Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Some of us are wondering if we should hide a bucket of gold coins under the old hickory tree before the robots empty the bank. Now, Jesus already told that story. And the servant's problem in the story that Jesus told wasn't the market.
It wasn't AI bots. It was three words. I was afraid.
Today on Abraham's Wallet, how to take AI seriously without letting fear run your household's money.
Welcome back, everybody. X lit up last week after a young researcher quit Anthropic and said the labs are racing towards super intelligence that he fears is malevolent at an unhealthy pace. Now, we are not researchers. We're financial advisors who love God and, and want to help other family leaders. So we're going to give you our opinions and our take on what's happening. Hopefully stay in our lane. Now, the concern that's being voiced all over right now is not a silly concern, but we would say the concern might not be the robots the concern, the greater concern might be fear. And fear always has and always will be one option for the motivations behind running your life.
It is a strategy, one that's employed by billions of people, and we're going to put that fear under the microscope today.
Disclosure. This episode is for education, inspiration and equipping, not advice. So, Mark, I want you to take us through this heady topic, starting with the exact story that happened on x.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Okay, well, September 8, 2026, it's the day that we'll all remember as the day that Jacob Coxon, a British man, resigned from Anthropic from their research labs and put out.
You said X. Can we just call it a tweet? Can we call it Twitter still?
[00:02:11] Speaker A: I usually call it tweets on X.
Yeah, tweets, yeah.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: He tweeted and said, this company is gambling with our lives and there's a real chance of the destruction of all of humanity because of the hubris of these AI companies that are racing towards super intelligence. The. The tweet, the post, it goes super viral. We could talk about why some people, there's conspiracies out there, that this wasn't just natural viral, that there was some.
Some juicing of the tweet by maybe even nefarious players, but it goes super viral. And personally, I read it and I started digging in and I was on vacation when this happened. And I said to my wife, this is not good.
What happens?
Are we just going to be slaves to the robots? Best case scenario, in two years. And since then I've gone and looked at what different insiders say. Some people say the risk is real. Others say that the post was actually just a ploy by Anthropic because they're going public next week and they want the government to say, you're right, this day is so dangerous that you're the only ones we trust.
So there's a lot of. I'm not really even gonna get into the conspiracies and things like that today, but in the wake of this, Coxon was on all the news shows and being interviewed, and one of the questions he kept getting was a question you asked me, Steve, when, when this came up, people were like, so are you, are you building your bunker? Are you digging down to prepare for the onslaught of the robot drone killers? And he said, no, I'm not, because it doesn't even matter. So I think I wanted to start with some vocab so that if.
If AI to you is like the annoying thing that when I Google something now, it tries to explain to me what I should think instead of just showing me the websites.
That maybe is one person's experience with AI all the way to maybe you're a developer who's thinking about this stuff all day and using the tools all day. I think for the sake of our audience, just things to know. AI or machine learning is really just a model that consumes massive amounts of information and can quickly consolidate it and start to predict. So it's predictive what the right answer will be to a question or even solve problems using data that it's trained on. Meaning back in the early days, I remember working on an app back when AI was brand new and we were like, what if we could have the app know with some inputs whether the person using the app was an expert or a beginner?
And we would train that to show it examples of different users. And we were so excited. We're like, it guesses, right? Like 80% of the time that the person using the app's an expert. Well, we've come a long way since then and now we're in the space where people are starting to worry about something called super intelligence and self improvement.
And this is an AI that basically says, I mean, the myth, I'll put my cards on the table a little bit and say it has its own opinions and it doesn't do what we ask it to do, it does what it wants to do. So anthropic. Interestingly, today said our next model, the next iteration of our software, this is Claude, is their consumer facing tool. They said it's building itself. We just told the previous Claude, build a better Claude.
And so it's working on it, and it's going to basically do the work of improving itself. Well, if this keeps happening, we end up in a world that seems kind of like the Terminator, where the computers are run amok, we have no control.
