Sometimes You Just Have to Start Talking Again

After realizing that his podcast was still being downloaded despite not releasing an episode in over a year, Dylan reflects on creativity, consistency, and why it’s time to bring So I Said Pod back.

Transcript

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What's up? I had so much fun yesterday. I decided I'd just come right back. oh I don't know if that's the protocol, if that's what, you people do these days. So I named it uh Sizzle Live. Cause if you don't know, I got a podcast. Podcast is called Saw I Say A Pod. Now I'm bringing back the podcast, but I got some explaining to do because I just looked at my, the backend, my analytics for my podcast. that some of you guys have been supporting, which, beautiful, thank you, I appreciate it. but I haven't dropped an episode since 2024. uh All of last year, bro, not a single episode. Like it is absolutely bananas. I'm looking on the backend of it, which is crazy because like I've made content. I got plenty of content, but I haven't posted a single episode in a year. And so maybe that's why like I'm feeling like I need to get back in front of a mic, right? um But what's crazy is like, and Kat, okay, so uh my producer Kat and also Dika Kat is in the background. uh Kat, m we had 180 downloads in the last 30 days. I don't know what. Bro, I don't know where from. no idea, like, just randomly people are downloading and finding the pod, right? And so I need to make some more episodes. um Podcasting is one of those things that I think um I've gone through a lot of phases in trying to figure out like what I wanted it to be. um and what I needed it to be for me, right? um And so similar to pastoring for me, it has gone through this like evolution because, you know, it's the comparison trap. So you are comparing yourself to what you understand a pastor to be comparing yourself to other podcasts and what that looks like. um And do I have the time? Like, I have the ideas, I have the the desire, right? But for a long time, it was just like kind of on the back burner. And so now, homegirl Kat, Deacon Kat, Deacon Big Purr is gonna help me put it together. So what do I wanna talk about tonight is the question, right? Last night, I yapped pretty heavily. about AI and the church. And I think that like, that is, that's good informed function. I think that like, I'm gonna revisit that topic. I need to do some more research because I'm starting to realize that I don't understand AI as well as I thought I did. There's so many different parts of it that like, most of us know like the big, I guess what, three or four of them. There's, there's Chad GBT, there's. I'm Claude, I almost called it Claudeette, that's funny. And Jim and I, and then I guess like Grunk actually counts, but I don't count it. I don't count anything that Elon Musk does, but that's neither here nor there. You feel what I'm saying? S-O. Those are basically language models. And then I'll tell you what threw me about this AI thing when I realized that I didn't know as much about it as I thought. It was the situation uh with Claude and the Department of War, right? Or the Department of Defense. It's really the Department of Defense because like you can't just change the name of a department without congressional approval and he never got congressional approval. So it's still the Department of Defense. He can go around calling it the Department of War. Side note, side quest friends, side quest friends. I don't know if you remember this from a few years ago. I'm from Cleveland, right? um I'm from Cleveland. And so there was a, there was a, uh a CEO of Cleveland schools a few years back who decided he wanted to change the name of the schools from the Cleveland public schools to the Cleveland metropolitan school district, right? But he did this without like any approval from the school board. He just start calling it CMSD. It was mad wild. And I think I'm marking how old I was. I had to be in like, middle school maybe right this is this is probably in between and this is deep cuts like if you're not from Cleveland you may not know this but like this is probably in between like barber burr bennett like after barber burr bennett left there was this guy who came in i don't remember his name but it was definitely before eric eric gordon and so he just was like we're changing the name of the school district and i remember um Teachers get together having this conversation like you can't just change the name of the school district, right? Like But apparently you can apparently you can because right now we call it the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, right? and But uh I think that like The Department of War is the same situation, right? Well, this dude is going around just calling it a thing when it's not actually that thing, but he'll correct people reporters when they call it the Department of Defense, but it is still technically neither here nor there. Right. And so when Claude and the Department of Defense got into it, I realized either I am wildly under using AI or I don't completely understand it. You know what I'm saying? And so like the fight was really about Claude not being ready to be put into like autonomous weapons because it's a predictive model, right? And so like predictive models are not good for strategy. Does that make sense? Right? Like they are trying to predict what the next word is. You can't use it to be autonomous to like. plan strategy and so that's what Claude was trying to say like it's not ready to be in a weapon it shouldn't be used to like play it shouldn't be used to plan attacks right is what it is what they were saying they said it like you should use Claude for efficiency in like bureaucratic stuff. You shouldn't be using it to plan attacks. And so what the Department of Defense wanted to do was use it to plan attacks. And Claude was like, no, this is, no, this is a bad idea. No, you don't have permission to use our stuff this way. And so the Department of Defense, yeah, I'm surprised you didn't hear about this. on social media. