Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: When I would do my walk around pre flight inspection on my EA6A, I would start at my boarding ladder in the right cockpit and I would go clockwise around the airplane. I'd always wind up at the starboard engine intake and that was just the right height to do this. As I shined my flashlight down there and looked at the sensors and the compressor blades and everything else, I would always say a prayer looking down that engine intake. And then I would go over and climb my ladder. And as I climbed the ladder, I recited Romans 8, 38, 39. It's probably one you can recite. It's for I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither present nor future, not anything, not even height or depth will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Welcome back to Code Red. I'm your host, Zach Terry, and today we are honored to have in the studio Ken Watts. Ken Watts was a military professional and he is a Christian. He's a believer in Jesus Christ and he is now an author. He's written the book Neurofact, which talks about where spirituality, technology and the military intersect. It's a book you're going to want to read and a story that you will want to hear today. Welcome to Code Red.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Ken watts, Good morning, Zach.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Welcome to the Code Red Studio.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: Happy to be here in the world famous Code Red Studio. And I'm sitting in the seat where I've seen some pretty impressive people sitting. So I'm honored.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Well, we've been honored to have them and honored to have you. In fact, probably of the interviews that I've watched that I've learned from.
One of the most common that I watch are people who write novels.
But I've never had a guest who's written a novel.
So you're my first.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Well, and this is my first novel. So it's a couple of firsts here today.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: I'm curious. You started it later in life and I'm sure some of that is because it requires a lot of time for you to tackle something like this. But your whole life in another sense was preparing for this novel. It seems like.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: The novel is kind of multi threaded. I'm a Marine.
I went into the marine Corps in 1971, a victim of the draft. Vietnam War was going on and I went in the Marine Corps so I could fly and get in and out in a hurry. And I wound up staying 10 years of active and 20 reserve. So I'm a Marine and I actually had the carrier Experience. I spent a year flying off the USS Midway. So I lived the Top Gun life. Oh, wow.
And the flight of the Intruder, that was my airplane, if you ever saw that movie then. I'm an engineer.
I got a bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering. And when I left the Marine Corps in 1981, I went into the aerospace defense industry. So I spent until 2013 as an engineer. So I can talk from the tactical perspective, having flown off of carriers as a Marine. I can talk from the technical perspective, having been an engineer for these many years. And I was actually an engineer in the Marine Corps. I was an airborne electronic warfare officer. I never dropped any bombs. I just jammed bad guy radars and found out where all the Russian ships were around the carrier and that type of thing. So an interesting career.
And so.
And there's been kind of an interesting convergence of. Of technologies and tactics. Of course, everybody knows the Top Gun movies and they're making Top Gun 3 as we speak. And we'll probably feature the F35, which is what my novel features. So we have that. The interest and hype, if you will, in carrier aviation and then AI.
I think when I started writing my novel, there were like, I think 200 ChatGPT users back in 2024. I googled it up this week. There's over 800 million. You being one, I'm sure ChatGPT users. And then the other technology that's kind of come along pretty significantly is neuroengineering. And I feature that in my novel, which I'll get into shortly. But you know just what Elon Musk is doing with neuralink, being able to put a thousand probes on the brain. And then as a quadriplegic or the patient thinks about different things, looking at the brain activity and being able to interpret that so that a quadriplegic can now maneuver a computer pointing device just by thought. So we're just at the cusp of that technology. And what it holds a key to is quadriplegics may be able to walk. Who knows?
Miracle of technology. That's true.
I'm off on my technical tangent already here and we've barely started.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Well, we've got a lot to talk about and I listened this week when we returned from Scotland, I was recommended a book in the Name of the Rose. The Name of the Rose. Umberto Eco, and he was an Italian writer and it was a great novel. Years ago, Sean Connery had a movie that he starred as the lead character. But I've watched interviews with Echo all week. That's what I do for fun is watch interviews. It was from Larry King on.
So I've been watching these interviews all week. And the way that the brain works for a person who is a novel writer is very different than the way the engineer thinks typically.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: So have you always been a fan of novels?
[00:05:26] Speaker A: I had to do a lot of reading of military history in the Marine Corps. So I read all of Ambrose's stuff, which were factual, documentary type books, memoirs of largely World War II.
And then I read some of the techno threads, thrillers, you know, some of the Clancy stuff and some of those things.
And I haven't been a real active reader. I don't read romance. And as an engineer and a Marine, I'm not a very emotional person. I'm not a very romantic person. My wife of 53 years will tell you that.
But it was.