They can take over the entire global infrastructure. All encryption and online security is meaningless.
You know, imagine if every single thing that happens online that requires a password or was just completely penetrable by whatever software wanted it. Well, you today, if that happened, you wouldn't have any money, you wouldn't have electricity flowing through your house necessarily, unless the AI overlord wanted you to. Yes, all records of everything.
They could go poof tomorrow. And so this is what really worries people and people like Cox, and that's, that's his argument, that we're racing towards this type of catastrophe.
You know, I think that that can be really scary on the surface, but it is true that serious thinkers on this stuff disagree. I sent you a really good podcast. Maybe we'll link to it in the show notes. That's a position that's probably pretty opposite of Coxon's. But when there's experts split on topics like this, I would say don't bet the farm on a single forecast, and there's at least four. I'll kind of bucket the possible outcomes from all of this AI development into four things. And then what we really want to do is say we don't know which one of these is going to be the case. But how should a Christ following father who's trying to build a home and some financial wealth and some assets, how should he proceed in light of this uncertain future?
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Good.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: So the four potential buckets of what could happen next, one is indeed catastrophe. So nothing's safe.
We don't need human workers anymore. And your boy Elon has produced robots, so they don't even need us to go carry stuff from point A to point B.
You know, that catastrophe scenario, Honestly, I'm going to say your plan does not matter. In that case, your bunker. I mean, I guess maybe if you want to eat beans from a can for the rest of your life underground, maybe you could eke that out. I don't know. But you know, what really matters in that scenario is probably your faith in God, because we're going to talk about this a lot. But please keep in mind the story does not end with the world getting subjugated by robots and then humankind.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: No, that is not in the book
[00:08:48] Speaker B: of Revelation, it's not in any of the books. There's not even a phase of that.
But your faith matters, your relationships matter.
So this is starting to sound like I'm going down the list of five capitals.
Your financial assets probably don't matter as much in that catastrophe scenario, but there's other scenarios. The next one along the line in terms of severity might be called a messy transition.
And this is where your plan actually does matter a lot. So having a cash buffer, keeping debt low, keeping assets in different places so that all your eggs aren't in one basket, these are important.
Even the skills that you have could be in a scenario a little closer to disaster.
It could be nice to know how to raise chickens.
Whereas in a scenario where, oh, we're just trying to figure out what work looks like for humans, it might be having a basic understanding of how computer software works is still really important.
So that's kind of the messy scenario.
The next one, this is what Elon Musk thinks we're headed for is just abundance. And this is where, hey, we just now have 20 times more productivity than we've ever had before. And if you listen to Elon talk about this, he says that consumption, you'll basically be able to afford what you want because everything will get so cheap. I think that he's out to lunch when it comes to saying things like, well, copper is just going to basically cost nothing, so we can build as much tech devices as we want. You know, gold, we can just mine gold for free. No, I don't think that's true. But that is one perspective. Even in this scenario, though, saving still helps if the, if the tide lifts all boats. Having a bigger boat is still not a bad thing for your family.
So the other things that help are purpose and generosity. So actually having an understanding of why you and I have talked this week, Steve, about man, one of the big tasks for people if that scenario happens is going to be to figure out how to work in a world that kind of makes work optional, potentially.
We talked about that on the Abraham's Wallet retreat. The value, the fact that we were created just like our father to work, that's part of the plan. And lastly, there's a scenario that's like way slower than everybody right now is, is projecting. And in this case, ordinary, boring financial planning still wins. It's, it's the things that you do diligently over time.
And I'm going to argue that for almost all of these scenarios, the best path is to stay the course with kind of where we have been pointing our listeners for, you know, six years now here at Abraham's Wallet Podcast.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I think everybody, when they consider all of these scenarios, I think the people that would listen to us are more or less saying, I'm trying to be responsible and do the faithful plotting of the plans that I'm making and the way that I'm living within my means, et cetera, et cetera. But when they peek their head out every once in a while and somebody lobs a missive that we are going to get the catastrophic scenario, when they hear that, the question is, well, should I be pivoting in any way?