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. I'm surprised you didn't hear about it anyway, right? So anyway, so the Department of War Defense uh threatened to put them on the blacklist. And Claude was like, come at me, bro, right? And so their contract ended with the United States government. Yeah, yeah, it was a big deal. Happened a couple of weeks ago. But what I realized then that it was like, I am clearly not using AI to its maximum capacity because the Department of Defense is trying to use it to like plan attacks because, oh, that's what happened. Remember when they kidnapped the president of Venezuela? They used Klaw to plan parts of the attack. I can't make this stuff up, bro. I can't make this stuff up. Right, they used Klaw to plan parts of that attack. And so... That's how Klaude found out. That was like, yo, we could tell that like, you use our stuff to do this thing. And we asked you not to do that. So, Remy our stuff. Appreciate it. Right? So anyway, I have a lot to learn about AI. Got a lot to learn about AI. ah The questions that I was asking yesterday about AI, uh questions I was asking yesterday about ah its impact on church and relationships and community and organizing and like what it's going to do to those aspects of our lives. I think in order to have a more nuanced conversation about it, there's some more reading that I need to do. There's some more like understanding and like listening to some of these experts because I've been listening to them and one, Nobody knows what's going on. uh That's a common thing. Like you hear everything about AI from uh it is going to cure all diseases to it's going to destroy the world. Somewhere in between is gonna happen, but nobody knows like how, I mean, for all the sense of purposes, right? It is going to destroy the world that you know. that's absolutely gonna happen. It's already happened, right? It's gonna destroy the world that you know. It's gonna lead to an ecological collapse. We don't, maybe. that for sure right um and i say that because like okay this is the reason i say that and this is this is the nerd in me right so this is reason i say that i was talking to charmaine about this yesterday i watched this documentary about the saltwater kingdoms right and so saltwater kingdoms for those who don't know i don't know this is a mad rant but y'all just got to let let me cook on this right Saltwater kingdoms are like Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, like those like Middle Eastern countries who are, you know what saying, like basically in deserts. And the life wouldn't be able to be sustained there if they weren't desalinating water. So they've created desalination plants. where they are really extracting salt out of water so they can use the water from the ocean. So 90 % of their drinking water, of their water that they're able to use for that, 90 % of that comes from the ocean and these desalination plants. We don't talk about it too much in America because we don't need to. uh Correct, we live... We live on the Great Lakes, you know what saying? And so like, that's one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. And so like, we have a lot of groundwater um that we keep destroying with fracking, but that's another conversation, friends. Another conversation, you guys stay focused. So these salt water kingdoms, right? Desalination plants are a big deal. That's why I said, don't know what's going to happen because like, the thing that you can count on capitalists to do, is be able to make money. Right? You may not be able to count on them to do nothing else, but you'll be able to count on them to make money. What I mean by that? So as soon as it becomes impossible for them to make money at a thing, they will innovate. And so this desalination plan, I think, while it is very expensive to run and very energy intensive, Currently, I think that they're gonna start to try to figure out how to do that cheaper and easier so that they can use that water for these plants. I was listening to this guy today, because I'm my research on this AI thing, because I'm like in my AI bag right now. I was listening to this guy today and he was like, know, these data centers that are popping up everywhere are the infrastructure for AI. but we might be putting the cart before the horse because like we don't know if we're going to need all of these data centers. It's sort of like the economic collapse that was caused after they built all of the railroads but the industry hadn't caught up to the need for the railroads yet. Now once you had the infrastructure like these organizations, these companies, these countries did bounce back right? They did bounce back but They bounced back in a way, but it was, it took a while because of uh them building this infrastructure that you didn't really need yet. So we don't know if we will ultimately need as many of these data centers as being built and they're leveraging that. All that to say, I don't know enough yet to make predictions about necessarily like what this is going to, what this is going to look like. for the church, right? uh I just know, I know for a fact that it's gonna be big, right? I know for a fact that it's gonna be, it's gonna be a problem. uh But there also must be opportunities there, right? uh It has to exist. And so, you know, we were thinking about, and like, we can have this conversation. The church has been decentralized. almost by force right and definitely by choice at this point um so and i said this yesterday in the live but In the Black church, you went primarily for three things, right? One was preaching, the other was the music, the last was the community, right? The best preaching in the world, really, best of Black preaching, you can find online. every week and you can press pause you can watch a sermon a different sermon every day for the rest of your life and never run out and you might even get some really good sermons out of that right it's gonna be some harmful theology in there somewhere i'm sure but for the sake of the