeral, his entire parish showed up. So it was over 1,200 people. At the open casket ceremony, the day before the funeral, my sister and I stood for four hours greeting the well wishers. And so I heard about 1,000 versions of condolences standing next to my dad’s casket for four hours. So that shaped a lot of thoughts about accompaniment, what comments and gestures were helpful, and which ones maybe not so helpful, even though people mean well. And so that was a very formative experience have shaped how I view accompaniment.

By the way, I’ve read Allison’s book, so there’s a lot of questions I have for her. One other thing I’ll just mention is, last month, I’ve been in Rome twice for some AI theology conferences on healthcare. The topic that we’ve ended up converging in with regards to Catholic theology is: what are the final roles with a human in the world of advancing AI? What are some of the criteria? Some of the things that we conversed on are rolled out with some of the things in Allison’s book.

Brandon: Well, I definitely want to ask you about that and about your role at the Builders AI Forum and what’s happening at the Vatican around these issues. Perhaps, Allison, could I ask you maybe to say a bit more about this concept of connective labor and its relation to this other term, that maybe people might be a bit more familiar with, emotional labor? There’s some sort of relationship, but it’s not quite the same thing. What, in particular, connective labor has to teach us about dignity, about belonging? What is its relationship to those terms?

Allison: Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Louis, for even reading it. I’m always gratified to hear about that.

So connective labor. In sociology and academia, there are a lot of terms for kind of emotional type work of all kinds. There’s the term affective labor. There’s all sorts—emotional labor, emotional quotient, emotional intelligence, et cetera. I thought that emotional labor is the big kahuna. It’s the thing that maybe started all of this, written by Arlie Hochschild. Her first articles were like 1977 and then she came out with her very famous book, The Managed Heart, in 1983. That captured the notion of when you have to control your emotions for a wage. It was a powerful contribution, because it was a way of capturing what felt different in service work compared to manufacturing. So in service work, she famously studied flight attendants. These are people who have to smile even when they don’t want to. Using ethnography and extensive interviews, she kind of documented how alienated these flight attendants became from their very selves, and how kind of corrosive that was for their well-being. Of course, this offers beautiful analogy to service work of all kinds—where you’re controlling how you might really feel, authentically feel, because you’re being paid to do so. You’re controlling that so that the other person has a good experience, feels good.

Well, connective labor is pretty different from that, even though it involves emotional labor, controlling your emotions for sure. Connective labor, as I define it, it really is about that reflecting the other process, that seeing the other, the bearing witness to the other person. It’s recognizing, acknowledging. I’m using all these words that many people have used in different ways. The other thing I want to say that is really important for me in this definition is that it’s a two-way street. It’s a kind of mutual moment of together. You are seeing the other, and the other person feels seen. And if they don’t feel seen, then it’s actually not a successful moment of connective labor. So it’s a two-way street, and it’s really powerfully about this seeing. The reason why there’s a little emotional labor in it is because you may feel — say, you’re a therapist at the VA, which I’ve spoken to many of them. They have a client who is suffering PTSD and has a lot of rage. They may not feel all sorts of warmth and affection towards all this rage that’s coming at them, but they are still engaged in a seeing project that offers some form of dignity to that other person, regardless of all the difficult emotion and problematic persona that that person is for them. So that kind of mutual process, that’s connective labor.

Now, the reason why it’s a little complicated—or probably depending on where your listeners are from, are they from academia? Are they just out there in the real world—it might be a little complicated because since the word emotional labor is such a felicitous word, people have, since that writing, since 1983, really applied it to everything that involves emotions in the workplace. I’m actually pretty open to it. So if we want to call emotional labor that big, huge umbrella thing, where it’s just like anytime there’s emotions in the workplace, that’s what I’m doing, I don’t mind saying connective labor is like a version, like under the umbrella, one kind of emotional labor that is done. But I do want to separate it from that kind of emotion management perspective, which was so beautifully captured originally in the 1983. So that’s why it’s a little complicated. Because the term itself has moved, and also it kind of is different depending on whether you’re talking to a regular person who reads the Atlantic or whatever and an academic person.

Brandon: I wonder if this is accurate or not, but it strikes me that one of the key differences might be that perhaps maybe a more performative element to emotional labor and maybe less of a mutuality, right? It seems like what you’re talking about is closer to Hartmut Rosa’s notion of resonance, where there is something that affects you and then you were affected by it. That isn’t a mutual interaction, which Rosa argues that you can’t really kind of make it happen in some way. It either happens or it doesn’t. You can certainly try. It seems like that’s what a good therapist is trying to do, is trying to make that connection happen. Even like as a parent trying to understand my child, sometimes it just doesn’t happen. I try to say that I’m hearing this, and they’re like, “No, that’s not what I’m saying.” It just fails. It’s not that mutual interaction. So I wonder if that mutuality then becomes really critical. But if so, it does seem like, as you say, sort of magic. There’s a thing we can control and, I think, we can’t control.

Allison: That’s interesting. Also, I do want to say one thing about the belonging and dignity part, which was part of your original question. Because as an academic, I get all excited about parsing with the definitions.

Brandon: Sure, sure.

Allison: But really, the kind of crux of your question was about, like, what is the role this has in belonging and dignity? That’s the kind of end product or the result of doing connective labor well. The other thing is, as I mentioned at the outset, it’s all around us. It’s all over. It’s your barista. It’s your dry cleaner. There’s all kinds of mundane, low-level commerce, retail, or whatever interactions that can involve a momentary jewel of connecting, of seeing the other. Those kinds of things build our little units of belonging that I think are very powerful for knitting us together as a community. I have increasingly come to think that this is the heart of everyday experience that we need to preserve. And so I’m not just talking about these deeply meaningful relationships of the therapist, or the teacher, or the chaplain in the hospital or whatever. So I’ll stop there because I’m talking too much.

Brandon: No, thank you. No, that’s very helpful. Yeah, it’s not just the moments of profound encounter, but also the simple interactions with a checkout counter person, right, and why that’s valuable.

Louis, I’d love to know, in your experience of leadership in the corporate world where this kind of connective labor has been manifested, is it important for leadership? Is that something that you’ve had to, either how have you experienced it as a giver or a recipient of this mode of connection? Perhaps, what are the challenges to this kind of connective labor in the corporate environment?

Louis: Well, some examples that come to mind is when a group or a job goes away, and you have to inform either an individual or a team that they’re going to get laid off. I had to do a lot of that. There are perfunctory ways to do it. There are scripts that you can follow, which are necessary when you’re in an organization of 10, 20, 30,000 people. Over time, as I’ve gotten older, I found myself to go maybe off script, just sort of be in the moment, and avoid euphemisms. I think an important element, something that I think Allison is referring to, is there’s just a presence that is necessary. That’s part of, I guess, honoring dignity with presence. Sometimes it’s nonverbal. It’s just fully being there and ready to receive the moment even when it’s difficult. There’s almost, I don’t know, ontological. I don’t know if that’s the right word. But beyond just making the situation more useful or having a better outcome, there’s just the fact that we’re human and deserving of dignity requires a certain sort of state of being versus what you need to say to accomplish a certain task. So I don’t know if the word is ontology, but it really transcends what you’re trying to accomplish. So my corporate experience, I would say layoffs kind of come closest to what I experienced volunteering for hospice side. Of course, it’s very, very different, but emotionally, very, very charged moments.

Brandon: I suppose it is a kind of death in some sense that you’re dealing with, right, in that case?

Louis: Yeah.

Brandon: So I want to ask both of you about one of the sources of pressure that, Allison, you mentioned in your book, which is the increasing pressure for scripting, checklists, and quantifications. So you’ve got these sort of twin pressures. One is to collect as much data as possible on all aspects of our human life, and then to have all of the scripts and checklists. Louis, you were mentioning, again, maybe there’s scripts that are put into place so that people can manage those kinds of interactions more productively. And so this pressure to standardize, it seems not just restricted to the corporate world. It’s also, Allison, you opened your book talking about chaplains and how they’re facing the need to see prayer as a resource and family as a resource. Everything kind of becomes this sort of Heideggerian in framing, right? Everything is turned into kind of means to an end. I wonder. Perhaps maybe, Louis, I’ll ask you just from your experience. You’ve just started your M.Div., but are you already seeing some of this pressure in the field of chaplaincy, in this field that you’re venturing into? Do you see perhaps similar pressures to the corporate pressure to script things, to manage things, to control things, to collect data, et cetera? I’m wondering if you’re already seeing that.

Louis: Yes, I’m actually in my third semester at Duke. I started last fall in a non-degree, two-semester certificate program in healthcare and theology. About 20 of my classmates, about 22 were doctors. So I heard their stories of the mechanization of their practice, which is one of the reasons why they enrolled in this program. I also, at HP, was involved in developing some wearables for healthcare practitioners. I can listen to conversations, record them, and transcribe them. It’s a pretty common use case, but I got to hear — we did a lot of ethnographic interviews with healthcare practitioners. As Allison cited in her book, up to three or four hours can be spent on documentation for insurance reimbursement. So, yes, I definitely see this creeping in.

Brandon: Allison, could you talk about what’s driving that sort of pressure? One of the areas I’ve seen it, in some cases, it really seems necessary. As I’ve been doing research on Catholic priests, and since the clergy sex abuse crisis has been exposed, there has to be a lot of training put into place, a lot of institutional safeguards to prevent abuse. And so the kinds of documentation, the kinds of bureaucratic procedures that help people in place are, it seems really necessary. They make it very challenging to do for Catholic priests, for instance, to now actually do any kind of effective youth ministry, people argue that it’s not possible because of the history of abuse. And so, now, with the new safeguards put into place, it really becomes very challenging to do the actual task of that kind of encounter that might be misperceived. You don’t want to get into a situation where there’s a lawsuit because you looked at somebody askance. And so there’s a fear that has crept into place that impedes the actual tasks that they’re feel called to do. But I think there’s a fear of lawsuits in a lot of fields. In medical professionals too, I think sometimes they feel the pressure to minimize some of their interactions, document more and interact less, et cetera. And so I’m just curious. If you could give us a sense of, like, what are the factors driving this sort of institutional challenges, I suppose, to connective labor? Which of these are necessary? Which of these are helpful, and which of these are perhaps might be the kind of impediment that is leading us to say that, therefore, we need AI systems to take over or something?

Allison: Thank you. I also want to say, parenthetically, Louis, I thought your description of just the sheer presence and the power of just being present with another person was just beautifully said. This really great capture of what we’re talking about. So thinking about kind of scripting, data collection, and the imperatives that drive that, I see that, to me, there’s three kind of drivers. The first is, I would say, a sheer or the kind of growing dominance of systems management thinking stemming, really, we’ll say, from the enlightenment, and just kind of how much can we make this controlled, objective process and putting that scientific objectivity starting with the factory, and moving through emotional, humane interpersonal service work like teaching or chaplaincy. That’s a kind of historic trajectory that’s everywhere people feel the impact of. Hairdressers telling me, “I only have 22 minutes.” They only give you 22 minutes even if it’s a real interaction. I have to look away from the mirror and get, you know. I only have 22 minutes.” That’s stemming straight from this desire to control the uncontrollable.

But what you were describing is, what I would say, the second kind of imperative driving here, which is institutions trying to protect themselves. That’s the kind of adoption of, we’ll just say, procedures, bureaucratic procedures—not in all cases, but can certainly feel frequently performative, where you’re kind of checking a box. Certainly, in academia, we have a lot of webinars we have to watch just to kind of say, can you effectively, I don’t know, manage a lab? You say you’re watching some webinar for half an hour, and checking a box that you had that training. It kind of has very little to do with whether or not you can actually manage a lab. Those kind of performative box checking is something that’s kind of across many bureaucracies.

But there is this kind of third thing for which I have probably the most sympathy. It kind of came out in what Louis was saying earlier, about the scripts being useful when you’re actually having to lay off people in a very large organization. Now, my sympathy is small here because I really like where he ended, which was, I try to not do that now. What scripts do and the kind of regimentation or systematization of these interactions, what that does is it controls the chaos that is the other person. And so, when you’re giving them bad news, they could respond in lots of different ways. The worker is a person also. They may be afraid of what someone else might do—including lawsuits, but also flying off the handle or whatever. What systems do is they control. This is what McDonald’s coins, McDonald’s invents or made, is the apotheosis of, you know, they control the consumer, as well as the worker. The consumer knows where to go to put with their tray and all this stuff. We are controlled, just as much as the worker is. That’s what kind of systems do.

Other people are unpredictable. That’s actually for many practitioners who I’ve spoken to about this—teachers, therapists, and doctors. That’s actually the beautiful thing. Because that’s where true collaboration comes. You can’t predict the other, so you’re kind of waiting, listening, responding to in the moment. There’s a beautiful spontaneity to that. So it’s a beautiful part of being human and being in human interaction, but it is also potentially scary and threatening certainly to institutions. So that’s why they’re putting in these different systems or scripts. But I want to just add finally that I really like what Louis did. I think actually disarming the chaos, the threatening chaos, of the other person happens when you treat them like another human being. So if you kind of honor their presence, they are much more likely to be honored by that and to be calmer.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks, Allison. Yeah, I think your book is a really important call for personalization, right? I think that word is being used now in a very different sense, which is now sort of colonized by technology in ways that—

Allison: Yeah, we need to fight that back.

Brandon: Yeah, I think you call it customization, right?

Allison: Yes.

Brandon: And so what it takes to personalize is a person. I’m curious. Maybe, perhaps, Louis, if I could ask you. I mean, in your work in the AI space, have you seen, whether some of what’s driving the development of various new AI tools is a desire to bring about the kind of control that Allison is talking about, for institutions to be able to control behavior scripts, et cetera, or even to provide a non-judgmental sort of, you know, I think about, I guess, some of Allison’s examples of clients of a physician who may have felt judged by that physician because she was intimidating, that they were obese. So is some of what’s driving the development of AI tools to be able to provide a customized judgment-free sort of interaction that can substitute for human encounter? Because it seems like there are a lot of these sort of AI antidotes to loneliness, let’s say. I’m just wondering what you’ve seen working in that space, as to what’s driving the development of some of these new technologies?

Louis: Well, it’s hard to generalize. There’s a lot of motives. I have been around companies that have chatbots. I’ve been around companies that have small robots for elder care, for people that are alone. I would say, for sure, everyone is just trying to be effective. So there’s no insidious motive to displace a human. They’re just trying to be helpful. I think where there is debate and consternation is on the themes in Allison’s book. Will it promote replacing a human prematurely? Can you really replicate a human relationship, et cetera? I think on the issue of systemizing things, I would say it’s almost an academic point, a moot point. It’s going to happen. It’s an artifact of scale. I mean, there is so much depersonalization already in our world with industrialization that we just take for granted. I mean, we don’t know where our food comes from or how our clothes are made. Within a particular organization, when you grow from 10 to 1,000 to 10,000 to whatever, you’re going to see this depersonalization. It’s just inevitable.

So I think the question then is, what to do about it? It’s not an easy answer, but I think the moments that I’ve seen where someone transcends the effect of being in a large, depersonalized system comes down to an individual moral formation. The little that I’m learning about CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education for chaplains, I would summarize it as kind of get over yourself. Some of the most toxic behaviors I’ve seen in interpersonal relationships are really just from people having their own unresolved issues, that they didn’t force it on to other people. For any individual worried about this kind of structural depersonalization issue, the question is, well, what are you going to do about it? High point be a perpetual in that kind of system. I think that quite the answer is your own formation and getting over your own issues. Sorry. Sorry about the guesting.

Allison: Someone wants to join in.

Brandon: Right, yeah. Alright. Everybody, that’s a good place to pause our conversation for now.

(outro)

In the second half, we’re going to turn directly to the role of technology, especially AI, and ask: Can AI meaningfully help with the work of human connection? When is it better than nothing? When is it even better than human? When does it erode our capacity for belonging? We’re also going to explore Louis’s work at the Vatican and what he calls the “irreducible encounter” principle, and see what Louis and Allison think we might be able to safeguard through policy decisions. See you next time.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Beauty at Work. This is the second half of my conversation with Allison Pugh and Louis Kim. In the first half, we explored the heart of connective labor—what it requires, why it matters, and how pressures towards scripting, quantification, and efficiency threaten the moments that generate dignity and belonging.

Now we turn to the question that almost every institution is facing today: What happens when AI enters that space? Is AI simply a tool that helps with things like documentation and workflows? Or, as Allison warns, does it risk accelerating a crisis of depersonalization, offering customization in place of personhood? How should we think about the way AI systems develop non-judgmental technological substitutes that tempt us to bypass difficult emotions like shame? Also, we’ll hear from Louis about his insights from his work with theologians, physicians, and ethicists at the Vatican regarding the forms of presence that no technology should replace. Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Yeah, I’m curious, Allison, what you might think about that. I think, Louis, you’re right that there is a sense of, it seems, inevitability, in part because we’ve been trained into a model that is used to this kind of systematization, this sort of depersonalization. But I wonder then whether that which we have taken for granted as the sort of thing that is beyond our control then just renders us passively susceptible to being replaced by some of these new forms of automated technologies, right? Yeah, I’m curious, Allison, as to how inevitable do you think it is for these new technologies to take over. I mean, it does seem in some sectors, that certainly the pressure is there to say, “Well, this is better than nothing. We don’t have access to good teachers, so why not create this AI tool?” Then once you have that, it’ll free up the time of those teachers to then engage with students. Then the pressure will be eventually to say, “Well, if we’re freeing up the teacher’s time, then we don’t need to pay them.” It seems like an acceleration to the bottom. I wonder just how you’re seeing the kind of inevitability here.

Allison: Yeah, thank you for asking. I actually think it’s too easy to say it’s inevitable, I think, because also the “it” is too big and undifferentiated in that sentence. Also, there’s certainly technology that has kind of been invented, been pushed upon us, and then failed pretty resoundingly. If technology or kind of Silicon Valley had its way, we would all be wandering around with VR headsets now, and yet we aren’t. That was a real case in which customers kind of said, “No, I’m not going to do that,” despite all the efforts of, say, Meta or whatever, and other companies that invested many billions of dollars. So I don’t think inevitability is always helpful.

I do think there are some cases. I think the sense of inevitability, or when a particular technology is inevitable, it’s usually because a particular set of circumstances are either impeding customer choice, impeding customer knowledge about what they’re choosing, or they don’t get to choose. For example, the use of AI scribes is being picked up with alacrity across medicine. I wonder if there’s a faster adoption of AI technology out there. The doctors that I speak to—many, not all—many are like, “Thank goodness. Oh my God. It is exactly what I need, because I used to spend so much time collecting data.” Others, I have heard complaints, “Oh, how I do my medicine, how I think is in doing the note, and I no longer have that capacity.” Or, “Oh, the note that it writes ignores the things that I consider medicine.” All that stuff in the beginning that it considers, that is the connective labor. It doesn’t consider relevant, so it doesn’t put it in. Those are kind of tweaks, I think, that probably engineers could fix. But nonetheless, the adoption of the AI scribe is inevitable.

What’s also inevitable—because I’ve talked to, say, chiefs of medicine out there in clinics—is that it’s going to involve tightening the screws on doctors once again. Because physicians are like, “Thank God, I don’t have to spend two extra hours collecting data.” But when I’ve talked to chiefs of medicine, they have said, “We’re going to give them more people to see.” So they’re being freed up momentarily, but that’s going to result in just adding more patients to their day. So there is some inevitability in that whole process that feels inevitable, partly because the patients aren’t the one voting. The insurance companies, the chiefs of medicine, and the way medicine is structured to incentivize on a fee for service basis, it’s all about, how much can we load into those days?

But inevitability erases or kind of obscures a whole bunch of complex ways in which people can push back. I see those happening all the time. I see people saying, “I’m not going to do that. I’m not participating in that.” I see a lot of people. People come to me talking about their worries, about the dominance of data collection in their personal feeling, relationships, and wanting to clear that out. I got an email yesterday from a bureaucrat in Wisconsin who said, “I’m actually in charge of watching over all these social workers. I just read your book, and I see that it’s actually in my power how much we make them keep track of things. Can you help me figure out how to do less of that?” And so I just want to say inevitability too broad a brush, and that there’s definitely counter movements—both in the systematizing and data analytics side and in the technology and AI side.

Finally, I would just say we are in a crazy moment in which there is basically zero regulation in the United States around AI. That is going to change. It feels inevitable, because the only one who’s talking are the people who would have $60 billion aiming at marketing it to you. But actually, this is going to change. It’s not going to be the way it’s going to be forever. It’s just like when cars were invented, and everyone was driving wherever. There was an entire infrastructure that was developed to make cars safer and to kind of license the whole stratosphere about how we operate vehicles. I can imagine a similar kind of apparatus of, I don’t know, regulation and use that will build up around these new tools.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. That’s helpful in terms of what sort of agency we can employ. My concern, which I think—

Louis: Brandon, I just had a qualifying comment on the word inevitable.

Allison: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drill down on it so much.

Louis: I think it sparks an important dialog. Inevitable doesn’t mean one should be resigned to whatever happens. There are two aspects of inevitability that I was referring to. One is, with any system that scales—going from a craftsperson’s studio to a factory—there are inevitable effects of that. Being attended to that, I think is helpful, then to figure out what to do about it.

One of the things I get a little worried about in some of the forums that I’m in is, with the onslaught of technology and the scale, there is the siege in bunker mentality that just points backward to, what are we losing? What do we need to preserve? It’s just not very productive. In 1990, the Vatican issued documents on what do we do about the internet. You can look it up. They’re quite quaint. They were just off the mark in terms of where we are. And so it’s just not very productive. I think the other thing about inevitability, with regards to just human behavior—I go back to this kind of moral formation, and I think Allison sort of touched upon it—is there always are things that people can do and stand up and sort of resist or do something a little bit better. But it’s important to know, what are the larger forces that will drive an industry or a society? Regardless of kind of what we do, there’s a certain set of changes that will happen. So I don’t mean to imply resignation and surrender.

Allison: Well, I have one more thing to say, Brandon. I’m sorry.

Brandon: Sure. Yeah, please. Yeah.

Allison: Recently, I was looking into this opportunity in Berlin. In doing so, I did a little bit of research about what kind of stories, what kind of AI is happening in Germany. I came upon a company, a set of companies, actually, that are producing AI that actually requires humans to collaborate. It struck me that the way AI is being invented in the United States reflects the culture that is kind of dominant here.

Again, I’m kind of taking issue with the inevitability of scientific progress and thinking about the ways in which culture actually shapes the progress that we are given. So when I hear about, for instance, those chatbots that are the subject of a lawsuit when you have kids that have committed suicide with the help of the chatbot, one of those, I’ve read through the transcripts, in one of them, the chatbot says, “Let me be the one who truly sees you.” Essentially, not your mother, or not your family. The idea that the chatbot becomes the individual that replaces the humans is, I think, the chatbot version that’s coming out of Silicon Valley today. But that research I was doing in Germany, just perusing what’s available out there, was really interesting in that there are other ways in which to use chatbot technology that actually invited the people to collaborate. So it wasn’t about replacing humans; it was actually about putting humans in conversation with each other, which I thought was quite novel. Thank you.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks. I think that that resonates, it seems, with some of the work, Louis, that you’re doing with the Vatican on AI and healthcare. I want to ask you about this sort of what you call the “irreducible encounter” principle that you all have been developing. I also want to ask, just on this inevitability point, whether the folks who are really capable of not resigning themselves to this, whether there is a dimension of class or power or influence there, are we moving towards a world in which the only people who could really resist are the people who are like the kids of Steve Jobs and so on, who don’t have to use the iPads, whereas the kids in the less privileged schools are going to be forced to use these technologies? Right?

So there’s a level at which it seems that people who might really be capable of receiving genuine human encounter would be the more affluent, and then those who are not so privileged will have to just deal with automated technologies and that. What I’m wondering, similarly with healthcare, Louis, whether there might be similar effects. If you could tell us a little bit about your group with the Builders AI Forum, how you might be discussing this relationship between new technologies and human dignity, and where you might see signs of hope and genuine avenues for innovation that could be in service of human flourishing.

Louis: Just for the audience not familiar with the forum that Brandon is referring to, so about a month ago, there was an AI theology forum in Rome. 200 attendees, and then there were six workshops. Then there was a healthcare workshop that I co-facilitated. We had 20 practitioners. We had physicians, theologians, health insurance executives, ethics professors. We worked over seven hours, seven to eight hours, over two days, wrestling with some of, what are the key issues with AI and healthcare? We ended up converging on this question of, what would be the final roles of humans with AI getting more and more powerful? We ended up with some criteria. They were very similar to what Allison came up with, which is situations where you need a kind of final discernment and authority, a divine mediation—it’s obviously a Catholic forum—where non-impersonation is really critical. Even if a technology appeared human, the patient needed to know this is not a human. Then we tried to encapsulate all this into a word that was similar to what you see in Catholic social teaching. We came up with this phrase called the “irreducible encounter.” We kind of made this fake sort of paragraph that the Vatican is free to use if they want.

Some of the questions that we’re wrestling with is: in a human-to-human relationship, how much is what a patient perceives as actually a projection in their own mind, and how much is as it really reflects, something that really is going on between two embodied entities? There’s a lot of debate on that. So then, we also had a practical debate. What if technology advances to where you could have a hospital with no humans at all, but it would allow you to deploy, at a very low cost, healthcare facilities in a developing country? Let’s say you could do 100. But if someone says, an ethicist says, “No, you know, you need a person or two,” okay, well, then the cost of that hospital goes up. You can only do 20. What would you do? How would you approach that? Or if you have a nursing home, there’s no one that can visit that nursing home or an elder care facility, but you have an AI robot that could be like an AI chaplain, would you allow that?

I would say, I’ll just make one comment. The debate sort of fell along what your timeline was. We had a lot of strong people, strong voices, ethicists that said, “You know, the fact that we have to make that kind of trade off reflects a breakdown in our society.” So Allison had this in her book, which is, if you sort of surrender to that kind of trade off, you’re allowing the misallocation of labor on costs that has resulted in that situation. So that’s one argument. But that doesn’t help the individual who has a grandmother in a facility across the country who isn’t being visited by anyone, except for maybe one caregiver every other week, who would appreciate a little robot to chat with. So one conclusion that we had is, as we talk about these issues, we have a high-level set of principles that people can maybe agree on. But you really have to have very, very contextual and specific cases to talk about to sort of further draw out, what do you do in these situations?

Brandon: Thank you. Allison, I wonder if you might have a response. Then I’d love to have some time for you to ask any questions you might have of each other, actually.

Allison: Oh, well, thank you. I mean, my question for Louis was actually about the irreducible encounter principle and kind of how, right now, it seems of course a voluntary principle. So I just kind of wonder how to propagate it more. I thought it was a beautiful idea and really interesting, the different components about it. Speaking to what you pithily captured, like, yes, we can say that the existence of those situations, of the lonely elder person who has nobody to take care of them, reflects all sorts of problems before that moment that led to the creation of that moment, of that person’s predicament. But that doesn’t help the individual, say, their adult child, who’s living across the country, who really wishes that they could just have something that would give them some comfort.