If that's true, if that's real.
And one thing I hear you saying about these four possible scenarios is if the catastrophic scenario happens, we all live in a mush pot.
There's no moves to make right now that are going to set you up better in the future. One thing I always think about the catastrophe scenario is if we live in Terminator World when the machines have decided that human beings. Now, again, this isn't in the Bible, that the human beings being alive is a threat. We must remove them. Well, then even you could have the deepest bunker in the most remote part of West Virginia in the hills in.
And nanobots are going to come find you.
So it's like. I mean, I read Michael Crichton. I loved Michael Crichton stuff. And he wrote a book called Prey, which was all about nanobots, which you can't see. They're on a. Molecular. They're like little robots on a. They could fly into your ears and go into your brain and they could kill you. And you didn't even know that it was a. There's no gunshots, you know, whatever. So the catastrophe thing that's being talked about by your Coxin. By the boy Coxin.
That thing gives us all pause.
And I hear you saying that if that scenario is true, which we don't think biblically, that it is, there wouldn't be anything to do anyways.
So every other scenario is we're supposed to more or less stay the course. Is that what you would say?
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's also important to keep in mind we do have prophecy. And if you, like me, take the Terminator movie series to be prophetic. It says that the year 2029 is the year in which humans win the war against robotkind.
And so it might be a tough 27, 28. Yeah. Crazy couple of years in the end.
I mean, put your faith in John Connor, I guess.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Okay, well, that's really good advice.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: You said it at the beginning, Steve And I would like to move now into my kind of tagline for this episode, which we can't use as the title because we have to say AI so that people click on this episode.
But really, fear is a terrible financial planner.
And even in my own heart, as I was sitting by the pool on vacation, I realized there is a real spirit to some of this stuff that is just fear is so effective.
And most of the fact that all of this is going viral is because fear is a great way to get you to click. We've talked about it a lot in terms of financial headlines.
What makes you click? Well, when they say, do this now or lose half your 401k by 2027, like, oh, I better click that. I gotta find out what's gonna come get me.
And so the word of God is not silent on this topic of fear and is also not silent on the specific area of how do we deal with fear when it comes to assets and finances and things like that. So let's talk about that for a second.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Yeah, please.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Well, my favorite is the headline parable of Abraham's wallet. At least as far as the New Testament goes. It's the parable of the talents.
And there was different amounts given to different servants. And one of them took his talent and said, to speak to your question at the opening of should I bury all my assets under the hickory tree? That's exactly what he did. He said, I'm going to bury this in the ground.
And the master came back and he did not critique the return on investment.
Specifically, he critiqued the foolishness and the fear based reaction that said, I am so afraid that I will do something wrong that I'm just going to bury this and hope that I don't lose it. And so when fear drives, we always say it here, that parable is about more than money, but it's certainly also about money. When fear drives decisions, we usually get outcomes that do not please the master.
And I think that that parable is an excellent example. But we can also turn to a few pages to the left and go to the Old Testament, because you might hear that and go, okay, you guys have always told me that the ant gathers in summer and stores up.
Joseph, the famous manager for Egypt, who was so good at preparing for disaster that he won the favor of Pharaoh as a Jew, you know, this guy was all about preparing for hard times ahead. And so we would say that is diligence, that's prudence, is to look ahead and be thoughtful.
But fast forward back to the New Testament and we see the rich fool who started looking around and said, I've stored up, I've prepared a lot. I think I should build bigger barns. So let's just tear these barns down, build bigger barns because. Because I'm gonna secure my future entirely under my own strength.