argument you can get that on demand you used to have to wait for a very popular preacher to come to your town That's what the revival circuit was about. So remember like, when you was probably young, like uh when you was a kid, like really, really young, that was like the tail end of the the revival circuit where there will be a week long, uh what they call revivals and preachers would come in from all over the country and they would preach. And like part of the culture of the black church was that like these revivalists, you wanted to be the person who was preaching like the last day of the revival, right? It was kind of like a seven day long like music fest. Does that make sense? So it's a seven day long almost music fest, but it's for preachers. This is where the idea of like a seven last saying comes from, right? Seven last, seven last sayings or seven last words uh is the thought that like, know, uh preachers get up and it's usually about, they give out seven minutes, maybe longer to preach a sermon about the seven last sayings of Jesus while he's on the cross. And so like revival was that, but for seven days, right? Sometimes longer. but you had to wait for those times to happen to get these preachers who everybody was talking about were really good. Now, you could do your own revival all on. And you could do that every single day. All right. The other circuit was the gospel circuit, right? So gospel singers used to go church to church and hold these benefit concerts. And that's how like they paid themselves, right? Like they might have CDs, they might have tapes, but like you had to really kind of wait until they was able to make that happen and come to your church before you could experience them. You don't have to do that no more. I listen to Johnny McRams every day. You know what saying? Johnny McRams is heavy on my playlist. I've never seen him live. You understand what I'm saying? And like his live is now like a, it's a concert. It's more like a rock concert. You know what saying? And I'm not hating, I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm just like the world changed, if that makes sense. So because the world changed, those two things have now become uncoupled from the church experience. You don't have to go to church to experience those things. Does that make sense? You don't have to like be in community to do that. Now, here's the things get, here's the things get crazy. The community part has also been uncoupled from the church because the community, the church used to be the center of community for the black community. And it is certainly not that anymore. You understand what I'm saying? And so the communities that you build with your chosen family, Friendsgivings are a thing, digital communities are a thing. There are different ways to gather and different ways that people are choosing to connect that has been uncoupled from this thing that we call church, right? And so the things that we like leaned heavy into like needing to central to center the preacher needing to center the music right because there was a there was a move real heavy a few years back before the pandemic. where people would get together for just worship nights, right? No preached word. It wasn't a church, right? They were just getting together to sing uncoupled from the church thing. So like church has, as we know, has been decentralized. So the question becomes one, what is church now? What does it look like? What does it need to be in order to serve the people? Or does church need to serve people? Right? Do you need it? And I know that that's a dangerous question for a pastor to ask, but it's the question that any pastor needs to ask, right? Or any. person who is like staking their claim on being a part of a church needs to ask in order to get at the answers, you have to ask the hard question, right? Like, why do I need this anymore? You gotta be able to answer that, right? And so like, that's not to suggest that like theology isn't important and that you don't need to like engage with what you believe and the rituals aren't important, but they are and they are. But the rituals of the black church have always been deeply communal, right? So I was watching this um doc the other day. I watch a lot of docs. Now that I think about it. I was watching this doc the other day about food that used to exist in uh the black church, right? I can't tell you the last time that I was um at a church and then after church, everybody ate dinner together. They used to have it all the time when I was a kid, right? Where like, either they was selling the plates or it was just like, they fed you. Like the church mothers got together, they cooked, it was potluck style and they fed you. I can't remember the last time that that happened at the church, right? Well, it happens at Purpose Community every week when we get together. We eat together, it was a big deal. But. for for a normal like now when I grew up like starting like maybe 15 16 when I started going to a mega church that became impractical right because like the church that I grew up in the one that used to like have these really like sunday dinners after church it was maybe like 30 40 people max right and so it was feasible to feed 30 to 40 people it's not feasible to feed 500 and you got another 500 coming in for a second service. You understand what I'm saying? And so now you have to like, because things have changed so drastically in that context of the megachurch system, there's a hyper focus on preaching and singing. as the experience of God. There's hyper focus on that. Less of a focus on the communal needs. Because like every, every Wednesday and Sunday, sometimes Saturdays is really like kind of a performance or like a concert of sorts that is being put on every week, right? um And can be exhausting just ask anybody who has served in a mega church like. and served, I served, mean, volunteered um because we thought that that connected you greatly to God. That's a side note that I'm not going down today. But anyway, asking these hard questions about