What Is the Life We’re All Looking For? | Andy Crouch (Tech-Wise Family)

What's up, guys? This is Ben Pierce from Provoke and Inspire, the podcast dedicated to learning how to follow Jesus in a post Christian world. I had the privilege of interviewing Andy Crouch. He is a best selling author. What you probably will know of him is the book Techwise Family, where he gives this very practical warning about the dangers of social media on family life and then offers tools and tips for how to navigate it well.

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Almost everyone I talk to, especially those with kids has read this. If you haven't, you should. He is an amazing writer. He's been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etcetera, etcetera. He is a incredible communicator and thinker in the space of technology and sociology and being a follower of Jesus, how to navigate all of that.

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And we talked about his newest book, The Life We're Looking For, Reclaiming Relationships in a Technological World. But we really talked about a million different things, AI, art, social media, how to follow Jesus, what it looks like to be discipled, what it takes for somebody to actually change. I know I say this a lot, but I think this was one of my favorite episodes I have ever recorded. Andy is an awesome dude, very humble but bright, a clear thinker, a great communicator, and you're going to love this conversation. I know the topic of the Internet and social media and technology and family is on everybody's mind and so you're gonna wanna listen to this from start to finish.

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You will be blessed by it. I promise. I love having conversations like this because it fits into the larger picture of what we're doing here. This podcast is part of a mission called Steiger and we mobilize followers of Jesus to reach those who would not walk into a church. And conversations like this help equip me and I know you and all of us how to navigate this very difficult topic in our lives, in our family's lives, and in the lives of those outside of the church as they also wrestle with the lies and the trappings of social media, technology, AI, and the rest of it.

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So we love having these conversations. It's all part of trying to get better, become more effective, more in tune with what God is saying, and then ultimately more fruitful in reaching those who would not walk into a church. For more information about Steiger, the mission that this podcast is a part of, you can go to steiger.0rg, steiger.org. You can get all the info there, all the ways to plug in, to support, to be part of it. We would love that.

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And then lastly, as I say a lot on this podcast, we love doing this. It's such a privilege for me personally to be able to speak to all these people and to share those conversations with you. All I ask in return from you is that if you enjoy this content, if it has edified you or inspired you or just helped you in your faith in some way, would you consider sharing it with somebody else? I know there are people in your life who want that boost in their faith. They wanna know how to reach those outside of the church.

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They want to know how to navigate culture and everything that it throws at us. So share this podcast with them and let it encourage them the way it has encouraged you. If you would invite them into our community, I know they'd be blessed by it. We'd be blessed by it and we could just continue to grow this thing so we could keep getting better guests and making better content and continuing to learn how to follow Jesus in a post Christian world. Alright.

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Let's get onto the conversation with best selling author and brilliant mind and great guy, Andy Crouch. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. We are rolling. This is the Provoke and Inspire podcast. What's up, man?

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Thanks for being on. Alright. Alright. So as I was saying before we started, I I think my greatest challenge with this conversation is going to be focus. Just in my regular life, let alone preparation for this podcast.

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And so as I was specifically preparing, it became too much. I I was like, I don't know what to do with these nine pages of questions. So the real prayer is going to be focus. Alright. Yep.

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Yep. And then I'll be brief, but I'll answer briefly so you can get to your all nine pages. Yeah. Yeah. 90 it's gonna be 90 questions in under forty five seconds or less.

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So it's like a some some sort of game, some sort of youth group game. So, I wanna talk, of course, about your latest book, The Life We're Looking For, Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. I can't not talk about all the other things that I love from you as well. And so I I guess maybe the most fundamental question for me is, what has drawn you to this world of conversation? Technology, society, faith.

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What is it about that that it just makes you go back to that well again and again and and contribute what has been very helpful for me in my life and I know many others? Wow. Well, that is a great question. I think the best way I know to answer it is what the sort of through line of most of the things I write about and spend my time on is it starts with the belief, really, that con or I would actually say maybe conviction that, at the most general level, there is something special about human beings. And more specifically, that that special thing is that we somehow, bear the image of god, that every person you've ever met, no matter how young or old, no matter how able or not able, disabled perhaps, no matter how obviously attractive or or apparently, off putting or even repulsive, that every single one of these human beings, unlike any other creature, is somehow refracting into the world, something about the creator of the world.

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So this is obviously a very specific, not just Christian, but Jewish and Christian belief. Also Muslim, actually, because the Muslim world shares this this kind of foundational text in the book of Genesis that that starts this idea or gets this idea going in history. And, by the way, in quite a contrast to other ways of seeing human beings, because in the ancient Near East where the book of Genesis was written, the image of god was the king and only the king. If you wanted to know what god was like, you looked at the people in power and, specifically, the emperor or, you know, whoever kind of ruled, the world. And and in the midst of that, this this people who don't actually have an emperor and don't have an empire, never do, innovate this idea that every single human being, reflects the ultimate reality rather than just, exemplary human beings.

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Right? So it's all a very long way of saying, I think human beings really matter. I think we matter more than we realize in a way, often. And then there's this kind of corollary idea, which is that the world has ended up full of false pictures of what ultimate reality is like. And the biblical word for this is idols, which sounds to us like figurines or, you know, like little statues.

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You I mean, we dig them up from from the soil of the engineers sometimes. But I think more generally, there are all these substitutes for the human that we are told or that we ourselves imagine will actually make us better than we are, like, better than human, more like God, that really show us what God is like currently right now. AI is the thing. Yuval Harari would be an interesting example. He's like this Israeli historian, sort of historian.

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He mostly writes about what he sort of imagines the future will be. He has this book called Homo Deus. Right? Yeah. Which is like Latin for man, god.

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Very interesting book. But it's a bait and switch. So you you read the title of that, Homo Deus. You're like, oh, that sounds good. Like, we're going to be we're going to become god.

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We've been waiting. When when will that happen? How will that happen? But by the end of the book, he actually says data is going to be god. He literally says there will be a new religion called dataism in which we all worship and kind of submit ourselves to the god of data.

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And we'll also we'll all be so just grateful to be able to contribute our data to the great stream that the artificial intelligence processes. Right? So even this book that starts out by saying, you know, humanity is becoming god ends by saying, no. Actually, this other thing is going to be god, and we're just going to be caught up in the slipstream of it. So, anyway, that's a okay.

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I am not doing my job of giving you short answers. But I'm fascinated by the idea that there's an image in the world that matters in ultimate ways. I'm fascinated by the idea that there are false images circulating and that we ourselves get attached to them. And then I'm fascinated at both the damage that does and the repair that's possible. So Yeah.