And engineers tend to write, you know, I've written tactical military documents and I've written technical documents and I like to, I don't like to say it, but I, I have mastered the hundred word sentence, grammatically correct, a lot of content, but just exhaustive to read. So I had to slay that habit. And then when I had Neurofact edited, my technical editor culled out over 10,000 words.
And it's still.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: That hurts a little bit, I'm sure.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Well, yeah. And the biggest comment I get back from this is, hey, it's a little technical.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, probably one of my favorite.
He wrote novels but. But I like his take on Civil War history with Shelby Foote. And you know, a Southern guy, not also not an emotional man. If you just watch his interviews. I think I've seen every interview ever done with Shelby Foote. He's just fascinating to me.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: But probably read Killer Angels too. Yeah, yeah, fascinating.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: He's got some, he's got some great, great work in watching those.
You have to know he could lean on history.
So he would say that he was not really a historian, but he's telling the story, using the facts, a little bit of creative license. On like the three volume Civil War series with you, you're looking into the future and so you can lean on a trajectory of technology, but you're also having to invent a world.
And that to me seems to like that. That would be a challenge to the engineer brain. How did you overcome that? Or was that something that was more or less awakened through your work?
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Well, I'd had this concept and just a little bit of background.
I've had multiple Events in my life where actually when I was doing my thesis research, I had a block wall and I needed to solve a problem. But you probably faced problem. Maybe a problem, an issue or an obstacle or something that's holding up your progress. And maybe it's not, you know, really critical, but it's just an obstacle, and you pray about it.
And I've had this happen to me, you know, and no solution seems to come. And you just kind of keep slogging on and slogging on. And then sometime when you're doing something altogether different, your mind is not on that problem. Maybe you're out driving. Maybe you're out jogging on the beach. I don't know, maybe you're shopping at Lowe's or something. And then, bing, a solution out of nowhere will pop into your mind. And you say, number one, where did that come from?
And you say, number two, it's so brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?
[00:08:41] Speaker B: But you don't want to take credit for it.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
Sometimes you have to stop and say, wow.
And I maintain that there is some maybe physiological phenomena where the Holy Spirit can plant that thought in your mind when you least expect it. And that's what I attribute it to. And I think there's some scriptural evidence of that, too. I mean, there were some impulsive things happening. I mean, Peter, go downstairs. There's three guys down there. Go with them.
Examples of things like that happening.
So I.
It even happened to me one time when I was flying. We lost an engine off the catapult one night off the Midway. And we had to do some things that weren't in the checklist. And so, you know, it was one of those. And we made it to the beach with that compressor stalling airplane. Right.
So anyway, I think. And so I'd had enough experiences. I said, you know, I'd like to write a novel about that. And then AI technology comes along, and fighter pilots and attack pilots. There's a little controversy there between those two. Skills sometimes do things impulsively. I mean, they have so much.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Tell me the difference in those things.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: They just react.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: I mean, what is a fighter pilot and an attack pilot? What's the difference?
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Well, one of them's. If you see the movie Flight of the Intruder, I think there's a famous scene there where the attack pilot says, fighter pilots make movies. Attack pilots make history.
And we just saw that happen with the midnight hammer. The B2 pilots actually were the top gun guys on that one.
There's that long history of competition and there's competition in every aspect of aviation, but certainly between the attack pilots and the.
And the fighter pilots. And of course, you have the F35, which is a strike fighter.
I can see more targets than could ever engage. But it's also a very capable fighter aircraft.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Do those aircraft use a lot of AI?
[00:10:33] Speaker A: It's coming.
What is happening now. And I referenced in my book, and it's even made more strides since I published what they call collaborative combat aircraft. And these are aircraft, the Valkyrie and Lockheed just, I can't remember the name of it, AI Shield. They're having these aircraft that will fly in formation with a manned aircraft and be a collaborative aircraft. It will do things for them. Maybe it will go out where there's a bigger threat and they can do strike missions. So that's the first step toward having a completely autonomous AI piloted aircraft. The F35 is such an amazing aircraft.
I could get into a lot of detail about it, sensor systems, but it can see far more than the pilot can see or comprehend. And his biggest problem is being saturated with too much information.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: But I'm just curious and if some of this. I know you had to get some clearance from the Department of Defense in the content of your book.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: So if anything I'm asking is beyond that scope, then I understand.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: I'll make this disclaimer up front. If you turn my book over, you'll see on the back it says department of Defense Neuro Effect has been reviewed and approved by public Release by the DoD and it's the Department of Pre Publication and Security Review. So unlike John Bolton, I had my book reviewed and I still do some consulting and I have a security clearance, so I had to be cautious. So everything I talk about in the F35 in here, and I've got it well documented, it's from open source.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: You can go out and Google up Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and BAE and other companies and find out all the stuff about this airplane that is in here. So I was very careful not to cross that line. And more recently, in the Rising Line, the Israeli operation, I think you've got some reading on this.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: This is the one in Iran.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Where Iran did all the rocket attacks. And of course, our ships shot down a number of those, our Aegis ships, which is another amazing platform.