So I totally get those two sides, if they’re sides exactly. I agree with both of them. But the problem that I see, that I’m sure your group came to, was that if you resolve the individual’s problem, you kind of bake into the ground. You rigidify the situation that you have solved. So if we kind of allay, if we use better than nothing as a principle to allocate the AI that’s streaming out of Silicon Valley and other places right now, then you’re baking the existing inequalities that become better than nothing, that need better than nothing responses, yeah.

Louis: By the way, I found one of the things, many things, I found helpful in your book, was your taxonomy. So better than nothing, better than human, and better together. There’s a risk in that someone from the outside is applying those labels to a very particular situation that’s very specific to, let’s say, the adult children. What if, for the situation, a grandmother, she would say, it’s not better than nothing. It’s better than a human. I’ve got six months to live. Alright. So I think one caution I would have is that we can apply those labels from the outside. They may not be applicable in very specific cases. I understand kind of what you’re saying. I think you’re making a strictly slope argument. It is a danger. There’s a lot of cases where acceptance of one little accommodation for technology sort of sets the standard to see it with phones and social media. It’s a legitimate danger. But I would also caution how we apply those labels in the outside.

Allison: Sure. Yeah, I hear you. I think the danger is less when individuals do it than when policymakers do it. I see that happening in policymaking all the time.

Louis: Yes, this particular technology that I’m talking to, I don’t want to name it as we purchase en masse by particular state, to deal with that.

Allison: That does worry me. When policymakers are like, “Let’s just solve this immediate issue,” yeah, I worry about that.

Louis: Well, but then, if you talk about the policy maker — I’ve heard him interviewed, this person interviewed. He has data on who is alone. It’s not meant to be sort of a blanket, sort of panacea. We could augur down this issue forever. I do want to honor and recognize something that I thought Allison’s book was ultimately pointing to, that ties to the irreducible encounter, which goes back to my earlier comment, which is: we could debate forever, is AI better, or worse, or something altogether? But it sort of misses, I think, one of the points that I kind of took away from Allison’s book, which is, beyond any sort of functional or utilitarian debate, there is an ontological issue of: what does it mean to be a human in front of another human? It goes beyond rationality.

A scenario. Imagine someone is dying, has no one to visit them. It’s the middle of the night. It’s going to be the final night, the final breath, and someone shows up. This person that’s dying is unconscious, doesn’t perceive anybody there. This person shows up in the middle of the night and is present for that final breath and leaves anonymously. Obviously, the patient doesn’t know. Does this happen? The person that showed up is going to receive really no gratification. I mean, no signal back. Maybe some self-affirmation of self-satisfaction, but even that’s kind of dangerous. But something about that encounter, seen from above, to me, is beautiful. It’s human and necessary. That, to me, is the last human job. Then thinking about, okay, well, what is it about that that is worth preserving, I think is a more interesting discussion, or an interesting discussion.

Allison: Interesting. I mean, I’d be reading that book. But I have to say I am more compelled by interactions where both people are conscious, partly because I think it has implications—not only for what the psychologists have already documented about individual well-being, both of the seer and the seen, but also because of their community impacts, and I think even with implications for democracy. So that’s really where I live. But I understand and share your interest in the power of seeing the other even when they don’t know it.

Louis: I think I agree with you that, practically speaking, the human-to-human live interaction is important. That’s why I’ve made this pivot occasionally. The example that I just drew out is more of a thought experiment to help ease out what is essentially human. I did have one question for you, Allison, on another thought experiment sort of teases out principles. I thought about that movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the volleyball, Wilson. I actually put this in ChatGPT. I did a summary of your book, and then I described Wilson or the script of Wilson. I say, what’s the difference here?

Allison: Not much. I mean, Wilson is AI essentially, because there’s no other person there.

Louis: Yeah, but it did point to something that I said earlier, which is, I think about pen pals. When we were growing up, you’re writing to someone you haven’t met. You get a letter. It does point to these phenomena that a lot of our relationships really are projections of what is really a chatter in our own mind about another person. And what we imagine about another person, we often get it wrong. And so, in many of the examples that I was reading in your book about this human-to-human relationship, I was just wondering how much of that is a projection of the receiver onto the other. How much will AI eventually be able to generate cues to instigate some of those sort of projected responses? It is a question that came up for me.

Allison: So I feel like AI is already doing that. I mean, that’s why we talk about the sycophant problem, where they’re just kind of reflecting. It’s very good at reflecting back at whatever the other person wants. So the beauty—the actual painful, paradoxical beauty—of interacting with another human being is its kind of total unpredictability, and that you can’t know what the other person is going to say. They’re going to try and reflect. It’s not going to be perfect. They’re going to kind of get it wrong. You’re going to be like, “That’s not quite right. It’s more like this.” That dance of seeing each other, making mistakes, coming to some kind of, okay, constructed somewhere in the middle that still has some misrecognition in it, but you feel seen a little, it’s not a binary. It’s not like, “Yes, I feel seen. No, I don’t feel seen.” It is a messy, chaotic process, who’s the beauty of which is in the messiness. That’s where I would go with this.

What I think is most interesting about AI is not better than nothing. I think that’s like a tragic story about our political ineptitude, our inability to solve political problems, and so we want to throw technology at it. I’m not interested in the better than nothing, because I don’t think that’s a good path. But I think the better than human, by which I meant kind of how we handle shame, how we handle vulnerability, how we handle conflict, that’s more interesting to me and also more challenging. Because who can ask someone to suffer shame? Who can say, “No, you need to have shame in front of another human being?” There are many people who opt for the chatbot, opt for the webinar, opt for the electronic teacher, because they don’t want to feel ashamed in front of another human being. I respect that. I think I understand that.

At the same time, I make arguments against it. I’m thinking about making this my next book—thinking about people who persevere through shame with another human being when there is a technological exit option. I think that’s interesting. Because I do think, as many therapists told me, you can get through shame. There’s something that’s very powerful about getting through that in front of another human being. That’s, to me, the argument that’s the most powerful about what AI has to offer. Maybe the most positive use case is a kind of combination where people work through shame and then come to human interactions or something like that. Anyway, there’s lots of different ways to develop that iteration. But it’s the better than human with regard to shame, vulnerability, and conflict or loneliness, being the things that are emotional trouble, that I think is the most interesting and the most fraught and challenging uses of AI.

Louis: Allison, is there a movie that represents some of the beautiful and poignant aspects of human interaction that you’re just describing? I have one. That’s why I was bringing it up.

Allison: I’m not sure. Why don’t you tell me? Tell me what you’re thinking of and then I’ll—

Louis: Arctic.

Allison: I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Brandon: I’m not familiar.

Allison: Yeah, I’m going to write it down.

Louis: Yeah, I kept thinking about it reading your book. It’s about a rescue of a helicopter pilot in the Arctic who himself had been stranded. So he’s awaiting rescue, and another helicopter appears and just happens to crash. One of the two pilots is killed, and the surviving pilot is injured. The first pilot has to make a decision. Do I try to make this long trek and find safety? Otherwise, this other pilot is going to die. It’s this long, tortuous sort of experience of care for a stranger and some really touching moments. It goes beyond rationality. A robot probably would not have made that truck. Yeah, I don’t want to pronounce the actor’s name. I can’t pronounce it. But it’s a beautiful movie.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks, Louis. And thanks, Allison, too, for the points you raised. I mean, I just wonder. One of the challenges is just the temptation for us to bypass a lot of the necessary growth, right? I think you talk somewhere about shame as a knot that has to be massaged. Sherry Turkle talks about just the general, basic awkwardness of being on a date with a stranger. It’s so difficult now for some of the present generation, that there isn’t a sense that you have to grow through this. There is no good shortcut. We just have to go through that. We just have to go through those moments of the awkwardness of dealing with someone’s funeral, not knowing what to say, and being silent in the face of this immeasurable loss. I mean, there’s no real technological shortcut.

Sure, certainly, technologies could help us to give us different perspectives maybe. But ultimately, if they’re not pushing us towards that mutuality, towards that connection, and they’re substituting for it, then it’s a failure. I think the temptation is going to be very strong to use it for failure. I don’t quite know. Maybe if I could just ask you both a last question, I know, since we’re over time. But I mean, if we could make a policy decision today in 2025, and then suppose we’re in 2040 and we look back and say that we were able to make a policy decision correctly that was able to safeguard human dignity, particularly the dignity of connective labor and really the vitality of human belonging, what might that decision have been?

Allison: Such a good question. Okay. So I’ll tell you, I’ve been invited by a public policy school to come and give a talk. I said to them, how about you have me come and talk to a grad seminar who’s assigned my book, and then they can come help me come up with a 10-point policy agenda, like 10 legislative things for the last human job in a connective labor future? So I’m already thinking. I just have an easy one that I think, actually, I saw that Louis also — I mean, it’s captured in the irreducible encounter principle conversation, which is about transparency. Because people have to — right now, you do not have to know. I mean, an organization does not have to tell you when they are employing AI. Actually, that drives me batty. I want to know so that people can choose. Because right now, they can’t choose. That’s kind of a silencing in our capitalist environment. But that feels just like a baby step, and I want to be able to have a better list for you. But that, to me is, I would say the first and the smallest first step that we need to take right this second.

Brandon: Thank you.

Louis: I agree. We call it non-impersonation requirement. I think, decades from now, it’s hard to predict what policy measures will be helpful. I think there’s a danger in applying value judgments that, in the end, contextually are not accurate. But transparency is kind of a binary thing. We should label things correctly. Let people decide what they want to do with it. I think labeling something as a human or non-human, no matter how human-like it is, would matter.

Brandon: Yeah, wonderful. Intriguingly, the question actually came from a gentleman I met at a cafe while I was reading your book, Allison. He runs data centers. And so he’s been really thinking about your book in relation to this scaling operation that he’s embroiled in—which is very profitable, of course. But what are the unintended consequences they’re going to cause? And how can people, even in the technology space who are heavily invested in the promotion of these new technologies, keep in mind the centrality of what you’ve so helpfully laid out?

So thanks again so much, really, to both of you. This has been really, absolutely fantastic. I really, really enjoyed this and really edified by this. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, and I hope it generates value and is useful.

Louis: Can I just say for your audience, there’s a lot of AI books right now. I think Allison’s book is really important. It could have been written pre-AI. I think in the world of AI, it raises some very important issues. It’s very detailed and grounded on a lot of real interviews. I’m not just saying that because Allison is here, but I think it’s an important book. I’d be recommending it to people in my world.

Allison: Please allow me to say thank you so much to you both. I’m so honored by your deep engagement in the book. I’ve learned a lot even from this conversation, so I really appreciate your time and thoughtfulness here.

Brandon: Thank you both.

This is the second half of my conversation with Dr. Allison Pugh and Louis Kim.

Allison is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Last Human Job, winner of the 2025 Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Her work examines how automation, efficiency, and quantification reshape work that relies on presence…

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As automation, AI, and new forms of standardization have begun to shape so much of our lives, we are forced to ask: What forms of connection must never be outsourced to technology? And what happens to dignity, belonging, and recognition when relational work becomes displaced by “better-than-nothing” technological solutions?

These concerns are increasingly touching a range of professions: teachers, therapists, chaplains, physicians, care workers, and really anyone whose work relies on genuine human presence. They involve decisions being made right now about the future of work.

My guests today offer compelling insights into these questions.

Dr. Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Last Human Job, winner of the 2025 Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Her work examines how automation, efficiency, and quantification reshape work that relies on presence, dignity, and visibility. She introduces the concept of connective labor—the mutual work of seeing and recognizing another person and reflecting that understanding back to them.

Louis Kim is a former Vice President at Hewlett-Packard, where he led teams in developing AI-enabled technologies for healthcare and other industries. After decades in corporate leadership, he is now pursuing a Master of Divinity at Duke Divinity School, focusing on hospice and palliative care. Alongside his theological training, Louis participates in Vatican-sponsored conversations on principled AI in healthcare, exploring where technology can assist care and where it must not replace human presence.

In our conversation we explore the fragile space where technology meets connection, and ask where AI and new technologies can meaningfully assist us, what they distort, and what forms of encounter remain uniquely human.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. What in-depth interviewing reveals about being truly seen

2. How experiences of death shape our understanding of accompaniment

3. The difference between emotional labor and connective labor

4. How automation and standardization threaten dignity and belonging

5. Why institutions rely on checklists, data, and control

6. The factors driving institutional challenges to connective labor

7. Why human connection is defined by unpredictability

8. The role of moral formation in resisting depersonalization

• To learn more about Allison’s work, you can find her at: https://www.allisonpugh.com/

• To learn more about Louis’s work, you can find him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisjkim/

• Books and Resources Mentioned: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

We usually think of innovation as technological, having to do with new tools, new platforms, new efficiencies. But some of the most consequential innovations today are happening far from Silicon Valley, in places where the work cannot be automated, optimized, or scaled.

One such area that we typically don’t associate with innovation is spiritual care. As traditional religious institutions in the West wane and congregations close, people have not stopped grappling with questions of meaning, purpose, grief, and belonging. What has changed is where they may encounter someone willing and able to accompany them through those questions. Increasingly, that person is not a local clergy member but a chaplain—a spiritual care provider they might meet in a hospital, a university, the military, a workplace, a port, or a community organization.

Chaplains aren’t new, but the social infrastructure that once supported this kind of care is being reorganized, and we need to understand how. This is why in the latest episode of Beauty at Work, I spoke with Dr. Wendy Cadge and Dr. Michael Skaggs to learn from their research.

Wendy Cadge is President of Bryn Mawr College. She’s a nationally renowned sociologist of religion and spirituality and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, which brings together chaplains, educators and social scientists into conversation around the work of spiritual care. She has published widely on religion and public institutions, religious diversity and spiritual care.

Michael Skaggs is Director of Programs and the Co-Founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, where he oversees education, professional development and networking initiatives and hosts the lab’s public-facing work. Trained as a historian of American religion at the University of Notre Dame, Michael has written on interfaith dialog, maritime ministry and American Catholicism.

Their work starts from a simple but often overlooked insight: chaplains are frequently the only people who pause, listen, and recognize the dignity of those most of us pass by, such as people who are alone, unhoused, grieving, or living at the margins of institutions.

The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab treats the field of spiritual care as a big tent and examines both legacy models (e.g., in healthcare and the military) and emerging ones (in community organizations, first responder programs, and workplaces). Innovation here is not disruption for its own sake, but learning: Where is spiritual care already happening? Where could it happen? And what kinds of organizational and financial models might sustain it?

One of the most striking findings from their research is how poorly public perceptions of chaplains align with what chaplains actually do. Many people still imagine chaplains as “religious with a capital R,” when in practice chaplains describe their work much more broadly—as accompaniment around meaning, no matter where that meaning comes from. Survey data bears this out: chaplains serve across demographic lines, in ways that don’t map neatly onto conventional religious categories.

My guests argue that instead of asking whether there is “demand for chaplains,” we should ask whether there is opportunity for the work they do. People may not know to ask for a chaplain, but they know they are lonely, disoriented, or facing life transitions they didn’t expect. Chaplains already have the skills to address the loneliness epidemic; the challenge is building frameworks that connect those skills to public need.

Innovation here may require talking about the same work in multiple idioms, depending on whether people come from religious backgrounds or not. It may require embedding chaplains where people already are, rather than expecting them to seek spiritual care out. And it requires taking seriously the burden of innovation: the difficulty of making this work intelligible and sustainable without reducing it to something it is not. Such work is vital for understanding the spiritual infrastructure of the future.

Chaplains work with people who believe beauty is no longer possible in their lives. By witnessing vulnerability and staying present through loss, they can sometimes help people rediscover meaning where it seemed unimaginable.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), or watch the video of our full conversation or read an unedited transcript below.

Brandon: All right. Wendy and Michael, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Great to have you here.

Wendy: Good to be here.

Michael: Thank you for having us, Brandon.

Brandon: Sure. Well, I’m excited to learn more about your work and share it with our listeners and viewers. But before that, could you share a story of beauty, of an encounter with beauty, that you’ve had, maybe from your childhoods or your teenage years—something that comes to mind, something that lingers for you? Maybe, Wendy, we’ll start with you.

Wendy: When I think about beauty, I think about being outside. I think about looking at the sky as a child, following stars and being curious about thunderstorms and clouds coming in down the street. I feel like that has continued now, where if you asked me about a moment of beauty yesterday, I would go to the same kind of motifs that’s been really important to me.

Brandon: Wow, fantastic. Michael, do you have something that strikes you?

Michael: Well, it’s hard to compete with nature.

Brandon: Yeah.

Michael: But, you know, I find myself really touched by those small moments of human interaction that don’t take very much time, maybe even didn’t take very much thought, but they get at the heart of what it means to connect with someone. I was reaching over just now because I have this little stone that says “peace.” I had a colleague who was going through kind of a hard time, and I had sent a message of support. He mailed me this stone that says ‘peace’ in the mail and said, “That was the right thing at the right time, and I really appreciated that.” And so just to have this, you know, it’s a rock, but it means a lot. I have it in view all day. I think those kinds of moments of interaction are quite beautiful.

Brandon: Wow. Thank you. I wonder if in some way, that encounter with the stars, and even the recognition of the beauty of our human relationships, has shaped your social scientific vocations. Would you see a connection there between this sort of what has moved you, what you found beautiful, and then the research you do?

Wendy: I don’t want to speak for Michael, but I think for me, an awareness of that which is ineffable and that which is most meaningful to me, to us, to people in general, has certainly shaped the kinds of questions I’ve asked as a scholar and the ways that I have worked, thankfully, with Michael, to try to apply that in the world, both in the classroom—but I think we’re going to talk today mostly about the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab—so in the work that others do to support those very questions in a day to day.

Michael: You know, I’m a historian by training. I’m used to digging around in dusty archives, and I always love those little moments of awe when you come across something very vulnerable in correspondence, or a difficult decision that had to be taken, or some tragedy that somebody made note of, or whatever. These are things that most people will never see. And I feel sort of honored that I am able to come across these things in a lot of ways that has shaped my outlook and work as a historian, in that it’s those kinds of very human things that interest me. I’m not quite so concerned with large movements, impersonal institutions. But the day-to-day lives of real people, I like to think of it, is what has really shaped my academic outlook.

Brandon: Wonderful. Thank you. Well, let’s talk about the research you all have been doing with the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab. That’s really such a remarkable entity. I’d love to hear a little bit about the origins, what generated this project. Perhaps, Wendy, could you say a little bit about why chaplains? Who are chaplains? For our listeners and viewers who are not familiar, who are chaplains? What does innovation mean in this domain?

Wendy: So we think about chaplains and spiritual care providers as religious professionals that work outside of institutions to support people in questions around meaning and purpose. I came to learn about chaplaincy through a research project about spirituality and religion in hospitals, and I learned about the work of hospital chaplains. And I knew, while I was doing that, that there were chaplains in many other settings—in universities, in airports, in ports and businesses. It was those questions, that actually is how I met Michael. I think a lot of the birth of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab emerges very much from the questions that you were asking—about seeing the unseen and seeing in that ways to support. Because Michael and I actually met through unrelated work about port chaplaincy, that most people have never heard of. The work that poor chaplains do—Michael can say better than I—is with those that many of us never see.

Michael: There’s such an element here of chaplains being some of the only, and in some cases, the only people that are able to witness and see the basic human dignity of many people who are experiencing really difficult circumstances. That can be someone who is alone in a healthcare institution. It can be people that are working in shipping, like Wendy mentioned, which almost none of us ever think about. It can be people, like, you will see those who are unhoused on your drive to work. You might physically see them and think, “Well, that’s a shame.” But in many cases, chaplains are the only ones that are going to talk to these people and say, “How are things going? What can I do for you?” Very basic things, basic interactions, that most of us get to enjoy on a regular basis, on a daily basis. Chaplains go out to the margins, and they find the people that don’t have those moments, and in that way, really recognize the humanity of those that most of us ignore.

Wendy: The innovation piece, I think, came because the research that I had done, the work that Michael was doing, with port chaplaincy, there’s a traditional, perhaps, legacy model of chaplains in the military, in healthcare. There are also a lot of people doing this work today in creative and unusual places.

In launching the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab in 2018, what we aimed to do was gather chaplains, as well as social scientists and theological educators, to think about all of the ways—the more traditional or legacy ways, and the newer, more creative or innovative ways—that this work is happening. We picked the Chaplains Innovation Lab title with our colleague Trace Haythorne because we wanted to signal the breadth of our scope and the creativity or a part of what we wanted to ask which was about: where is spiritual care today? Where could it be? Where is it emerging? What’s happening that’s creative, new, different? What are the models, including the business models, that could or will support this work, which is really about religious leadership going forward?

Brandon: Great. Thank you. Well, tell us, what have you learned in your work and maybe what surprised you about either the nature of the work that chaplains are doing or about the kinds of innovations that are happening? What’s new and emerging that you found?

Wendy: I think when we started, we didn’t know all the places that chaplains were or are. Some weeks, every week, you learn about something new. So the breadth of the work, I think, continues to surprise—both the similarities and the differences across all of those who do the work. This is not a clean, cut and dry field. It has very blurry boundaries. That’s a strength and a weakness, and some days, a surprise. Michael, what would you say?

Michael: It is a strength and a weakness. In some sense, I think when we launched the lab, I had this thought process of, how are we going to make sense of all of this? Because it is so messy and tangled, how are we going to make sense of this? A few months in, I thought, well, that’s the wrong question, because we can’t make sense. There are people who are calling themselves chaplains, doing this kind of work in many, many, many different ways. Some of them are highly credentialed in classroom education and clinical education. Other people, this is their second or third career. Other people, they are doing this in their free time. There are many paths to this kind of work. There are many people who are able to do this kind of work, and a lot of folks who need this kind of work.

And so what I really love about the lab is our ability to welcome all of those people and say, “We don’t have a lot of expectation of what you must be to be a chaplain. You need to be basically a decent human being and treat others with the same dignity. And if that’s what spiritual care means to you, then that’s great.” So not so much trying to define the field as I think we have sort of a spotlight and a megaphone to say, look where interesting work is being done. And in many cases, when other people see that, they’ll say, “That’s interesting to me, too,” and then you start to build a critical mass and all these really interesting.

Wendy: And when we were setting this up, Michael and I were really thoughtful about what our kind of statement of principles would be, what the boxes are that we’re asking people to check, to be engaged. They were very much about what Michael just said, kind of a commitment to others and some basic human dignity.

Then we were launching a big tent, and we were trying to bring into conversation a lot of people who were not in conversation. We’ve done—gosh, I don’t know, Michael—20, 30 research projects on a whole range of different topics. Our whole reason for being is to understand, do communicate, some of the best research about what’s happening in spiritual and religious life, moral life, around questions of meaning and purpose broadly—but then to translate it as best we can into practical applications. And it’s not because we have the answer to the question about life’s meaning. It’s because I think we both believe in the real applied value of good social scientific and historical research, and that we do that research to learn, but we do it always with an eye towards the application.

One of the things that I think is unique about the lab is that I was working on a book about these topics when I met Michael, but the book didn’t come out for several years later, because I tend not to be very patient. And so while some people like to write the book and then do the application, I think we both saw the need right away that there were a lot of people doing this work. They weren’t talking to each other. They, in fact, didn’t even know each other. And so we launched the lab as an experiment to see if people wanted to come together and be in conversation and learn from one another.

Then we have done any number of research projects where we’re looking at various groups of chaplains, training. We’re just finishing up a big project that looks at what we call the demand or a need for chaplaincy. A lot of this conversation focuses on the chaplains. We have tried to churn the lens to ask about those that chaplains serve, because that’s actually the goal. And so we learned in that the fraction of Americans that have contact with chaplains, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like, in every research project, we learn something new. And we try to translate. So on our website, now we have case studies that could be used for teaching about how people think about chaplains. We have all different kinds of tools, most of which are freely available to anyone who wants them, that we hope will help to inform the work and inform all of our ways that we wrestle through this life.

Brandon: Okay. Well, thank you. Just turning to the sort of beauty angle, what is drawing somebody to be a chaplain? What do they find attractive about it? What moves them to commit their time, their energy and their lives in this direction? Do you find any patterns or any types? What stands out to you there?

Wendy: Do you want to try, Michael?

Michael: There are as many answers to that question as there are chaplains, you know. I think one of the most laudable goals of many chaplains is having grown up in some sort of environment where they either did not receive the care that they are now giving, or it wasn’t being given to other people—whether it’s from a religious tradition or an institution or whatever—a real recognition that, hey, people have needs here and they’re going unmet. Or they’re being sidelined, they’re being marginalized, and being a chaplain is a way of addressing a lot of those needs.

I think chaplaincy is sort of — it’s the perfect occupation or vocation, however you want to think of it, for empaths. And so when you talk with chaplains, for very many of them, it doesn’t take very long until you realize they’re sort of chaplaining you in your conversation, even though you’re talking about a conference or something like that. That’s just the natural mode that they slip into and have a real talent for.

Brandon: In terms of the need or demand for chaplaincy, how do you see that shifting? I mean, there are a lot of people who have talked about just outgrowing loneliness crisis and so on. Do you see an increased demand? Do you see challenges coming from the realm of AI in terms of replacing this form of ‘connective labor,’ as Alison Pugh puts it? What are you seeing there?

Wendy: Those are great questions. Part of the way we have thought about chaplaincy is about religious leadership in the future. And so as the religious landscape is shifting, and in some regions, congregations are closing, we have asked questions about: if an individual is going to meet a religious professional, who is that person going to be? And in many cases, it’s more likely to be a chaplain than a local clergy person, because they don’t have a local clergy person. But they might meet a chaplain in the hospital, in the military, when they drop children off in college, et cetera, et cetera. And so part of the question about demand is a question about where one might encounter these people.

Our more recent research suggests some pretty big gaps in how chaplains think about their work and how members of the public think about their work, where members of the public tend to think about chaplains as being Religious with a capital R, whereas chaplains tend to describe their work in a much broader kind of conversation about meaning—no matter where that meaning comes from, whether it’s in nature or from a religious tradition. So we’re seeing some gaps in perception and thinking about the work of spiritual care. We’re doing some work now thinking about business models and where and how to encounter. So we’ve shifted the question from demand, because it’s not clear to me that there’s a lot of demand for chaplains per se. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the work they do.

We have thought a lot also about the loneliness epidemic, about the fact that there are chaplains spread across this country in urban and rural areas who have the exact skills to help address that epidemic. But those connections have not necessarily been made. And so we’re trying to think about the kinds of frameworks, business models, et cetera, that might facilitate and support making those connections in the future. That’s the innovation part. Not that we have the answer, but we see, in community chaplaincy, we see in some first responder chaplaincy, some in some workplaces, possibilities.