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That that would be the the big thing. Yeah. What was a big question in your defense? I are we living in a different time? Is technology in whatever form it's taken always been a threat to the image of God in the form of vitals?

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Or do you think we're living in unique times? Yes. Great question. I have a strong opinion about this, and I and I disagree with a lot of people. A lot of people would say, look.

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There's always been technology. We've had tools actually, tools and tombs, and art are the three ways you recognize human beings from the very beginning. We fashion tools. We we adorn and care for our dead in a way other creatures don't. And then we make useless representations of, you know, like the cave art that comes from 13,000 plus years ago, maybe 30,000.

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So some people would say, look. There's nothing new. These are just new tools. And I disagree. Yeah.

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And I would say you say, are we living in a new time? I would not say, like, 2024 is a new time, but I would say roughly the last hundred fifty years since we developed autonomous power that and the first version of this was like the steam engine and machines, which were initially mostly in factories, that something really changed. Because before that, all tools required a human being to be present and operating them with skill, and they were thus both ennobling and humbling. So someone who can use a hammer really well. If you've ever watched, like, a skilled carpenter, either, like, finished carpentry or even just somebody who's really good at framing, like, my goodness.

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You you admire that person. Right? If you have any sense, you're like, oh my gosh. You are amazing with that hammer, especially if you are not amazing with a hammer and never tried. Right?

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Guilty. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right.

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Me. I mean, I I would be useless on a construction site. Right? If I can't speak, I have no reason to live, I don't think. I think it's my only discernible skill, the things that come out of my mouth.

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Oh my gosh. Yeah. So there are there are these tools that were used by people, men and women. In fact, in most cultures, completely sets of different sets of tools for men and for women that every generation learned to use, developed skills. So ennobling in that sense of, wow, you admire someone who can use it.

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But also humbling because it is humbling to learn to use a tool. You have to go through this process of, of apprenticeship and and to really become excellent with it, to become a master leather craftsman or a mass you know, you can think of so many trades, right, and and artisan trades. What changed about a hundred fifty years ago is we started having tools that don't need us, that actually don't ennoble us. So it's not ennobling to kind of be part of a old school factory assembly line in the way that it was to craft, say, a a a wood into a wheel, like, to be a wheelwright. And that, actually, rather than humbling us, they just kind of discard us, and and people become discardable.

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And even labor becomes discardable. This is just accelerated into the present where we now are surrounded by things that are way more impressive than us in many ways, but don't require very much of us, don't transform us. So the word technology is only about a 100 years old that we even use that word. And we've had words for tools all along. But about a 100 years ago, we're like, woah.

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So this is different. And I think we coined the word technology for the difference. So in that sense, it's a it's a more dangerous time, to be human than it was, before these autonomous, devices and autonomous power showed up in the story. Yeah. And we almost become disembodied from the work that we're doing.

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We become detached from it. And it's almost like a one to one thing. Right? Like, I do this one thing. I see the impact I have in the world.

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I create this thing. And, yeah, in the name of, I guess, profit, we create things that can produce far beyond our one to one ability to create. But, man, it's come at a cost. Right? Yes.

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Yes. You are absolutely right. I mean, so Karl Marx and and Friedrich Engels are some of the first people who see this happening and theorize it. And you don't have to buy everything Marx and Engels say, especially their kind of imagination of how history is going to unfold to to feel like, wow, they really saw something important. And you, you know, you say one to one, and I agree.

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A kind of personal presence in the work of being human is taken away. But I also think it was not just one to one. It was relational. You you did work together. You did life together.

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And Right. Once you have these layers of autonomy kind of baked into your world, you can actually become much more isolated. And by the way, there's two quick exceptions I feel like I should mention. There are two technologies that preceded the industrial revolution, and they are money and writing. And those are the two things that are like our Maillai technology that have been around for a very long time.

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And when you actually go back and look at the history of those things, you see people expressing great concern over what's going to happen. There's this dialogue that that Plato wrote, the Phaedrus, where Socrates is sort of unpacking what will happen once we can write everything down, and we don't have to remember it. We don't have to talk with each other. We don't have to have conversations to transmit information. So money and writing were the, like, or technologies, to use that German kind of prefix, the original technologies.

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Yeah. But then we've had this explosion where it's all technology now. I think I was introduced to that idea in the shallows by Nicholas Carr Yes. Where he talked about there are consequence to technology and even neurologically, the lost ability to memorize when we departed from the oral tradition to a written tradition, and that was the debate back then. Right?

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Like Exactly. If we deposit all of our information onto these scrolls, there'll be no need to memorize. Yes. There's the whole cab study in London, how pre GPS, the parts of their brain for spatial awareness was hyper developed. Right.

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By the way, I can't swing a hammer, and I can't navigate out of my own living room. Navigate. So whatever part of that brain, I don't think I had that to begin with, let alone it atrophied. What is driving this? Like, what is sort of the spirit that is accelerating us into this disembodied isolated state that we seem to be heading to in an accelerating way?

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Well, you already used the word, but I'm gonna give you another word for it if you want. So the the word is profit. Yeah. And but, you know, the deeper word, I would say, and here I'm just drafting off of Jesus of Nazareth, is mammon. Yeah.

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Mammon being the name of the spiritual power that attaches itself to money. At least, I think that's what it is. It's not just another word for money. It's a word for the spiritual power. Money's a useful thing.

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So is writing, of course. I'd hope so. We're both kind of in trouble, especially you. I know. Right?

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Exactly. But money because of the way it detaches value from relationships. So money is a way of making value nonrelational. So if I walk into a store, why should the store owner give me something? Well, one reason would be because I know you and your family, and you've provided for my family in the past, and I know that you're raising grain.

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And at the end of the season, you know, you're going to give me some grain. And that's a relational agrarian kind of economy where most things are done on barter, you might say. With money, I can walk in, and you don't have to know me at all if I have, these days, a credit card, which is just a representation that some bank will pay you. And you never learn my name. You don't you know, it's a completely unrelational way of of transmitting value, which is super useful.

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But the spiritual power that attaches itself to that basically says you don't need relationship to get stuff done. You don't actually need a body to get stuff done. You don't need the material world to get stuff done. So one of the powerful principles behind mammon is dematerialization. And that is actually the history of money.