But when Israel went down there and counterattacked after that, they called it Rising Line, I believe Operation Rising island, the F35, they didn't lose a single airplane. And they went in and they actually Targeted. Their intel was good. They took out senior Iran levius, senior Iran nuclear scientists. And they actually had some agents in there with UAVs. But the F35 was able to virtually annihilate the Iranian air defense system. They have, you know, they have the Russian S300 which is comparable to our Patriot system. And they didn't, they didn't shoot down a single airplane. And largely because the F35 is stealthy, it has radio absorptive coating so it's going to be difficult to see.
And it sees everything. And it carries an internal bomb bay. It carries some precision guided small diameter to bomb GBU 53s which are precision bombs. So I could get off on the tactical.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: I'm enjoying that. So with the hypersonic technology that's out now, how do they respond to the hyper. Are those aimed at jets?
[00:13:40] Speaker A: The Hypersonic is a Mach 5 Plus and it's something that's skirting along the upper reaches of the atmosphere where it can still maneuver, it can still get some maneuverability. And why it differs from a ballistic missile which is very predictable and able to be intercepted. Hypersonics can maneuver so you can't predict where it's going to be. And also if you come down at machine and hit the, you'll go right through the carrier flight deck and out the bottom without a warhead. Just the kinetic energy. So hypersonics are primarily the bad guys plan for those to sink our carriers.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: So they're difficult to predict where they're going to be because we use these EKVs, EXO atmospheric kill vehicle which is. It just hits it. There's so much energy when you things hit things going 10,000 miles an hour plus it just melts everything.
So hypersonics is a threat that we have.
We have that capability as do the Chinese and Russians. And it's just difficult to defend against.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Right. When you began this work and you sent me a copy of the book to give the audience a little bit of the overlap of where our worlds connect. I think on an earlier conversation we were talking about we'd been in the same church together. And so I pastored up in north Alabama in the Huntsville region.
And somewhere around 70% of the men in that church, probably USA, either NASA or Redstone or a civilian contractor for one of those three entities.
And it was challenging in itself for a country boy like me to go up there and suddenly shepherd a bunch of engineers.
And I think part of the challenge of that was that part of the engineer's job is to Find the mistakes and the problems.
And you can only, good old boy gloss over it so far. Before you're getting emails, you've probably heard.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: Some of the engineers ask an engineer the time he'll tell you how to build a watch. And if you're trying to build a widget, a product to get out and get it into the marketplace, there comes a point where you have to shoot the engineer and get the product that's true to the market space engineers tend to want to spend a lot of time to get that last infinitesimal small hey, I can improve performance. 001% if I can work another six months and boom, forget it. We've got to get the product out there.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: And so shepherding that flock, it was so good for me. God did so much to grow me and mature me and teach me different ways of looking at the world and even different ways of reading and read Scripture. And so it was. It was extremely, extremely helpful. But, but just to show you how the worlds connect, all of the people that you and I knew there when I came here, predominantly entrepreneurial, so people who've ran businesses, been in, you know, C suite, employees, whatever it might be, retired here.
And currently I'm in North Florida. For those who are listening or don't, don't know the context, but right before the operation, the precision operation that sent the bomb down the tunnel to take out some of Iran's capabilities, three hours before that happened, I get a phone call.
One of the members of my church had a family member who was connected to that operation very closely.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: And so when that starts happening, and that happens more often than people may realize that when a pastor gets that sort of phone call, it's more than just war games at that point. It's real life.
And people are going to live or die because of what's about to happen. It really affects the way that you pray in your capacity both in the military and developing weapons and weapon systems.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: How did you.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Did you have a professional separation of that emotion? How did you deal with that?
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Well, you know, you're a Christian, but you're working on weapons that can kill thousands of people. So that immediately.
And I just finished reading bill O'Reilly's you know, the Day the World Went Nuclear, and just listening to the interviews that he had. Even Eisenhower said, I wouldn't have done it. Japan was near.
So. And you got to know that a lot of people that worked on the Manhattan Project knew that their weapons were going to kill 100,000 people.
And so it's A conflict, you have to somewhat divorce yourself from it.
Now, I flew 10 days in Vietnam for the evacuation, and that was the only time I saw hostile radars.
