The Impact of AI on Relationships, the Church, and Spiritual Development ft. Carey Nieuwhof | 008

Carey Nieuwhof has spent the last decade in a chair few people occupy: hundreds of conversations a year with pastors, CEOs, authors, and public thinkers, watching up close what success does to a person's character. In this conversation with John Ortberg, recorded in the redwoods of Northern California, that vantage point turns into something more personal — a wide-ranging talk about leadership, fame, faith, and the strange new terrain of artificial intelligence.

The back half is Carey's sharpest territory: the book he has been living inside for two years, on AI and the church. He lays out both the utopian and the dystopian cases and lands on a single, disarming thesis — as the world becomes more synthetic, the church's job gets simpler, not harder. It has to become more human.

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What this Conversation Explores:

• The Wendell Berry fan email that turned out to be an AI scam
• Sitting with Tim Keller weeks before the world shut down in 2020
• The Bible Carey gave Scott Galloway, inscribed "you're not far from the kingdom of God"
• Why dogmatism is usually fear wearing a disguise
• Carey's unpublished meta-theory of leadership: we're all making it up as we go along
• What happens when platform grows faster than character
• Why chasing fame is a dangerous goal, and the machinery engineered to make you feel behind
• The existential case on AI, from cured diseases to a coming white-collar bloodbath
• The AI companionship problem: no rupture, and therefore no repair
• The thesis: as the world becomes more synthetic, the church has to become more human
• Grief, resurrection, and the app that offers to regenerate someone you have lost

Resources Mentioned:

• Leadership Is an Art — Max De Pree
• Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman
• Range — David Epstein
• The Algebra of Wealth — Scott Galloway
• Tides of Mind — David Gelernter
• If Anyone Builds This, Everyone Dies — on artificial superintelligence risk
• Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze)
• Sermon Central

About Formation:
Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Socials: @formationjohn

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