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It starts up wealth starts out being land, agricultural land. Then it becomes, precious metals. Then it becomes coins, which are still made out of precious metal. But then in the course of the Roman Empire in particular Interesting. The coins get debased.

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So they have they have less and less intrinsic value, but the state just says it's worth this amount. And if if we all agree with the emperor that it's worth that amount, we can trade with it. Right? Then it's then it's no longer coins. It's now paper.

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And now it's not even paper. It's just ledger entries. Right? It's just computation. Crypto.

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Yeah. And crypto is actually the next step in the financialization and the dematerialization of value, I would say. So value which starts out being inherent in, well, I would say the created world, the natural world, as tended by human beings in relationship over a three thousand year history, value becomes a representation on, the blockchain if you're already there. And what does that lead you to do? It leads you to devalue relationships and and revalue money and the making of money as the prime directive.

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And and that's what's driving the deployment of technology because, as you say, this stuff only is deployed to the extent it makes more money. I I just read an interesting definition of, AGI, artificial general intelligence. That is the sort of dream of an AI that could do everything human beings could do, but it actually had a very clever and insightful addition. It said AGI will perform all the economically useful tasks that human beings perform. And that's exactly right because AGI will not be deployed to do things that human beings do that don't show up on the GDP ledger of a of a national economy.

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But that leaves out a lot of important stuff. And yet, what we're doing is basically building a world that's good for the economic bottom line, but not very good for anything else as far as technology goes. Well, that's depressing. Should we talk about something a little heavier? That's the good news.

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Seriously. Help me settle a debate. So so a lot of what we do is in the art space, and, like, I am a musician, and we are having a debate on our podcast a few weeks ago about art and, you know, obviously, it being a very fundamental aspect of how God's created us, this image bearing quality that no other living creature does. We produce art, and it's so profound. Right.

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And one of the guys on our podcast was talking about how, well, I don't think AI will ever be able to do that. It can't generate novel things. It can rearrange preexisting matter. And and I'm not, like, nerdy enough to know whether he's right or not, but the argument I made was that it may become a distinction without a difference in the sense that because it's economically driven, in the end of the day, as far as the consumer is concerned, they're not gonna care who made the art. Yes.

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If the art is perfectly tailored to them, created at scale, at the end of the day, there is a consummation of art in the consumption. Right? Not to make it crass, but there is a consummation of the art in the consumption. It's like Right. You can have, like, a means to an end idea about art.

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Like, I don't care if anyone ever hears my song, but that's not true. Right? Like, you wanna share something beautiful with somebody else. Right. Oh, absolutely.

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Consuming audience, much like the fake sugary bright food, if they don't care to make the distinction between genuine beautiful art and in so doing cut away all the demand, isn't that in some way making it a distinction without a difference whether the the art is truly novel or whether it's just a shiny sugary replication that's gonna leave all artists with no audience? Oh my gosh. Well, so I think there's two sides of this. So one is there is absolutely a thinification of all kinds of things in our world. So Steal that out.

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Yeah. Yeah. There's a a more scatological version of it that Corey Doctorow uses. But, but the the thinification is taking things that were once rich, multidimensional relational experiences and turning them into very thin versions of that. So I would say, just to pick I'll come back to art in just a second.

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But, like, the difference between rest and leisure to me is a very consequential Oh, yeah. Rest is a is a profound thing connected to work, actually. Whereas leisure is this sort of thin experience of inactivity. And often connected with and this is where you get to the art version. I think there's a difference between art and entertainment.

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And, by the way, I'm not saying I'm not actually saying leisure is bad. It's just thinner than rest. And I'm not saying entertainment is bad, but it's thinner than art. And and entertainment is susceptible to being kind of caught up in a commercial market, I would say, in a way that art, doesn't lend itself to as well. And, there is going to there is, in fact, already massive demand for thin versions of deep things.

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And, you know, that's true whether you are choosing between reading Jane Austen and a romance novel. You know? Like, they're both purportedly about, women finding a husband. But, and, by the way, in Jane Austen's side, there were lots of romance novels. There are all these penny dreadful novels, that we don't read anymore, and they're gone.

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They but but we just have our modern versions. We've kept Jane Austen because she was, in some ways, doing the same basic story line, but just in a so much deeper way that endures. Right? So, you know, every young female reader in the nineteenth century could choose at the bookstore between the thin thing that we now have just pulped and discarded and the thing that you and I may actually have read even today, you know, even though we're certainly not the original target audience. The same thing is going to well, by the way, it's going to be as as, you mentioned consummation.

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So without taking that metaphor too far, AI boyfriends are going to be a huge industry. And now you can say it's not a real boyfriend. And a lot of people are gonna say, I do not care. It listens to me. It engages with the the way no man has ever bothered to do.

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It's always there for me. It never, ultimately says no to me. There's this very interesting writer, Anton Barbache, who says, notwithstanding Hal in in 02/2001, A Space Odyssey, that the the one thing that AI will never ultimately say to you is no. It will always kind of, as you mentioned, accommodate itself to your preferences and kind of conform itself to your desires of what you imagine the world should be. Now does that mean art is going to be, like, driven out of the world?

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I don't think so. I think I I think what's going to happen what what already happens is a lot of people settle for the thin. Yeah. But others are like, get me out of this, you know, two dimensional hall of mirrors. Yeah.

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And we hope artists are waiting for them. And, actually, that artists are even inserting themselves into entertainment, because a movie in a movie theater has to be someone entertaining her. It's not gonna get to the movie theater. But when Spike Jonze makes the movie Her, he's, like, inserting himself Justice. He's inserting himself prophetically, I would say, into a world, yes, a world of entertainment.

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And, yes, you know, the trailers for the other movies before her are probably shallower movies than that movie. And I'm not saying her is, like, the the pinnacle of cinema even. But he's like he's making an intervention as an artist within a genre of entertainment that actually, hopefully, wakes people up. Although, the terrifying thing is Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI. It's like his favorite movie, and he wants to build it, which is definitely not the point of the movie arc.

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You better missed the point there, dude. Jeez. Yikes. So, yeah, that is that's also the problem. But but, does that make sense?

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I mean, how does that It totally makes sense. I there's gonna be a rebellious view. Right? There's gonna be the those they choose to unplug from the matrix to, you know, use every pastor's favorite illustration from 2000 whatever. Or or the people who come out who say, hey.

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There's a world outside the cave, which is Plato's image. Right? So the this is a very ancient kind of question. Do we settle for the shadows on the wall, or do we go through the process of growth that actually takes us out into reality? You know?