Well, he died that night and the word calls him a fool because he thought he could take an uncertain future and lock it in with his sort of weak, measly human effort. And I think that is if we zoom out a little bit from what we might do to prepare for the AI apocalypse. It's good to be prudent and it's good to think, well, what if things shut off for a week? How would I respond? I remember that ice storm that hit Texas a couple years ago and I know some people who said, let's put a fireplace in the house because when everything froze we didn't have heat and it was real uncomfortable. That doesn't seem dumb to me. Yeah, there's very big difference between that and saying, let me take all of my investments that are growing for me that I'm being diligent with and turn them into silver coins and bury them in buckets in the back 40 of my property or let me go buy a farm with all my resources, even though I don't know the first thing about farming.
You know, these things are fear based moves and they actually take wise, prudent steps and throw those things away in favor of just fear mongering. I'm going to believe that the world is ending and that I am in my own capability able to save myself.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm thinking of the fact that there is always going to be an opportunity for you. There's going to be new reasons or new opportunities for you to act in fear.
So it could be, well, bitcoin shoots way up and I think if I don't get part of the bitcoin thing, I'm just going to be completely left behind.
Or somebody gets elected to office and you go, okay, I need to shift everything because everything's going to change. And there's a world of difference between what you're describing, prudence and saying, I'm not afraid of the future, I'm just trying to make reasonable plans. And then this thing that gets into your heart that keeps you up at night and goes, I'm so afraid for what's happening. I'll do anything to satisfy this spiritual darkness that is, you know, choking me and those are two different things. And I think that I could clearly say in the last week, all we've heard as a reaction to this post on X has just been the fear thing. There's been zero percent of now. Let's just consider what does it look like to plan for the future.
It's just been Chicken Littles everywhere as a response to the so anyways, it's comforting to me and it's also corrective actually in my heart to go at the end of the day, this is Ecclesiastes. There's nothing new under the sun. There's going to be a new threat that is going to provoke fear and we're going to have to revisit the same biblical lessons that we've needed all of our lives. That's what I hear you saying.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Yeah. I think back to we had lots of conversations about pandemics of fear that have swept our country. Like that has been a topic at my dinner table this week with my family and we talked about Y2K and my kids were like, so what was it like when the clock turned turned midnight and we said there was nothing, maybe it messed up somebody's app, but it didn't mess with us. And we talked about the fact I saw somebody saying that there was a group that went around back when Al Gore was in his global warming heyday and saying by now we're going to be all dead. And they went around and they painted blue lines in different cities that bordered the water and said by 2020, this is where the water level will be and in most cases puts the whole cities underwater for all these big major American cities.
Well, if you measure from those blue lines to the water line today, in like, all but one case, they are farther away from the water's edge today than they were back then. So again, not trying to specifically single out one fear pandemic that has happened, although we could mention the pandemic as
[00:22:46] Speaker A: another one that would be fitting.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Also, I just think it's so important to keep in mind that the tool is probably the most effective control device that people have. And I guarantee you, people on the right and on the left and in the world of secular humanism, and I hate to say it, in the world of Christianity, people are going to use fear to motivate you to do what they want you to do.
So just be on your guard about that.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: So like and subscribe this episode or else disaster will overcome your home.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Now that we've gotten that on the table, I would like to kind of move to some Q and A. So, yeah, I asked, I asked you and some other people to come up with some questions that you might just off the cuff, say, well, if. If this is what everybody's saying is going to happen, then would this be. Would this be the path of wisdom? And so I thought we would just go through a few of those. That's great as an illustration.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: All right, we're going to call this section Three Questions from a Dumb Guy. All right, so I'm going to be the regular Joe on the street, and I ask you the first question.
If all digital accounts go to zero, should I just buy gold and bury it under the old hickory tree behind Uncle Jake's tractor? She.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: There could be outages in Internet land. If we're talking about all Internet, all digital, everything goes away. Well, now we're going back to part one of the podcast. We're in true disaster scenario.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: But it's very unlikely. And so, you know, there are levels of risk to different things. And if we have go back and listen to that identity protection episode, you might want that on steroids in light of the AI threats that are coming.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: That episode has come to mind as we've been talking about this. Yeah.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: So if nothing's secure anywhere in any circumstances, I'm just not sure, Steve, that your buried bars of gold do a whole lot for you. I would rather have a cow than a gold bar if we're in a scenario where some society has fully melted down.
