Bo and I started with bikes, a Pentecost-red pair of glasses, and my new Crazy Chicks ballcap. We did not stay there. By the end we had hit the evolutionary anthropology of religion before belief, Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical, Gandalf telling Denethor exactly where he can put his stewardship, and the working thesis of the my AI book in process — the platform is the plantation. The connective tissue: we are inside a transition the old institutions cannot speak to, the technology is rewriting the very interiority Whitehead says religion grows out of, and the resources we actually need are older than we think. Three centimeters per second of grooming older, in fact. This is the nerdiest TNT we have recorded in a while. Come for the social-bonding endorphins. Stay for the encyclical.

Highlights from the conversation

Religion before belief. A lecture-prep riff from the class I am teaching this fall with Ilia Delio: how social grooming at three centimeters per second triggers the bonding endorphin that lets mammals scale past fifty without killing each other, how humans developed laughter, then song, then ritual, then religion to do that grooming at distance — and why religion is 190,000 years older than belief. The rowers study and the naltrexone studies are the spine. Bonus: it also explains Pentecostal worship and the preacher’s flow state.
Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical. Released on the same day in May that Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum 134 years ago — and you should read it as the AI version of that document. Babel or Jerusalem. The idolatry of profit. “Technology is never neutral. It takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” Why the Pope can say what neither political party can, when both have taken billions from AI.
Gandalf vs. Denethor. From Barry Harvey’s episode and my current Lord of the Rings re-read: “Mine is a rule of no realm, but all worthy things that are in peril.” The church’s stewardship is Gandalf’s, not Denethor’s. Every AI company and every nation-state is currently making Denethor’s argument — I am the steward of this realm, my responsibility ends here — and calling it realism.
The platform is the plantation. The working thesis of the next book, laid out for the first time in any detail. Five hundred years of extractive economic order, in sequence: land, then labor, now interiority. Captive bodies. Surveillance regimes. Absentee ownership. Racial ideology. Religious sanction. The algorithm has the same five-element architecture. Liberation must now be structural and contemplative — because the territory being annexed is the inner room from which liberation becomes thinkable.
Privacy is a luxury good now. Bo’s off-the-record story about his town’s largest employer, a lawyer, an accountant, a medical professional, and a college all paying for AI tokens to keep their data from training the model. The default used to be privacy. The default is now surveillance. You buy your way out. That is exactly backwards.
The grandma’s granddaughter. Rejected by every medical school she applied to because the AI screened her out. She physically walked into the admissions office of her first choice and got in. The new pastoral move: find the human, go around the algorithm.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

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