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So it's that is not new. I do think the power of the thin things is maybe unparalleled just because they're so available. I think it's just their availability. Well, and the the problem is that art is a uniquely human thing to a certain degree, and to make it is difficult and or at least it was. And when that changes and when people's interests become the the driver and and the ability to create and then ultimately test thousands of versions of something to perfectly fine tune to someone's taste, you know, it's like, what are the limits?

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It's like, okay. So there's a counter reaction and now people want genuine art. So AI goes, okay. Now people want genuine art. I'm gonna make 10,000 genuine art.

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You know, I can make 10,000 versions of her. We can't outflank this. The starving artists are probably gonna be really starving artists in order to be the rebellious few that remain. And and that, I guess, is part of the argument is, like, man, some people are just gonna be forced out for pure pragmatism, and maybe it's utopia to think, what if the market would actually want real art and good artists? And maybe that's never been the case.

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But I don't know. That was kind of the heart of the argument anyway. There's two meanings of the word economy. Okay? So the the the global market economy at this point and for the foreseeable future and and and, by the way, not in not in every respect's a bad thing, is driven by money.

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And and it is, I would say, captive to this kind of spirit of mammon. And in that sense, yes, art already has been driven out. Many things have been driven out. Economy, though, there are other kinds of economies that are not the global market economy. And and economy is a you know, comes to this Greek word meaning the management of the household.

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It's it's, originally just about how do you sustain mostly in an agricultural society, like, you grow enough food for your home. You you sell a little bit of it to trade for things that you can't produce. But it's it's it's actually a self contained sustainable system of caring for the world in such a way that value emerges. And it's highly relational, and it's and it's highly plural. It's it's not a nuclear family like four you know, two parents and two kids, which is, you know, not the reality anymore in America or Western culture, but still sort of maybe the the model.

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Mhmm. Two parents and two children cannot generate a sustainable life in almost any setting. But an extended household of dozens of people, which is what the ancient like, the Greek household was when Aristotle coined this word oikonomia to refer to that. It that and when you have enough land, right, that starts to be actually a little micro community that can sustain things. I think that is a metaphor for the kind of economies we need to support artists.

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Artists need Yes. These kind of micro economies that do not get caught up in and kind of swamped by the market economy, that actually enable on kind of the mesoscale. Right? If if the the nuclear fans is the microscale of human sociality and society at larger, the market at larger is the macroscale, there's a mesoscale where we actually can relationally build a sustainable way for you to make what you're really called to make. Yeah.

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And will you get a yacht out of it? No. You won't. But will you starve? No.

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You won't. Right. There's a way to build these mesoscales even in the world of mammon. So we need a middle class for the artist. Yeah.

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Interesting. Basically. Yeah. I mean, that that's it. Right?

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Because it's very dichotomized. It's either the yacht or, you know, you're living in your mom's basement, and that is part of the problem. Yes. Yes. Even in my context, you know, I think artists have a profound role to play in the body of Christ, and I think they're rarely recognized for their missional value in the sense that they don't fit into a typical box.

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And even that, I think, is a massive shame because there are filmmakers and writers and musicians who I'm sorry, but they're not meant to be on your worship team. I know. And and so or in your graphics department, and that's not what they're called to do. Completely. Completely.

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Yet, for them, it's like Guitar Center or the church. That's my future. I mean, obviously, there was the era of really high patronage under the Medicis, for example, where you do get kind of extraordinary works of art in the classical, tradition. But I actually think a better model is, you know, every market town so this was not disconnected from markets, but every market town in Europe, eventually built a cathedral. And a lot of that was not Michelangelo level, you know Right.

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Extraordinary singular, art making. It was more craftsmanship, but it was highly collective. Lots of people in that community, certainly, anyone of means contributed to it out of as a matter of course, not expecting any notoriety or even power or influence out of it just because it was part of being a citizen. True in the ancient world too. I mean, Rome had a big role for once you had a certain amount of wealth, you were expected to kind of plow that back into public works that are still the glory of human achievement in various domains, architecture, and so forth, but not necessarily like the the lavishness of a Caravaggio or or a Michelangelo.

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There's a place for those folks too, and they do usually require extraordinary levels of patronage. And maybe they deserve it, but there's a whole the mesolier is really not about, like, the the singular, you know, talent for the ages. It's about making it possible for a whole bunch of people to make music, to make, buildings that are worth building, to Yeah. You know, do visual art that simply creates a a human scale, response to the wonder of the world, which is what art should be. And the cathedrals, as amazing as they were, were highly collective projects Yeah.

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At, ultimately, at the mesoscale, not at the scale of kind of global economy. And yet, can our global economy build anything close to any of them anymore? The answer is no. All we built are big glass boxes for offices and and very rich people to look out the window. Isn't that crazy?

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Yeah. They were able to do more amazing things with far less than we're able to do or that we choose to do now in the world of mammon. And that's because even in an era where food is more scarce, security was more threatened, there was still an understanding that artists played a valuable role Right. In the local little town square, which is why right now, there are 2,000 European cities you've never heard of that are better and more beautiful than anything in The US. I'm sorry.

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Completely complete. To some random little city in Poland you've never heard of, and it will blow away. Yes. Just the decorative arts. The yes.

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Yes. I mean, it's like the intricacy and the level of detail. They're like, oh, this was, like, the seventh rated, you know, stonemason in our in our town. We gave him the least most important job, and here he is. It's Yeah.

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Oh, man. Anyway, I could go on and on and on about this forever. I wanna talk about the household thing because I think that's a crucial Okay. Conversation. But before that, even the maybe the underlying issue is loneliness.

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And in your you know, the life we're looking for is the title of the book. Talk about loneliness as a profound issue today because I think the household thing is part of that, the remedy to that. But but just talk about loneliness and how technology is is just wreaking havoc in that whole area. Yeah. Well, this was really a driving kind of topic of of this last book, because the question I started with is, how is it that we're living in a world where we have more power available to us than we've ever had, measured in so many different ways.

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Like, those who are rest residents of the Western world, literally more, like, electricity coursing through our homes, more kilowatt hours of power being deployed for each of us than any human being has ever had, More money, like the GDP hockey stick, right, of of modern development that has benefited and, I would say, in some ways, genuinely benefited, many people, though not all people in the world. So how can we have more power and be more lonely, anxious, and depressed than any group of people in history? And to me, the heart of the matter is that technology is, by definition, impersonal power. It's power that does not help you be a person, power that does not help you connect to other persons. Actually, I actually think it gives you amazing simulations of that, but very poor, versions of the real thing.