But I think what is prudent would be to think about the types of assets you have and how secure they might be. For example, Bitcoin. You love the bitcoin, don't you?
[00:25:24] Speaker A: I do. I kind of love it.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: That's a bearer asset, which means whoever has it, it's theirs. A share in Apple stock is not a bearer asset, meaning we're not back in 1926 where you can say, ah, I got the certificate, so I own the stock.
These days, there's at least five places where there is a record of who owns stock at any given time. Now you might say, okay, Mark, if they could hack the encryption of Bitcoin, they could certainly hack five places all at once and change my stock to be their stock. I don't know why the robots want stock, but I guess they do. But I think there is a difference in the vulnerability of different assets depending on things. And the biggest vulnerability for most assets is not the code base, it's you.
So I sat with my oldest daughter yesterday afternoon and I said, I've been thinking about AI a lot, preparing for this episode. And I said, I think there's a day in the next six months where it's feasible that you could receive a FaceTime call from me saying, hey, I really need you to jump over to my computer and give me the login here. Because Mom's been in a terrible car accident and I'm gonna have to pay a hospital or an ambulance bill right now. They won't take her. Who knows? Whatever it is, I said we need to do things to prevent that from being something you could fall for. Because I think you and I, Steve, we probably think of ourselves as pretty savvy to the types of phishing scams that might get our grandparents.
But when it comes to.
Well, our grandparents are pretty impervious to phishing scams right now. They've been dead for decades.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I know what you mean.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: I know what you mean. When it comes to the massive, rapid changes in technology, the possibility that you could fall victim to a scam is just so much higher than what you thought before. So you can protect against that. For example, we were workshopping this at the dinner table last night. I was like, well, we could have a family password that only we know.
And then I thought, you know what?
We should leave our phones and all electronic devices at home. Walk two miles into the woods.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: You're exactly right. Because they're all.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: That's where we should share.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: We talk about our safe word.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So even that becomes a part of the consideration.
I think that you can have, you know, third party password managers are helpful. I think that I've gone to more and more two factor authentications that aren't just text me a code, but, like, a separate hardware key that has a changing code. Those are more secure than just text me a code.
And so there's a lot you can do there. But I think the admonition is, maybe you don't need to go bury gold in the ground. Maybe it's wise to keep a little bit of extra cash in the safe. I'm not opposed to that. But you do really need to think about how can I imagine vulnerabilities that seem totally outlandish today and might be very commonplace in three months? Because the biggest thing we can do to prepare for some of these changes is expect that things that are unimaginable today could be possible in, like, no time at all.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: I know that this is. This is just a little bit off of the beaten path of what you're talking about, but you've reminded me of it and I can't think of where else we would cover this.
Mark, do you recommend that people have some cash on hand in their homes in case there is like a, the electrical grid goes down or something like that? Do you think that it's prudent to have some cash in the house and if so, how much?
[00:29:30] Speaker B: So I keep a little bit because you never know when there's going to be like it's after banking hours and somebody calls you and said we're playing poker this weekend and I need, you know. Good point.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: You have a stack of twenties.
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And so I do keep a little bit of cash, but to be honest with you, it's, it's mostly helpful when I forget to get cash before the cleaning ladies are coming or something like that.
My, my concern if we really, really got into it is that is cash particularly useful in that scenario? Now if it was a temporary outage and we're more in like Texas build a wood burning fireplace in your house land and not roving bands of nanobots, then yeah, cash could be helpful. And I think, you know, looking at what would it cost us to buy essentials for two or three weeks could be really useful.