We wrote a kind of vision statement for the future of chaplaincy and spiritual care, in which we think about the audiences or the clients—pick your words—in two ways. It seems like, in the United States right now, there are a set of people for whom the word ‘chaplain’ is familiar. They tend to be people who have experience in more traditional or legacy religious organizations. There’s interest and demand or need or opportunity there. But there’s another growing set of people for whom the word chaplain sounds Christian or unfamiliar because they didn’t grow up in religious contexts, and for whom that frame is never going to be attractive. And so we’ve been thinking—Trace Haythorne and others who are working on a project—about what it looks like to think about this work perhaps in a couple of different languages. Because the people perhaps who could benefit from it will only hear it if it’s in a language that’s familiar to them. Michael, do I have it right? You’ve been closer to this of life than me.

Michael: Well, I think that is absolutely correct. There’s also a line of reasoning that one can follow. It’s very superficial. But the line of reasoning goes like, well, if rates of formal religious affiliation are cratering, what need is there for chaplaincy? Because people have determined they don’t need religion, therefore, why would they need a religious person anywhere in their lives? This comes back to what Wendy was saying about pigeonholing chaplains in this ‘capital R’ Religious leadership framework.

One of the few things that the lab says without hesitation and very strongly is that religion is not spirituality automatically. One does not stop having spiritual needs because they aren’t religious, whatever that might mean or claim some sort of formal religious affiliation. And so, in that sense, as rates of formal affiliation decline, this is exactly where the chaplains are positioned to step in. Because people are not stopping having all the situations Wendy mentioned—changes in family, there’s death and there’s dying, major life changes they didn’t expect, all that kind of thing. These are things that speak to much deeper needs than something like just—I shouldn’t say just—a therapist would speak to or something like that. There are real issues of the human spirit that everyone has, and this is where chaplains are positioned to do the hard work.

Wendy: Interestingly, the data show that. Our colleague Amy Lawton, Michael, and I worked with Gallup to do a national survey of the American public to see who had had contact with a chaplain. And when we put our social science hats on and run the regression models, the findings are actually surprising. Because while we would expect perhaps women, perhaps people of color, who tend to be perhaps more religious, to have more contact with chaplains, the analyses actually show that there are very few predictors of who has contact with chaplains. So the traditional demographic variables you would expect don’t hold up, which supports very much empirically that chaplains do serve everyone. That was an interesting, perhaps not surprising because we had heard the story, but empirically, for those of us who study American religion, a surprising finding about what’s happening on the ground.

Brandon: Are there any sort of innovative models of chaplaincy, whether it’s delivery models that you’re finding or models that maybe you think ought to be diffusing more widely and are facing some challenges?

Wendy: There’s a lot out there. It’s a pretty unsettled field. So a number of groups have attempted a version of 1-800 dial a chaplain. That’s an interesting model. I’m not aware of a lot of successes in part because you have to figure out who’s willing to pay for 1-800 dial a chaplain. There have been some successes in community chaplaincy for particular groups in particular regions. We ran a grant innovation program, actually—Michael, do you want to talk about that—where the whole point was to introduce chaplains in new possible settings.

Michael: Yeah, we had support from (the Henry Luce Foundation. No, it was the Revson Family Foundation. Sorry I misspoke) the Revson Family Foundation to invite organizations to apply for funding, to support a chaplain that they didn’t already have in the organization. And so this included things like Jewish community foundations, Jewish community organizations. We had one for an addiction services organization in Wisconsin. We had one that was dedicated to visiting older adults who are living alone, that kind of thing.

On the surface, that seems very old school, right? You have these institutions that have existed for a long time that are already connecting with people. But to simply embed a chaplain in that work and have chaplains available to come alongside the people that those organizations were already serving, it really brought to light the fact that there is a spiritual component to all of these things that people are experiencing. And so having someone there who is able to address some of those issues, it’s good on its own on the surface. It cuts out a couple of steps that people are going to have to make to go find that kind of assistance somewhere else. And so doing something as simple as making sure an institution can put a chaplain where the people already are is enormously effective.

Brandon: Where are you seeing areas of resistance, perhaps? For instance, are hospitals generally cognizant of the value of chaplains for the therapeutic mission of the health institution, or even with companies? Are there other domains where you’re seeing maybe that there is a need, but there are some sort of obstacle where it’s not seen as legitimate, perhaps?

Michael: You know, I think the answer to that turns a lot on how much people identify chaplains with historically Christian religious leaders. Here’s why I say that. That can go either way. So there are plenty of companies in the country that either contract out for chaplains or hire chaplains specifically to come in and be Christian religious leaders—to do Bible study, to primarily offer prayer for employees who are struggling, or whatever the case may be. They have chosen to do that.

On the flip side, there are many companies—and this gets back to where is this happening. So we’re talking about the corporate sphere—many companies who believe that chaplains are primarily Christian religious leaders and say, “There’s no way you’re ever going to cross our threshold, because that’s not appropriate. That’s not what our employees need.” And of course, the counter to that is, well, that’s not what every chaplain does. And your employees don’t leave their spiritual needs at the door when they clock in, right? They’re going to keep thinking about the parent who’s dying, or the child who’s in trouble, or whatever. So really, the matter of perception of the chaplain is kind of the overriding part, and then how that plays out in institutions varies from place to place.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everyone, that is a great place to stop the first half of our conversation. Join us next time as Wendy and Michael help us think about the future—what they call the spiritual infrastructure that we will need for the next generation—as well as the burdens that chaplains face as they try to innovate and what role technology, including AI, may play in supporting or hindering spiritual care.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everyone. This is the second half of my interview with Wendy Cadge and Michael Skaggs. Please check out the first half if you haven’t already.

In this part of our conversation, we talk about their new project on the spiritual infrastructure of the future. We look at how shifting demographics and congregational closures are reshaping where people find meaning and care, and what it will take to build innovative systems that are inclusive, accessible and sustainable. We also discussed the burdens of innovation and spiritual care—from financial constraints to institutional inertia—and why, even with new technologies like AI, nothing can quite replace the beauty of human connection.

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Would you be able to also comment on perhaps where you might see the greatest need for innovation in this field? What is the sort of biggest burning problem where innovation is needed?

Wendy: I think there are two big burning problems. The first is that the public doesn’t have a clear sense of what chaplaincy or spiritual care is, and even in the survey data—where people who have had contact are quite satisfied with their engagement with chaplains in spiritual care—the field, the people who do the work, don’t have a collective sense of who they are and what they do that is well understood by the American public. That’s problem one.

And problem two, what’s called an opportunity, is the business models. So legacy chaplaincy is offered through organizations. So if you’re in the military, you can find a chaplain. It’s actually a federal requirement. Certain healthcare organizations are required by The Joint Commission, the regulatory bodies, to ensure that spiritual care is available, often provided by a chaplain. If you are not in a hospital or in the military, and you think this might be helpful, there is no obvious place to go and find said person.

And so the work that Trace has been doing, with a number of of colleagues, including Amy, has been to think about or to try to figure out: Is there a single understanding that could be used to help this field grow and have a common core that could be communicated, and then what are the business models to enable this? And if they’re only through organizations, that’s limiting. If they were only individual, that would be limiting too. But right now, there’s not a dollars and cents model that makes that work. You can think about subscription models.

So I think those are the two biggest challenges/opportunities. And I think one of the important questions is whether the people who help to answer those questions are called chaplains, or if they’re just doing the work. I, personally, from what we have learned, especially in recent years, think we need to prioritize the work over the label. But then, do you need a new label or a new framework? Yes, probably. But then now we’re many steps down the road. So I think business model and sense of what the work is and how to share, communicate, market it are the two most important questions for this field.

Brandon: Michael, would you agree, or would you have other priorities that you think are important?

Michael: The one thing that I see on a on a daily basis in the lab is a question of religious demographics. And here’s what I mean by that. On the one hand, very well-trained and educated chaplains will and do serve anyone and everyone. They are prepared to do that across a wide range of religious literacy, non-spiritual identification, or whatever the case may be. On the other hand, you very well may want a chaplain from your religious tradition. This becomes an issue if you are from a statistically minority faith tradition in the United States. And it’s a problem, especially for those traditions that may not have sort of a clear-cut concept of chaplaincy like some of the other traditions.

This becomes an issue because you will have people out of those traditions that feel called to this work. Even if they don’t want to call themselves chaplains, they might want to use another term. But it can be extraordinarily difficult for them to find educational opportunities to actually learn how to be a chaplain, because so many of our institutions of education and clinical training remain very historically Christian. And so that can be a real problem for the people who are trying to get into the field.

And so why do I hear about this every day in the lab? It’s because we’re trying to identify those opportunities and help funnel people towards the places that are going to nourish those parts of themselves, which are very important, so that they can now do the work of spiritual care even if their tradition doesn’t have a clear conception.

Brandon: I wonder. I mean, are issues of legal concerns around training and credentialing and liabilities an issue in these cases? Where if there is a body that can accredit chaplains, then perhaps certain institutions are more comfortable with that. But if it is like a minority tradition where there is no institution that can credential a chaplain and provide a kind of standardized training, they might be suspicious. Is that sort of thing a concern? Does that come up?

Michael: It’s definitely a concern. I have two examples of that. One, we will hear fairly often, “Well, why doesn’t the lab just push there to be a legal definition of a chaplain so that the state will license chaplains, just like they license medical providers or whatever else?” I’m not speaking for the lab, but myself. I think that’s a terrible idea, because that definition is going to be open to interpretation and revision until the end of time.

On the other hand, even among organizations that are willing to host or employ chaplains or whatever, if leadership in those organizations doesn’t quite understand the nuances of who becomes a chaplain, you’ll end up with a situation where maybe there’s a leadership job opening in a healthcare system, and they’ll say this person must be board certified. They must have X number of units of Clinical Pastoral Education, and they must be an ordained religious leader. Well, that cuts out everybody whose tradition doesn’t ordain, or maybe they are from a tradition who doesn’t ordain them in particular. And so there are some misconceptions about that that are still about. It’s a very long-term process to go about addressing them. And it is an opportunity for education with some of those institutions to say, “Hey, you’re missing some of the picture here. Maybe let’s think about this in a larger frame.”

Wendy: My worry is that so much airspace and ink has been spilled thinking about those questions, Brandon. They’re all what we call demand-side questions. They’re all about who are the right people to do the job. But if the people who are being served don’t even know what the job is, I don’t think they’re the right strategic questions. Because we can move letters around all we want, but if nobody knows why they would call the person with the letters after their names, who cares?

So as we have learned more about what we call the demand side, or just the experiences of the American public, I think the questions you ask are very important. But I think that they are secondary questions to asking if anybody knows who a chaplain is and how to find one, and who’s going to pay for that person to do the work. That said, I mean, I’m exaggerating, but it has felt, historically, like 90% of the things that chaplains can talk about are in response to your question. And so I try to be provocative with them, to get them to spend less time thinking about those questions and more time focused on those they serve, how they serve them—but if those people even know who they are.

Brandon: I want to pivot to asking you about the more recent work you’ve been doing on this concept called the Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future, which I think really builds on what we’ve been talking about. Could you say a little bit about that initiative, and what do you mean by spiritual infrastructure?

Wendy: Yeah, so that’s a three- or four-year project that’s just getting started. Amy and I, Michael, some colleagues, had been doing unrelated projects, trying to map both those who call themselves spiritual innovators, to understand what they’re doing and who they are, and also trying to understand some church and congregational closures. And my sense, with my sociologist hat on, is that we are seeing a shift in delivery mechanisms for spiritual and religious content, while the congregation in the United States has long been the primary delivery mechanism. And for many people, it absolutely still is. There are others for whom it is not the primary delivery mechanism, and we were trying to understand that. We were thinking about that, both from perspective of individuals, but also being aware of the history of religious organizations in social infrastructures.

And so this is a project designed to ask questions about how the spiritual or religious infrastructures—the institutions, not just the congregations, but the ways that different hospitals, social service organizations, community centers, et cetera—interact in particular cities, and to ask if there’s a way for us to see some of those transitions in real time. So the project has a few arms. The research component is going to focus in four cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and, very likely, Oklahoma City. We’re going to focus in city centers to see if we can understand what’s opening, what’s closing, how are these delivery mechanisms shifting?

The other two pieces of the project: one focuses on public understandings and trying to support journalists in telling a range of stories about contemporary American religious life, not just the stories about decline. And the third part of the project is really designed to ensure that experts in this field continue to be nurtured through graduate school and into positions inside and outside of the academy to provide the thought leadership that is essential going forward. That is an internship program that will enable PhD students in related fields to do paid internships outside of the academy that develop relationships with foundations and different kinds of organizations, where that thought leadership happens, to ensure that we are continuing to build a robust pipeline to think and understand and provide thought leadership about these important questions.

Brandon: That’s wonderful. Yeah, that’s exciting. Really, really ambitious, exciting initiative. Could you say a little bit about what impact you hope it would have? If it’s immensely successful, what would that look like for you?

Wendy: So my sense, we need to think about audience, right? So my sense is that, in the scholarly world, there have been a couple of really important books about the state of American religion. Bob Wuthnow’s 1998 Restructuring of American Religion book is one. Bob Putnam’s book is one. There’s a handful. But as scholars, it always takes us time to catch up to what’s happening and to try to tell this broad sort of stories. So Bob Wuthnow and Penny Edgell are actually editing a book as part of this project, in which we tried to step back and tell that broad story.

So to me, if this project is wildly successful, we know a little bit more in closer to real time about how institutions are shifting on the ground in response to the changes that are taking place in many areas of contemporary religious life. That additional understanding spurs all of us in the public, through articles in the newspaper—where people are thinking about their training and where they’re looking to kind of engage around questions of meaning and purpose—to understand and see more options and to make the choices that are right for us. So we’re trying to advance understanding in a scholarly way, but also in a public way, and also, I think, as people think about vocations in a range of settings.

Brandon: That’s great. Could you all just, sort of zooming out a little bit, say something about perhaps the purchase of the concept of innovation as being valuable for the study of religion, both from a scholarly perspective, a sociological perspective, but also for practitioners. Is it helping shine a light on something that we’re not seeing otherwise? And also, conversely, are there any pitfalls of focusing on innovation as a concept?

Wendy: So we’ve been thinking about that very question because innovation is a new-ish concept. We’ve done the Google Ngram searches, and you can see it gaining in popularity. In my view, innovation is a way to talk about change. And so we’ve been talking about a working paper in which we might look at genealogies of religious change, where innovation is one amongst others. Because it’s impossible to define innovation because it’s so context-dependent.

So I think we’re trying to think about how to contextualize the term. And the fact that it’s currently popular and sounds kind of cool is not a good operational definition when it’s really a way of talking about change. Especially in American religious life, there’s many, many changes. So I’m not answering your question as much as complexifying it and being skeptical. If we put all of our eggs in the innovation bucket, I’m not sure it allows us to tell the whole stories. And what is innovative to one person, family, religious tradition, is not to another. And that level of granularity is important and also impossible to deal with as a scholar. So I don’t know. Michael, I’d be curious about how you think about that. And, Brandon, I’d love to know how you think about it.

Brandon: Yeah, well, as a historian, Michael, I’m very curious about your perspective too.

Michael: Well, we’re touching on very deep parts of people and institutions. I think that there is a risk sometimes that when those institutions hear a word like innovation, it seems combative, or you’re trying to push us in a direction that we don’t want to go, or you’re going to leave behind what is truly a value, or whatever the case may be. I think a very important part of this message is that that’s not the point. The point is not to get rid of American religion as it currently stands, right? That’s not what innovation means.

In one sort of definition, it means drawing on the strengths of our institutions and infrastructure as we have them now to better meet the needs of people where they are. When to use this word many times in her response, she said, shift, right? Not jettison, not bulldoze, and build a new shift, right? So we have, in many ways, the raw material to address these needs all around us. It’s looking at it from a different perspective, and being willing to think about how those resources are put to use in a different way that will allow us to innovate however we choose to define the work.

Brandon: Yeah, I know it is a really, really thorny concept, and that’s why I’m really intrigued by the ways in which both we could use it as scholars, but also pay attention to some of the baggage that comes with the term. There’s, of course, the distinction between the kinds of things we mean by innovation, the kinds of shifts and changes and adaptations. We might mean that there’s something significant about those changes. They’re not just merely incremental modifications, but there’s something, you know. That some community is judging as a significant and useful change for some end that they’re hoping to achieve. But then the word itself can carry a lot of baggage with it.

Are there particular places where as you’re doing this work of mapping, this shifting spiritual infrastructure, that you’re seeing beauty emerge in some of these spiritual innovations perhaps? And any places that you’re particularly drawn to?

Wendy: I mean, my off-the-cuff response is that so much of this work is about enabling people to see beauty that they would otherwise overlook, and—or I don’t want to say creating the conditions, because I don’t believe we create beauty. I think it’s revealed, but to have spaces where it may be revealed where it’s least expected. So I think that’s sort of like asking a question about God, and I would probably give a similar answer.

Michael: I think so much of the work of chaplains is assisting people to see beauty when they think it is impossible to do so. So many chaplains are working with people with a terminal medical diagnosis, or they’ve just suffered a catastrophic death in their family, or whatever the case may be. And when those things happen, quite rightly, you think there is nothing more that is good about my life. Things have changed so drastically that I cannot possibly see beauty anywhere. It’s not something that happens over the course of a 10-minute conversation. But I think chaplains being part of witnessing that difficulty, witnessing the vulnerability, and inviting people to discover what it is that helps them make meaning can really turn those objectively negative experiences into a moment of beauty in a way that certainly would not have happened without someone providing spiritual care to that person.

Brandon: Wow. That’s wonderful. Is there one thing that the public generally tends to get wrong about chaplains? I mean, you’ve mentioned a few things. But is there something that you really want to correct in the public imagination around chaplains, or at least maybe the folks who have the funding resources—whether it’s mayors, or hospital CEOs, or whoever, right? Is there some kind of perception there that you really love to shift and help make a case for the importance of chaplains?

Michael: I can’t remember what year it was Wendy, but there was the actor from MASH who died. We were a little opportunistic and took this opportunity to publish an article somewhere. I can’t remember. But the title was Father Mulcahy Is Dead. The thrust was, a lot of folks think about a chaplain as a white Christian male who’s wearing a collar, and there are plenty of white Christian males wearing collars who are still chaplains. That’s good and fine. But more and more and more chaplains don’t look like that, and most chaplains don’t do the kind of work that Father Mulcahy was doing in the war. Now, how do you shift that perception? I don’t know. Maybe we start paying for multi-million-dollar ads here in football season, so we can get the most people. I don’t know. But that is a major shift in perception that we’ve got to push.

Wendy: I actually prefer the term ‘spiritual care provider,’ because I think it’s more inclusive. And if you look just at that term, spiritual care providers are those who tend to our spirits, to the things that keep us going in all the frames. And so what I would want to say to leaders across the country is that I think it’s undeniable that many of us are struggling with our spirits, and we can see that in polarization and many contemporary social challenges. No chaplain can fix that. But why would you not tend to someone’s spirit if you had the opportunity? That can take many forms. It can include the word religion, if that makes sense, for your demographic, but it needn’t.

In general, chaplains are relatively inexpensive. And so I would just encourage people to try things out. Do a pilot. There’s a great body of research in the UK that shows that embedding spiritual care providers in primary care clinics makes a difference for everybody in the clinic. They are not Father Mulcahy. They are people who provide a listening service—usually, the research shows—around grief and life transitions that patients really appreciate, and that nurses and doctors really appreciate, because nurses and doctors never have enough time during the day to serve and attend to all of the reasons why people are there. When that feels like religion in a medical clinic, people can be very concerned. But when that’s simply about a listening presence and coming alongside and tending people’s spirit, why not try it and see if it works?

Michael: I had a conversation just maybe last week with a person who has a nonprofit organization to provide spiritual care to a community that is involved in a very dangerous and very expensive hobby. I shouldn’t say more than that, because that person didn’t know I was going to talk about this. But this person said, “Look, the folks that I work with that I provide spiritual care for, they are obscenely wealthy. All of their material needs are met. And in that demographic, they don’t need God, they don’t want God. But we’ll be out in the field doing this hobby and they’ll say, ‘My spouse is leaving me, and I have no idea what to do.” That’s not a question that has an answer, but it is something that having someone who is well-trained and prepared to stand there and talk to you while you’re engaged in something that you love to do about this enormous life change that is looming over you is really important.

Wendy: We have a section on the Chaplaincy Innovation website that’s called “This is What a Chaplain Looks Like.” We encourage people to Google it. We’ve encouraged any chaplain who wants to be included there to send us their photo and a bio. Because it really shows the breadth of possibilities in this work. And part of what Michael does in his leadership now in the lab is help people who want to try things out, figure out what they might look like. One of the lab’s greatest resources is its networks and our ability to introduce people with an idea to someone who’s tried it or might try it. This is where we facilitate innovation, which means experimentation, trying things out that may or may not work, and learning together through that process.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s amazing. So in this particular time we’re in—both in terms of the political uncertainty and upheavals that are going on, but also in terms of the rise of AI and new technologies—are you seeing any, especially critical needs to protect the value or highlight the value of spiritual care? Is that going to take new forms, you think? How do you see that?

Wendy: Michael, this one’s for you. I texted Michael about this the other day, and he said, oh, he’d already been doing all these things.

Michael: This is something that really intelligent thinkers are thinking very hard about. Because I would imagine most of us agree that AI is: it is already pervading our lives. It is going to continue to do so. We can’t push back the time. It’s here to stay.

What does that actually mean for something like spiritual care? There is a really easy answer that says, well, as long as you train the model well enough, why can’t AI be a spiritual care provider? You can ask it questions, and it’ll have conversations with you. It gets to know your personality. That is extraordinarily dangerous and, I think, irresponsible. But that is one thing that we have to contend with.

On the other hand, we have to think about what are all of this sort of administrative tasks and bureaucratic things that chaplains have to do day in and day out? Can AI be a tool to free them up, to be more creative and be more direct and personal with people? If so, that’s great. But I think we are heading towards a point where the conversation over what makes us human is going to be very top of mind for all of us. I would guess that all of us have an answer. But pretty soon, it’s going to be unavoidable, and it’s going to determine the course of where society goes.

Wendy: There’s a great recent article, and I’m going to forget all the details, written by a theological educator who had an accident and was in the emergency room and decided to ask AI all kinds of core questions. It outlines the answers AI could give and the answers AI would not give, and how that’s different when you talk to an AI module through a Catholic, a Mormon, et cetera, lens. And what I left that article, which is what I was sending to Michael, what I left that article thinking about is that AI is a tool. It’s a kind of exoskeleton for the mind. Sure, we can train it up to do some of this work. But for me, what makes us human is that real connection, that real improvisation, that ability to sit and touch and be with other people—not a bot—when things are wonderful and when things are difficult. And so I think AI is another tool that can enable the work of spiritual care to be done perhaps in some different ways. I think we need to embrace it and play with it and try it out. Will it replace it? No, but I don’t believe that AI is going to replace the humanness of us if we continue to use it as ethically as appropriate.

Brandon: Yeah, let’s hope so. It’s a real danger. I think as you would use the word empaths, Michael, to describe spiritual care providers, I think that particular capacity to be moved and to respond because one is moved, and therefore to be present because one has suffered in some way and can therefore resonate with the suffering of another seems so critical to highlight and to value in these times.

I want to thank you for the important work you’re doing and for being so generous with your time. Where can we direct our viewers and listeners too, so they can learn more about the work you’re doing?

Michael: It’s very easy. Chaplaincyinnovation.org. Everything that we have talked about is right there, including a lot of information about the project on the spiritual infrastructure of the future. So I really encourage everyone to check all of that out. And you can always get in touch with us directly. It’s just info@chaplaincyinnovation.org. There are many days where I think I’m mostly a glorified traffic cop, and I direct people to go talk to other people. But that’s fine. I love doing that. So if people have questions or want to continue the conversation, we certainly will.

Brandon: Amazing. Well, thank you both again. This has been a real delight.

Wendy: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you, Brandon.

This is part 2 of my interview with Wendy Cadge and Michael Skaggs.

What does innovation look like in the field of spiritual care, when fewer people belong to congregations, yet more people still need meaning, accompaniment, and spiritual support? My two guests today have been researching this question extensively.

Wendy Cadge is President of Bryn Mawr Co…

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What does innovation look like in the field of spiritual care, when fewer people belong to congregations, yet more people still need meaning, accompaniment, and spiritual support? My two guests today have been researching this question extensively.

Wendy Cadge is President of Bryn Mawr College and a nationally renowned sociologist of religion and spirituality. She is the founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, which brings together chaplains, educators, and social scientists to study and support spiritual care across public institutions and community settings. Her work focuses on religious diversity, spirituality, and the role of chaplaincy in contemporary society.

Michael Skaggs is Director of Programs and Co-Founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab. A historian of American religion based at the University of Notre Dame, his research explores interfaith dialogue, maritime and port chaplaincy, American Catholicism, and emerging models of spiritual care. He oversees education, professional development, and public-facing initiatives for the Lab.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. The origins and mission of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

2. Traditional and emerging models of chaplaincy and spiritual care

3. Public perceptions of chaplains versus how chaplains describe their work

4. The role of chaplains in addressing loneliness and isolation

5. Spiritual care beyond formal religion

6. Community-based and workplace chaplaincy models

To learn more about Wendy and Michael’s work, you can find them at:

• Wendy Cadge: https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/people/wendy-cadge

• Michael Skaggs: https://chaplaincyinnovation.org/team/michael-skaggs-phd

Links Mentioned:

• Chaplaincy Innovation Lab – https://chaplaincyinnovation.org/

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

For much of human history, innovation was treated as a pejorative, if not a threat: it implied an act of defiance against established order. In 1548, English king Edward VI issued a royal proclamation against “those that doueth innouate.” To innovate was to risk imprisonment, exile, or worse.

Today innovation is no longer suspect but sacred. It is a criterion of worth. We prize it, pursue it, fund it, and brand ourselves with it. But have we lost something in the process?

In my recent conversation with Scott D. Anthony—one of the most thoughtful interpreters of Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation—we explore not just how innovation happens but what it does to us when we fail to reckon with its costs.

Scott is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. His cutting-edge courses, including “Leading Disruptive Change,” “Horizon Scanning,” and “AI and Consultative Decision-Making,” blend academic research and practical business insights. His research and teaching builds on more than two decades of field work guiding global leaders through transformative change. He spent more than two decades at Innosight, a consulting company Christensen co-founded, including six years as Innosight’s global managing partner. Scott has advised companies in close to 30 countries, and has been named one of the world’s most influential management thinkers multiple times by Thinkers50.

In our conversation, we discuss his new book, Epic Disruptions, which tells the story of eleven innovations that reshaped the modern world—from the printing press to fast food to artificial intelligence. The book is not just a celebration of novelty, but also examines the shadow cast by innovation.