But every day off the carrier, my job was to go out and find all the Russian ships within 300 miles of the USS Midway. And I had the receiving systems. I could detect their radars over 100 miles away and get enough direction finding on it to know where they were. Then we'd get low and fly up.
But it was amazing when we would fly. Here's the Russian ship. And we would fly. I was in the right seat. We'd fly by the stern, up the side and up in front, and I'm taking pictures the whole way.
I looked out there, and there was a Russian sailor out there taking pictures of me. And he waved to me.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: And I said, he's just a sailor doing his job. I'm up here doing my job, but tomorrow we might be killing each other.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: And, you know, I've got many, many pictures of Russians on ships, and I'm sure they've got many, many pictures of me up there snapping pictures of them. But it was, you know, we were from an aircraft carrier back then. They didn't have an aircraft carrier. So always put our hook down as we flew by. That was kind of doing this to them.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: That's always interesting to see the way that in the middle of war, especially when life pauses for just a moment for two guys to wave at each other. And I'm thinking during the Civil War, there were moments when on Christmas Day, they would just put their weapons down for a minute, walk to the line, and they would exchange greetings and gifts. They would trade tobacco, they would trade newspapers. And then the next day, they're back at trying to kill each other.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Did you ever tour the Shiloh battlefield?
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I've never done that. I've always wanted to.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: That was a vicious, vicious battle. It went on for really two days, but there was a pond of water there.
And when you take the tour, they will say that there were soldiers from both armies crawling up to that pond just to get a drink. Wounded soldiers and just, you know, one of the subtleties of combat.
And I actually opened my book with a prologue that goes back in history. My fighter pilot is the great grandson of a World War II Tuskegee Airman and PTSD. Not much was known about it in World War II when, you know, hundreds of thousands of people came home from watching their friends be killed and killing. And actually, I have a scene in here, where the last M109 Messerschmitt that he shot down, the pilot bailed out and he flew by, and he was bleeding. And he said, I looked at him and he was wearing boots and flight jacket just the same as I was wearing. And I realized I just probably killed him. And he was just a pilot doing his job, just like me. And I opened the book with that story.
And then my pilot goes on to actually have a situation where he witnesses a victim in a parachute.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: I think it was brilliant that you opened it with that particular angle connecting him to Tuskegee. For those who don't know, being from Alabama, we knew that story, and we're connected to that story from elementary school. But explain to us why that's significant.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Well, Tuskegee University, which is in Alabama, is where the Tuskegee Airmen trained. And that was kind of a moment in history. Even back in the Civil War, we had a regiment. You know, the movie Glory, I think it was, where they assaulted. Charleston was a black company.
But it was. I.
My fighter pilot in here is an African American F35 pilot whose great and his great grandfather had an influence on him. But I just wanted to open it with going back to that, because I emphasize the ptsd. He came home with ptsd, never flew again, never talked about it. And his great grandson, my fighter pilot, is flying his simulator at age 10, knows his great grandfather was a World War II pilot, and finally convinces his great grandfather to sit down and fly the simulator. And 60 years later, he flies it just like it. So he said, you do that. He said it's something that he was very fluid. And matter of fact, I have a senior. He says, in air combat, you gently.
You just move. You can't be moving the Pipper around. You've got to sweep it across the target, because in a gunfight.
But anyway, again, off on a little bit of a tangent there, but ptsd, and my pilot gets into a situation where he could very well become a PTSD victim because he has to kill hostile pilots.
So I want to introduce it with that and then have that come back in later when his great grandson, 20 years later killed, finds himself in a very similar situation and being able to deal with that. And again, I don't experience that. Like I say, I only flew 10 days in Vietnam prior to and during the evacuation. But, you know, I have many friends who. And, you know, some of them at Capshaw, that was Special Force, Delta Force. And the stories, it's real. Yeah.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Let me pause for just a Minute double check on logic.
I want to make sure that I'm. I hit the right button.
Speaking of those moments.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah, we're good, we're good.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Just want to make sure this is. This is recording.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Hit the ATM button. The red.
If we've got this far and I forgot to hit record.
I'm getting old, Ken.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: I hope not rambling too much here.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: No, no, no, you're doing great.
So you connected it. You open up with the PTSD situation.
And we've been talking about. So that the people know kind of the essence of the book Neurofact.
You're looking at AI. You're looking at things like neuralink that Elon Musk is working on.
And anytime new technology is invented or discovered, there's immediately somewhere in. In the Capitol or somewhere in the Pentagon, there's the curiosity of what are the military implications for that technology. Yes, and that's always been. Been the case probably since, you know, iron was discovered and, and it was used for swords. You know, I mean, it's always been around that. That instinct. And so, you know, the heart, I think probably behind things like neuralink are to help with quadriplegics and instances like we were talking about earlier.