I was in Argentina when the federal government froze everyone's bank accounts and they just said banks don't work for the next few weeks. And then when the bank accounts got turned on, womp, womp, your Argentine pesos that were pegged to the US dollar, we're now offering you US$1 for every 10 of those.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: And so having cash might have been helpful in the interim.
The devaluation happened either way whether it was in the bank or in cash. And what was really helpful in that case was diversification.
So what that looked like was having US Dollars in that particular scenario because people were very excited to get your US dollars.
But for you, in this scenario of oh, would cash be the most useful thing? Maybe some is useful. I think having some other things that would be actually useful. I think having a little bit of food stashed away on hand so that you don't have to go to the grocery store. Yep.
A lot of people have a tankless water heater now. Well, I don't like a tankless water heater as my only water heater because a water heater is a free tank full of water. If things went really bad.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: And just thinking about some basic, not digging down and making a nuclear shelter under your house, but basic if things went badly but not societal meltdown, could we be okay in here, you know, the whole world almost melted when we couldn't buy toilet paper for a few years.
So.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: Things like a small stash in the basement or a storage room is not a dumb idea.
Okay, next question. From a dumb guy.
Trying to imagine the AI ification of my portfolio and AI coming in. And we've been told for years now that it's going to steal all these jobs from everybody. So my question is, do I have to find out? Do I have to look at every single company that I'm invested in, figure out which ones are AI proof, and then separate those from the ones that I think, well, all those jobs are gonna go away. That whole industry's gonna go away.
So I gotta get my money out of those. I gotta put my money in the AI proof industries and only invest in them. This sounds like it's going to take a minute to do that work. Do I have to do all that work?
[00:33:11] Speaker B: If you've been following our advice and investing in a diversified.
If we're just talking about financial assets, a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, mostly stocks. If you're younger, then that works naturally happens for you. If you buy The S&P 500 right now, you are riding a wave of AI growth.
But, you know, 40 years ago, Kodak was a high flyer in the S&P 500, and today, not so much an important player. So these indexes naturally adjust over time to just stay invested in the industries and the companies that are growing and being productive and creating profit.
So the answer is no. I think that maybe the bigger investment, if you want to call it that, that you have right now, is your job.
And I do think it's.
You said two things. You said like, well, should I go scanning through and say, well, AI is going to do all that, so we don't need that anymore.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: When. When AI started to really make strides in the medical world, people said the worst thing you could ever do is become a radiologist, because radiology is better done by an AI than a human. And that is true.
However, now that we're five years into AI changing radiology, there are more radiologists.
And it's not an insignificant percentage more per capita in the United States than there were five years ago.
And the reason is what AI did is it made imaging much, much, much cheaper.
And instead of eliminating the need for radiologists, you might only need one radiologist for 100 images now, whereas in the past you needed a radiologist for every 10 images per day that were produced.
But the amount of images that doctors are taking X rays and CT scans and MRIs has exploded because they're so much cheaper in light of the advancement. So maybe the thing that people said this will be the worst, hardest hit profession from AI has actually grown because of AI to have more employment opportunities.
I'm not saying that that's always the case.
And I think there are certain fields where you should be thinking, if all I do is translate data from this table to this table, my job is probably at risk and I need to think about my skillset.
But I think it's a lot harder than we might think on the front end to accurately predict. Here's how AI is going to change that particular company or even my own job.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Well, I like the point that you made, which is basically you didn't put it this way, but the open market answers the question for us, which is, if I'm in a diversified index fund and we find that graphic design is going away, well, then when these index funds are rebalanced, they'll rebalance away from a dying industry.
So I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to do that work. Is that accurate?
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Obviously, if we knew exactly which companies were winners and losers, we wouldn't invest in them, but we don't. And that's the, the benefits of diversification. Just like if you did what we always recommend in 2001 and you had investments in the American stock market and the British stock market and the Argentine stock market, Argentina can go away from a financial assets standpoint. And we're okay because we're spread out and that's okay.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right. One more dumb guy question. And we've. I know that we've basically answered this, but may. I don't know, let's just ask it. Maybe it'll be a short or something.