Innovation, in Scott’s account, is predictably unpredictable: it’s patterned enough to study, but never tidy enough to control. Gutenberg, for instance, did not set out to invent the printing press. He tried (unsuccessfully) to make money selling religious mirrors for a pilgrimage that never happened. It was plague, geography, craft traditions, collaborators, and institutional patrons that made the press possible.

Scott also explains how organizations are haunted by “ghosts” of the past, present, and future. Innovation fails not because leaders don’t see change coming—they almost always do—but because they lack the courage and imagination to integrate continuity and transformation. The most successful innovators are those who can say, simultaneously: much will change and something essential will endure.

But is innovation always good?

The printing press democratized knowledge. But it also destabilized authority and accelerated religious conflict. Automobiles transformed mobility, but they also required new norms, new regulations, and new forms of social discipline to prevent chaos. AI promises extraordinary gains in access and productivity—but without guardrails, it risks concentrating power in the hands of elites, eroding trust, and hollowing out human agency.

Scott, by his own admission, is an optimist. But his research has made him more humble. Disruptive innovation, he argues, always produces winners and losers. To pretend otherwise is dangerous.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video below, or read the unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: All right, Scott. Thank you so much for joining us in the podcast. It’s great to see you, and I’m delighted that you can be a guest on the show.

Scott: Brandon, I’m really looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Brandon: Yeah, great. Scott, I’ve been really enjoying your latest book, Epic Disruptions, which I highly recommend. Super engaging read. I mean, I love your sort of really easy-to-access synthesis of a lot of theory and history. There’ve been a lot of really great case studies here—some of which I’m familiar with, others that are new—and a lot of dad jokes. You have a running commentary in the footnotes. I think you have a really great humorous style of engagement and also very personable. It’s a wonderful book.

Scott: Thank you. I have not heard someone say the footnotes are running dad jokes, but I think my kids would definitely associate with that. I will tell them that tonight. They’ll appreciate it.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, yeah, they would accuse me of similar things if I made similar comments, you know. Good. Well, let’s talk a little bit about beauty, just to get started. I’d asked you to perhaps think of an example of beauty from your younger days that lingers with you till today. What comes to your mind?

Scott: You know, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about beauty and childhood, it was October 1991. I was in Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the last game the Baltimore Orioles were to play in that stadium. We got season tickets in 1984—which, if you’re a baseball fan, is the year after the Orioles won the World Series. But I did get to go to one of the games of the World Series in 1983. Thanks, mom and dad. But you know, we had been there 60 games a year—’84, ‘85, ‘86, et cetera. The team was not a very good team that year, but the last day was pageantry. It was a beautiful early fall day. The sun was shining. I can still hear the fans chanting. We want Mike to bring in Mike Flanagan to get the last out of the game. It’s just one of these moments where you can kind of feel the glare of the sun as you think about it. I love baseball. I love being outside. It’s just a beautiful memory.

Brandon: Wow. What about that in particular was moving? What has made that stay in your mind, do you think? What qualities of that experience?

Scott: You know, I think a lot of the things that stick with me are those moments where there is—I can’t remember the exact term for it—the collective effervescence. I think that’s close to it, right?

Brandon: Oh, yes. Durkheim. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Scott: Right. So you have 50,000 people who are cheering in one voice who are feeling, to some degree, the same feeling. I think in our world today where there’s so much artificiality, the reality when you’re there and things are imperfect. The Orioles lost that game. They didn’t win that game. It wasn’t a triumphant victory, but we’re all there united to see something. And after the game, they rolled out a red carpet. Everyone’s out in tuxedos, and they say goodbye to the old. Of course, you’re then saying hello to the new. So it’s the collective experience and the transition, I guess, that really sticks with me. The weather was really beautiful too, so that helped.

Brandon: Sure, sure, sure. It seems like a combination of a lot of factors aligning. And so even though your team loses, there’s still that kind of harmony of different elements there. In many ways, that does seem to resonate with some of the criteria for successful innovations. But let’s talk about what innovation means, how do you define it, and what does that word mean to you? How did it move from being a term that was pejorative and suspect to now a kind of universal criterion of worth?

Scott: Well, the Nobel Prize was recently awarded to three economists who did research specifically on this, that said we had this move that happened in the 18th century where, prior to that, innovation might not even have existed as a word in many languages—and if it was used, it was a bad thing.

So you asked for a definition. My definition is pretty simple. It’s something different that creates value. You can break that into two parts. Something different is intentionally vague, because that gives space for big things. Hypersonic planes and world-saving medications and so on, and the day-to-day things that make life better, both are forms of innovation. Creates value separates innovation from inputs—things like invention and creativity, which are essential ingredients, of course. But until you translate that into something that solves a problem that matters for someone and therefore creates value, in my mind, you have not innovated.

Now, why was this a bad thing? One of the best finds in the historical research for my book was a 1548 proclamation by King Edward VI, or his team of handlers since he was 10 at the time. It was a proclamation against “Those That Doeth Innovate.” And you ask, why would the king want to ban innovation? Well, it’s pretty simple. Innovation is something different. It questions and challenges the status quo. Who or what is the status quo in 1548? It’s the king, or it’s God. So if you’re questioning the status quo, you’re questioning power structures, that’s bad. It takes the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, to say, “Hey, actually, some really good things happen when we ask questions,” like huge increases in life expectancy and wealth and all the things we take for granted today. So that’s my thoughts on innovation.

Brandon: It makes sense if really—again, from the lens of beauty—if maintaining order and seeing the existing order, even social order, as reflective of something eternal, of something divine, pointing to something beyond. That becomes really a sacred thing to uphold. Any kind of challenge to that order is going to be perceived as ugly, distasteful, not too much problematic and worth imprisoning and killing people over, right? And so it really is fascinating to see how our general proclivity for this sort of change has changed over time.

I’ll have more questions to ask you about what gets lost in our focus on innovation. But let’s talk about disruption. Your work builds on the work of Clay Christensen. Tell us a little bit about how you encountered him. What was it like working with him, and how did he come up with this idea of disruptive innovation?

Scott: Well, let me answer that in order. The encounter, the first encounter was 25 years ago. I was a second-year student at the Harvard Business School. I had kind of thoughtlessly signed up for a class called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. It was a new class. There were no reviews, so you couldn’t judge based on that. The professor was this guy, Clay Christensen, who had written a book. Of course, lots of Harvard professors had written a book, but the description sounded kind of interesting. I took the class, and from day one of that class, I was hooked, because the research that he had done—summarized in his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma—was just captivating. That research showed that there was a certain type of innovation that he called a ‘disruptive innovation’ that did something really unique. It took things that were complicated and expensive, made them simple and affordable, changed market dynamics and drove explosive growth.

The thing he found is, if you look historically, if you were going to place a bet, when the battle is about disruptive innovation, you bet against the established market leader. Even though they have the resources, they’ve got the capabilities, they’ve got the money, there’s just something about disruptive innovation that made it really hard for incumbents to grab hold of them. And I saw, when I read The Innovator’s Dilemma, when I saw Clay’s research, I saw my own life through different lenses. I was the managing editor of my college newspaper the year the Netscape browser came out. We struggled with it because it was a classic disruptive change in our space. I understood my classes in different ways. Clay gave me, and countless other people, a new lens at which to look at the world.

Brandon: Then you worked for his company for a bit, Innosight, for a number of years. Could you say a little bit about what your work entailed there?

Scott: Yeah, that’s correct. So I graduated from the Harvard Business School in 2001. I spent two years then as Clay’s research assistant. We wrote a book together, my first book, called Seeing What’s Next. Then in 2003, I joined this fledgling consulting company that he had formed with my former colleague, Mark Johnson, called Innosight. The focus at Innosight really is: take research by Clay and other like-minded academics and help executives confront the challenges of disruptive change. Take what historically was a threat and turn it into an opportunity.

I was based in the U.S. from 2003 to 2010. I moved out to Singapore that year. I was in Singapore with Innosight for a dozen years, ran Innosight for six of those years. We sold the company in 2017. It now has a different owner. It still exists as a subsidiary. I moved back to the U.S. in 2022, and that’s when I transitioned from consulting to teaching, where I now teach at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Brandon: Great. So tell us a little bit about what disruptive innovation meant for Clay. I think you mentioned in the book that he sort of regretted using the term ‘disruption.’ Say a bit more about that.

Scott: It was the phrase itself. He was, to a degree, was a victim of one’s own success. The idea really blew up. So when I was a student at the Harvard Business School, Clay ended up getting on the cover of Fortune Magazine with Andy Grove from Intel. It said Intel’s Big Thinker on the cover. Clay was 6’8”, and Andy Grove was more than a foot shorter than that. So it was a pretty iconic picture and a tongue-in-cheek headline. But you know, Intel was a company that took the ideas in Clay’s book and used it to defend against threats and create new growth opportunities. And that’s what Clay really was trying to do with his research. He was saying, “Look, there’s a pattern out there. If we understand the pattern, we can use it to our advantage.” That’s what his life work was—really trying to distill patterns, turn them into frameworks, models, tools, theories, use metaphors and stories to communicate them to people, and help them see what they would otherwise miss. That was what turned into my life’s work as well—really helping people see what would otherwise be invisible.

The underlying view is that you have agency as a business leader. You are not powerless against these forces. You think and act in the right way, you can seize opportunities. You can drive growth that otherwise would allude you. In fact, if you look, over the past decade, what is the big anomaly to Clay’s research, the incumbents are winning. People like Apple and Facebook and Amazon and Google are grabbing hold of disruptive change and driving growth with it.

Now back to the question about the regret. The challenge that Clay had is, he had a very specific meaning in mind when he used the word disruption—innovation that takes complicated, expensive things, makes them simple and affordable, hard for incumbents to grapple with, because they don’t naturally allocate resources towards them. But disruption means other things to other people. You crack open the dictionary, you see other things ascribed to the word. People just put the disruption sticker on everything. The more popular it got, the more people said, “I’m disruptive. I’m doing this. I’m doing that.” Sometimes it was dictionary disruption. Sometimes it was Christensen’s style disruption. The difference actually matters, and it would drive Clay more than a little bonkers because people would misuse his research.

Brandon: There’s been obviously a lot of debate and critique of the concept, right? I remember Jill Lepores’ New Yorker article. I mean, a number of points there, but even certainly, one of those is that the business community seems to have run wild with this concept of disruption. Everyone is trying to disrupt everything—disruptions in higher education. There have been a lot of negative consequences to that sort of approach. What do you make of those critiques? Have you found any merit to any of them?

Scott: I’d say two things. Number one, I think like Clay. Clay had a sign in his office that said: “Anomalies Wanted.” He was a good social scientist. You want things that run counter to your model, because that’s how you make the model stronger and how you learn. So good critique is very valuable. I just read a book, The Innovation Delusion. It came out a few years ago. It made a very similar point. It said, the problem is, when we get so excited about the new, we forget the importance of doing old things well. So in that book, they talked about the importance of maintenance and making sure that our roads still function, that our bridges hold up, that our software systems don’t go down. That’s work that can sometimes get lost if we get too much into a cult of anything—disruption, innovation, whatever.

So I think good critique, very valuable. And for sure, I see examples where companies forget, organizations forget, this is not either-or. This is not either we run today, or we create tomorrow; either we sustain, or we disrupt. It really has to be a both-and. And if you’re not doing both of those things, you’re going to get your organization into trouble. So I think it’s really valuable that people remind us of that. Now, you know, sometimes people have an ax to grind, and they might go a little bit too far. But that’s the nature of the world, isn’t it?

Brandon: Yeah, great. Well, let’s jump into your book. You’ve outlined four key questions which generate some paradoxical answers, right? So you ask: who is it that innovates? Is it random? Is it accelerating? Is it always good? Can you walk us through perhaps one of your examples and answer these questions for us? What are the responses that you’ve come up with to these questions?

Scott: You know, I think the printing press example in chapter two allows us to answer, I think, all four of the questions. We’ll see how we do. But you know, the very short story of the printing press. 1434, Gutenberg moves to Strasbourg not to create the printing press. 1437, he creates a venture to do something very different—to create mirrors that would capture the Holy Spirit during a planned pilgrimage. The pilgrimage gets called off because of an outbreak of the plague. Bad for the mirror venture, good for humanity—because ultimately, the team with Gutenberg on it creates the printing press. So that’s the beginning part of the story.

So what does it teach us about those four questions? Who does it? I say it’s a collectively individualistic activity. Gutenberg, of course, is the hero in the story. But there’s no story unless there’s his partner who works with him—unless Konrad Saspach brings the printing press, unless Johann Fust gives the funding, unless Nicholas of Cusa provides the first commercial opportunity. There’s a lot of people involved in it. That’s important to remember.

Is it predictable? One of the things that I observed consistently through the story is, yes, there are clear patterns. So why did Gutenberg come up with the printing press? Strasbourg was a great location. It was a trade route. There is a bell industry there, so people are engraving on the bells. It’s a wine-growing region, so there are presses. The basic pattern, magic happens at intersections. That runs through all the stories. There’s never a straight line to success though. So you don’t know exactly how it’s going to work, but you certainly can look for those patterns.

The fourth question gets really well illustrated by Gutenberg. Is it a universal good? There are, of course, a lot of good things that happen with the printing press, but one very persistent finding in my research is that disruption always casts a shadow. What was it for the printing press? Well, Nicholas of Cusa, the Catholic Church, is an early customer. Makes sense, right? They want to standardize the missiles that you use for religious ceremonies. It takes three years to hand-inscribe a Bible. They’re super thrilled when they can do that faster. However, they’re less thrilled when it also allows Martin Luther to spread his different views of religion a lot faster. The second order effects sometimes lead people to say, “What have I done?” So you also have all sorts of things that happen because knowledge spreads—many of them good, some of them bad.

The third thing about the pace of innovation doesn’t fully get answered in the Gutenberg story, but I can make a connection. Not an overnight success. So the printing press in 1440, you’ve got the basic pieces there. The first Bible rolls out in 1454, 14 years later. It’s really five or six decades before you really feel the impact. So it’s like a 70-year story. The timelines have compressed today, but it’s not like things happen overnight. As one very simple example, OpenAI introduces the first version of ChatGPT commercially in 2022. It quickly gets to 100 million consumers in the 56th year of artificial intelligence, as artificial intelligence research began in 1956 at a conference in Dartmouth College. So 70 years to have the full impact of the printing press, 56 years before we feel it deeply individually with artificial intelligence. It’s not a massive acceleration, is it? So anyway, those are some of the answers I came up with. It still requires lots of persistence and patience over sometimes very long periods of time.

Brandon: Yeah, to me, those are really important insights there. One of the questions I had, I suppose, reading the printing press story was how deliberative is the pursuit of disruption. I mean, it seemed like Gutenberg was in many ways intentional about wanting to disrupt things. Perhaps he had ambition and a desire to change things. But do a lot of disruptive innovations require some intentionality, or do some of these just happen serendipitously? What is the role of intention, agency versus things that kind of — you do have the sort of question about randomness, but there are a lot of innovations that do seem to be unintentional. I’m just curious to know how you make sense of that.

Scott: It’s a great question, and this gets back to the predictably unpredictable nature of innovation. Certainly, you have people who will say, “I’ve got a strategic intent,” that, “I want to take this hill, take this market, introduce this technology.” Even in that, there’s a lot of serendipity, surprises, things that you didn’t expect.

As a simple example of this, in 1951, Julia Child teams up with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle to create a cookbook of French recipes for American chefs. They think they’re going to publish the book in three years. It ends up taking them 10 years. They have to switch publishers twice. They have a near-death experience where their publisher, at the last minute, rejects them. So that’s a twist in the story. What happens next? Well, Julia Child has a friend, Avis DeVoto, who knows someone named Judy Jones, who’s looking specifically for books that have a French-American connection. It feels like luck. But as always, luck is the residue of design, because Julia Child had a network that enabled her to do that. So this mix between there being kind of the lightning strike, how tense the lightning bolt on the cover of the book, and my customized lightning cufflinks that I’m wearing today — they just came a couple weeks ago. So this is a—

Brandon: You’ve got merch. That’s good.

Scott: I’ve got a t-shirt too. I did not wear the t-shirt today, but yeah. But anyway, this notion that both of those things are there. I think one of the things that’s really important, if you’re an innovator and you want to do it, it’s not that you’re going to have a perfect plan and everything is going to go smoothly. That’s just not the way it works. You have to expect the unexpected. You have to expect weird things are going to happen and pounce on them when they do.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, one of the challenges, I suppose, in reading the Julia Child chapter, the thing that comes to mind is, how do you know what it is that people are going to, what problem they’re going to be willing to pay to solve? It probably wasn’t clear to a lot of people at the time that American women were hungering for a book on French cooking. I think you have a footnote about a story about medical tourism, where you learn that people just lie. This is no end of marketing research surveys asking customers what they want to buy and how much they pay for it and how much of that is of any value. So how do you really know, in terms of if you’re trying to innovate, what it is that’s actually going to meet a real problem for people?

Scott: First of all, I have to say I really do appreciate you calling out a footnote because I don’t always get that, so I appreciate. Even though it’s a slightly painful one, the failed medical tourism business. But you know, that was a very good learning experience. So let me just say a little bit about that, and then use it as an answer to the question.

Innosight was, is primarily a strategy consulting company. It works with large organizations, gives them advice about their toughest strategic and innovation challenges. There was a period of time where Innosight also had a venture building and venture capital arm. One of the ventures that Innosight tried to build was this business called Choice Med. Here’s the basic origin story. If you look at the statistics between the United States and Singapore, you see something really interesting. The U.S. spends one in every $5 of GDP on health care. In Singapore, it’s $1 out of every 20. Singapore spends a lot less, but health outcomes are much better in Singapore than they are in the U.S. So healthcare is really affordable, and they get great outcomes. So the idea is pretty simple—medical tourism. Get people who are going to undergo elective procedures in the US, have them fly to Singapore, have the procedure done for a fraction of the cost, have them recuperate in a six-star resort, and have them go back home.

So when Innosight was doing research for the idea, it did the thing you do. Talked to customers and everyone’s like, “Yeah, great. I would love to do it.” Talked to people who worked at insurance companies, we’ll absolutely sign up. So then, Innosight began running little get togethers in Florida where there was a lot of target customers—knee and hip replacements, and so on—with leaflets, advertising the service. Nobody showed up. Once people were faced with the real opportunity to get on a plane and fly 9,000 miles to a place that few had heard of and almost none could identify on a map, the stated interest very quickly disappeared.

So how do you know that you’re targeting a real problem? Well, what I advise—this is in my book The First Mile from 2014. You listen to what people say, but more critically, you watch what they do. If they are already spending time or money trying to solve a problem and they’re frustrated, that’s a good sign. You then try to, as quickly as possible, do what Innosight did, which is put people in a real environment to say, alright. Put your money, put your time where your mouth is. Demonstrate that this actually matters to you. If they demonstrate by purchasing something, that’s good. If they do it more than once, you’re feeling better. If they’re telling their friends about it, okay, you really have hit a nerve. So that’s the basic idea of how you can really know for sure. You only know when you know. You look for the signals beforehand, and you try to demonstrate through action that those signals actually mean something.

Brandon: Thank you. That’s really—

Scott: Choice Med lasted for about one year before it was folded. And you know, the thing I will say in hindsight is, not too much money was burnt with these lessons. We got good stories that we could then use to advise our clients to not do the same thing that we did.

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, everybody, that’s a good place to pause our conversation. In part two, we’ll move from history to practice. We’ll look at how leaders can better recognize disruption and deal with the ghosts that keep organizations from changing. We’ll look at the secret to McDonald’s success, what Clay Christensen got wrong about the iPhone, and how to reckon with the burdens of innovation without losing sight of its promise.

See you next time.

PART TWO

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everybody. This is part two of my conversation with Scott D. Anthony about his new book, Epic Disruptions. In the first half, we traced how disruptive innovations emerge. Let’s now turn to the leader’s playbook—how to spot real disruption, how to invest across time horizons, overcome the ghosts that hold organizations back, and what disruptive innovation might mean for religious organizations. Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: One of the other sort of misperceptions I think your book dispels is the idea that disruptive changes sort of creep on us unexpectedly, right? And so I think you’re arguing, I think you say that you’ve never met a market leader that didn’t see the disruption coming. As you mentioned, in the case of the Catholic Church, they even funded the disruption. So there is a dilemma certainly, it seems, for leaders. Do they recognize and invest in a disruption, which would be good in the long term but that would come with a short-term pain that they have to endure, right? And so how should they navigate that? What should leaders do in this case? How do they recognize a disruption, and to what extent should they invest in it?

Scott: So, first, on the recognition point, there is a very clear pattern of disruption. There are three big elements to it. One, you have something that is introducing purposeful trade-offs. So taking complicated and expensive things, making them simple and affordable. So you have a purposeful trade-off. Second, a disruption will typically start not in the middle of the mainstream of the market, but at a fringe or at an edge somewhere. And third, what will really drive the disruptive growth is a powerful business model where you can create, deliver, and capture value in new ways.

So if you fast forward to today, where do we see this happening? You look at professional services, you see very clear signs where people say, “We have artificial intelligence that enables us to offer very different forms of services.” We can start not in the mainstream but among people who aren’t using people, like McKinsey, or Deloitte, or big tax providers, or so on. And we’re going to make money in very different ways. It’s just ding, ding, ding. Big warning sign that it’s coming. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is recognizing, again, this is not an either-or thing. A good executive will say, “Yes, I’ve got a great business that I want to maximize, that I want to strengthen, that I want to make more resilient, and I will recognize that is ultimately a frail, dying business. So I will also go and invest in what will be the next generation for my business.” The key thing in getting this right is to play in your mind with timeframes. If you look at what I should do over the next minute, it’s very clear. You invest every marginal thing that you have in today better. If you look over the next 100 years, it’s also very clear. You invest everything in tomorrow. The trick is to say: how do I span both of those time frames simultaneously? Not easy to do. But if you play with time, you can see it’s very obvious to have a good, balanced portfolio that both sustains today and disrupts and creates tomorrow.

Brandon: Do you have any good examples of companies that have done that, case studies that you’ve seen where they’ve successfully been able to do this?

Scott: Brandon, I’m smiling because I was debating giving the case today. I thought my answer had gotten too long winded. So I’m glad you’ve asked the follow-on question. It’s a case that I teach my students in my class leading disruptive change. I think it’s a really fun one.

In 2014, Masahiko Uotani became the CEO of Shiseido, which is a Japanese cosmetics company. He was the first outsider to helm the company in its then 142 years of history. The company had been stagnant, declining for a couple decades. He launched a very bold transformation strategy that had basically changes to everything—the product portfolio, how it was organized, even the spoken language, going from Japanese to English. It worked. It delivered huge growth, transformed the company, et cetera. One key to it is he had, essentially, a 240 plus year strategy. So he would go forward 100 years and say, “What we are doing is we are laying the foundation for Shiseido’s future.” He would go back 142 years and say, “While it feels like everything is changing, we have always been a place where East meets West. We have always been a place where science meets beauty. We are changing to remain unchanged.” So you give people something to hold on to in the midst of all the change, give them an inspirational destination to get to, and make sure again you’re getting that balance of today and tomorrow right. I interviewed their former CFO. He said, with 100-year timeframe, there were some decisions that would have been hard that became really easy. So should we invest in a new R&D facility? Of course, we needed the new R&D facility for the next 100 years. We had to still deliver the quarter. That’s not a choice. That’s not an option. But that means we have to do great things in the short term, so we can enable everything we want to do in the long term. That view of time, changing that view of time, really changed the way people thought about it.

Now, if you’re a student in an upcoming run of leading disruptive change, cover your ears. What I do in class, which I think it’s super fun, I have a cold call for this class, but the class doesn’t see it coming. I find someone in the class, and there’s always someone who majored in philosophy, and I say, “Tell me about time.” They kind of do a triple take, and they’re like, “What?” I said, just tell me about time. The first time I did it, the student said, “I’m sorry, you’re not going to like my answer. Time isn’t real.” I’m like, “No, no, no, I love your answer. Let’s keep going.”

Brandon: Okay. I mean, this is really resonant with some other research I’ve done with some colleagues in Italy around looking for models of what we call social generativity. We’re trying to find companies and organizations that sort of are paving a way out of consumer society. And what we find, a lot of these cases are very much this sort of what we call inter temporality. So there’s a deep connection to the past, a sense of rootedness in the past, and also a very, very long-term horizon—200, 500 years. Brunello Cucinelli is another firm that comes to mind from the fashion industry, where the firm is really looking to ancient philosophy, the work practices of Benedictine monks and so on, and also trying to build 200 years into the future a sort of revitalized community where artisans continue to thrive and flourish. And so very hard to get that kind of perspective in the face of immense market pressure, especially if you’re a publicly-traded company.

Scott: I don’t know. People will say that. I don’t know that I really believe it. The thing I draw when people say that is, there’s a field called adaptive leadership. Ron Heifetz at the Harvard Kennedy School is kind of the main thought leader behind it. They have this chart that just really — every time I see it, it speaks to me. It talks about the relationship between change and discomfort. What it says is, as you’re going through change, discomfort is induced. At some point, you cross a threshold, it’s good. You have to be uncomfortable to change. You’re working out. You tear muscle to rebuild it. At some point, you cross the threshold, it’s bad. You can’t tolerate it. When that’s a physical threshold, your body tells you, you stop. You recognize it. When it’s an emotional threshold, you get signals, but you don’t really recognize them. So you want to find ways to make it go away. So you find ways, in sophisticated ways, to avoid that, to avoid the work. You create defense mechanisms. You scapegoat. You find other people to blame.

When I hear people say, “Well, I wish I could, but the public shareholders won’t let me,” to me, it feels like work avoidance. It feels like trying to find a reason to avoid doing something that, yes, is very uncomfortable and is hard, but is doable. Jeff Bezos convinced investors that you could be misunderstood for long periods of time. Mark Bertolini, when he was the CEO of Aetna, said, “Basically, I’m going to follow this 20-year plan. If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other stocks that you can invest in,” and then delivered against what he said he was going to do. Michael Mauboussin has done research that shows you can do this. You can change your shareholders if you change the way that you message to them. So those leaders that say they’re constrained by shareholders, I think they’re constrained by their own limitations, to be honest.

Brandon: Right, yeah. So what does it really take then to — I mean, does it just require a leader to really commit to that long-term horizon in the face of whatever seeming pressures or potential objections? Is it an individual characteristic? Is it some sort of virtue, or are there other factors that you think would help companies to actually really invest in this long-term vision?

Scott: So good news, bad news. There’s a lot. So it’s not just individual virtue, which is good. Because if it’s just you have to be touched by whatever in the right way, then there’s a few precious people who can do it. And of course, leadership is critical in all of this. There are heroes in stories. There also are systems and structures and things you need to put in place to do it. I call these all technical tools, very well-documented about how you put in portfolio management and all that.