where the church is, what the church needs to be, right? um leaning on your doctrine, is important, what you believe becomes radically important, but also... you can't communicate what you believe to people just intellectually, right? And so like yesterday I said, um there won't be a premium on answers anymore. Like our society is like kind of fixated on people who have answers or things that have answers, but that's not where you're going to put the premium anymore. You're going to put the premium on people who ask good questions. because answers won't be scarce because of AI. Like the technical stuff that you wanna know, that thing will have the answer. But are you asking the right questions, right? And so we have to become a community of faith believers resilient enough to sit in the tension of questions, which is something that like, the church historically has not been good at. We don't wanna sit with the tension of not knowing. And we don't sit with the tension of not knowing because like my pastor is supposed to know, right? And like, you're supposed to have this like secret, sacred knowledge that comes directly from God. which I am not discounting is a thing. I believe that is a thing. What I am saying is the tension of the question is where our community is. Right? Like that's where all of the deconstruction happens. That's why the deconstruction happens because we started to ask hard questions and we got weak answers. And so we asked more questions, right? This is what happened in the church. Again, this is what happened in your family. This is what happens in relationships. When you ask hard questions and you get weak answers, you start to realize that you can't stand on the thing and you back away from it. When you are like in a toxic relationship and you start asking the question, why am I here? Why are we doing this thing? Why do you talk to me like this? When you start asking those questions and not filling in the gap with an answer that you think is appropriate, when you start asking those questions and you wait for an answer and that answer is weak, you start to trust that thing less. And so that's why you deal with the like the no contact, right? Like that's why like those relationships fall away. That's what happened in the church. You start asking hard questions and instead of, don't know, let's wrestle with the tension of this together. You gave me weak answers that made no sense. So I trusted it less. That's where deconstruction is, right? When you deconstruct something, think about it, think about the term, right? When you deconstruct something, you are literally taking it apart because you don't trust its ability to stand. have to take it down because it is unsafe. I can't trust it. I could use the material somewhere else. That's why you deconstruct a thing. You reconstruct a thing or you construct a thing for it to bring safety and stability to give you trust in a thing. Think about it this way, right? If you saw a chair that even looked like it couldn't hold you, do you sit in it? No, of course not, right? If there was a house that looked like it was leaning to the right, are you going in that house? Absolutely not. I don't trust it. So you must deconstruct the house because it does not serve the purpose that it was intended to serve. Now, can you reconstruct the house? Yeah, of course. Because you see the value in having a house Right? I see the value in having a chair. I see the value in having a relationship. I see the value in having a thing called a church, but we must reconstruct it in order for it to be safe and secure and something that I can depend on. And so if we're not asking these questions about what is going to make the structure of this thing stronger and more resilient in an age where all of the things that you were leaning or have been uncoupled from the church, you wonder why there's nobody there. This is real simple math, I think. And so these are the questions that I'm asking myself. These are the that keep me up at night. um These are the questions that have me. slow to answer when people ask me questions about the faith. I usually have more questions for you, more, don't know, this is what worked for me, for you, than I will with a solid answer about something. And I think that like, that's because I've... I put less of a focus on me having the answer and I've put more of a focus on or more of a premium on you being able or the person that I'm talking to to be able to like trust that I will sit here with you in the uncomfortable thing as we experience that wrestling with God together. And I think that that's like the role of a pastor. At least that's how I... defined pastor for myself, right? Because when I was coming into the pastorate, um preaching and pastoring in my mind meant somebody that like had answers and that, you know what saying? Like could preach and wanted to do the research and you know what saying? Like wanted to like give you the right answer for the God that you serve, which fine, cool, cool, cool, But for me, that didn't work. Right, I needed the people who I was talking to on a regular basis were asking questions that I had. And so to make up an answer, again, giving a weak answer would make our relationship less reliable. And I think that like, as a pastor, as a fellow believer, as a fellow human, We need more situations where we can rely on one another. Where we can, you know what mean, like we're sitting with one another. Yeah, I think that that's, that's where I'm at on that. I got so many things bro that I'd be wanting to talk about and here it is just on the live who is it here? What's going on bro? How you doing? uh I know, think I'm gonna wrap that one up. I don't know if I got much more to say for that. Yeah, maybe I'll pop on here tomorrow. I'm doing a radio show with my homeboy Reverend Napoleon Harris called politics to the people. And so I'll go live while we're doing the show. So you can hear some of the stuff that we'd be talking about over there. But yeah, I think that's a wrap for the evening. Y'all be blessed.