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And what is it that that we most need to thrive as human beings? It's to be embedded in, a relational world. So the title of the book is The Life We're Looking For. And, really, where that comes from is this incredible thing that happens the moment every single human being is born, which is you are looking for something the moment you're born. And, if you've ever happened to have been at present at a birth, you saw this happen.

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Every human being is born looking for a face. The kind of incredible thing is that though we're not very developed neurologically at birth, we do have the ability to, process the visual field about eight to 10 inches from our face. We can't focus our eyes yet, but our eyes just naturally focus about eight eight inches away. That happens to be the distance of a baby lying on its mother's chest or at its mother's breast. And and as the baby is at the breast, the baby is looking up and finds a face.

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And babies, at the first moments of birth, will will focus their attention if they can find a human face at that, in that plane of vision. They will that that's what they're looking for. We were all born for that profound human connection that almost always and I think always in in the in a way, the divine intent. Like, if life were as it should be for all babies and all mothers, it would begin with that bond between the mother and the child. Sometimes someone else has to step in, and sometimes it's another face.

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And for some babies, they don't find a face. And, that's a tragedy. Right? Yeah. But what we're all looking for is that connection.

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One of the things I say, there's this really annoying thing people say about, like, young young people today. They're like, well, they're digital natives. And, like, no. There's no such thing as a digital native as in someone who, like, came into the world just like, give me where's the screen? Where's the screen?

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Give me my iPhone. A zero year old, also a two year old, by the way, in 2024 is not looking for a screen. They are looking for a face. The only reason the two year old starts looking for a screen is because the faces turn away. And the parents are distracted.

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The parents are busy. The parents are distressed perhaps by how much demand this two year old is making on them or the way the two year old is behaving in the grocery store. And the parents are like, look. Look. Here.

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Have a screen. And the two year old was not asking for a screen. I guarantee you what that two year old wanted was some human being to be with them. But we very early now because we have these things that will kind of pacify a child. We hand that child a screen.

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But what that child then starts to learn is, I guess, this is the best I can do. And because it is kind of magical and is kind of responsive and all of those things you were talking about how that customized art is, it's it's very good at kind of accommodating itself to what you want, be you two years old or 52 years old. The child starts to rewire their expectations and come to prefer that kind of controllable world of the screen to the uncontrollable world of the relationship. Right. But we were originally looking for the relationship.

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So this predated screens, Marks and Engels see it happening with industrialization and the the, the way people have to leave land, leave community, move to the cities, become anonymous factory workers to just provide for their families. But it's accelerated, of course, in the digital era because we just keep finding new ways to intermediate personal relationship and bring media into into it. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's Too much sense, unfortunately.

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I feel like I should mention all this was happening in the Roman Empire in the first century. Right. Part the other big idea behind this book, The Life We're Looking For, is actually we have faced this before because the Roman Empire had now it didn't have digital technology, but it did have writing. It did have money. It did have a lot of power.

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It did have this kind of it was a modern maybe in certain ways, the first modern civilization compared to, say, the Persians or the Babylonians. And it was very dehumanizing. And 20 to 30% of the population were literally enslaved, which is to be treated not as a person for economic value. That what a slave is is someone who's had their personhood stripped away so that they can be pure economic productivity for the owner. Well, up to a third of their own empire was, enslaved.

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And in that world, this movement arose that, that started treating people like persons and treated everyone like a person and said, you know what? This ancient Hebrew idea of the image of god actually applies. Whether you have a slave tattooed on your face as would sometimes happen, or whether you are rich and propertied, it really doesn't matter. You are an image bearer, and we're going to call you now our brother and our sister and treat you like family. And that started in first century for interesting reasons.

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Yeah. And by the fourth century, it's competing with Caesar to be the, like, dominant ideology such that Caesar himself, Constantine, converts to this new way of seeing the world. And and now and that story continues for another 16 centuries, and we now find ourselves in this world with this kind of this sort of unholy mixture, you could say, of the still the Roman thing keeps going. Right? The technological empire keeps going and picks up steam once we invent these autonomous things.

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But the other story keeps going too. And I am as hopeful as I can be that we are going to have another wave of resistance movement to, the way of mammon in our world. Yeah. So how does that happen? Because Mhmm.

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You know, you have this Roman Empire, and you have this introduction of ultimately explosive Yeah. Counter paradigm that changed the entire planet. Yep. And, you know, I mean, it its impact is so profound. I think of Tom Holland's book, Dominion, and and the Yes.

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Exactly. Exactly. We don't even recognize that often the very things we're judging everything by are Judeo Christian standards, even those judging Christianity or judging them by Judeo Christian standards, which is the ultimate irony. Right? That's the sign that something has become truly embedded is that you don't even recognize it.

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Okay. So now we're in this state where we take these ideologies, these powerful revolutionary ideologies for granted, and they've almost in a sense put them in a box and made them, you know, contain them or made them cultural? Or how how do they become revolutionary again? Simple question. Forty five seconds.

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Go. Simple question. Well, I have a human answer for you, but I feel like it it it would be incomplete if the testimony of the original revolutionary movement, and we're obviously talking about the people who first call themselves just people of the way, then the ekklesia, the assembly, and then eventually, we come to call them the church. Their their own testimony was this didn't happen unless you had this kind of infusion of divine presence. Yeah.

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So I'm gonna give you the sociological answer, but I think it's important to say that the not just the testimony of the people who are, like, part of the movement, but the people who joined the movement all the way up to Constantine was like, this doesn't this is not just a natural phenomenon that we can engineer. Right? So, with the sort of granting I mean, in Christian terms, we call this the holy spirit. That without the power of the holy spirit, maybe this thing does not get going and doesn't sustain itself. But at a natural level or a sociological level, I think what's fascinating is in the midst of the Roman Empire, which is the the largest scale, integrated human society to its time and and in its part of the world.

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Now China had a a separate story going on, but but in its part of the world, the Roman Empire is the this massive thing. And the fascinating thing is this alternative, basically, it starts very small Right. And stays small for a long time. So the thing is if you are going to create a resistance movement to impersonal power, You are going to have to do it with a means that is not just more impersonal power. So as much as I enjoy podcasts and what we're doing right now, I I believe it's time well spent.

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This is not gonna be a media strategy primarily. It's not gonna be a, like, mammon driven strategy at all. It's going to start with very small groups of people who basically come to see each other as tantamount to family. That is they develop that level of trust, that level of reciprocity, to use a sociological term, that level of interdependence. You mentioned the word households.