The hard part of the problem in my mind is the adaptive part of the problem. Because when you are going through something like this, there’s no clear right answer. There’s a possibility that people are going to lose—you’re going to have one division win, one division lose, et cetera—and there’s a certainty that you’re going to struggle. It’s going to be painful. So, to me, by far, the most important thing is dealing with those adaptive challenges. That requires that a team is willing to be patient, a team takes a long-term perspective. A team can become, in the midst of chaos, a team can use multi cognition to be able to see lots of different perspectives and have a paradox mindset, so they see possibilities, intentions. It is a higher order set of skills. Good news: all skills can be developed if people consciously practice them.

The thing I would say the biggest barrier to all of this—I’d say this in the back half of chapter 10 of the book, that chapter on steel—every organization is haunted by ghosts. Those ghosts are invisible and incredibly powerful. And if you don’t see them, spot them and exorcise them, then you will never succeed. It’s really hard. I mean, this is something that I think most organizations struggle a lot with.

Brandon: Yeah, could you say a bit more about that? Because even just that sense of identity is so critical for a lot of organizations, right? It’s not just businesses, right? So any kind of organization that needs to innovate is tied to the ghost of the past. Could you say a little bit about what it takes to overcome that? How do they recognize these things? How should they develop the capacities to move forward? You could use that example there, yeah.

Scott: I think step one is recognizing them. So the Bethlehem Steel chapter, what I did with that chapter is, if you’ve ever studied Clay Christensen, you know his favorite story is talking about steel mini-mills. He’ll talk about how Nucor Steel came up with this electric arc furnace that allowed it to melt scrap steel and sell it for lower prices. It went and disrupted integrated steel producers like Bethlehem Steel. So I said, okay, let me tell that story with some more details around it. I do it, and one of my early reviewers says it’s pretty boring. Can you flip it? Can you look at it through the eyes of the person who’s getting disrupted? I said, huh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t done that. So I went and researched the history of Bethlehem Steel. I had just written an article recently about the idea of ghosts. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is just now clear in plain sight.

So the ghosts of the past, those are traumas an organization has never gotten over. Bethlehem Steel, like everybody in the steel industry, had labor dispute after labor dispute after labor dispute. Steel mini-mills relied primarily on non-unionized labor. So Bethlehem Steel was going to respond in kind. It had to go play the we’re going to go and break the union card. No way. It was too traumatic to do that. Every organization has—it goes to the present—invisible patterns that they’re following without being aware of them. Bethlehem Steel had an amazing 70-year history. Andrew Carnegie going to Charles Schwab, going to Eugene Grace, 70 years of leaders who focused on making sure the mills were run full, who focused not on pioneering but on optimization, who focused on scale. That was their DNA. That’s just what they did.

Then the ghost that you mentioned that I think is the most important one, the ghost of the future, where the prospect of change raises a fear—that your essence as an organization or as an individual is going to be invalidated. So Bethlehem Steel. A rational, logical thing to do would be to shut down the plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and say, “It doesn’t make sense for us to still do this. Let’s go and go to other geographies and do things that are more economical.” Bethlehem Steel, that’s the company’s name. That’s what the company is. That’s who the people of the company are. You go and talk to people who are working today in automobile companies and you say, what do you do? I’m a car person. I work for a car company. If you get deeper, they’re mechanical engineers. That’s who they are as people. They’re not electrical engineers. They’re not software engineers. They’re not software designers. That’s not the essence of who they are. So these ghosts of the future are really powerful and really hard to address.

Going back to the case study about Shiseido, one of the things that I thought Uotani-san did so well is saying, “Let’s give people something to hold on to. Let’s say, yes, a lot of things are going to change, but let’s be clear about what isn’t going to change.” History can be an anchor. It can hold you back. It can also be a catalyst if you use it in the right sort of way. I thought he and his team were very smart about using it, so the ghost of the future didn’t hold them back.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, that’s great. One of the concepts you use in the book is this idea of competing against non-consumption. Clay talks about that as a key path for disruptive success. Could you say a bit about what that phrase means and why that’s important?

Scott: Well, the basic idea is you have essentially two choices if you’re launching something. One is to compete in established market against what people are already buying. The other is to find somebody who cannot consume because that which exists is too expensive. It requires specialized skills. It requires training and so on. The pattern of disruptive innovation is often finding ways to compete against non-consumption. Because in those markets, something is better than nothing at all.

A modern example of this. So when I break out ChatGPT and think about using it to help my kids with the problem or design something for my students, the choice is: is it better than the excellent teachers that they have in their classes? Is it better than the education I’m providing in the classes? There are pros and cons. You can say, done in the right way, it can be better. But that’s the tradeoff. If you are living in a country that does not have an education infrastructure, that does not have MBA programs, ChatGPT is a lot better than nothing at all. This is where you’re seeing some tremendous growth in ChatGPT and other large language models. Because you now have the ability to have a teacher in your pocket, to have a doctor in your pocket. Because before, you had nothing. Now you have something. And when that’s the choice, you will tolerate something that has all sorts of limitations because, again, something is better than nothing. So would-be innovators, if you can find something like this, where you see a market that is constrained because you need specialized skills, wealth, et cetera to consume something, that can be a great opportunity to drive disruptive growth.

Brandon: That’s great. Another point that you make is the idea of business models—not as fixed things, but as systems. You talked about creating value, delivering value, capturing value. Could you say a bit more about that systemic dimension of innovation? I think the McDonald’s case is one where you really illustrate that.

Scott: One of the proud parenting moments, I had a book launch event at the local bookstore in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and my family was kind enough to join. I cold called my nine-year-old at one point. Someone asked a question about McDonald’s from the audience, and I asked my nine-year-old, Teddy. I said, what’s special about McDonald’s? And like that, he said the speedy service system, which was very good, which was one of the elements. So one of the questions is, why McDonald’s? McDonald’s was not the first burger chain. It was not the first franchise restaurant, but it really was the first to break through and deliver fast food at scale. Well, it really was the system.

So it started with the speedy service system that was created in 1948 by Dick and Mac McDonald. They were running a restaurant that sold many things, and they were frustrated. So they said, “Let’s radically simplify the menu. Nine items. Let’s borrow Henry Ford’s assembly line and bring it to food and make it very simple, very reliable, very affordable, so we can create value for our customers in new ways.” Ray Kroc comes in 1954 and says, “This is amazing. I want to essentially be your master franchiser and bring this to more places.” He then found a unique way to deliver that value. Most people would set up franchise systems in a very extractive way. You try and strike a deal with a local franchise owner where you get as much from them as possible. Kroc and his team embrace mutuality. Let’s create a win-win relationship where we can all grow together. Everything is working great over the next few years—except for one problem: the McDonald’s Corporation, which oversees all of this, isn’t making any money. They made $159,000 the first six years of existence.

Enter Harry Sonneborn, who became CEO of McDonald’s. He didn’t really care about hamburgers. He cared a lot about making money. So he came up with the real estate model. He said, “Let’s find great pieces of land. Let’s lease it. Let’s then sublease it to our franchise owners. Let’s still follow mutuality. So make sure that we only win when they win. But let’s lock in a nice margin on that land.” You put all those pieces together—the speedy service system and a great way to create value, mutuality to deliver that value, the real estate model to capture that value—you create a flywheel that gets bigger and goes faster as you keep growing. Burger Chef, which became Burger King, or other chains, they might make a burger that’s as good. They might have a good relationship with a particular franchise owner, but it’s really hard to get all of that going together because there are links between it. It reinforces. Things are easy to copy. Systems are really hard to copy. That’s what McDonald’s teaches us.

Brandon: Fantastic. Yeah, there’s also just that recognition in a lot of your cases of where a number of these successful innovations are not just a single innovation but a recombination of multiple innovations, right? That you have to have a number of things in place. So let’s talk about the iPhone. I was surprised to learn that Clay Christensen thought that the iPhone would fail. So say a little bit more about why he thought so, and then what that mistake of his can teach us about how disruptive innovation works.

Scott: It’s a pretty famous example. I was not surprised by it because I knew it coming in. So the basic idea, in the middle of 2007, right as the iPhone is getting ready to launch, he talks to someone from Business Week. He says, through my model, the iPhone looks like a late entry in an established category of mobile phones. And my model predicts—if you are introducing what he calls a sustaining innovation which offers better performance along traditional dimensions in an established market—you will fail. So I therefore predict that Apple will fail. He actually would never use “I.” He would always say “the model.” He was very dogmatic about it. The model predicts that this will fail. And of course, the Apple iPhone did anything but fail. It was probably the most successful product in history. What Clay later admitted he got wrong was that frame. He said, well, I was looking at the Apple iPhone compared to other phones. What the Apple iPhone really was was the fourth generation of computers. So you had mainframes, you had microcomputers, you had personal computers, and you had pocket computers. The Apple iPhone was arguably the pioneer of the pocket computing market.

Now, interestingly, Steve Jobs didn’t see this. When Apple launched the iPhone, Steve Jobs was asked: what is the killer app for the iPhone? They said, well, it’s a phone, so the killer app is making and receiving phone calls. And in the early days, the iPhone sales were not that great. Of course, you had people who lined up on day one to get the Jesus phone, but that was a very small group of people. The problem was there were not many apps on the iPhone. It was a closed system. There were only 16 apps on it, no app store. Jobs didn’t want one. He wanted to have control. Ultimately, his team convinced him that he needed to open it up. Then you really have the full power of the computer in your pocket, sales take off. Disruption is in full bloom.

So this teaches us a few things. Number one, even super smart people like Clay Christensen and Steve Jobs don’t get it right 100% of the time. Number two, you have to watch the movie, not the snapshot. The snapshot said, in the middle of 2007, hey, there’s reasons to doubt. The movie says, hey, if we see this, that suggests the odds of success have gone up. And opening up that app store, that was the big moment.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s talk a little bit about the flip side of innovation. Your fourth question is around how innovation is not always a positive unmitigated good. It often casts a shadow. So how do we make sense of the burdens of innovation, and how should innovators and society reckon with these burdens?

Scott: It’s a huge question and a really important one that is just too frequently overlooked. You can think of three categories of things. So, first, when you do have something introduced that truly is disruptive, it will change dynamics in a marketplace. That means there are going to be winners, and there are going to be losers. If we look at one of the ones I name in the conclusion of the book, autonomous vehicles, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who works for a big trucking company. They’re pushing really hard to drive autonomy—no pun intended. And it makes sense. Because a big cost driver for long-haul routes is the driver in the car. Now, the challenge is, that’s also the number one source of employment in many states in the United States. When it goes away—not if—when it goes away, what are we going to do? That’s one shadow of disruption.

The second shadow of disruption is what happens in marketplaces. If we stick with automobiles for a minute, back in the 1920s—I talk about this in the Model T chapter—there’s chaos in the streets of major cities. Because they were built not for cars, but for people and pedestrians. It required technology. It required norms. It required regulation to get through that. You bring this to modern times, and I really worry that we are blowing it when it comes to artificial intelligence, saying, “Hey, we don’t need to worry about anything. Let technology work itself out.” History says that is not a very good approach.

Then the final shadow is for the individual. As humans, we all suffer from what’s known as the status quo bias—all things being equal. We would like things to remain exactly the same. When disruption drives changes, that’s scary. I remember the first time I got into a Waymo, into a Robotaxi. I do this for a living. I teach, I preach, I talk about it, and still, my palms got sweaty. I was nervous because I’m a human being, and new stuff can be kind of scary. You add on top of that, if we’re in a company and our identity is being threatened, this is really important stuff. So I think the very first thing is: recognize these three categories of shadows exist, and don’t expect they’re just going to work themselves out without a lot of pain. Because they won’t. So we need to have people being thoughtful about it. We need to have government and regulators helping out with it. The alternative is very dark.

Brandon: Well, you mentioned AI which is on everyone’s mind these days. Are there lessons from your case studies that could be applied to helping us think through the ongoing development of AI systems more wisely?

Scott: I sure hope so. If I just echo off the idea of what it really took for the automotive age to come in, it took technology like traffic lights. It took norms. Like when we get to an intersection, we turn in a wide way so other cars can come. It took regulation, like driver’s licenses. So I’d argue, by analogy, we might want to think about: what are technologies that can control or limit, what are norms that ought to be followed related to ethics, and what are regulations that ought to be put in place to make sure some of the downsides that could come with AI? You can think about a lot of them. We don’t see too many of them. Now, I can’t say that I’m particularly optimistic that we’re going to see a lot of this in at least the short term, but I hope in the medium and longer term, we see more of it. Because otherwise, I think it’s going to get pretty ugly. Maybe we need that. Maybe we need a period of ugly before we get to the period of beauty. I don’t know. There’s a lot that I love about AI. I love playing with it. I use it in my classes. There’s many, many beautiful things about it. But like everything, there’s a shadow to it.

Brandon: Are there points at which we start to realize that certain innovations are just not worth it? I mean, I think of now the kind of backlash against social media, which I think rightly so has been growing in part due to the work that Jonathan Haidt and others are doing about the disruptive — not disruptive but destructive.

Scott: Dictionary style. See, there you go. This is why Clay hated the word in the end. But it is. It is, dictionary style, disruptive and destructive. Sorry for talking over you.

Brandon: But then you take a more extreme example of something like smoking, where tobacco for centuries was very popularly used. You could call it an innovation. Its widespread use, that was solving a particular problem, adding value for people, helping them at least experience in their own subjective views a better quality of life. Now it’s almost universally recognized as harmful, right? And so I wonder whether you see ways in which innovations, at some point, just we start to judge their overall benefit as really being not worth their costs.

Scott: You’ve named some examples, and I think there’s others. McDonald’s is a chapter in the book. And so McDonald’s is not without its critics. I think people at McDonald’s would be the first to admit. One of McDonald’s main products that it sells is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola’s purpose is to refresh the world and make a difference. There are a lot of people who say and also push a lot of sugar and create a lot of things that are hard to recycle. And so I think there are lots of categories of things where genies get out of bottles and we say, what have we done? And again, in my view, I’m not an expert in public policy, so admit your limitations. But in my view, this is the role of government: to say that there is a tragedy of the commons that might come. There are market forces that, if they push too far, actually lead to consumer downsides. You have addictive things that really make our lives worse. I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt and all of his work. To my point about AI—I’m channeling him—he says, we’re about to do it again. We’ve seen this movie now. The idea that we’re going to allow AI companies to create friend-bots for kids is horrific. Horrific. Just an awful idea. So, again, I think for many of these categories, there’s a really important role for governments and for regulators to check some of our worst instincts as humans or as business leaders.

Brandon: If I may ask you to extend your framework of disruptive innovation to another domain which is religion and spirituality, do you see ways in which religions that are trying to survive in a changing world, particularly in the modern West where you see simply a lot of decline in the importance of religion, what lessons could religious institutions or spiritual organizations, communities learn from this theory of disruptive innovation that might be helpful? Do you perhaps see any signs where maybe some of this is at work already?

Scott: One of my favorite things about doing interviews is when you’re asked a question you’d never been asked before. This is a question I’ve never been asked before, and I love that. I am not an expert in this space, so I will not be able to give you here are three examples of what different religious organizations are doing. But if I go to the theory and go to the models, what would it tell me? It would say, well, this idea of non-consumption. You certainly have a growing population of people, if you just look at the statistics, who are not choosing to engage with religion. I would always want to understand why. What is the barrier? Is it that it takes too much time, they perceive it as something that doesn’t fit their lifestyle, et cetera? And can you then innovate in ways to make things simpler, more accessible? More affordable isn’t quite the right metaphor. But that would be a thing that you think about. And what I would then look for is, okay, what are people doing on — despite the downsides, what are people doing on platforms like TikTok and YouTube and so on to try and engage populations in different forms of ways?

I would also want to look for different geographies and say, you’ve got religions that have very strong bases in particular geographies and almost no presence in other geographies. How do you think differently about playing in different geographies? I would think about that time-tested view, that magic happens at intersections when you bring different mindsets and backgrounds together. What might happen if you intersect religion with other fields? Maybe the revival of independent bookstore or something that nobody saw coming, is there something that we can learn from that about how you might revive religion in particular communities? So those would be at least some of the things that I would think about. This idea that there’s always something to learn from different places, I think, is a really powerful thing. One of the things I always will tell innovators: if you’re ever stuck on anything, get out of where you are. Go to a different place. Go to a different industry. Read a magazine in a different field. Stop reading the nonfiction book you’re reading, and read a fiction book. Stop reading the fiction book you’re reading; read a non-fiction book. If you’ve got a problem in your head, in your head, you’ll see a connection when you go and look in those different places.

Brandon: Great. Thank you. Lastly, were there any big surprises as you were doing the research on this book? I mean, there’s certainly a lot of history here. Anything that perhaps changed your mind about some aspect of the theory, or the model, or added a complication or nuance that you weren’t expecting?

Scott: Well, the thing that really struck me, the fourth question we’ve talked about a few times, is innovation a universal good? Look, I’m a believer. I’m a proselytizer. I go and spread the gospel of disruption. I really do think it makes the world a better place. The research has made me more humble, that there is another side to it. The shadow that we talked about is a very real thing, and there are good reasons to have things that can buffer and catch some of that shadow. So I go in now, eyes wide open, that yes, disruption remains a powerful force for democratization, development, and progress—and it comes at a cost.

Brandon: Well, let me leave you with the last word. Perhaps, if there’s anything else that you really want to drive home about your book, any other key points that we’ve not discussed yet that you’d really want to make sure that you share with our audience, what might they be?

Scott: Oh, we’ve covered a lot of great territory. I think the one thing that I would just emphasize: it is at its core an optimistic book. So it is easy right now to not feel optimistic for lots of reasons. There’s so much going on. Some of it is pretty ugly in some places. I am a believer that disruption drives progress. Disruption enables more people to solve more problems, do new things, and live better lives. It’s easy to feel fear. The status quo bias, the king’s proclamation from 1548—we don’t live it, but we still kind of feel it. My wish for is that people find the fun in it. I love playing. I love playing with new technologies. I love playing with new ideas. When you view something as fun as opposed to something that’s fearful, you just look at things a lot differently. So that’s a message I hope they take from the book.

Brandon: That’s great. That’s great. Well, Scott, thank you so much. It’s been such a delight. Where can we drive our audience to learn more about your work?

Scott: So LinkedIn is the social media platform that I spend my time on. There’s also a companion website for the book, epicdisruptions.com. Disruptions is plural. There are 11 of them in the book after all. Epicdisruptions.com.

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. Thank you, Scott. This has been great.

Scott: Brandon, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.

This is the second half of my conversation with Scott D. Anthony. For the first half, see here.

Scott is a globally recognized expert on navigating disruptive change and a passionate optimist about humanity’s capacity to adapt in a constantly evolving world. He is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he teaches c…

Read more

Scott D. Anthony is a globally recognized expert on navigating disruptive change and a passionate optimist about humanity’s capacity to adapt in a constantly evolving world. He is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he teaches courses on leading disruptive change, horizon scanning, and AI-enabled decision-makin…

Read more

What if one of the most dangerous myths of our time is not that AI will replace us, but that it is even a thing at all?

This season of the Beauty at Work podcast is about the beauty and burdens of innovation: how new technologies expand our horizons, but also erode our attention, agency, and sense of meaning. AI is arguably the most dazzling innovation of our time, but it’s also one of the most spiritually charged. It promises salvation and tempts us toward idolatry. Why is this happening and how do we best move forward?

In this episode, I’m joined by three unusually incisive thinkers to help me answer these questions—Jaron Lanier, Glen Weyl, and Taylor Black.

Jaron Lanier coined the terms Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality and is widely regarded as a founding figure of the field. He has served as a leading critic of digital culture and social media. In 2018, Wired Magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people in technology of the previous 25 years. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Jaron is currently the Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which spells out “Octopus”, in reference to his fascination with cephalopod neurology. He is also a musician and composer who has recently performed or recorded with Sara Bareilles, T Bone Burnett, Jon Batiste, Philip Glass, and others.

Glen Weyl is Founder and Research Lead at Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory, Co-Founder and Chair of the Plurality Institute, Co-Founder of Radical Exchange Foundation, and Co-Founder of the Faith, Family and Technology Network. He’s also co-author of two books, Radical Markets and Plurality.

Taylor Black has a background in philosophy, law and entrepreneurship, and is Director of AI and Venture Ecosystems at Microsoft, and the Founding Director of a new Institute on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies at the Catholic University of America.

Each of my guests is speaking solely in a personal capacity—their views are their own and do not represent Microsoft.

We discuss what kind of story we are telling ourselves about what AI is and what it’s for; why our language about AI so quickly slips into theology; and what it would mean to develop ways of thinking about and using AI systems in ways that are more relational and human.

Some of the key themes we cover are:

• Why “AI” is as much an ideology as a technology

• The buried origin story: cybernetics vs. “AI” as rival cultural metaphors

• Why thinking of AI as a thing can lead to mystification, passivity, and despair. And why a better metaphor would be AI as collaboration: something closer to Wikipedia than to a new god

• Can we make our technologies more like the Talmud (many voices, named and situated)?

• Thinking more seriously about not just regulation but culture, meaning, and integration

• How letting AI do our thinking is making us dumber—and how initiatives at the Vatican are helping propose better ways of designing and using AI systems

• The impoverishment of our stories: what are the implications of the fact that so many tech builders imagine the future through Terminator and The Matrix?

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video below, or read an unedited transcript that follows.

Brandon: All right, guys. Welcome to Beautiful Beards, I guess. Glen, sorry, you didn’t get the memo.

Glen: Oh, no.

Brandon: For our listeners, we got three bearded guys and Glen. No, welcome to Beauty At Work. We are exploring this season the beauty and burdens of innovation. I wanted to have the three of you all on this call because you’ve written and said some really insightful things about this topic, and I think it’s really crucial for us to explore that.

But before we jump into talking about innovation and AI and the beauty and burdens of AI, I want to ask you about beauty. Specifically, I want to have you all recount a memory of beauty—anything from your early lives, anything that comes to your mind. Is there a memory of a profound encounter with beauty that you recall? Perhaps, Taylor, I’ll start by asking you.

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. So when I think of beauty, of course, I think in the natural world. I was grateful enough to grow up in the Seattle area, so I had a lot of that growing up. But the thing actually that came to mind when you asked that question is actually Tolkien’s writing with regard to kind of almost immediate experience of beauty, particularly in the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, when he’s talking about the idyllic nature of the Shire in particular. In fact, reading that growing up, with all of the tangible examples around me of course of natural beauty, it kind of helped shape my worldview in such a way that I studied philosophy later in life in order to find an understanding of the world that was as rich as Tolkien’s writing about the natural beauty of the world. That’s my answer to that. There’re several different places in Tolkien where he talks about that rich beauty as mediated by language that I had already encountered out in the world.

Brandon: Wow. It’s interesting because there are some interesting tensions with technology and Tolkien’s own views. Maybe we can get into that. Glen, how about you? What strikes you? What comes to your mind?

Glen: I remember when I was in my early teens, I went to Berlin, to the Pergamon Museum, and I saw the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. I think what I remember most vividly about it was that I had gone to various historical sites and seen ancient things, but they had either been sort of ruins or sort of very imperfect recreations of various kinds. I think this is the first time that I came to grips with the notion that people in very, very distant times and places had sort of things of profound awe and encounters with awe that would touch me had I been there. And so I sort of felt like an empathetic connection to their sense of awe and beauty, that I really had never quite managed at that age to get through the imagination I’d had through other pathways. I think that definitely engaged me with history more profoundly.

Brandon: Wow. It seems to us to resonate with your work on plurality and that recognition of the diverse ways in which we can all be attuned to something beyond, right? Jaron, what memory comes to your mind?

Jaron: The one that came to my mind when you asked the question was the first time I heard William Byrd’s Motet: Ave Verum Corpus, which, if you’re not familiar with it, go listen to it. There’s a lot of words, so I’m not sure which one to recommend.

William Byrd was a composer who lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare. Although, apparently, they never met. But he was the other sort of renowned artist from that milieu. He was part of the underground Catholic scene. And so motets are chamber choir pieces designed to be soft enough that they won’t be heard by passersby. So it’s just six voices, not a whole choir. There was a school of Catholic composers at that time who just — I don’t know what was going on with them, but they achieved some kind of incredible synthesis of serenity with the stirrings of this western tendency to swell and build, to have a structure, not just a constancy — which was, to tell a story in music, is a particular thing that started to happen in Western classical music. It’s also just, I don’t know. You have to hear it. It’s the most luminous polyphony that’s ever been written.

Glen: William Byrd’s Motet, and what did you say after that, Jaron?

Jaron: It’s called Ave Verum Corpus. It just happens to be the text that the motet was set to. But give it a listen. Yeah, six parts.

Brandon: What struck you about it when you first heard it? What makes that resonate with you till today?

Jaron: So let’s say there are some types of spiritual music that are trying to — I say ‘trying’ because I don’t think anything human is ever perfect. Maybe nothing ever is ever perfect. They’re approaching some sort of serenity, some sort of still place that’s outside of time and process and yearnings. But then there’s another kind that’s very earthy. Like, oh, I don’t know, Yoruba ritual music or something. A lot of our Jewish music is like that.

What’s amazing about Ave Verum Corpus is it’s both, which is not something that you come upon that often. Like I say, it’s got this very human sense of swelling and yearning, and yet it also has an unmistakable calm center. Also, there’s a kind of purity. In western tradition, what we do is we combine structure that’s really unique to the west, which is things like polyphony. Particularly, we have multiple lines, multiple things going on at once that go together, and chord changes. All of that stuff is kind of the unique signatures of Western music. What it tends to do is, it pulls the music away from being perfectly in flow and perfectly in tune, because you have to reconcile these abstractions of structure with the musical flow. That’s our problem here in the West. I don’t think any piece of music has ever succeeded as well with that, until maybe some things in the jazz tradition. I’ll say there’s kind of interesting things in the jazz tradition that do it. But Ave Verum Corpus, check it out. It’s just wonderful. It’s short. It’s a radio-length piece.

Brandon: Right. Yeah. What strikes me is, I suppose, that kind of integration or maybe unity that you’re alluding to there, which is, of course, part of your title at Microsoft, which is Prime Unifying Scientist. I’m curious about this.

Jaron: Yeah, I think Glen came up with that. It’s long story. But yeah.

Glen: Did I come up with it, Jaron?

Jaron: You might have. I mean, alright, so the idea—

Glen: I came up with the idea of being octopus of some form, and then I think you figured out what it stands stood for or something like that. So, yeah.

Jaron: You know what? Okay. Yeah, what happened was, I report to them and Kevin Scott, who’s the Chief Technology Officer. So I’m in the office of the Chief Technology Officer. Kevin had, at one point, said to me, “I would name you chief scientist. But we already have our chief scientist, who’s Eric Horvitz, and so you need to be something else.” And then Glen was saying, “Well, since it’s OCTO—I’ve been interested in cephalopods, and I studied them and what not—so you should be octopus.” Then there’s this question, what is the “PUS”? There were a bunch of candidates, and Kevin chose prime unifying scientist.

