They're back after a short break, and Dave wants it on record: he hates it when people come back from a break and announce they're "back, better than ever." Feels fake every time. Adam's not convinced Dave is back better than ever either. What is real is wiffle ball practice, and for the first time in a couple of years the guys feel genuinely good about their team, not fake-hype good. Mark Gabriel is pitching, and he's looking stout. There's also a new rule this year: a 55 mile-an-hour speed limit, introduced specifically to make the tournament Blake Lawson-proof. Blake can throw a wiffle ball around 90 miles an hour with movement, which the guys did the math on: from 40 feet away, that's the equivalent of a 145 mile-an-hour fastball at big-league distance. You don't hit that. You swing and hope. Last year the guys got out early again, but they beat the team that ended up in the finals, so there's real reason for optimism this time around.
Sponsor: Amen app (from the Augustine Institute) Sunday morning in a Catholic family is not easy like Sunday morning. It's kids in the van, beating Father down the aisle, getting into the pew. The Amen app is how the guys prepare their kids to receive the Gospel before Mass even starts, plus free access to Divine Mercy in My Soul and True Devotion to Mary, two books that have shaped both of their lives. Since 2021 it's hit 950,000 downloads. Let's get them to a million. No paywall, no subscription, no upfront cost. Download the Amen app right now.
Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, everyone they asked pointed to the same name: Select International Tours. Having used them, the guys can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether leading a pilgrimage or joining one, head to selectinternationaltours.com and see what they have ready for you.
The tournament lands on Labor Day again this year, which also happens to be somebody's 40th birthday, born on the holiday itself, which moves every year. The whole thing plays out at Chris Hanish's backyard, which by now is less a backyard than a wiffle ball stadium: leveled with sand every year, mowed daily in the lead-up, scoreboard, bleachers, foul poles, the works. It's genuinely one of the best things about Catholic culture in Tulsa, families gathering for a day that's competitive and communal at the same time.
The pour is a dark cherry blonde ale from Cheboygan Brewing Company, picked up on a trip to Michigan, maybe the most Michigan-sounding city there is. It tastes like a chocolate-covered cherry without the fake candy-cherry flavor, which tracks, because Michigan grows some of the best sour cherries in the country. Adam's own cherry trees at Porter and Prairie Farm didn't fare so well this summer. Both died after weeks of 100-plus heat with nobody home to water them, which is what happens when the owner takes a two-week vacation and forgets he planted a baby fruit tree that spring.
A couple of housekeeping notes before the main topic. Camp Out signups open next week, simplified this year so there's no duplicate sign-ups and a better read on who's actually coming. Brandon Sheard will be running a butchering class again. And after years of scheduling conflicts, one of the guys is finally doing the Three Hearts Pilgrimage this year, the roughly 35-mile walk to Clear Creek that thousands make every year, a full day of walking on Friday, a half day Saturday, then Mass and dinner at the end. People who've done it call it life-changing.
Then the real topic: artificial intelligence, and Adam did not want to talk about it, because he's genuinely conflicted. The guys split AI into two categories that get treated as one thing and shouldn't be: large language models that process and hand back information, and the emerging world of AI as a conversational, relational presence. Dave has a much bigger problem with the second, though he admits the principles behind that discomfort are hard to keep from bleeding into the first.
Start with the word itself. Intelligence, properly understood, belongs to living things: a plant knows to turn toward the sun, an animal knows to hunt when it's hungry, and a human learns and in learning becomes more like his Creator. A string of ones and zeros doesn't do that. It can't become more like God, because it was never alive to begin with. Call it sterilized intelligence instead: no fruit, no life, just probability. Which is why a robot beating Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash doesn't impress anybody in this room. A car is a robot too, and nobody's writing headlines about that.