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I I do think this idea from the ancient world and many modern societies also where you don't just live with your spouse and dog and 1.2 kids. Right. You live in intimate interconnection with a relative a a medium sized group of people, like dozens, let's say. And, you know, in our modern world, how would that happen? I think I've seen it happen on city streets, like, on a particular street in a town where, like, four different dwelling units all they all have the keys to each other's house.

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They all know each other. They take care of each other's kids, and and they are pursuing the way of Jesus together often. I think it's gonna be those kinds of personal level communities that start to create those economies in another sense. They start to connect with each other. Right.

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Once a month, you're all together at something like a cathedral, like a place where you all get together. And you're like, woah. Let's just reflect on what the big picture is that we're part of. But then you go back to the local, and I think that's going to be how it's going to change. Yeah.

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Which I don't know. That may sound, like, very inadequate. Like, we're we're up against, like, OpenAI and and, you know, Microsoft. Sound inadequate. It sounds incredibly daunting, if I'm honest.

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And I think that's because it feels as though everything in our the way our society is structured, everything in the way that we're conditioned to think, everything in our you know, we're talking about the inbaked Judeo Christian values. Well, right along with that are is sort of this Western individualism. Alright. And this idea that you you Yeah. You don't do that.

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You you get your own space. You you have your own little family. It's not so much that I'm not enthralled by that vision. I guess I'm daunted by the idea of trying to it's almost it's almost like trying to graft two things that just are built to resist. And it's like, how how do you radically reshape life when we live in a drive through era?

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Like, you don't even talk to your neighbors anymore, let alone open up your household to people outside of the nuclear context. Let me say it this way. I think one of the reason why what you did with TechWise family resonated so much with me and I think a lot of people is that it took a very, very daunting problem and somehow made it a compelling vision but with practical steps. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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It was like so maybe you need to write a book on how to how to build a household in that way because it's kinda like I look at that and I go, oh, man. My wife we're so overwhelmed right now. Like, hey. Can I have my buddy move into the basement? She'd kick me out, let alone invite him in.

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Well, okay. Well, that's a great question. One comment on the overwhelm part. Part of why you're overwhelmed is you are too small a unit, awash in the forces of mammon that in ways you don't even realize are shaping your family. And the more you would to the extent you could What's the irony?

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Right? Specific buddy moving into the basement, I can't guarantee this will be like a walk in the park. But in general, if you develop structures of independence, the overwhelmness starts to abate because resilience starts to increase. But it is very hard because we're caught in these, like, local minimums, you know, to use that algebra idea. Like, we're caught in this valley, and we're, like, moving any direction.

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I can't even imagine right now. Even though there's a much better, like, reality if we could just get out of this valley. Right. Well and it's also kind of a self enslaving paradox. Right?

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Because it's like the more independent you make yourself, the more overwhelmed you become by a reality that was probably never supposed to be sustained by this little nuclear family? That so it's this it's this terrible idea because, you know, I look at all my friends, and we're all independent and desperately dependent on everyone around us to make our crazy lives work at the same time. So it's kinda like there's clearly a the broken paradigm there where we were never even just practically, how beautiful would it be? And I think I first was introduced to this idea by Nancy Pearcy, actually. I don't know if you've heard of her.

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Maybe in love love thy body. She she talked about the whole idea that, you know, the agrarian society and then, men moved out of the home and and in these factories all day, and then they went and drank afterwards because they were so miserable and depressed. You think about the jungle, you know, the book. And Yes. Yes.

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Yes. So they they drink, and then and then the wives become detached from the workforce, and they start to feel miserable because they don't know how they belong in the ecosystem of the family and society. And and then they're expected to do all of this very, very intense child raising on their own where that never was really the way it was meant to be. That's never been done that way ever in history. And yet we say, no.

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This is the standard. This is what we've done for a hundred years as opposed to thousands before that. So it's a self enslaving paradox. The more independent we become, the more dependent we become on childcare and a billion grandparents and everything else. And so we're not really independent.

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It's a myth anyway, isn't it? We're just it's just less organic, natural, and beautiful. Yeah. And less resilient, I would say. And you also become very dependent on on stuff that has to be channeled through the money economy.

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So you have to pay for childcare. And, you know, we don't have time to get into bubbles, cost disease. But part of the problem is as this mammon economy takes off, labor becomes very expensive. And so all these costs escalate, including, like, once caring for your children is not something that's once it's done on the books, that is through GDP, the household income has to go up to match that very high cost. And and that's the kind of vicious cycle you're talking about.

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And then you have to work to to pay for the very thing that requires you to work in the first place anyway. Wow. Yes. Yes. Exactly.

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So what do we do? So so I think there are stepwise ways to move towards it's just moving towards greater connection. So I think the first thing so the TechWise family, which is my book about how to, like, put this stuff in the proper place in our homes and keep it out of the non proper the places where it's just gonna do a lot of wreck a lot damage. I actually think that is is in some ways the first step because the less, you know, most of us, the most agency we have, the place we have the most agency, let's say, is is kind of what's the culture of our own home. And this is true whether you have children or not or even where you're whether you're married or not.

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And the more that we can start to limit our dependence on these devices and the way they shape our imaginations and use them only as instruments for the kind of exercise of skill in the world rather than consumption and, the stuff that really deforms us, the already, you have a lot more margin. Already, you have more rest and less leisure, for example. I mean, our family has not gotten rid of electric lights, but I sometimes wonder, like, if we should basically turn off the circuit breakers, at least once a week for a day. Of course, Jewish families do this literally. Mhmm.

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Because electric lighting tempts you to stay up when you are tired. So do all the glowing rectangles, of course, the screen and the iPad and the phone and all that. And if all those things are off, when it comes to be, you know, dark, people sit around the fire for a while and tell a few stories, and then they start yawning. And they're like, you know, let's go to bed. And I honestly feel like 50% of the overwhelmness that people feel right now is just because we are not sleeping.

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Yeah. If you just got the sleep of someone who goes to bed when the sun has gone down and wakes up with the dawn rather than the beeping of the alarm or the buzzing of the Apple Watch or whatever, like, that would go a long way. So first step is, like, start to dial back the role of tech tech in the formative space of our lives, which was our home. Second step would be just take one one move closer to someone you trust. I'm not talking about inviting your crazy friend to move into the basement, but maybe you have a semi non crazy friend or a friend who is crazy in the same way you are and thus seems sane to you, which is probably how most of us function, who could get a key to your house and the invitation to use it.