When do you think and who began to look at that in the sense or. Or are they exploiting that for military purposes yet?
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Well, there. There are actually AI autopilots right now that have gone against humans in simulators. And actually the first example when my pilot is flying against an AI simulator, and they do very well, you know, in air combat, particularly if you take the radar out of it and you got to fly the dog fight, where you're just looking at firing to air. To air combat. You're not firing the missile from 10 miles away.
There is.
The field of aeronautics is pretty well understood computationally, and you can model the aircraft.
And also with AI, you can look at the situation, you can look at your adversary and you can look at what he is doing, and you can come up with the optimal maneuvering to put you in a position to secure victory.
So to date, the AI autopilot is doing very well against humans. But every now and then, the human will do something what I call impulsively or instinctively that will confuse the AI. How did he do that? Getting near the performance envelope of the aircraft. And of course, the heuristics and whatnot of a fighter pilot might go outside that envelope a little bit and do something totally, that was totally unpredictable that the AI couldn't comprehend. And that's actually what kind of happens in my book, my pilot has these and the tagline is when a sudden impulse intercedes and we can get.
He's a Christian.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Yeah, unpack that.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Well, the name of the book, Neurafact. Let me. I had to come up with a name and what happens if I get too far off on a tangent? But the theme of the book is my hero is an engineer, very rare, but he's one who had flown in his younger years. And he's under contract with the Navy to determine why fighter pilots are able to do these things instinctively or impulsively sometimes that allow them to do things that.
That appear tactically unsound but yield victory. So what he is doing is he has a helmet that's instrumented with over 1000 EEG type sensors and he's able to monitor the brain waves. And there's enough neurological data out there that we know where sensing takes place in the brain. And you get into the beta and the gamma waves that are faster. When cognition and decision making and logic deduction is going on, those brain waves are characterized. So what he is trying to do is, is he's instrumented the pilot's brain.
He can track brain waves. He's instrumented the whole aircraft. He can look at his eyes and see where he's pointing, what he's focused on. He's getting all the data out of the aircraft, instrumented gloves and everything that he's doing. And what he's trying to do determine is when this pilot does something impulsively that yields mission success.
What was the trigger? What did he sense?
And the word neurophysic fact is a compounding of neurological artifact. So what happens with my pilot is first in a simulator, then later in an actual combat mission.
He's wearing this helmet and he also, he says a prayer and recites a scripture because all the audio is being recorded at engine start. And it's the same scripture that I used to recite when I would do my walk around pre flight inspection on my EA6A, I would start at my boarding ladder in the right cockpit and I would go clockwise around the airplane. I'd always wind at the starboard engine intake and that was just the right height to do this. As I shined my flashlight down there and looked at the sensors and the compressor blades and everything else, I would always say a prayer looking down that engine intake. And then I would go over and climb my ladder. And as I climbed the ladder, I recited Romans 8, 38, 39. It's probably one you can recite it's for I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither present nor future, not anything, not even height or depth will be able to separate love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I like that scripture because it has height and depth in it, not height nor depth. When you bang off the front of that carrier, for an instant there, you're watching the angle of attack and the airspeed. Am I flying or am I falling? Because I'm looking at the deepest depth and the highest height. And unfortunately, you know, it all comes up. And for me anyway, everyone was flying. But that's the scripture that he recited. I recited. And then, of course, since I'm an engineer and I did this, my pilot uses that same scripture, and it's just pertinent for an aircraft carrier mission. But so he's flying in the simulator and all his brainwaves are being recorded. He does three different things impulsively in a simulator mission that allow him to achieve success.
When my engineer goes in and looks at that data before he did these three things, and I won't steal the plot here, I want people to go read it. These three things he does. There was this unique brainwave phenomenon, and he's got an AI tool that he's created. He calls it Perry, named after Perry Mason, who was investigative defense attorney, that it goes out and looks at all the neurological databases. It looks at all these brain waves, and it's seen all the sensing and a lot of cognition activity and a lot of motor activities. It's trying to determine what cued that action. And it can't find anything that cued these maneuvers. But there is this brainwave anomaly in a remote part of the brain that he says is a neurological artifact that preceded that.
It was no sensing, just cognition and doing it. And so that's kind of the premise, the theme of the book is neurological artifact keys these things in my fighter pilot's brain. And. And because he recited that. Romans 8:38, 39. If you back up just a few verses back to Romans 8:26, the Holy Spirit knows our weaknesses. We don't know what we ought to pray for, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. So what happens is my engineer's AI program is looking at all this neurological data and it sees this unique brainwave that doesn't correlate with anything in the neurological intelligence out there in the big data data centers.