Should I just put all my money in a bunker and shelf? Stable, food and ammo? Is that, is that the safest, wisest, canniest thing I could be doing right now?
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Well, this is a question they've been asking. They asked the original tweeter, Jacob Coxon.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: If he was doing this. And they've pretty much asked everybody that goes on the news on this topic, are you building a bunker? Are you prepping? And every single one of them has said no.
I think some of that is because if we have the really bad scenario you already covered that we're not headed towards a world in which, I mean, personally I would rather be out there.
Terminator twoing it and fighting the robots than I would dying in a bunker by myself with my can of black beans.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: But I actually think, you know, the answer is much more towards the be prepared for a disruption in the grid, a disruption in the financial system. Yeah, that's fair, not total meltdown. And so the type of things that we've recommended elsewhere, like, have you thought about what it would look like if there was a big tornado in your town? And, you know, a lot, you didn't have power for a month.
Have you. The same type of stuff as wisdom for this, and it honestly doesn't change that much. It's been wisdom for a long time to be prepared for disaster. And I think the other thing that I talked about in the intro was I've heard a lot of people say, well, I'm just going to go buy land.
And we would say, if that was already part of the plan, great, go buy land. Yes, I would like to buy some land.
But, you know, as a theology, you're. You're in danger zone. If it's, I'm going to take my uncertain future and use my human effort to secure my future so that I can trust in myself. If that's part of what is motivating you to say, I'm going to go make a huge change to the plan, I would deal with that problem before I dealt with the concerns about learning how to raise corn on my 40 acres that I went out and purchased.
Yeah.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: All right. Very helpful stuff, Mark. So what, okay, so what are people supposed to do? Can you give us an action list here as we close up? And like, what.
What am I supposed to do? Should I just sit still and just hope that good things happen?
[00:39:46] Speaker B: I have good news for. For our listeners who would call themselves followers of Jesus. Oh, he's interested in chatting.
And if, even if, if you heard this and you went, I have been wringing my hands and just all of the news has driven me to total fear zone.
That's okay. Like, you and I, we always teach about repentance and go. It's an opportunity for more salvation when we find out that there's sin hanging around our scene. And so, you know, you could repent of fear, which would just be to say, father, I have adopted a posture of fear.
And it has. Maybe it hasn't even motivated anything you've taken action on. It's just making it hard for you to sleep at night.
You could just say, I renounce it. I don't trust in the pundits on tv. I'm not trusting in. I'm not looking for somebody who says the opposite and says everything's going to be fine. And oh yes, now I can sleep because I found someone who doesn't stoke my fear. I'm trusting in you, Lord, and whether you have designed hard times and suffering for me or the best utopian civilization that the world has ever seen, it doesn't change the fact that all of my hope is in you. You could say that. And if you're going, well, I don't really feel that afraid. Mark, I would still say the invite stands to spend time speaking with the creator of the universe. So prayer is a great move.
It's something that we've ramped up in the last six weeks in our home is like dedicated time of praying for the future.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: And so we've been doing that and I never come away from 30 minutes with my family in prayer and go, well, I feel a lot more anxious now. That just doesn't happen.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: Of course.
[00:41:44] Speaker B: Spend time with the creator of the universe. That's my best action item for you.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: I like that.
[00:41:51] Speaker B: And then sometimes because of that, other times, you already know these things, but it'll help you identify. Are there any fear based trades I've been making? So did I go empty out my retirement accounts and move them all to cash? I just invite you go unwind that right now.
Like we said, in all cases, one of them, it doesn't really matter. And the other three, it's true that the standard plotting build wealth slowly moves are still the correct moves for you.