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Like, to me, the big threshold is is in building a household is someone who's not sort of culturally natural, suddenly has access to my life and can contribute to my life and can also make requests of me, without me gatekeeping it in a way. Yeah. My wife and I, two years ago, she had a year off from her work. She's a professor in a college associate, sabbaticals. And we moved during the sabbatical and moved in with friends into our own apartment in a three story house that our friends live on the third second and third stories.

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And we had our own entrance. But it was such a revelation living with our friend Simon Manuela and their two teenage daughters and her very, very aged mother who has now passed away. But the year we were living there, this extend this extended family was upstairs. We were downstairs. And our lives just naturally without effort, without a whole lot of, scheduling, just overlapped in ways that made everything so much more resilient, honestly, Ben.

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My own father died during that year. And so I had all these family responsibilities. And it all was just so much more emotionally and logistically doable because we were living, like, downstairs from these friends. And can everybody instantly do that? No.

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And can my wife and I do that right now? It we don't know how, to do that now that we don't have that year off for her. But but what would be one move closer, perhaps with very obvious people, perhaps with very unexpected people? I mean, you were saying how hard it is to imagine this, but I have to say, we get glimpses of this in the Christian New Testament, like, Roman 16, which I talk about in the book. It cannot be harder than the treasure of the city of Corinth sitting down at a table with, a guy named whose name literally means number three because he was probably born as a slave, and he was probably the third child or maybe born in the third month of the year.

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And so he doesn't really need a proper name. They're just like, we'll call this number three. A a very low class person who happens to be the scribe who's taking down dictation, for them to sit at a table and have a meal together in the Roman world, that is way more unimaginable than anything we've talked about just now. So if it happened then, maybe it could happen again. Yeah.

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And I think that's the lie that Satan uses to keep us immobilized and entrenched in our our current patterns is that somehow what we have is worth protecting or we just don't even recognize the beautiful vision of life that exists beyond the confines of what we're doing. It's like I often say to my kids. I want them to understand that following Jesus is not just an arbitrary set of rules passed down by some celestial dictator, but a design for flourishing that it actually is better to give than to receive. Like, actually. Like, not in some Ferrari sense, but in a you will be blessed.

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I mean, I recently did a a little talk about why I don't like my birthday, and That's interesting. Of it was, it's this one day where you devolve into narcissism where it's like, today's gotta be about me. And, you know, as an adult with kids and you learn to kind of serve because you you, a, have to, and, b, it's an instrument God uses for self denial in your life, and that's awesome. But your birthday, you kinda devolve back into a 12 year old, and you're like, and yet and yet no matter how much the people around you serve you, it still isn't good enough. You still are a little bit miserable.

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Oh my gosh. And I'm always like, it's a perfect window into how God's design is better. And so even for this household idea, I mean, I think about how many people in our life are cast off because they don't fit in a nuclear family or they don't they they never, for whatever reason, were able to get married or maybe they're young and they Yep. I have a friend in my life and, you know, her family life's a kind of a mess. And so could she use a family to be a part of where she gets to experience that?

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And, oh, by the way, is tremendously helpful as she is for us. You know, there's so much that this is meant to facilitate and and Yes. The good it's supposed to produce, and yet we go, I don't know. It seems kind of uncomfortable, and we got our Tuesday night routine. I don't know if I wanna do that.

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And so we hold on to this phony vision when God has something so much better. So the one step thing I'm with you might not be the crazy friend we keep mentioning. I don't know who he is in my mind as a metaphor, but you're right. You're right. I will say part of what made this year so powerful for Catherine and me, with our friends Simon and Manuela, is they they are very unusual people.

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They are not busy. And they're professionals. They're educated. They have interest you know, interesting jobs, but not jobs that are overwhelming by their own choice. They moved into this onto the street twenty five years ago.

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They know everyone on the street. They are on Tuesday night, they're not overscheduled. Their kids are not overscheduled. It was very it was a it was quite challenging, actually, because I'm not sure we've made as good choices as they've made in in these respects. And it does take, you do just have to decide this this default settings of our culture are not working, and we're gonna choose something different.

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And, or you have to go find some people who have kind of done that. I will say, Manuela's mother was, was in the long process of decline and and dying. I mean, she was not speaking by the time we moved in with them. She was dependent on them to be fed and, you know, just all everything. She she was sort of immobilized by old age, basically.

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And so a person with a profound set of disabilities, we might say, acquired acquired through old age. I actually think that made a huge difference. It meant frankly, it was hard on Simon Manuel. They they didn't go off on many vacations. Right?

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Because mom is there. It has has to be cared for. They did have help with her, professional help to some extent. But still, every day, they're caring for her. But it slowed them down.

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And, you know, Mammon wants you to dream of a world where there is no such dependence. As we are speaking on this particular day, the house of parliament, is a day away from considering a bill to allow Britons to take, have a doctor help them take their lives under certain conditions, including the kind of conditions that Manuel's mother was in. And, you know, Mammon would say, oh, bring it on. Bring on, you know, terminate whatever is not economically valued. Rid of it and move on.

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Fundamentally. But but the presence of people, including those who begin their lives and live their whole lives with disabilities, as well as the many of us who will live parts of our lives with disability. If you have these people present in your household, or on your street and meaningfully part of your life, your life starts to change shape in a more human direction. And, of course, this is another thing about that early movement. So the the Roman world abandoned infants when they were seen to be, disabled.

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They took them to the trash heap, usually sent them with a slave. So the baby would be born. Some deformity would be recognized. A slave would have to carry that child to the trash heap and leave the baby there. And the first Christians start going to the dumps and picking up the babies and bringing them home.

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And they say, we will care for this child who has been abandoned by their family. I think that that does something to our our whole world when we start including those people. So is this impossible to imagine? In one way, like, if you're captive to technology, it's impossible to imagine. It's the opposite of what technology wants.

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But there is a way to get liberated from captivity, and and then you start living this other beautiful human life. Oh, man. I mentioned on the onset of this that I would struggle with focus here. I love I've loved this conversation so much. And out of respect for your time, maybe I just end with this thought.

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Because like I said, I literally feel like we could go for days. And even the art bit of the art diversion we took, I know your your background is like, man, even that I could do for hour. Hour. Anyway, one phrase I've heard you use a lot that I really love is this whole idea of of joyful mastery and, you know, that you're not gonna be able to just sort of talk someone into this. Like, as somebody's listening to this, we could just explain, explain, give all the stats.