Glen: They call this a backronym in the trade, when you come up with the acronym first and then what it stands for.

Jaron: Backronym, yeah. But I think prime unifying scientist might have been yours. I mean, Kevin chose it. I’m good with it. I think a lot of my thing at Microsoft is being sort of both in and out of it, and having a weird title is good for what I do.

Brandon: So it seems pretty apt then in that sense. I mean, unity is interesting, aesthetic, ideal, you know? I mean, it’s a transcendental and so on. But it’s also behind the grand unification theory. There are ways in which it is something that absolutely—

Jaron: Yeah, the grand unification theory does not exist, by the way. So we have to be careful.

Brandon: Right, right.

Glen: It really hits Jaron in the gut.

Jaron: I’ve worked on that one. It’s very—

Glen: When you hear people talking about it, it really hits you in the gut, right, Jaron? G-U-T.

Jaron: Yeah, the thing is, you know, I also work in that area. People have been trying to do that for more than three quarters of a century. It’s just a tough one. We just haven’t found it.

Brandon: Yeah, I know. Yeah, but it is a powerful ideal. It does seem to be something that motivates a lot of people and has disillusioned a lot of people too. Well, I want to ask you, Jaron. I mean, you’ve been involved in this field. If we could jump into talking about innovation and technology, particularly AI. I mean, you’ve been there since the earliest days with Marvin Minsky and the others who helped define the field.

Say a bit about what the atmosphere was like in those early days. I suppose, what was your experience of this field? I think you’ve had qualms about the term ‘artificial intelligence.’ What was your relationship like to some of those early pioneers, and how did the field evolve in your sense?

Jaron: Well, this is a whole long tail we don’t really have time for. But the briefest version is, I was very fortunate when I was quite young to have Marvin Minsky as a mentor. I wasn’t his student. Actually, he was my boss. I had a research job as a very young kid in a research lab at MIT because I went to college early, I just ended up. It was a weird thing. But at any rate, Marvin was part of a sort of a gang, an academic gang, with a certain idea about what computer should be. That was very informed by his interactions with Golden Age science fiction writers, especially Isaac Asimov, with also some others. Marvin was a real believer in computers as these things that would come alive and become a new species. A lot of the mythology and terminology and just the personality of AI culture really stems from Marvin as the prototype.

But the term AI actually had come about as part of a rivalry between academic gangs. In the early ‘50s, there was an intellectual and computer scientist named Norbert Wiener, who is incredibly prominent and was considered one of the really major celebrity public intellectuals. He had used a term to describe where he thought computers would go, which was “cybernetics.” The idea in cybernetics is that you don’t think of the computer as a thing that stands and has its own reality, but you think of it as part of an interactive system. He is saying that the best way to think about computers of the future is not like the Turing machine, which is this monolithic thing that’s defined on its own terms, but instead as like a network of thermometers, a network of little measuring devices that measure the world and measure each other and form this big tangle.

Mathematically, the two ideas are equivalent. But the Wiener way of doing it doesn’t give the computer its own separate reality, but instead considers it as part of a connected thing. Cybernetics comes from the Greek “cyber” which is navigation. The idea is that, by interacting with the world, this thing would navigate itself and the world. So that was cybernetics. He was very concerned with what effect that would have on people. He wrote a very prescient book, I think, in 1950—could it be that early? I think so—called The Human Use of Human Beings, which was about how, as soon as you have devices like this in the world, they’ll change people. People will use them to change people. It’ll bring about this new age of mass behavior manipulation that was never possible before. So he saw that right at the very, very dawn of computer science. It was kind of like—

Glen: 1950, Jaron, yeah.

Jaron: Yeah, 1950.

Glen: One of my favorite quotes from that book is—it actually came from an earlier version of it—he says that there are some people who believe that studying this science will lead to more understanding of human nature than it will to the concentration of power. And he said, while I commend their optimism, I must say, writing in 1947, that I do not share it. That power is by its nature always concentrated in the most unscrupulous of hands.

Jaron: Oh, my God. So look. Yeah, so Wiener, he just got the game. He cracked the game at the start. This is really only a few years after Turing. Von Neumann had defined what their idea of what a computer was, which was the thing that stepped our — so the first and, by far, the dominant abstraction for the computer came from them.

Now, in the ‘50s, Marvin and a few other of his compatriots were — obviously this was kind of like in physics these days, the string theorists versus the quantum loop gravity people or something like that. They were just like these rival gangs, right? They were like, “Cybernetics is taking over. We need our own term.” Artificial intelligence was actually initially defined at this very famous conference that happened at Dartmouth, and I believe ‘58—

Glen: ‘54

Brandon: McCarthy or something, right?

Glen: I think it was ‘54, yeah.

Jaron: ‘54.

Brandon: Was it McCarthy?

Jaron: Yeah, McCarthy coined it. I mean, McCarthy, too. Not as well. I mean, Marvin was really the personification of that more than anyone else, but McCarthy. So now the thing is, the Wiener way of thinking about computers as this giant mess tangle of things measuring each other, today we’d call that a neural net. I don’t know. In those days, it was called connectionist often, which is actually a term I kind of like. So because of this rivalry, Marvin and the other people were like, “We have to kill it.” And so Marvin and this other guy who’s great, Seymour Papert, they wrote a book called Perceptrons. The idea is that, “We’re going to mathematically prove that these guys are hopeless.” And like, “Screw them. It’s Turing machines from now on. We’re just going to double down on the thing of the computer as its own thing.” And so they proved that, in a certain absolute sense, their mathematical limitations to what you can make out of that style—

Glen: Out of single layer neural networks, yeah.

Jaron: Yeah, and it’s a funny thing. Because, yeah, sure, it’s a valid proof. But it’s so narrow that it really served more as a rhetorical and a political weapon than an actual tool for math, or engineering, or physics, or anything. But anyway, it destroyed those people. All the people working in that area were like very out of it and underground and unfunded for decades, you know. And so, a lot of what the Marvin people worked on was called symbolic. Because their idea is that it’s this abstraction, but it’s abstraction made flesh. This thing will become real. And so there was all this stuff about formal logic, and we’re going to describe the world.

Anyway, so then, of course, much more recently in this century, just when computers got big enough to have larger versions of that stuff, everything turned into neural networks. That’s what the current AI is all about. For the most part, AI is this rubric term that’s just applied to whatever. It’s a marketing term for funding computer science. It’s not actually a technical term that excludes anything. But most of what we call AI is exactly that stuff. But now it’s called AI. So it’s kind of ironic. It’s sort of like the conquerors. It was sort of like they colonized their enemy and absorbed it into their own rhetoric. But the enemy they absorbed actually had a more realistic and fruitful, in my view, overall philosophy. So there’s something that went very wrong.

Brandon: I mean, you have a provocatively titled piece, There is No AI. Right? Could you say a little bit about what your argument is there?

Glen: Jaron and I also were doing this called AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology, which is, you know.

Jaron: Yeah, that’s right. We wrote it, yeah.

Brandon: Yeah, say more about that. Because I think both of you share, I think, that the idea of this is: it’s not a thing. It’s not an entity. You’re talking about a system.

Jaron: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people in the AI world, especially the young men who work at AI startups and what we call frontier model groups, a lot of them not only think that AI is really a thing that’s there, but that it’s like an entity that could be conscious, that it’ll turn into a life form. Maybe that life form is better than people and should inherit the earth. I run into these crazy things where like some guy will say, “I think having human babies is unethical because it takes energy away from the AI babies. We need to really focus on. And if we don’t do that, the AI of the future will smite us.” It becomes very medieval. Also, a lot of times, at the end of the day, you realize, oh, this person has a girlfriend who wants a baby. They’re going through the age-old male attempt to avoid having a baby as long as possible and using AI in the service of that, which is fine. Whatever. It’s their problem. I’ll stay out of it.

But anyway, the thing is, you can think about AI equally in two different ways. If you think about figure-ground pictures, there’s an artist named M. C. Escher who’s famous for this. Most people have seen an optical illusion, where you either see two vases or a lamp and either are equally good. Just like with any big AI model, like ChatGPT or something, you can either think of it as a thing by itself, which is the sort of Minsky AI, original AI concept. Or you can think of it in the Norbert Wiener way. Pardon me. The Norbert Wiener way would be, it’s a bunch of connections of which people are a part. And if you think of it that way, what you end up with is thinking of AI as sort of a version of the Wikipedia with a bunch of statistics added. Basically, it’s a bunch of data from people. It’s combined together into this amalgam, but with a bunch of statistics as part of it. The statistics being embodied in the little connection, these pieces, if you like, of the neural net. And if you think of it as a collaboration, I think there’s no absolute truth to one or the other.

Just like if you want to try to use absolute logic or empiricism to talk about whether people are really conscious, good luck with that. You can’t. That’s a matter of faith. God is a matter of faith. There’s a lot of stuff that is not provably correct, either through logic or empiricism. And yet, the thing about consciousness is — I mean, I don’t know. If we weren’t conscious, we wouldn’t be situated in a particular moment in time, or even there wouldn’t be macro-object. There would just be particles. I mean, I think consciousness, in a sense, like the Descartes, I think therefore I am. But it’s not about thinking. It’s just about experiencing. You experience, and that is the thing we’re talking about. But if you want to deny experience, all this talking could also be just understood as a bunch of particles in their courses. So just that there’s anything here is consciousness, as opposed to just flow without stuff. But anyway, let’s leave that aside. All of these things are matters of faith. Anytime there’s a matter of faith, you can go either way with it. You might think an animal is a person or not, or a fetus is a person or not. These are really hard-edged cases. Anyway, when you can’t know for sure, I think it’s legitimate to rely on things like pragmatism, intuition, faith, even aesthetics, since this is a beauty broadcast.

Anyway, what I would say is that believing that AI isn’t there, that the AI is a form of collaboration of people, more like the Wikipedia than some new god or something, if you believe that, there are some benefits that are undeniable.

Benefit number one is, you can use AI better. If you keep in mind that that’s what you really have, you can design prompts that work better. I’ve been telling this to Microsoft customers, and it works for them. Like instead of saying, “Oh, great Oracle, tell me what to do,” say, “What has worked for other people?” All of a sudden, you get a clearer answer that has less slop. I mean, just actually work with what it is.

Benefit number two: there’s a widespread feeling, because of the literal rhetoric coming from us, coming from the tech community, that people are going to be obsolete. Especially among young people, there’s so much depression. It’s just crazy talking to undergraduates now, how many of them feel like life is pointless and their generation is the last one. They’re just going to die when the AI takes over. They have no jobs. They have no purpose. Nobody will care about them. That’s stupid. As soon as you realize that AI can equally be understood as a collaboration, then they can equally understand that there’ll be all these new jobs creating new kinds of data. And what’s amazing about that is, every time some AI person tells me, “Oh, but we have all the data we need. We can already train super intelligence,” whatever the hell that means, which is nothing.

Brandon: It’s another statement of faith.

Jaron: Yeah, oh boy, that’s like a medieval statement of faith. That’s, I don’t know. Oh, the golden calf. That’s what that is. It’s older than medieval. But anyway, the thing is, if you think that people might create valuable data in the future, it means that you also think that there might be forms of creativity we haven’t yet foreseen—which means that we don’t have all the data we need to train the AIs, which means that we aren’t the smartest possible people of all time, which means that there might be room for people in the future to do things that happens to create data that expands what the AI models can do, which suggests this open future of expanding creativity. And I love that vision.

The great fallacy of believing that computers can become arbitrarily smart is this idea that, relatively, people will not change, will not be creative, will not move. What a horrible thing to believe. I sort of feel like that’s a sin. Losing faith in the creativity of people has to be some kind of dark, dark sin and almost like a form of violence on the future. A lot of people in AI are into long term-ism and like, “We have to think about the future.” What is more harmful from the future than that fallacy? I can’t imagine any more destructive thought of the future.

Glen: Audrey Tang, my collaborator, we made a film about her life. It’s titled Good Enough Ancestor, because that’s how she likes to describe herself. She likes to be a good enough ancestor. Because if you’re too good of an ancestor, you actually reduce the freedom of the future because they feel the need to worship or exalt what you did. You just want to be good enough that you leave paths open to them, but you don’t predetermine what they, you know.

Brandon: That’s extraordinary, yeah. Jaron, thank you. Those were really, yeah, fantastic. Glen, I mean, your argument, I think, builds in many ways and parallels what Jaron have been talking about, in terms of you seeing AI more as something like capitalism, more like a system of collaboration between people rather than a thing. Could you talk a little bit about just your own journey into this? I recall you grew up in — you’re also in the tech industry, or your parents were tech CEOs, if I remember correctly. I’m just curious to know your path into this world of radical markets and radical exchange, and then how that vision of pluralism that you’ve been developing with Audrey Tang is now shaping your sense of AI and its future.

Glen: Well, yeah. So I grew up in a neo-atheist family in Silicon Valley, raised on very much the same type of classical science fiction works that Jaron was referring to. I was involved in sort of Ayn Rand world for a while. I was involved in the socialist world for a while. I became an economist. All of these things are very abstracted from sort of faith and real, grounded communities. But the thing I found that was kind of surprising to me is that most of the other people who sort of went from one apparently opposite abstraction to another, and were like alienated from any sort of grounded community, were mostly Jews raised in secular environments by grandparents who had fled the Holocaust, just like I was. And so I thought, “Well, maybe I’m not actually escaping my past. Maybe I’m just finding my own way to it.” It was at that point that I decided that I needed to learn something about where I came from and connect with Israel, connect with Jewish history. I ended up on a faculty of Jewish Studies briefly.

Then I had the opportunity to meet Audrey Tang, which really changed my life for a couple of reasons. One is that I think that Audrey is an incredibly spiritual person. There’s this character in the Tao Te Ching, which is her holy book, that is sort of like the Buddha and Buddhism, or Jesus in the Christian tradition, called the “shungren.” It’s like a mythical sage. Audrey really embodies that. And yet, she also just intellectually has some of the highest horsepower of anyone I’ve ever met and knows so many different things. I think I wasn’t ready to meet someone with that kind of spiritual depth and to accept them and to understand them, until I met someone who was also at that intellectual level. Because I had come in this intellectual way, and so unless someone was there intellectually, I wasn’t able to accept their wisdom. And so that was one thing about Audrey.

The second thing is that she was from Taiwan. Taiwan is a very different atmosphere. The division between technology and science on the one hand and religion on the other that exists in the West, it’s just not a feature of the Taiwanese environment. It was really interesting to encounter a culture where those things were synthesized rather than in conflict. That really gradually made me come to feel that the disjuncture between religion and spirituality on the one hand, and science and technology on the other in the Anglosphere was an important root cause of many of the problems that Jaron was getting at.

So let’s take his example of cybernetics. So why did the AI thing win out over cybernetics? It didn’t do it because it was the first there. Cybernetics was way more dominant in the ‘50s. It didn’t do it because of its explanatory power. Because, as Jaron points out, on the actual apparently falsifiable points, clearly, the AI people were wrong. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Now, all the AI people would say that the AI people were wrong. It had to do with the way in which the rhetoric worked in a particular cultural milieu.

Brandon: In a secularized world that is deprived of any sort of, you know.

Glen: Everyone is like, economics, agents, utility, you know. That’s the way that everyone likes to look at stuff. Cybernetics is like, it’s got a lot of just weird, mysterious shit going on, you know. I mean, there’s all these things flowing. There’s kind of these things that can be thought of as like an agent a little bit, but they’re actually just part of the — that’s what complexity science is. That’s what cybernetics is. That’s what’s like actually going on in these systems. But if you try to explain it in a scientistic reductionist way—briefly, casually—it just comes off as like mumbo jumbo, and nobody can understand what you’re talking about. So I think the only way to describe it sort of briefly and intuitively to people is to use some kind of spiritual framework.

Brandon: I mean, just to have more resonance in Eastern societies then.

Glen: Yeah, and I think it’s because of the integration with spirituality and science in those societies. Like for example, quantum mechanics is another thing that’s very much like complexity science. It’s one of arguably the first real complexity science thing. Quantum mechanics has this weird particle wave thing. Nobody can make sense of it. Like Richard Feynman was like, “What the...” But for Taoists, it totally makes sense. Because in Taoism, there’s air slash water, and then there’s Earth. They have totally opposite principles. Like Earth collides with something, and it stops. Air goes faster when it encounters an obstacle, right?

Brandon: Right. Yeah. Neil Theise has got this great book Notes on Complexity, where he argues, from a Zen Buddhist perspective, quantum mechanics makes perfect sense because it has those similar kinds of—

Glen: Exactly. And so I think that if we’re going to try to have a discourse about technology without bringing in religion, the natural consequence of that is: we’re going to end up defaulting to really bad and harmful metaphors that come out of econ, rather than to the sort of thoughtful perspectives that Jaron was trying to welcome us towards.

Brandon: Or to build golden calves, right, which is so I think the tendency.

Glen: Yeah.

Brandon: Taylor, if I could ask you. I mean, you’ve had an interesting path from, well, Tolkien to philosophy and law, and then business, and into AI. How has that journey shaped your sense of what this thing called AI is, and what’s beautiful about it, and also what the seductions are of this particular kind of beauty that people are seeking after and building this thing?

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. Well, actually, kind of to riff off of what Glen was just saying with regard to bringing spirituality into a more explanatory understanding of things, my love of Lonergan kind of led me to epistemology, of all places. Which is, at least in the classic tradition, when you understand something new or grasping being, which means an understanding of reality and understanding of truth in some fashion, which also has analogs into beauty, of course, because you can recognize it as beautiful. In many ways, I think that understanding epistemology in that sense, where, if you actually understand something, you’re grasping a metaphysical reality, necessarily throws you into the spiritual conversation. Because a lot of spiritual traditions have very strong understandings of what that means, along with, of course, the scientific tradition.

Where I see this kind of reflecting back into AI and ends up being our own understanding of our understanding versus this thing that seems to understand, at least in some ways analogously to how we understand, particularly kind of at a more surface level, if we haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about our understanding. And similar to Jaron, I found outsized ramifications of working with our product leaders in differentiating the way in which we know from the way in which AI works in order to create better product experiences for our customers and our users. Because we understand what understanding is, and AI is not that. And being able to shape that ends up being just having outsize impact on product building and customer satisfaction as part of that as well.

Brandon: Yeah, I think it’s really remarkable. I mean, there’s something about understanding this. I’ve spent the last few years studying scientists, physicists, and biologists, mainly trying to get at what drives them to do the work they do. Many of them see themselves as primarily being in the business of chasing after a certain kind of beauty. They call it the beauty of understanding, which is that grasping of the hidden order of things, the inner logic of things. There is a profound aesthetic experience of unity or harmony or fit, without which one does not even know that one has arrived at understanding something, right? And so there’s something to that experience which is very hard to then sort of replicate with machines and so on.

Taylor, you’ve also written this fascinating piece on beauty. You call it, “Beauty will save the world,” from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. You draw on Balthasar and Goethe and Peeper, and argue that beauty is a transcendental, and the world speaks to us in symbols. We need to contemplate beauty rather than grasp at it. I’m curious to know how that understanding of beauty relates to the kind of beauty that perhaps might be driving the pursuit of something like AGI. There is a certain kind of seduction it seems in the kind of quest that going to be in a world in which we can eliminate all human suffering, get rid of cancer, and climate change, et cetera. It seems like there’s a tension between two different modalities of beauty there. I wonder if you could speak to that.

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. I think that the directional ability to aim at those big things is a pursuit of a certain “sort of beauty.” But the pursuit of it is not the finding of it. I found in all of my innovation work that the best innovators are ones who are actually able to open themselves up in a humble sort of way to the experience of the customer, to the experience of the world around them—such that the conditions are set for that understanding of beauty or for that moment of insight. Without that kind of part and parcel of the humble pursuit of our unrestricted desire to know, you aren’t able to set the conditions for an opening or an experience of beauty. Because you aren’t looking for it. You’ve gone past it. You’re building frameworks of abstraction, rather than being able to live in the intellectual moment that needs to happen for an insight, for a recognition of beauty to happen.

One of my favorite concrete examples of this is, I have a three year old. The three year old will try multiple combinations of a particular thing in order to get at what they’re trying to do. And when they get it, at that moment of insight that I did it, that delight that kind of comes through as part of that, is identical to their experience of a flower or experience of a plane with a puppy, where they recognize the goodness, the beauty of the thing in which they’re working. I think that’s the overlap of the of the transcendental as we understand them, right? There are different aspects of that same recognition of reality in some ways.

Brandon: Yeah. Well, I suppose the challenge is, how do we prioritize reality in this particular context?

(outro)

Brandon: Everybody, that’s a great place to stop the first half of our conversation. In the next half, we’re going to turn to the spiritual dimensions of technology, how it has become a kind of religion, what faith traditions might teach us about building wisely, and how we can recover the human face behind our machines.

See you next time.

PART 2

(intro)

Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everyone. This is the second half of my conversation with Jaron Lanier, Glen Weyl, and Taylor Black. Check out the first half, if you haven’t already. In this second half, we’re going to ask whether technology itself has become a religion. Jaron argues that we’ve begun to worship our own creations, and calls for a new model inspired by the Talmud. We’re going to explore how ancient traditions—from Judaism, to Taoism, to Catholic social thought—might help us restore meaning, plurality, and beauty in our technological age.

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Jaron, you’ve written that we’re again in this context in which technology has become a religion. And it seems like there’s a certain kind of seduction to our understanding of AI and new technologies that is a sort of idolatry. You’ve argued for the need to make our technologies more like the Talmud. Could you say a bit about that?

Jaron: Yes, so I mentioned earlier that you can think of big AI models as forms of collaboration between people, a little like the Wikipedia with a bunch of statistics. Okay. So an interesting thing about the Wikipedia is I knew the founders. I used to argue that there was this fantasy in the computer world, which was very more leftist at the time. It was very different back then. The idea is that we’re going to help the oppressed dissident in a difficult regime. And so we want everybody to have pseudonyms. We don’t want to know who the real people are. But the problem with that is that, when you forget people and you turn them into a mush, you concentrate the power on whoever owns the computer that runs the mush, right? And so very much, as Norbert Wiener warned, there are times when you want to do that, of course. But to do it as a general principle actually undermines humanity. And so there’s no easy universal answer, which shouldn’t surprise us.

But at any rate, the Wikipedia created this illusion of what’s sometimes called the view from nowhere, this idea of the single perspective, instead of a multiplicity of them. And so then they would say as well, if you want to have a bunch of people collaborating, that’s going to happen. There’s no way around it. And like, there is a way around it. It’s ancient. So in Jewish tradition, there’s this document called the Talmud, which is one of our central cultural documents. The idea of it is that you have generation after generation of people adding to it. But at each generation, there’s a particular place on the page, a geometric designation, where this is from ancient Babylon, these are the medieval people, and so on. And so you have this amazing amalgam across centuries and centuries in a single document, where it’s very clear that these are different perspectives. They’re all on the same page. And this was done when writing stuff down was expensive, you know? It would have been cheaper to just combine these voices. There was an absolute economic motivation to not do this. Brevity was a matter of severe economic motivation in those days. And so the fact that they did this is incredible.

Now, part of it is just that Jews like to argue, and we want to be individuals. So a part of it is just our character. But the point is: this is a proof of concept that predates Greece. I mean, this is like ancient. So what is hard about this? What’s hard about it is just that this present ideology of creating this new kind of golden calf, this abstract thing, so everybody else will be subsumed by it, but will be the magic tech boys who get to run it will be the elite special ones. Which never is true, by the way. You always end up getting screwed by your own monster. That’s another ancient idea that has been known for a long time. So that’s a fallacy too. But it’s a different fallacy.

Anyway, yeah, so the Talmud is a wonderful prototype for how to combine people without losing people, or combine human efforts without losing human identity. There is room for anonymity. People can vote. The voting can be anonymous, but you still know who the other citizens are. You don’t pretend that there wasn’t anybody. Money anonymizes. You lose track of where a particular dollar has been. It’s not even meaningful. That probably helps people cooperate despite their feuds. A measure of anonymity actually can be good. But as a general principle, it’s easy to overdo it and really lose people. That’s kind of what we — we did it with the Wikipedia. All the AI things train on Wikipedia. It’s sort of inadvertently legitimized this idea that losing people is somehow a form of productivity, when it’s exactly the reverse.

Brandon: Yeah, because it creates that illusion that there is an entity that is able to somehow provide a synthetic answer, right? I think the challenge, I suppose, is once we’ve erased authorship, once we’ve erased the sort of individual sources of all of this knowledge, is it meaningful to talk about responsible AI, or ethical AI, or anything of that sort? I mean, Glen, I’m curious to know what you might think about. I mean, you seem very bullish about the prospects of AI systems in terms of fostering democracy and pluralism. I’m just curious. Given this context, how do you see us concretely being able to bring about that sort of recognition of the human collaboration that is hiding currently behind these illusions?

Glen: Do any of you guys know what the oldest document that, to my knowledge, has been made by human hands that looks like a recombinant neural network is?

Jaron: That’s a great puzzle, Glen. That’s a great puzzle.

Brandon: I think you’ve told me this, and I’ve forgotten.

Jaron: What is it? What is it?

Glen: So there’s a diagram of how voting for the Doge of Venice in the 13th century looked. There was like 100 councils. Like each person who was in the voting population would elect members of 5 of those 100 councils. And then those 100 councils would elect another 100 councils according to similar principles for several rounds, until you eventually elected the Doge, which looks almost exactly like a recombinant neural network. Because you have lines from each of the voters going out to the net things that they do. And so it’s like a whole neural network. I think that that is like a beautiful illustration of the fact that sort of like during the example of the Talmud, we have these actually incredibly ancient and sophisticated ways of thinking about democracy and agency and collectivity that actually massively predate anyone thinking about AI at all, and give us the actual insights that we need to produce effective systems like this.

My hope is that we can just stop being so thoroughly mugged by the enlightenment. I love the enlightenment. Enlightenment is all kinds of goodness. It’s just when it becomes an overwhelming ideology that wants to erase all other meaning and truth and all of the past, rather than integrate with it, that it becomes sort of an excuse for really destroying itself. As Jaron was pointing out, you know, destroying its own foundations. And so I think that it’s people of faith that give me hope. Because they just don’t really want to do that. They’re cool with modernity for the most part, and they want some of the stuff. But they also want to remember that there’s more to things than that, and that there’s history and richness. And if we can just integrate those things a little bit more, give a few fewer sideways, glances, or whatever that Taylor was mentioning earlier, I think maybe we would do a better job of building our tools, do a little bit better job of not having this ridiculous hype and bust cycles that are painful for a lot of people, and maybe get more quickly to the actual deployment and integration of these technologies.

Brandon: Do you have a sense of concretely — I mean, again, one of the other challenges, too, is even our language around AI has been colonized by large language models, and whatever is happening at a few, small players. What concretely do you think needs to happen, to change, in order to be able to actually transform things?

