Ryan, Grant, and Gretchen ask each other all their burning questions, probing more deeply into past interviews and breaking new territory. Together they ponder how Jesus might run a tech company, the desire to live forever and its impact on procreation, and what it means to be stewards of reality. 

  • If there are computers in heaven, there will be no more bugs

  • Even in a “classless” society, we still have classes—the “laptop” class, the service class, and so on

  • In the Middle Ages three estates were conceived of: those who fought (the nobility), those who prayed, and those who worked

  • King Alfred formulated the three estates in answer to the question: “What do we need in order to cultivate the gift of creation God has given us?” 

  • “On the one hand, you can approach [economic problems] beginning from reality as gift; and then the question is, how are we stewards of the gift of reality?” 

  • A properly Christian, creation-oriented political theory wouldn't view the unemployable as “surplus” people

  • Suffering will never be completely eliminated, but Christianity proposes that suffering can be a path to ultimate happiness through Christ’s own suffering on the cross

  • WWJD as the CEO of a tech company: pursuing righteousness over profit or power

  • A Christian approach to tech services might charge for them upfront, rather than profiting from user data

  • Most healthcare can’t be treated in the same way as other markets, because it’s unexpected, expensive, and price inelastic, and demand for it is induced by those who profit it

  • “There's something interesting that the current generation wants to live forever, but does not want to have children. We want to save the planet for us, not to bequeath it as a generous gift to someone else, but so that we can enjoy it forever”

  • Using quality of life as a framework for life questions can  lead to euthanasia on the one hand, and a materialist/reductive understanding of human life and flourishing on the other

  • Because moderns don’t share a baseline concept of reality underneath our moral disagreements, we can’t agree on what we’re arguing about 

  • Modern moral anthropology assumes that humans are basically good and thus consensus will tend toward right judgment 

  • Conspiracy theories are less believable in societies where there are so many competing individual visions of the good

  • The concept of play finds its origins in the religious sense

  • Mountain climbing existed pre-modernity as a spiritual experience 

  • Increases in efficiency usually extract more profit from workers rather than benefiting them

  • “Caring for someone, [...] when you do it well, is pretty inefficient. There's a loss of attentiveness and the ability to care in a slow way when we're ruthlessly efficient”


Beatrice Institute is supported in part by Henne Jewelers and The Pittsburgh Foundation.