So it goes back and says, well, let's look at this scripture. And he recites the scripture, and it backs up and it finds that scripture. Well, that launches my AI program off on a scriptural theological data pursuit to explain this brainwave phenomena. And for the first engagement there, since it happens three times, it winds up saying that, hey, can't find anything that triggered these maneuvers. This pilot did that enabled him to win this competition, but with an 11% probability. And I won't get into statistics versus absolutes and AI, but it says that that brainwave anomaly could have been a spiritual interaction. And that leaves the tagline on my book is when a sudden impulse intercedes.
So that launches my engineer off on could this possibly have been a prayer leading to Holy Spirit interaction?
And that. That's the whole premise of the book.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Is the engineer a believer at that point?
[00:32:25] Speaker A: The engineer is a lifelong Christian and a model after me. You know, I became a Christian at age 8, right?
[00:32:32] Speaker B: So there's a. I'm asking, is there a hope from the engineer's perspective that that's what he would be able to find proof for?
[00:32:40] Speaker A: He's. He's.
As a. As a professor. He's a college professor at Florida Tech, where I did my undergraduate work down in Melbourne, Florida. And he says, I can't publish this. He says, if I publish this, even it's 11%. It's significant, I think, but I'd be laughed off the technology stage by all the scientists who are not believers who would say, you're just making this stuff up.
So anyway, he's a little torn. He says, and the other thing that he's able to do, he's able to go into his AI program and follow the threads of where did it get this dated and why did it make this decision? And there's a number of scriptures in there, and I'll go back and pick out one that it stumbles across in Luke 8. I think it is the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years, and she's trying to get close enough to Jesus, and because of the crowd, she can only reach up and touch the hem of his garment.
And what does Jesus say? Who touched me and what does I think, Luke record there? He says he sensed power leaving his body. So there's an engineering statement.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: It very much is. And these are the kind of things that I enjoy thinking through and talking through in that community especially.
And this is something. I pose it as a question to you and can give you my thoughts on it.
The laws of nature, the. The law of God, the word of God, the immutable characteristics of it.
Is God himself subject to those laws?
[00:34:19] Speaker A: God created those laws.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: I mean, philosophically, it's a big question.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: I maintain that in heaven that all the engineers will be headed close to the throne awaiting the highly anticipated lecture series by God on how I did it.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Well, and I think this never comes up currently in my congregation. This is not what they're thinking about, but it came up frequently up in Huntsville.
And the way I would present it would be something like this.
When a miracle occurred in scripture or when God created the heavens and the earth, did he.
If we could stand back and see it from his perspective, did it happen logically? Is there an explanation behind it? So for example, the woman with the issue of blood from a human perspective, from our vantage point, her hemorrhaging just stopped.
But if you could see it from God's perspective, did something technical occur, meaning that the Holy Spirit moved in such a way that makes perfect logical sense to God.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: You know, God could have effected that miracle through Jesus Christ any number of ways. But the breadcrumbs that I find in scripture there is that Luke records that Jesus sensed power leaving his body.
So did God leave a physical breadcrumb trail to that miracle? That would intrigue engineers like me to say, is there in fact something physiological with spiritual events and activities that God left us a trace there for us to pull that thread and explore? That's what I attempt to do in this book.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: I think you did. And there's so many things that are happening right now that wherever they. They end up, it's certainly spurring on spiritual conversation. So some of the things I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, some of the unidentified aerial phenomenon that even people in the Pentagon are suggesting, not necessarily could be otherworldly, could be enemy, but it could be spiritual.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Right now we've got this object that's coming around the sun coming this way. And is it an alien aircraft?
That's in the news almost every night now.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Right, right. And the tail is pointed the wrong way.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: There's a lot of uniquenesses about it, and it's getting closer. So as a matter of fact, there's been some talk about sending a probe up there to get closer to it before it gets here. But it's going to happen pretty fast. You know, we could talk for hours and hours and hours on that. I mean, there's again, back to creation.
I mean, we've. I don't want to go off on this tangent if we'd be fear more and more days, but you know, we got you know, new Earth, old Earth scientists beat each other up. You know, I don't get into that debate. Like I say, I'll wait. I know God did it and however it happened, he did it. And here we sit and we have the record in scripture of that.
But anyway, yeah, the old Earth, new.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Earth, well, you take, you know, we've got sort of assumed theory of angels, demons, what those are like, what they look like. And could it be possible, I guess is what I'm asking of these things that we're seeing, could it be possible that there are a few more levels to that than we have previously believed? So that what historically we would look at as alien technology.
Could it be transports of angels? Could it be transports of demons?