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But, man, there is something beautiful in watching someone live this out. And you even gave that example in your own context of moving in with these people that for various reasons had to slow down life, and that was so profound for you. Again, it's not books. It's not podcasts. It's not glamorous.

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It's doing life with someone like let me just give you this quick example because I think it's profound. My entire spiritual life changed when as a, well, late teens, early twenties, I was in a period of just, you know, becoming an adult, figuring out who I was gonna be. Always grew up in a Christian environment, a very profound one, but I was struggling in a sense. And I came home. I lived in New Zealand at the time.

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I know boohoo for me. I lived in the beautiful. And I was in the summer in New Zealand, and my dad probably recognizing that I was in this state was like, hey. We we should start this routine where we just go on we'll walk from our house down the beach to this amazing coffee shop. We'll do this every day, and let's just let's just pray together.

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Like, let's just do that while you're here for a month. You know? And we'll get coffee at the end. So we obviously understood on some level the psychology of habit formation. Make it attractive.

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Right? Put put the coffee at the end. Yeah. And and I was like, yeah. Okay.

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So every day for a month, we just go on these long walks, and it was very organic. And we'd pray, but then we'd talk. We'd talk about football. Then all of a sudden, we'd be talking about life, and then we'd be praying. And it was it was never forced.

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It was never religious. And I'm telling you, Andy, that put in motion for me a pattern I have not stopped for sixteen years to this day. I have because I recognized at that time, I have been wired to be outside. I've been wired to talk out loud. I've been wired to move, And I needed those three things to make sense in my head as a way to cultivate intimacy with Jesus.

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And so my dad, you know, it's a great place to start for a mentor in that way, kinda helped model for me how to cultivate intimacy with Jesus. I'm not sure how many people have had that. It's been taught to them in churches. It's been given to them in small groups or they heard it on podcasts. But who's the person that said, hey, let's how about you and me?

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Like, just how about we just read the Bible together and we we just talk about the things we don't understand? Or how about we, you know, look what it mean you know, whatever it means, I just think that joyful mastery, that to me is the most profound example of joyful mastery in my life, and it revolutionized my spiritual life. Wow. Could you talk about the power of that? Because I think we need that more, don't we?

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We're missing that in the church. Well, the way I got to that phrase was asking this very simple question. Why does anyone ever start to learn the violin? So question. I happen to have parented two children.

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They actually start the viola, which is just, like, a large and less good sounding violin. The viola sort of doesn't have the physics to sound as good as the violin or the cello. It's in this awkward middle size. And for whatever reason, my two kids gravitated toward that instrument. And and the first few years are horrible, I would just like to say.

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For bystanders, for cats in the neighborhood, for anyone in within earshot, the sound of early stage violin Sounds like a syndrome. Like early stage violin syndrome. Yeah. So and, of course, you if you're the student, you are right next to it. It's in your ear.

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Right? And you are making these horrible screeching sounds, and it doesn't sound anything like violin music. So why does and it's very hard. Like and you have to practice every day. And, you know, so I can multiply all the reasons you would not enter onto this path, let alone stay on the path.

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So why do people enter on the path and stay on the path? And, basically, the answer so there is a certain cultural slice where it's my parents told me they would kill me if I didn't do it and, you know, but be a doctor and you will play violin. Right. Aside from the tiger bomb, why do people do this? And I can tell you why.

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It's because they heard a violinist. They heard a person, what I would call they had an encounter with joyful mastery. They saw someone play it at a very high level, and they saw the freedom, that that the freedom to play. Right? There's freedom from and then there's freedom for.

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And this is the freedom to actually have music come out of these instruments that that sound so much in a way like the voice and and that express so much of emotion and are so glorious in so many ways. And and you heard someone play, and you said, what I whatever it takes to get there, no matter how hard it is, no matter how much rearranging of my life and my time are required, I'll I'll go through that valley of practicing for years and years to get to that summit that I glimpsed in a person. And I really do think all of us ought to seek out people who who who exemplify that for us. I I think of the saints in Christian tradition as those who who are the ones who went through this incredibly difficult process, all of them. I mean, Teresa of Avila, you know, painful physical ailments.

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Francis abandoning all of his wealth and family and wandering around practically naked for years. Like, they all did very difficult things. And they come out the other side, and you're like, you are different, and you are compelling. And we we encounter them, and then we say, what does it take? And I it's sort of another way of saying what I said before that this is a spiritual matter.

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Like, these changes will not happen if we just, like, do our cultural analysis and then develop our sociological strategy. I don't think they'll happen. But they can happen when you really encounter joyful mastery and you're like, oh, there's another way to be human. Let's let's get there. What does it take to get there?

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The answer is a lot of suffering, but the answer is also it's completely doable if you have a community of people around you who go to your little violin recitals and say Yeah. Keep going. You're doing you're on the right track. That's so profound. And I think it's a it's a very fitting way to end in in a great motivator for the discipleship and quite frankly the evangelistic space as well because the world doesn't need our injunctions and our prescriptions.

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It needs to see evidence. No. Right? You think you think of first Peter three fifteen as it says, be prepared to give evidence for the hope that is in you. Right?

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It doesn't say give evidence of the good knowledge you have or the great words or the the compelling arguments. It's the hope. And yet Yeah. If we're no more freed from the societal and technological trappings than anybody else? What vision of a better world can we offer to those who are equally mired in it?

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And so you're absolutely right. I think Yeah. In a discipleship sense, we need to be around people that inspire that in us. And then in an evangelistic sense, we need to be there for a watching world that is increasingly rudderless as it heads into the storm. And we we have the profound privilege of knowing what actually is true that we, for example, are image bearers of God.

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So we're not gonna throw babies over a wall. Right? We know what's true. Imagine a world that is entering into this in the absence of any of that sort of except that maybe the imbibed Judeo Christian heritage they have. Right?

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Residual. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

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Well, Andy, this is, this is profound, and it's been one of my, truly, I don't say this as an exaggeration. It's been one of my favorite conversations I think I've had Oh, very. On this podcast. You're a real blessing. To me, personally, I I've been inspired by this particular conversation and the things you've you've done in the past, and I know you'll do in the future, and I know our our listening audience will feel the same.

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So keep going. Keep keep leading by example. It's it's really fun to have this conversation. Thank you. It's a gift.

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Thanks so much, Ben.

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