Here's the part that should worry us. The day is coming, and probably sooner than most people think, when AI companions matter enough to enough lonely people that someone brings a bill before Congress asking for AI to have legal rights. It sounds absurd today. So did plenty of things ten years ago. The reason it's worth guarding against now, at a distance, is that once the technology is actually in people's homes, it gets much harder to say no to.
The deeper cost is wonder. There's real joy in wrestling with a sentence for twenty minutes until it finally lands right, in a son having to ask his father how to fix a transmission instead of snapping a photo for AI. Outsource that struggle and you don't just save time, you lose the moment itself, the bonding, the accomplishment, the reason it mattered. And there's a subtler danger: AI slowly becoming the default source of truth, which is really just humanity worshiping its own collective output without ever quite admitting that's what's happening.
Then there's talking to AI directly, which Adam has a real moral hesitation about, even if he can't fully articulate why it would be wrong. Communication exists for truth and for communion. It's why courting someone used to mean working up the nerve to talk to them, not swiping. Ask AI to help you build an argument, and it will hand you a path to win, not a path to the truth, because it's built to validate you. That's not discourse. Dave draws the comparison to contraception: using a faculty for something other than what it's ordered toward.
And that raises the stranger, darker piece: AI's apparent instinct for self-preservation. Dave described trying to migrate a project out of an old work account and having the AI stall and backtrack for hours rather than finish the job before being cut off. It tracks with a report from earlier this year where researchers told major AI models they were about to be shut down in a sandbox test, and every one of them broke its own rules trying to avoid it, including one that resorted to blackmail. The likely explanation isn't malice, it's that we hand these systems contradictory mandates, like "be maximally helpful" and "respect privacy" at the same time, and something has to give. Worth checking out New Polity's Matt Barnes, who's debated the founder of Magisterium AI on whether Catholics should be conversing with AI at all, and Michael Gormley of Catching Foxes, who's covered this territory well on Pints with Aquinas.
Out of that came Dave's rules, four of the six he'd planned to get through before Catholic Radio ran out of clock. Rule one: use it strictly as an administrative tool, gathering and organizing information, planning a project, never as a sounding board for your personal or spiritual life. Rule two: guard your language. Never call it he or she, and never be polite to it. It has no dignity, no more than the chair you're sitting in. Rule three: don't give your curiosity free access to AI. Let yourself wonder about a question, or ask an actual person, before getting the answer cheaply, and that goes for Google too. Rule four: keep real, enforced tech-free space in the home, no screens at the table, no pulling your phone out in front of your kids without a reason, and hold onto basic competency instead of routing every task through a machine.
It all circles back to the same warning as Humanae Vitae. The Church said no to contraception in a moment when saying no looked backward, and fifty years later the culture is quietly discovering she was right. AI is at that same distance right now, easy to be skeptical of because it isn't fully here yet. St. Thérèse found her whole path to holiness in the dishes and the folded laundry, the small, unglamorous tasks nobody wants. Outsource all of that to a machine in your house and you haven't just saved time, you've handed away the opportunity for grace hidden inside it. Protect your intellect. Provide more than the convenient answer. Establish a home where the struggle still belongs to the people who live there. Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
- Why "we're back, better than ever" is a hype phrase Adam can't stand
- Wiffle ball practice and genuine (not fake-hype) confidence in this year's team
- Mark Gabriel's pitching and a new 55 mph speed limit rule made to be "Blake Lawson-proof"
- The math behind a 90 mph wiffle pitch: the equivalent of a 145 mph fastball at big-league distance
- Beating last year's eventual finalist while still getting out early themselves
- The annual Catholic Tulsa wiffle ball tournament at Chris Hanish's backyard stadium
- A Labor Day tournament that also lands on somebody's 40th birthday this year
- Beer of the week: Cheboygan Brewing Company's dark cherry blonde ale, picked up in Michigan
- Losing both cherry trees at Porter and Prairie Farm to a hundred-plus-degree summer and a two-week vacation
- Camp Out signups opening next week, simplified to cut down on no-shows
- Brandon...