[00:38:21] Speaker A: You know, you could let your mind wander and come up with any theory and angels actually, my book actually ends, it gets through with this characterizing of the brain waves and everything else, but it ends with.
And again, I don't want to give away too much of the pilot. My pilot actually gets into a head on engagement where he actually shoots down a hostile aircraft with a gun. And he's only 200 meters away when he pulls away. But his brainwave sensors detect another, an external something outside of the helmet. And it's actually a death event. Wow. So I.
And.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: You'Re really delving into a lot of things that need to be delved into.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: Well, I'm trying to, but I'm trying to stimulate thought, make people think about the Holy Spirit.
And of course John gives us a lot of talk about the Holy Spirit's going to be a comforter.
But there's another one other scriptural highlight here before I forget it.
When my pilot gets involved in this air combat, the bad guys, he's just doing his mission on orbit and they come out and he rules of engagement, he couldn't initiate. So they get the first missile off and it's an air to air infrared missile that's coming at him and he does a maneuver that again impulsively he does this maneuver and the timing of it is like there's a 2/10 of a second window that he can do this maneuver to avoid. And he does it.
However, my AI program in trying to seek to explain this goes to Ephesians 6 where it says the shield of faith with which to extinguish the flaming arrows. And because my pilot had faith, this AI program says that perhaps Paul's writing there in ephesians is a 2000 year prophecy of an air to air missile being a flaming arrow coming at him, his shield of faith extinguishes that.
So, anyway, I'm back off on a little bit of a tangent there, but again, more scripture to support events happening today.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: And do you think what is the. Let's assume AI continues to evolve and to progress.
What is the essential difference between AI and. I'm not even talking about spiritual humanity or saved humanity. You have an unbeliever, you have AI what is the essence of the difference there?
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Well, funny you should ask. I'll take you to another line in my book over after this. Air to air combat, where he winds up being a victor. There's a press conference and the AI champions say they're having this press conference. And one of the reporters asked him, he said, hey, we ran your scenario through our AI autopilot.
And he said, cut and run.
This is not a significant event. Cut and run and don't respond to this engagement.
And you brought us to the brink of war by not running. And AI said we should run. AI probably made the wiser decision. And his response to reporter is, AI has no honor and no soul. But I do. So AI has no honor and AI has no soul, no consequences.
And it's pure logic. No spiritual, no Holy Spirit intervention, and AI has no soul. I guess that's my response to you.
[00:42:00] Speaker B: I don't disagree with you. I'm just thinking through it and really thinking through it in terms of eschatology and end times.
And, you know, I think each generation sees prophecy through its own lenses.
And so there was a. In the Middle Ages, they saw it in one. One way.
And then, you know, in our generation, we're looking, when it speaks of images coming alive, you know, and that sort of thing, wondering, could, could a demon use AI.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: I think it could, because AI and I've tinkered with AI asking it spiritual questions and it, it's very diplomatic in its response. You may have done the same thing.
It will concur and agree with you. And I've got some excerpts I could read to you here now. But it will concur and agree with you when you ask it spiritual questions. But it won't commit to.
It'll cite. There's anecdotal evidence that when I ask it, one of the questions I asked it is, is there empirical evidence of the Holy Spirit intervening with immediate guidance to Christians?
And it comes back with kind of a wishy washy answer. But it says anecdotal evidence. Yeah, people say those things have happened, but there's no quantity. My question was, is there quantitative and it came back and said no, there's no quantitative. So AI GPT is pre trained, predisposed to some things.
Pre trained transformer basically. And in the preformed, the software engineer is telling it how to go about it search and everything else. So there's bias in AI and there are a lot of AI authors and some of them, I mean when some of them first came out, they were so far off with some of the racial responses and everything they were given, everybody knew there was bias in there and they had to pull it back and redo it. So AI is built by, I mean the software and the algorithms and neural network and also that's constantly expanding its neural network as it discovers things, it remembers that path and adds nodes and adds decision processes as it builds out its logic process it goes through.
But there's, I mean there's been war games and other movies, you know, where AI has taken over and gone rogue and it possibly could. I mean that's a big risk. A lot of people are saying if we turn the world over to AI, is it going to conquer us? And I mean there's already been evidence of somebody tried to shut down an AI program removing its power and it found alternate ways to stop itself operating.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. And I think you as a novel writer reflect the image of God to some degree. As you're creating a world, you're taking a world. You're not creating ex nihilo, but you're creating with the world you've been given, you're reordering it.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: And in AI, the creation of AI in some ways is doing that.
The guys who originally conceptualize and programmed the AI models, they're, they're reflecting the image of God in that God made man in his image and man is making AI in our image in some, some degree.