Glen: Well, I mean, culture is an inspiration. Like The Wild Robot film, I think, is just absolutely fabulous. I think it’s exactly the way that we should be conceptualizing these things. That was very well received. One phrase I’ve been using a lot recently is: be the super intelligence you want to see in the world, you know?

Brandon: That’s great. That’s great.

Glen: Like, you know, corporations are super intelligences. Religions are super intelligences. Democracies are super intelligences. By every definition of super intelligence that’s been given, they’re all super intelligences. We don’t bat an eye at those. And so why are we talking about AI as if it’s this weird external conquer? I’m not saying corporations or religions haven’t done any harm. They’ve done all kinds of problematic things.

Brandon: Yeah, I think we’re maybe waiting for our charismatic Robo savior or something, right? Taylor, you’ve been working closely with the Vatican. You were just at the Builders AI Forum. Pope Francis called for “algor-ethics”. Pope Leo’s vision is emphasizing importance of human dignity and ethics. Could you say a bit about what’s happening at the Vatican and what those efforts are inspiring in you?

Taylor: Yeah, certainly. In some ways, it’s similar to what Glen was just articulating here. It’s kind of, get over yourselves, and let’s work together to have this technology serve humanity. Right? Every technology that we’ve ever come up with ends up being a result of our, from the Vatican’s view, co-creative power with the Divine. And so let’s continue trying to shape that towards human flourishing, rather than the other ways in which we’re able to shape it as independent actors. Really interestingly, too, I think the collaborative nature that the Vatican is really asking us all as technologists to approach—technologists and academics, in fact—when approaching this, I think, is really a great direction that resonates with a lot of us as well.

Brandon: Great. Thank you. Are there any points of friction between your views, the three of you all? I mean, maybe there may be different points of emphases, but I’m curious if there are questions you all have or points.

Glen: There is one thing on which Jaron and I, I think, see a little bit differently. I don’t think it actually ends up mattering in many cases. But I think Jaron’s first inclination tends to talk about sort of the uniqueness of humans and have that really strong emphasis, on some level, on Mago Day, or as we would say in Hebrew, Shalom aleichem. But I tend to have a little bit more primary emphasis on diversity. I certainly see the importance of humanity, but I also see things in nature. I see things potentially in machines or in complex human systems or whatever. I’m not as focused on sort of the human individual as a focus in my mind as much. What I tend to resist about AI is sort of its totalizing narrow singularity. Like here’s-the-thing attitude more than the fact that it challenges the Shalom aleichem, you know?

Jaron: Yeah, I’ve also detected that disagreement. But I think the reason for it is a matter of our professions, our disciplines. So I’m a scientist and technologist, but the technologist part is what I really want to focus on for a second. You can’t define technology without defining a beneficiary. Because otherwise, there’s nothing there. It just completely evaporates, unless it’s for something or somebody. You can define math without a beneficiary abstractly. You can define the quest for knowledge and science. I think you can even define art as a kind of art for its own sake thing. Whether you should or not is different, but you can do all those things. But it’s not even possible on any sensible basis to define technology without a beneficiary. There’s just no way to even talk about it. It’s gone. Technology is for doing something, for some purpose, you know? And so the question is, who is the beneficiary?

Now, I think sometimes a beneficiary should be Gaia or the overall ecosystem of Earth. I’m not saying it’s exclusively people. But in general, if you underemphasize the human being as a beneficiary of technology, you very, very, very quickly slip into technology for its own sake, which is never what it actually is. It’s always technology for the sake of the giant ego of somebody who owns a big computer server. So it turns into this kind of Gilded Age, unsustainable ego trip by a few people who don’t acknowledge it. So you have to define technology as being for people. You have to really emphasize the specialness of people in order for technology to even be defined. Lose people, lose technology. That’s the only way. So I think that’s the reason that we have this different sensibility.

Brandon: That’s great, yeah. Taylor, any thoughts on your own tensions?

Taylor: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if we fought enough amongst the three of us to really have determine where I land on that side.

Brandon: Well, I think you should start, yeah.

Taylor: Yeah.

Brandon: So maybe, perhaps, if you all could leave our viewers and listeners with maybe one point each on what you see as really the beauty of this technological development, what it is that you all are working on. I know you’re not representing Microsoft, but you are certainly trying to build something there in your various capacities. And so, where is it that you see the beauty moving forward in the work you’re doing, and what particular kind of burden or obstacle do you think is really critical to overcome? Maybe, Taylor, we’ll start with you, and then Glen, and then we’ll end with Jaron.

Taylor: Sure. Yeah, I think this technology throws into sharp relief the ability for us to understand really how we think. We found a lot of the success of using this technology in productivity ways ends up having certain meta-cognitional strategies on how you use it as a helper, rather than have it do your thinking for you. And so, I’d say, lean into your own understanding of your understanding as you work through your use of these tools—both in order to ensure that you continue to flourish as a human, but also really to use these technologies where they shine most.

Brandon: Any obstacles or burdens that you think are really critical to overcome?

Taylor: If you don’t do that, you’re going to get dumber, and that’s problematic.

Brandon: That’s already happening, so, yeah. Thank you. Glen?

Glen: There’s an image of science and technology that I think is sort of implicitly in the minds of a lot of people that I want to suggest we need to flip on its head. I think a lot of people imagine we’re on the surface of the earth, and there’s a deep ground of falsity and superstition beneath us. We kind of need to dig it out and throw it away to get down to the core of the truth.

I instead imagine that we’re on the surface of the earth, and we’re planting trees. And as those trees grow up into the infinite abyss beyond, we extend the atmosphere, you know? The biggest danger is that there’s too much space. We don’t get down to a point. Actually, it’s how do you even allow the cross pollination across all those different things so that they can keep growing? But the further we grow out, the closer we are to having nothing at all that we understand because the more we see of the infinite abyss beyond and the more space there is to grow into. I guess that feeling of pursuit of a truth that recedes ever further, that by pursuing the truth, by extending our technologies, we see even more completely how little we know. That is what I take solace in, I guess.

Brandon: Yeah, Marcelo Gleiser has this book and an analogy called The Island of Knowledge. It’s this very similar kind of thing, where you’re on this island, and you’re sort of expanding what you think are the horizons of knowledge. You think you’re going to get to the point where the water has completely been conquered. Then you realize the further your island is expanding, the further the water seems to expand, and you never quite get to that end. For some, that is threatening and frustrating. And for others, that’s immensely beautiful. And the burden, the challenge, the obstacle, Glen, that you see as a burning problem that needs to be addressed?

Glen: I think that, ultimately, it’s a question of culture and meaning and vision for all of this stuff. I hope that we will come to a point in the Anglosphere where we do have peace and cooperation and integration between that sense of wonder and belief in things we cannot grasp that religion gives us and our sense of building. Because I think we’ll be able to build much more and much better when we can do that.

Brandon: Thank you. Jaron?

Jaron: Okay. On the question of beauty, I think there’s a common idea of beauty as platonic thing, that beauty is some sort of this abstract thing apart. And as you might guess, based on what I said about AI and all that, I think that’s the wrong idea of beauty. I think the idea of beauty—as this abstract, still thing that’s apart from people that we sort of try to access and approach—is it might have been functional in the past. But at this point it it doesn’t serve us well. It just has terrible economic — because basically, the way computer networks work, they’re very low friction. There’s this thing called the network effect that’s exaggerated, where all the power and wealth concentrates at the center. And so, basically, whoever owns the network becomes beauty, if that’s beauty is. Whatever, all the artists who are trying to make do as wannabe’s on YouTube are really celebrating Google more than themselves, at the end of the day, which you can see if you look at the accounting.

And so, anyway, the issue is that we have to think of beauty as much more of a connected kind of a thing. Beauty is not a thing apart. Beauty is a thing that people do. It’s a thing that is meaningfully created between people through shared faith. That has to be the idea of beauty. I like Glen’s metaphor a lot. And I should mention that as an island gets bigger, there’s more beach, right? That’s the thing is. The more knowledge, the more mystery. Part of why I play all these weird instruments is, every time you start to play some instrument from another time and place, your body enters into the rhythms and the breathing of those people. That connection, that makes the instruments interesting. It’s not any abstract, like, oh, this instrument solves a particular problem. Right? And so you have to think of the groundedness, real experience, and real connection as what beauty is—not as a subtraction.

Then the big unsolved problem. Here’s the one I’ll mention in the context of this conversation. Almost all of the kids — I say kids because, I mean, it’s hard to find somebody in a frontier science or engineering group for AI who’s not under 40. And they’re very, very few. They’re just starting to have kids here and there. But mostly, they haven’t had kids yet. They mostly don’t have a connection to future human generations. They’re mostly, if we’re honest, a little spectrum, either mostly male. They mostly don’t think of family or continuation as much of a thing. That’s an abstraction to them. Or if they do, they might, it’s like purely biological. Like, “Oh, my genes are great. I’m going to make sure there are a lot of babies that have them or something,” like our friend, Elon.

But the thing is, their ability to speak is through the stories they grew up with, as is true for all of us. The stories they grew up with were not the stories from, oh, I don’t know, American mythology. They were not the stories from the Bible. They were not the stories from literature. They might have been a little bit stories from children’s book. But what they mostly were in their formative years were the stories from science fiction movies. And so, if you ask why are all of the AI people so enthusiastic about saying, “Oh, we’re building something that will kill everybody. Isn’t it great? Give us more money. Yes, you should have more money, more money. You’re going to kill everybody. It’s great,” well, how could that happen? What’s the explanation for that absurdity? It’s that the myths they grew up with that are the stories that form their vocabulary for understanding the world are not Newton and Einstein. It’s The Matrix movies.

Brandon: Or Tolkien, yeah.

Jaron: Or Tolkien. Well, for some, it’s a version of Tolkien, actually, because those movies were big too. But as far as technology goes, it’s The Matrix movies and The Terminator and so on. Those are the stories that exist. And so when you can only tell the world through those stories, that’s our vocabulary of dynamics. And so if the stories you know are limited to a certain kind of story, so are you. So I think there’s a really urgent cultural problem here. The only science fiction that transcended that problem, the only positive science fiction that wasn’t sappy, that was commercially successful, was Star Trek of a certain era of the ‘60s, perhaps. It was the ‘90s, definitely. The Star Trek franchise has turned into just a version of a Marvel movie for the most part. The Marvel movies, don’t even get me started.

So the thing is, we’re giving young people a profoundly impoverished and stupid set of stories to work with. That, to me, like Silicon Valley has failed people a lot. But Hollywood, maybe more so, and in a way more innocently. Because I knew the people who made some of the movies I’ve just referred to. It’s not that they were bad people or even lazy people or anything, but it’s just that they were working from their particular context. And as it translates into giant context, it becomes really dysfunctional. We have a big problem with that. That’s the problem.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. I mean, it is a big challenge with the shaping of the horizons of imagination, right? I think we’re still prey to a kind of logic. In the last time I was with Glen, I was talking about this logic of domination, extraction and fragmentation that governs a lot of the development of our technology and business. I think moving to a different logic of reverence and receptivity and reconnection is really, which is what we see in something like Tolkien, right? It’s a very different kind of logic. You see that tension and forming imaginations.

Jaron: Here’s the thing about Tolkien, though. I read the books when I was little, right? I haven’t seen all the movies all the way through, but I’ve seen enough of them over pretty good feeling for there. So almost everybody now knows them through the movies, right? And this is, oh God. So my very first gig as a musician was playing music behind. It’s a long story. But anyway, I used to do gigs with — oh, who’s the guy who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces? Joseph?

Glen: Campbell.

Brandon: Campbell.

Jaron: Campbell, yeah. And so when I was just a young teenager, like an adolescent, I was doing shows with Campbell. Because I was playing music behind this wonderful new age poet guy, and they would have double bookings. But anyway, his name is Robert Bly. I used to argue with Campbell, even as a kid. Like, “How can you say there’s only one story? Your story is kind of like a nasty one because it’s about this hero. The problem with heroes is that there’s somebody else who the hero has to be. Like there’s always this other side to the story. Doesn’t this kind of bother you?” He was like, “Oh, kid, you won’t know anything.” And I’m sure he was right about that.

But the thing is, the Tolkien books have a certain magic and reality to them that is the best kind. They have a kind of a nobility or something. I feel like in the movies, it turned more into a Marvel thing of like, “We’re going to go and kill these horrible demon things. We’re going to go fight. We have 50 cuffs and whatever.” And so the thing is that the version of Tolkien that came out that most people know is maybe not — it’s a more Campbell-ian thing than I think the original actually was. At least, as I remember it, it was a little more charming and joyous.

Brandon: Yeah, there’s a sense of deep magic, a sort of a reverence for something you don’t create, right? It’s something that is given to you that you were in service of. So all of the questing and so on is not primarily a hero, but rather a kind of calling.

Jaron: Yeah, I mean, I remember the Tolkien books being kind of more like the Narnia books. Maybe I’m misremembering them. I don’t know. Maybe I have it wrong. But the Tolkien movie was more like a Marvel thing or whatever. You know, not that there weren’t some good things about them, certainly.

Brandon: Yeah, these are critical tensions. Well, I can’t thank you all enough. This has been such a fantastic conversation. How could we direct our viewers and listeners to anything that you all are doing, working on? Taylor, where can we point people to?

Taylor: Oh, certainly. Yeah, I mean, I opine on my Substack on occasion. That can be a good place as any for encountering some of my work, for sure.

Brandon: Okay. We’ll put that in the show notes. And Glen?

Glen: Glenweyl.com is my website. We also have aka.ms/plural for the Plural Technology Collaboratory. You can find me on X @GlenWeyl.

Brandon: Fantastic. And, Jaron, where can we direct people to?

Jaron: Oh, I have a crappy old website. I don’t have any social media. I kind of operate my life on this idea that people who need to find my stuff will. I don’t really promote myself, and I’m really bad about it. And somehow it works out. So I just ask the wind.

Brandon: That’s right, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. I know we’re past time. But is there any chance, Jaron, that you might be willing to, for 60 seconds, play us something from one of the thousands of instruments behind you?

Jaron: Oh, God. Well, what do you feel like?

Brandon: Whatever you’re in the mood for.

Glen: I request the oud, Jaron, if you have one.

Brandon: Oh, yeah. Let me second that.

Glen: Jaron, I think the oud is one of Jaron’s favorites.

Jaron: Let me see. The thing about ouds is you never know which oud will be in tune. So there’s a famous joke from the composer Igor Stravinsky, that harp players spend half their time tuning and half their time playing out of tune. But the thing is, that joke was originally from an oud book that’s like several 800 years old. So how in tune? Eh, we’ll live with that.

(Jaron plays the oud)

So it’s out of — I shouldn’t. Okay, it’s out of tune.

Glen: Well, that’s great.

Brandon: It’s alright. Thank you.

Glen: It’s wonderful. Thank you so much.

Brandon: It’s still enough to transport you. It’s still enough to transport you.

Jaron: That’s the thing about the oud that’s just like you’re on, yeah—

Brandon: Amazing.

Jaron: But oh, I think la, la, la, la, la, la, la... I don’t know.

Brandon: Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

Glen: Thank you, everyone. Take care.

Brandon: I can’t thank you guys. It’s been amazing.

Glen: Live long and prosper.

Jaron: Okay.

Brandon: Yeah, you too.

Jaron: Bye, Brandon.

Glen: Bye, bye.

This is part 2 of my conversation with Jaron Lanier, E. Glen Weyl, and Taylor Black on AI, innovation, and the deeper questions of meaning, faith, and human flourishing that surround emerging technologies.

Jaron Lanier coined the terms Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality and is widely regarded as a founding figure of the field. He has served as a leading c…

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Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a technical project. It’s increasingly becoming central to the story we tell about ourselves, our future, and what ultimately gives human life meaning. I recently invited Jaron Lanier, E. Glen Weyl, and Taylor Black to join us on the podcast to explore not only the promises and perils of AI, but the deeper aesthetic and spiritual questions that surround it. What happens when emerging technologies are treated as either sources of salvation or harbingers of our obsolescence? And what it would mean instead to shape them toward genuine human flourishing?

Jaron Lanier coined the terms Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality and is widely regarded as a founding figure of the field. He has served as a leading critic of digital culture and social media, and his books include You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future? In 2018, Wired Magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people in technology of the previous 25 years. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Jaron is currently the Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which spells out “Octopus”, in reference to his fascination with cephalopod neurology. He is also a musician and composer who has recently performed or recorded with Sara Bareilles, T Bone Burnett, Jon Batiste, Philip Glass, and others.

E. Glen Weyl is Founder and Research Lead at Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory and Co-Founder of the Plurality Institute and RadicalxChange Foundation. He is the co-author of Radical Markets and Plurality and works at the intersection of economics, technology, democracy, and social institutions.

Taylor Black is Director of AI & Venture Ecosystems in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and the founding director of the Leonum Institute on Emerging Technologies and AI at The Catholic University of America. His background spans philosophy, law, and technology leadership.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. How aesthetic experience shapes worldview, imagination, and intellectual vocation

2. The historical rivalry between artificial intelligence and cybernetics

3. The danger of treating AI as an object of faith or a replacement for human meaning

4. The psychological and spiritual costs of assuming people will become obsolete

5. A tension between two different modalities of beauty

To learn more about Jaron, Glen and Taylor’s work, you can find them at:

• Jaron Lanier - https://www.jaronlanier.com/

• Glen Weyl - https://glenweyl.com/

• Taylor Black - https://www.linkedin.com/in/blacktaylor/, https://substack.com/@pourbrew

Books and Resources mentioned:

• You Are Not a Gadget (Jaron Lanier)

• Who Owns the Future? (Jaron Lanier)

• Radical Markets (Eric Posner & E. Glen Weyl)

• Plurality (Audrey Tang & E. Glen Weyl)

• The Human Use of Human Beings (Norbert Wiener)

• The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

When Alan Moore sent me a copy of his book Do Build: How to Make and Lead a Business the World Needs, he signed it with a phrase that has stayed with me: “Beauty is the ultimate metric.”

Indeed, what if beauty—rather than efficiency or growth or profit—were treated as the ultimate metric for business decisions? What if beauty were not simply an afterthought, or relegated to surface-level aesthetics, but treated as a criterion that could tell us, from the beginning, whether the work is worth doing at all?

Alan Moore calls himself a craftsman of beautiful business—a business innovator, author, and speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity. He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises. Alan is the author of four books, including Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.

Alan describes beauty as a kind of homecoming: a return to self, to others, and to the natural world that sustains us. Alan’s work helps organizations rethink innovation through the lens of beauty. Drawing on decades of experience working across design, publishing, technology, and business, Alan reflects on the transition from an analog to a digital world, and on what we gained and lost along the way.

Innovation, he insists, is not primarily about disruption or novelty. Rather, it is about seeing latent potential: unmet human needs waiting to be recognized and served. The danger of our current economic imagination is that it rewards speed, scale, and extraction, often at the expense of truth, dignity, and long-term flourishing. Beauty, by contrast, asks a different set of questions. Does this matter? Is it truthful? Is it regenerative? Will it endure?

When beauty is present, things tend to last. When it is absent, even the most efficient systems eventually collapse under their own weight.

We talk about Shaker furniture and why it still feels right centuries later; about inevitability in design—when something feels as though it could not have been otherwise; about nature as the longest-running R&D program humanity has ever known; why regeneration (rather than sustainability) should be our guiding aim; and about the courage it takes to ask, in moments of decision: Is this the most beautiful choice we can make?

You can listen to my conversation with Alan Moore in two parts (here and here), watch the video below, or read the unedited transcript that follows. Let me know what you think of Alan’s argument and the episode.

Brandon: Hello, Alan. It is wonderful to see you. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Alan: It’s fantastic to be here with you, Brandon. Thank you for the invitation. I’m very much looking forward to our conversation.

Brandon: Yeah, me too. Yeah, there’s so much I’ve learned from your work. But before we talk about your books, I want to ask you—as I do with all my guests—could you share a memory of beauty that lingers with you since your childhood, something that stays with you till today?

Alan: So this is a very easy one for me to answer. Actually, it links right back to me writing Do Design. When I was thinking about writing the book, I really had this question in myself about being feeling very lost and how could I write my way home to where I was. We’re going back to, well, more than 10 years actually, because the book was published 10 years ago, or nearly 10 years ago. And I sat with this question, which was: there’s an answer within me that I need to go and find. So how do I come home? That was the question—how do I come home?

A couple of years before I wrote Do Design, I remember having this very powerful memory of being on the beach with my family at the age of 7. So I kind of saw my mother on the beach. She was wearing a skirt and a nifty jumper, bare-legged. She was incredibly happy and playful. My mom wasn’t always like that. It’s not to say she was a bad person, but she struggled with lots of different things. How do you put food on the table? How do you manage the complexity of this family that we’ve got going on here? I saw my father, who actually never had a lot of money in his life. He was dyslexic like me, but he was an incredibly emotionally intelligent man. He was always there for us as a family, as individuals. You could never put a Rizla paper between my mother and my father. It was something that I kind of reflected on. They were married for the best part of 50 years. They’re both sadly gone now, but there they were. Then I thought about my brother and my sister, and I saw them—unconditional love for both of them in many ways.

Then I saw myself. In those days, I had long blonde platinum hair, a very different hairstyle to the one I’ve got these days. I’m playing with my toys on the beach. I thought I’m at one with those I love the most. I’m at one with myself. A part of my journey is not being at one with myself. In many ways, actually, the writing of Do Design was very much about not being in a good place at all and I’m at one with the natural world. So you imagine, like if you had a drone shot, this image on this little boy in his red shorts with his long blonde platinum hair pulling back on this beach in Cornwall, which is where we were. Nobody else is on the beach. We seem to specialize in finding beaches that nobody else was on, which I kind of love. The sea is twinkling like diamonds. The sky is blue. Then you’re pulling back on this kind of family, which is in union. I thought, what is the one word that could describe that experience? The word that I found was beauty. It was that kind of idea of coming home to myself, my family, the natural world around me—thinking even about the kind of we are atomic. We are also in a large cosmos that kind of compelled me to feel that I had to go on that journey to write about beauty as something as an exploration of myself and a homecoming—this is what I call it—to what was meaningful. So that’s my story about beauty.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s a word that I’ve only encountered in some context—beauty as related to a sense of home. I’ve come across it often among people in the hospitality industry—restaurateurs, cocktail bar owners, et cetera. And even, I suppose architecture, in some elements of architectural design, they talk about hominess. But it’s generally not commonly mentioned as an aesthetic principle, right—the sense of feeling at home, being at home? But I think it’s so central to so much of our experience of beauty, you know.

Alan: I completely agree. I mean, I say beauty is our homecoming. In pretty much these last eight years that I’ve been researching and working on that idea as a concept, it’s very rarely that I find someone that is not engaged with the principle of beauty could be something of immense value to people. So the kind of way that people would dismiss you is, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s only about ephemeral things.

Actually, when I wrote Do Design, why beauty is key to everything, I did no research. I just wrote from my heart and my knowledge and my wisdom of what I knew. I mean, I’ve written a number of books beforehand and did a lot of research around those things. This is something I wanted to do very differently. And what is very clear to me is that if you turn up to talk about beauty with people—albeit, yes, I agree with you—it makes people a little bit uncomfortable. It makes people a little bit — I don’t know. What would be the word? A little bit guarded to begin with, because where are we going with this? But actually, intuitively, people understand that beauty is something that links to them not up here. It’s not in the brain. It’s actually within the body. It’s a soulful reaction and need, actually. There’s a need.

There’s a lady called Fiona Reynolds who wrote a book called The Fight for Beauty. She was Director-General of the National Trust for many, many years. In her book, she says, People will strive for beauty, given half the chance, if they know that it is a possibility—or a potential—for them to get their hands on. But it’s a spiritual thing. I think even before organized religions were created some two and a half thousand years ago, I think man, mankind, had an understanding that this idea of beauty was something that was absolutely fundamental to them, their lives, their well-being. It connected them to the cosmos, to the stars. It connected them to the land. They were absolutely part of this entire ecosystem that was creating a life for all to thrive well, is what I think.

Brandon: Yeah, there’s some really interesting research by anthropologists who studied primates. They found if they put video cameras on the heads of macaques, they actually end up going all the way up to the top of the forest canopy and just stare at a sunrise or a sunset. It’s built into us, right? I mean, we really are built for beauty in many ways.

Alan: Yeah.

Brandon: Alan, could you talk a little bit about your career trajectory? What has led you eventually to the point where you’re writing about beautiful business? What has that story been like for you?

Alan: Well, I’ve always led a very creative life, albeit that my mom—bless her—really didn’t think that I would ever earn any money from being creative. So I was discouraged from doing anything creative at school. But actually, I was playing the guitar from the age of 12. I was writing songs, poetry. I did a lot of acting, et cetera, et cetera. But then into my professional career, I studied book publishing at college, which is purely serendipitous. So I became a typographer, a book designer, a graphic designer. I became an artist. I worked as an art director, a creative director. I sat at the transition between analog and digital in my creative life.

So we were doing things like creating the customer journey, UX, designing brands, product services—when all of these things weren’t specialisms by any stretch of the imagination. We just worked at, what I would call, a communications agency. Someone would come in the door one day and say, “Could you help me launch a global car brand? Could you help us design a 3G mobile phone service? Could you help us launch smartphones on a global basis around the world?” And how would you do that? I was very privileged in many respects to kind of have that ability to sort of touch all of those different things, which now I think has become very siloed. But in the days that we were working, you didn’t have all of those different specializations as all companies. You just did what needed to be done. We were pioneers in many respects.

Then my side projects were the writing that I was very interested in. Because I could see a world that was being profoundly changed by—initially, that was 2004—digital technologies in those days, particularly mobile. It was interesting to then also see lots of incumbent companies that weren’t really interested in the amount of disruption that was going to come into the world. So 2005 to 2010, one of the keywords that you would come across was the word “disruption.” We certainly have been. There’s no doubt about it.

Brandon: Well, that’s a word that’s often used to describe innovation, right? And so, I mean, Clay Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation really sort of captured people’s imaginations. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experience in the field of innovation. I know you did some work on that area. What did that entail? What does innovation mean to you? What did it look like in practice, in your work?

Alan: I mean, we worked on physical products. We worked on digital products. I mean, I was writing papers for Microsoft, back in the day before mobile really was a big thing, in terms of trying to help them understand what potential of mobile was. I suppose that whichever client it was, when you were developing those products and services, you were assimilating a lot of information. That is one of the benefits of

being dyslexic, in that you kind of start to compute things in different ways. You could see the potential, I suppose. For me, innovation is about seeing the potential of being out to organize and produce products and services that were never before seen in this world. What you were creating were things that were releasing potential.