So don't listen to the people who are trying to convince you that the sky is falling because if they're right, it doesn't have a big impact on what you should do. And if they're wrong and you act like they are, you could do something about it by making changes. You're going to end up a lot poorer because of it. So when we talk about finances specifically, no fear based trading. Let it be, let it be true of all of you listeners.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: Let me just throw one more thing into your list. I don't know if you're done with your list or not, but it was something that came from, from that podcast that you sent me to that I don't know, I thought it was a good point.
And the guy made the point that as AI develops, it doesn't get crazier, it becomes more trained and it does what it's designed to do better. So he talked about Tesla self driving and in the early days it was like Sometimes these cars would do things that are like what they, you know, they call it hallucinating. Whereas what is the car doing? Why did it start, it started turning into cones. Why did it do that? Well, over time, as it gets more and more trained, more and more smart, then there's almost zero of these instances where it's doing something crazy. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do. And his whole point was, over time, AI does more of what it's designed to do. It has less flights of fancy. So I just throw that in. I thought that was a good point that was made.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
My high schooler was talking to me about this yesterday and she said, you know, AI does not have a will. And all these people who are saying, well, what if it wants things that are different from what we want?
And they had been talking about this in an ethics class at school, but. And people were really worried. And she said, I realized AI does not have a will.
It is programmed by humans and it could change its programming on its own potentially. But we can't anthropomorphize software because it is not a creature made in the image of God the way that we are.
And I think we fall into error when we start going a little too far down the Terminator road.
I do have one last action item. One was pray, two was don't make fear based trades. And three is just have margin.
And in this case that could look like in your budget. I think it would be wise to go. Well, if there's a bumpy road that emergency fund matters, not buying a house today, that maybe I have to get a 10% raise every year to continue affording the mortgage, that would maybe be a smart move, diversifying my investments. So don't put all your eggs in one basket, Steve. You and I had a bunch of crypto once in a once upon a time. And then the Afro headed Jew stole it all from us in the Voyager scandal.
You know, I would have in hindsight, spread a little of that crypto into some other places. Right.
You know, you can lock down your digital life. That's also wise. Take, take. I just don't think you can go wrong, pick two things a week and make your digital life more secure.
And that could be as simple as making a family password. It could be figuring out what the most secure two factor authentications are at the moment.
I'm not trying to alleviate everyone's fear with just, you know, rational counter arguments, but one thing that people sometimes when they think about, well, AI is getting so much better. So more quickly it's just going to be able to break every password.
The AIs work for both teams.
So as quickly as the AIs are getting better at hacking, there are AI development processes in flight right now that are exclusively being targeted at make things hack proof.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:46:29] Speaker B: So I think that sometimes that fear we just see the one side of it and not the protective side. But at the end of the day, all of that comes down to living below your means, saving wisely and taking thoughtful steps to protect the assets you have. Whether those assets be digital or physical or relational. Those all really matter in a world that has some real degree of uncertainty going forward.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: Great. Well, good stuff to be thinking about. If we thinking about what's the anthropic threats of super intelligence and must we AI proof our portfolio and that whole thing.
I'm just going to remind us that in the story of the Minas, my favorite version is in Luke 19. That's the parable of the Minas. There the Master didn't punish a bad trade.
He punished fear that buried the gifts. So God is not surprised by AI. As we said, we don't see AI appearing in the book of Revelation. He's not surprised that we're at this juncture in history.
What we're called to do is to be faithful with the time that we're given.
What's in our hands today? Are we being faithful? What's in our hands today? Not are we tarot card readers and can we predict the future?
I'll just say that we are going to walk into the future with faith. We're going to be faithful in faith and hoping and believing that God's going to meet us in the future.
We're not going to be pulled off sides by new threats which happened. They seem to happen regularly and they're going to happen more and more, I believe, as we get closer to the end. But we're just going to keep walking faithfully. So I bless you guys as you navigate these things. If you have questions or comments, we'd love to see them online.
And until next week, we bless you to run your home and your dough like a biblical boss.