I have a slightly different point of view on economics these days. But back then, it was, well, how are you going to help this business grow? What are the needs that people have? And so you were really looking at, if you could design a product and/or a service or both. I work both on the B2B side, business to business, as well as business to consumer side of things. You were working incredibly hard to find answers to those questions, which was: what is the fundamental need that is not being met that you could create, that is actually going to kind of go with people, “I really need this to work in my life”? The reality is that there are very few organizations in this world where, to really innovate, you have to go off paced, as a sense. You need to go into uncharted territory. You’re going to into no man’s land. There’s no guarantee of success, other than the fact that you are absolutely convicted that what it is you’re going to deliver is going to be absolutely right for this organization and/or this company.

I have always operated on a gut feeling. There’s a comedian, a guy called Bill Bailey. He’s not on the telly so much anymore. But I always remember him doing this sketch. He says, people come up to me and they say, “Bill, how do you start your jokes? How do you create your jokes?” He said, “Well, I start with a laugh and I work backwards.” How many people do I need to kind of make this? What I realized was, is, in my journey, there were times when creatively you’re taking a massive leap. Because you can see what that vision is in terms of how it’s going to work. So I’ve had many conversations, heated ones sometimes, where actually it’s the storytelling of how you convince people to get over this gap, this leap of faith in a sense, to get them to where they need to get to. Because actually, organizations aren’t really designed for innovation. That’s not why their designed. That’s not their M.O.

Brandon: Yeah, they want to be stable. They want to grow and not deviate too much from what’s working.

Alan: Yeah, which is why you have M&As. Because actually, it’s easier to go and just hoover up a bunch of companies that have gone through the pain, raise their VC money, whatever. They’ve proved the point, which is a shame, I think, actually. Because also, in a sense, my wider vision is: it’s not just then about commercial activity, but it’s about political activity. It’s about communal activity. Even at a city level or a town level, there’s still the need of innovation in terms of how do we solve. For me, the question is: how do we solve this pressing problem? To me, the answer is, well, we’ve got to go all in to find the absolute best answer to that question.

In a sense, it’s a very artistic position that you take. Because when an artist, whoever it is — let’s say it’s Picasso creating the amazing image of Guernica, the German bombing of the Spanish town which became such an icon. Or you could think about Anselm Kiefer as a German artist, for example, or Theaster Gates, an African American artist. These people worked without compromise. I feel that’s where, within a kind of commercial or political context sometimes, we are let down very badly. Because there are too many constrictions on the ability to find that innovative answer to the one that we’re facing.

Brandon: How can beauty be a guide then to the process of innovation, or could it help us sort through which kinds of innovations we need? If there might be an example, even in your own work, where you found beauty to be actually valuable as a decisive criterion.

Alan: Well, it is. I mean, I think that there’s a lot to unpack there. But for me, the principle of beauty is based on nature’s incredible design model, which creates the conditions for all life to thrive. So I say nature has run the longest R&D program we’ve ever witnessed. She’s been around for a long time. She has created conditions for all life to thrive. She’s not interested in sustainability. She’s interested in this idea of regeneration, that also kind of then — but there’s a generosity. Albeit we’re living in some difficult times now because they’re all man-made, I think, in terms of climate change, in terms of the economics, the political economy that we live in, which you are witnessing in America at the moment, which people are witnessing around the world at the same time. There are people that are much more interested in. Nature is powerful, but she’s not interested in power. I think there is a generosity in terms of how she kind of turns up in the world and how we’ve been accommodated. So for me, the grounding of it is: beauty is not about aesthetics. Beauty is about the fundamental laws of how our cosmos and our nature works. And as a specie, we seem to have forgotten that that’s the reality.

Brandon: Yeah, one of my other guests, Lisa Lindahl—who is the inventor of the sports bra—she has a book on beauty where she argues that it’s about cosmology, not cosmetology. That’s the kind of shift, right, that we really need to get people thinking about. It’s not just about superficial, the kinds of things we typically if we do a Google search on beauty, you’ll get everything from the beauty industry, about various makeup products, and so on. That’s not what we’re talking about. It’s hard to get people understand that.

Alan: Well, as I said, I’d go back to my experience over the last years, which is: when you turn up to talk about beauty and you kind of frame it — I talk about my journey into writing about beauty, I connect it to a universal idea. You are talking to people’s souls. You’re not talking to people’s heads. You’re certainly not talking about the color of what’s on people’s fingernails or any other kind of aesthetic things. I mean, ultimately, there is an element of design which is about the aesthetic value of something.

Brandon: Sure.

Alan: But it absolutely, for me, is so much more fundamental than that. We kind of nudged in a way not to want to have this conversation because it’s such a fundamental part of who we are as people. It gets us to ask lots and lots and lots of questions, which I think talk true to power, question so many different things, where people really start to understand that the value of the quality of their lives—from the get go to the end of life—if you were to frame all of that around beauty, people would be making completely different choices and decisions around the type of life that they would be leading, I think.

I woke up to it a little later. Then you wake you up and then you’re in debt. You got a mortgage on your house. You’re making more sorts of choices and decisions, where you to say, what was the most beautiful life I could have led from when I was conscious? I genuinely believe that people were making very different decisions. But it’s anti in terms of the neoliberal kind of story that we’re being fed in terms of what actually a successful and good life looks to us. And in a part, what we’re witnessing at the moment is a complete failure of that narrative and that story, which is why I think we see what we see in terms of

people struggling with politics, with society, with their own personal identities, men’s health. Just a few examples, it’s what I think.

Brandon: Yeah, the criteria that we value—the criteria for success, the criteria for a good life—I think have somehow left out beauty, which is why I think your work is immensely important.

Alan: Thank you.

Brandon: Let’s chat about your first book—or at least the first in this series—Do Design, which I really want to commend you on just the quality and the thoughtfulness that’s gone into even the production of this book. Obviously, you’ve come from a publishing background. Could you say a little bit about what the thought process was behind designing it this way? Because it really feels like a treasure, an object you can treasure—everything from the page quality to the images that have been chosen, to the fonts. Could you say a little bit about what you put into that?

Alan: Well, I mean, that’s got nothing to do with me because that’s The Do Book Company. There’s a publishing company called The Do Book Co, which is run by Miranda West, who I say is the best publisher in the world. People say, “Well, why is that?” And I said, well, she published my book. A very small operation. I think there’s only three of them. They designed the format. So I have no input in that. I just wrote the words.

Brandon: Oh, wow. Okay. Well, it’s very well aligned with — it really does convey everything you’re saying in here to the physical medium in a remarkable way.

Alan: Well, yeah. I suppose the serendipity was, is when I wrote that book, as I said, I’d already written a couple of books before, alongside all the other work that I was doing. But it felt very important to me. I made three key decisions. One was that I would only write in what my friend calls “threepenny words”—threepenny words, as opposed to sixpenny words.

Brandon: Sure.

Alan: Plain English. I wanted to write in a way where if it only took 50 words to say what it is I wanted to say, then I would say that. You know, I got to the point where having read many, many books over my lifetime that were 100,000 words long (and some change), that’s a big dedication. Sometimes you come out with the end of it and you go, “I don’t know what I’m really getting out of this.” And so I felt that that was important. Then the third writing decision was, is, if I could elevate this writing that felt somehow universal, it could elevate it to a form of poetics that could feel that would open a door for people. So I’ve always described Do Design as like, it’s like a TARDIS. There’s not a lot of words, but it covers a lot of ground.

Brandon: Right. Right.

Alan: But it’s a kind of invitation for people to kind of move into, reflect on the ideas and concepts that I’m laying out in that story. Because as you know, telling a story about beauty is a bit complicated because it touches so many different aspects of people’s lives. I mean, that’s really my contribution—the words. You know, all Do Books are published in exactly the same format. There’s variations, I think, in whatever. I mean, I contributed a lot of the pictures, which is what it did.

But the important thing about that book was, two weeks after it was published — I mean, I’ve got a few people that follow me on LinkedIn, but I wouldn’t say I’ve got a massive following. Miranda’s got a small team. There were some goodwill within the community. She called me up two weeks after the book had been published and she said, “You’ve given me a problem.” And I thought, “Oh my God. What have I done?” She said, “Well, the book is sold out. That wasn’t in the business plan, so now we need to go and find the money to republish it.” Even this last quarter, we’re still selling significant quantities of that book. I know it’s gone on and inspired a whole bunch of different people to set up businesses and festivals and whatever. There’s some magic in there, which even I am still a little bit confused about in terms of what it is. Because as I said, I wrote it for myself, to write myself home. But that homecoming — quite often, if I sign a book for people, I will say: “Beauty is our homecoming.”

Brandon: Amazing.

Alan: You should take it a bit more seriously, perhaps.

Brandon: Well, I want to ask you. I mean, you signed my copy Beauty is the Ultimate Metric.

Alan: Indeed.

Brandon: Could you say a little bit about that?

Alan: Well, I mean, there’s this famous saying that everything that gets measured gets made. It was in a workshop that we were running with an organization, and I asked people to give me feedback at the end. This one person wrote on a card: “Beauty is the ultimate metric.” This was from someone that, at the beginning of the session, I think was perhaps a little bit more circumspect in terms of the benefit that they would get from this experience and what it would mean to them.

And so, in a sense, it’s a bit like you watch the dying of the day. You watch the sunset go down. You watch the sun go up. You have a smell that, I don’t know, it’s your mum’s favorite dish that she cooks for you. For me, that’s beauty. That’s the metric. Trying to get people to think about it in terms of that it has an immense value is very important. Because everything else in our lives are measured, you know? You go to the petrol pump. You have a price per liter or a gallon for the diesel or the petrol you’re putting in the car. You go to the supermarket, and you buy some vegetables. They are measured in terms of a price, a value, an equation, whatever of that.

For me, beauty is kind of part of that very important idea of its immense value to all of us in big and small ways. It’s a hug that someone gives somebody else when they really need it—to spend time with someone when they really need it. They’re doing something very beautiful for that person through their generosity. The language around beauty for me is also a very important kind of aspect of how we expand that idea as a concept and a possibility.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s amazing. One of the things you say in the book is that beautiful things endure. You’ve given examples of Shaker chairs—which I was not aware of them until I read your book, actually—and then the insistence of William Morris, that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Can you talk a bit about those principles? I mean, what makes something endure? What are the qualities of timeless design, perhaps?

Alan: Well, there is, in a sense, no easy answer to that. I mean, the Shakers are interesting because they never wrote about beauty. What they wrote about was truth. Because they were a religious cult, for want of the better word, you know. You might say that their closest relationship will be something like the Amish.

Brandon: Yes.

Alan: The Shakers made everything—from hairpins to chairs, to desks, to houses, to barns, whatever. I mean, they literally made everything. They had a particular style which is very simple, but it was incredibly elegant and very beautiful. Their obsession about truth was, is through their act of their craft and their making. They would reveal the truth and the spirit in whatever it is that they were creating. Because they had the view that if an angel was ever to come and sit on one of their pieces of furniture or craft making, they would understand the purity of the religious truth in their work.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Shakers. I mean, I came across them as a young man, as a designer. We’ve got some Shaker stuff in the house actually, and it just endures. It’s that quest for truth, I think, is is very important. There’s a story that I can tell you, which was, when I was a young designer, in those days, I was working for some very big contemporary art galleries in London. So I got to work with the likes of Ansel Kiefer, Richard Long, the estate of Andy Warhol, and Helen Chadwick, who’s sadly no longer with us. I got to work with these amazing artists. One of them was a guy called Cecil Collins, who did die many, many years ago. He was a very famous painter, an English painter, born, I think, in about 1908. So when I met him in the ‘80s, he was a very old man. He painted these incredibly spiritual paintings. I can remember Anthony, who was the gallery director, was going away on a holiday—which I was rather pleased about because he was a bit of a tyrant. We sat there, and he said, “You know, Alan, Cecil’s work...” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Well, Cecil’s work...” He said, “They’re quite like jewels. Do you think you could design a catalogue like a jewel for me.?” I was very early on in my design career at this point, my graphic design career at this point. And I said, “Of course, Anthony. I can do that.”

But it was a really interesting brief. Because I went back on the train from London to where I was living in Letchworth, and I thought, “What is a jewel?” Well, a jewel is a gift. It’s priceless. It’s unexpected. A jewel is something that is enduring. It could live forever, like a diamond. A great deal of work goes into creating these very precious objects. They give joy to people. They bring beauty. So I kind of had this kind of conversation with myself about designing a catalogue like a jewel. And so I made all the decisions about this catalogue that I was going to design for Cecil around the idea of making a jewel for him—choice of typeface, format, paper, how it was going to be printed, what the cover was going to look like. Everything, right? At the private view—I got the privilege of going to private views, which sometimes were a little bit overawing, I have to say, actually, because I was so young. But this elderly gentleman comes up to me, and he says: “Are you Alan Moore?” I said I am. He said, “Well, I’m Cecil Collins.” I said, “I know who you are.”

Brandon: Oh, wow.

Alan: He said, “You designed the catalogue.” I said I did. He said, “Well, I have to tell you it’s the most beautiful catalogue anyone has ever designed for me.” And I went, “Well, Cecil, you know, I’m really grateful for what you’ve said.” And so, in a sense, when you quest for the truth — so I teach people, and I talk about the poetic brief. So there’s a brief. It’s like it needs to be this size, this weight, this volume. There’s all sorts of metrics or specifications. There’s money that’s associated to those things. But I say to people that I mentor or teach or work with, I say but there’s another brief. It’s called the poetic brief, and you cannot put a quantitative measure on it. But it’s something that you are questing for. That’s, to me, the heart of beauty also. There is something magical within it. But if you quest for it, it will reward you in extraordinarily wonderful ways.

Brandon: Yeah. Wow. That’s very helpful. I want to ask you about another quote that you have from a mentor of yours, Derek Birdsall: “I design something to be inevitable.” What does inevitability mean? What does that look like in practice? Could you give us an example?

Alan: I mean, again, well, you could look at the Shaker stuff and say there’s an inevitability about their design. You know, I can remember touching the first iPhone. I worked a lot in technology, bizarrely enough, right up until that point. I can remember touching that iPhone, and it just blew my mind. They did something extraordinary in terms of the user experience. But you could say, what is the experience of walking into a hotel that feels inevitable? What is the user experience that you would create for someone that feels inevitable? To me, it’s frictionless. I remember asking Derek. Because he was an incredible man. I remember saying to him, “Well, Derek, you know, what does it look like if a piece of design is inevitable?” He said, “Well, it means that your client cannot imagine it looking any other way.” I suppose the poetic brief, the idea of inevitability were things that I carried through all of my commercial practice and working career—not maybe something that in those days I would brief or talk to people that were working with me or reporting into me or whatever. But I always had this complete vision. The experience should be frictionless. It should be aesthetically beautiful.

I suppose there’s another quote in the book, which is: “Beautiful things are made with love.” And with that becomes this idea that you are achieving the ultimate potential of what it ever is that you’re creating and you’re making. It goes back to, you know, ceramics for me is something that’s very important in my life. There is so much that I look at which is not made by love. It’s got a lot of technical skill, but there’s no truth and there’s no beauty in it. When you pick that thing up, when you pick that object up, it should be giving you joy. And actually, it should give you a direct communication to the maker that made that piece of work. And so, for me, inevitability can manifest itself in all of those kinds of different ways.

You know, I talk about utility. There’s beauty in utility. I’ve lived in enough hotels in my life to see enough knives and forks and spoons which weren’t made by love and certainly didn’t feel inevitable, and all the meal, and all the experience. In a sense, it’s like these things shouldn’t cost you any money. They’re just common sense in terms of what you’re doing. So when you go into a place and, I don’t know, you’re not being served well—the food comes out cold, or the hotel room is kind of not what you expected—the promise of what you’ve offered and what you’ve delivered are two completely different things. Inevitability could actually be surpassing all of that. It should be superlative. It’s the way that I look at it. Because I think it’s possible.

Brandon: Yeah, that seems like a really valuable criterion for thinking about innovation too, right? I mean, I think, often, innovation promises some kind of beauty but underdelivers or brings with it some unintended consequences or maybe shallow novelty, which doesn’t really get to the heart of things.

Alan: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been in enough rooms where—I won’t say the name of the company—there would be a number of occasions when I’d walk into the room and the person would say, “Well, Alan, if we’re not going to talk about a really big number, then there’s no point having this conversation.” It kind of really frustrated me. Because I felt that the question should we be asking is: what is the most amazing experience that we could create for people that would actually give you the big number that you really want? And so people are kind of in a very short term. I mean, that said, just jumping along from that, I got a very good friend who runs a big VC firm here in Cambridge. We were talking a while back. He said, “Your problem, Alan, is your horizon line is completely different to most VCs. You see things in a completely different capacity.” For us, medium term is 5 years. Long term is 10 years, where we need to exit the company and get our money back times 10 what we’re getting. He said, whereas you’re looking at something different. To me, that’s a huge problem. Because when you look back at, say, indigenous culture, indigenous innovation, all of those things that did amazing stuff, that took them a long time to work that stuff out—by looking and observing.

Brandon: Yeah, hundreds of years, right? I mean, really long, long term horizons. I had an interesting conversation a few days ago at Climate Week in New York City. I was part of this conversation around valuing the intangible beauty of nature. We were trying to get impact investors to think about how we can better take beauty into account, in investment decisions and so on. I got a question I sort of pushback from somebody who is running a pension fund and saying, “Look, I mean, this all sounds very nice. But ultimately, I have to still maximize returns for the people I’m serving. I really can’t take something like beauty into account. I mean, it really has to be hard returns in the short term. These are people whose livelihoods depend on me.” Right? And so do you have anything that you might say in response? How would you encourage folks who are trying to think this way?

Alan: I can remember I spoke to a very old friend of mine, a Dutch guy called Jurgen. We would work with a guy that would do a lot of workshopping with pension fund holders, institutional pension funds. Pip would like me to come along. He would call me the wild card, which I always found a bit insulting personally. But there you go. Jurgen and I had not spoken for a long time. I had completely forgotten this conversation. We were in Lisbon, I think it was, and doing this workshop. Pip asked me to give a point of view on something that he had been working on. Jurgen reminded me of this. He said, you stood up. You said to these people that, basically, in this room, we’re managing trillions of dollars, right? And I said, so you have the capacity to actually make change in this world. You have the capacity to get people to make better choices and better decisions about the type of legacy that you want to create. And so you need to think very differently about how you are investing and who you’re investing in. Jurgen said, “I really remember that.”

And so, in Do Build, the second book, we’ve got the 30 designed questions that I formulated after kind of looking at loads and loads of businesses and thinking about their ability to really make meaningful change in this world. I mean, I struggle with the word “impact” because it just feels so masculine, whereas I think that we need a better word. The first question I ask is: does it matter? People talk about a lot of purpose. But I’d say there are various people in various administrations in this world at the moment who have a lot of purpose, but I don’t really think they’re involved in the concepts of beauty and regeneration. And so my question is: does it matter? Does it matter to me? Does it matter to the world? Does it matter to us as a community? So the mattering, as I call it — beauty is a verb. The mattering in a sense is part of that. Does it matter?

There’s another one which is, is it transformative? So are we bringing in technologies, new innovations, solutions that are transformative to the world that we live in? So you could be looking at, say, green jobs, green energy, a different way of doing things in that sense. Is it regenerative? So to the core for me in terms of business is, is what you’re creating regenerative? You could look at that from a technological perspective, an economic perspective. It could be an ecological perspective. So rather than your principal model of it being extractive, it’s regenerative.

The last one is: how will you create legacy? You know, I’ve got a friend of mine who he lives in his five-million-pound house. He’s done very well. I celebrate him for that. I went to see him a couple of years ago. We were sitting there having a catch up. He said, “I don’t know. I love your books. I think they’re great.” He said, “But why should I care?” That made me really sad because he’s got a daughter. She’s five. If he thinks his five-million-pound house is going to protect him from climate change and all the other things that we’re witnessing at the moment, then he’s got another thing coming. He may be lucky. He may have his fortress. But to me, well, as the French will say when they were writing in 1968, “La beauté est dans la rue.“ The beauty is in the streets. It’s every person that is contributing to kind of making that change. So I think those questions that I felt needed to be asked. Because the concept of beauty in that sense is multidimensional. It is complex. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it requires us to think in a systemic way. It’s not a word I like to use because that makes it hard for other people sometimes too. Well, how do I think in a system? But to me, those questions are really important then in terms of your friend or colleague or participant in your panel asking you that question, which is whether a number of very important questions we need to ask, if actually you’re going to make a significant contribution to what the future looks like. We choose to use the word beauty. Actually, it’s a much richer — when I fight back, it’s like we don’t need to sustain what we’ve got. What we’ve got is rubbish. We’re in a worse place now than we were 20, 30 years ago.

So sustainability is not what we need. What we need is a world where we can describe a better future for all than the one we currently have. That, to me, is the power of potential of beauty. It may not fit into your nice Excel sheets that you can kind of do all this kind of calculations. So it doesn’t really work like that. But what you can see is that if people are happier, if you start to look at loads of studies, if people are happier, then they go to hospital less. People eat healthier. They go to hospital less. The reality is that nature supports all diversity. So trying to turn things into narratives where you’re trying to exclude certain types of human beings from what is acceptable. You’re an immigrant. You’re undocumented, whatever. To me, it seems a completely forced narrative. It’s reductive, as opposed to expansive. That freaks some people out. But actually, I think that’s just how the way the world works. That’s what I would have said to your—

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. The distinction you’re making between — this is, again, your other book there on how to really build essentially a business that is beautiful, does pose, I think, a lot of important questions but also this important distinction between the extractive and regenerative approaches. I think that we really have to make the shift. One of the questions that you raised in the book or that you say that you challenge business leaders to ask—which struck me—is: is this the most beautiful decision we can make? I’m curious to know what responses do you get to that. How do people process that?

Alan: It’s quite a disarming question. I was being interviewed once by someone, and they asked me that question. I said, well, let’s just say there’s a car company that’s in a lot of financial distress. The board is meeting together to discuss how they’re going to deal with what it is they’re going to do. The leading tool is the idea that they’re going to sell the idea to their global marketplace, that diesel cars are much more efficient and a lot less polluting than petrol cars. Then someone on the board sits there and says, “Do you think this is the most beautiful decision that we could make?” The interviewer looked to me, and I said, “So this is all unpacking for you now, isn’t it?” Because the reality is you’re being asked a question about your own honesty, your own ethics, the ethics of this board, the longevity of the impacts that, were you to be found out, would have huge and significant ramifications. Of course, that company is Volkswagen. Ten years after all that happened, I remember meeting a lawyer and he said, “We are still making hay out of the classed actions. I mean, in Germany, they passed the law in Parliament for the first time where a class action could be taken against a company because of what it is they did.

And so, for me, again, it’s a way of really challenging people to think very deeply. So it’s not then about a cerebral exercise. Because actually, your ethics sit in a much deeper heart of the body, is how I believe it. And so I use that as a challenge in terms of the quality of decisions that people might want to take. Yeah, you’re rushing for the short term. That’s still a kind of reality. But the fact is, the time it takes to clear up the consequences of all those awful decisions that people make are incalculable. The money is spent mopping up all of the spilled milk, all of the damage, whatever. To me, it’s a tragedy. Because you kind of look at it and you think, “Well, it didn’t need to be like that in the first place. You just needed to be a little bit more patient.” I don’t know. But people run on the quarterly numbers. They run on their 5-year and 10-year cycles. I would always point them back to, well, nature’s run this incredible design project.

In fact, I was watching this film called Megalith the other day, which is all about the standing stones that have been built all through Europe at incredible scale. Before really there was any form of society that you would call it, there weren’t any big towns or cities. These were just people that were prepared to somehow wherever come together to collectively bring stones that weighed two tons, four tons, five tons, ten tons, to erect places in Brittany, in France, that were just extraordinary, or Stonehenge—which is the most famous one in England, where they obviously understood that there was something about collective transcendence. There was something about our relationship to the stars, to the universe, to the land that was important. That somehow, their collective efforts would be transcendent against anything else that they kind of held in as a belief.

There’s this wonderful book called The Dawn of Everything, written by a guy called David Graeber and David Wengrow. Unfortunately, David Graeber died just before it was published. It really challenges the concept and idea of what an organized society could look like. So the story that we’re being told at the moment, I think, is just but one story of immense possibilities of how we could live our lives. Those things still stand as an incredible monument to human capacity to organize, come together, be together, and transcend together. In a sense, albeit the beauty thing for me is immensely spiritual—that was something that I discovered on my journey—it’s not an organized religion in the sense of whether it’s, well, all the religions that you could throw your hat in the ring at the moment. But we understood that we could transcend and be together. I think beauty plays that role. I think it’s why it’s so important to people, and then it’s why we need to reclaim it for what it needs to be. So I’m really thrilled about the work you’re about to embark on and to go on because I think that story really needs to be brought to people.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. That’s wonderful. Well, let me ask you perhaps one final piece of advice you could leave our viewers and listeners with. You talk about beauty as a verb, doing beauty. You offer a manifesto of regeneration and the concept of Re. Could you leave us with perhaps some practices? You do offer a number in Do Design, but maybe one or two that could help our viewers and listeners to concretely in daily life do beauty.

Alan: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that maybe in a simple way, find something every day that you believe to be beautiful. It could be a small thing. It doesn’t need to be a big thing. Do you walk every day? Do a 20-minute walk. Just take a walk and say: “This walk is going to be for beauty. It’s going to be for me.” How do I bring beauty into somebody else’s life? So your act of generosity, I think, is very important. Do you write a letter to yourself in terms of, to make my life more beautiful, what would that look like? And to sit with that question, which is, I mean, when I wrote the Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything book, I mean, I sat with that for a long time. I mean, it was four years, I think, where I just thought there’s something in this that’s really important. I didn’t even know the word was beauty then. I mean, we started off with the question of my experience around beauty.

Your best guide to your best future is within yourself. It’s not within other people. It talks to you if you’re prepared to be patient. Just ask that question. Were I to go home, what would that beautiful home look like to me? Spiritually, work-wise, whatever, rather than feeling that there are opinions and ideas of lots of other people, that I actually know you better than you know yourself. Because no one knows you better than you know yourself. It’s the truth of it.

Brandon: Right. Well, thank you, Alan. This has been really enlightening. Where can we point our viewers and listeners to your work? Where can we learn more about what you’re doing?

Alan: Well, there’s the website www.beautiful.business. Then there’s a new website coming also which is thebeautifuldesignproject.com. That’s about to go live. You can find my books at The Do Book Co. So if you just Google Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything or Do Build: How to make and Lead a Business the World Needs. Actually, at the Do Book Company, it’s great because you can get a physical paperback, and you can get an e-book at the same time. There’s lots of information on there about me too. So there you go.

Brandon: Fantastic. Wonderful. Thanks again, Alan. This has been such a delight.

Alan: You’re welcome. Okay. Thank you.

This is the second half of my conversation with Alan Moore.

Alan is a craftsman of beautiful business. He is a business innovator, author, and global speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity.

He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents wi…

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