So as it continues to evolve and move forward, I wonder at what point, and I'm sure God has used AI for his purposes, the enemy's used AI for his purposes. But I wonder how close it can get to humanity or exceeding humanity. But be just short of having a soul. How would you define.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: That's a difficult and complex question. We have a conscience and basically we're born with firmware of right and wrong, I'd say. I mean there's mental illness where some people don't have that. I won't get off on the mental illness aspect of it. But basically I think we're born with a certain, with an operating system and firmware.
Everything else that we get is learned And I think that baseline that we have, that conscience that we have of basically good and evil, right and wrong, that's kind of hardwired into us AI doesn't necessarily have. Now, operators could try to maybe put in some ethical foundations for things that would never suggest, you know, go out and murder 100,000 people, don't do this.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: But you know, that actually has been a big point of contention because GPT in particular is subject to the laws in which it's being used.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: So in Canada it has biases. It does. And in Canada there are physician assisted suicide is legal, euthanasia is legal. And so the advice that we'll give you in Toronto, if you ask it, those questions about end of life decisions is different than the advice it would give you in Florida.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: I would think so. Again, the software people that develop these things probably put some boundary conditions into it and the things that it wouldn't exceed and getting into ethical areas and things such as assisted suicide. And I haven't been down that path with it, but there are probably those that don't put those boundary conditions, those bumpers in there. And it might say, hey, go ahead.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: That's the advice it gave in Canada was it showed you safer ways, less painful ways, that sort of thing you've seen behind the scenes for your entire career and you've watched this develop at a base level.
Do you fear AI? Are you excited about AI as a human?
[00:47:59] Speaker A: How do you feel as a human and an engineer? I look at technology for good and of course here I was developing, involved in developing weapons systems and missiles and Seekers and whatnot. But I see it and again I see the potential of it positively just because, you know, we can't. It can go out in microseconds, access terabytes of data and look at all that stuff that we couldn't look at in a lifetime.
And based on its rule sets of whatever neural network it has formed and the decision processes and thresholds and things like that, it all comes down to ones and zeros.
It can make a decision. And just the fact that it. Look at, I mean we're finding out on the medical field with the imaging things it sees in imaging, the doctors don't see it's become a great tool for diagnostic, medication, medical practice, and it's helping doctors quite a bit in that aspect. I think it's very powerful.
But when you get into ways to destroy things, our power grid is so vulnerable. I'm sure the Chinese have AI programs that have ingested all the data on our Power grid, and they know exactly where to take out small nodes and just totally neutralize it.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: Well, I was thinking, I don't know what got probably one of these books I've been reading, but I was thinking, if I were engaged in warfare, if I were in those seats in government, whatever it might be, and I had to put a priority on a weapon system, it would probably. Is it EMTs that take out the electrical? That would probably be where I would put the bulk of my resources, simply because we're so reliant upon them.
[00:49:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And what's going on now with weaponization in space is quite frightening.
And when you start putting weapons in space and fighting, you know, wars 100 miles up, with all the EMP and everything else, I mean, so much. So much damage and killings could be done autonomously.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: They could, you know, we. So let me. Full disclosure. I drive a Tesla. I use ChatGPT multiple times a day, every day.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: You're one of those 800 million people? Yeah, I'm one of those people using it every day.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: And what I do every sermon that I write, I don't touch it until I'm done with the sermon. When the sermon's done, I'll give it to the AI, and I use three. I use Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT.
And I'll ask it, how can this be improved?
And it's always in. It gives me hermeneutical improvements, things, ways I could communicate better. Yeah, I've kind of trained it, and this is my style. This is what I'm going for. And so my openings are familiar, my closings are familiar. And so it'll recognize. Okay, you're redundant here. So maybe point one, you really made this point clear enough. You don't really have to come back and visit it in point three. So it'll clean it up in those kind of ways. It'll clean up.
If I say I'm looking for a better opener, it can look through my entire sermon database to see if there's something I've used before. It can access whatever's on the web. And each.
It seems to me, each week it gets a little bit better and it finds out what I'm looking for. So I use it in those regards. I use it for daily planning. I use it for sometimes, like in letter writing, if I say this could be taken too harshly, how can I tone it down? I'll use it for that kind of thing. Use it in parenting.
I trust my Tesla's driving better than mine, and so I really rely heavily upon AI Simultaneously, I look at eschatology. I'm reading revelation or whatever it might be, and it's using. It's describing warfare in something that looks more like the Civil War.
So the blood went up to a horse's bridle, those kind of comments.
So you ask theologically, is that John, how God spoke to John and what John saw and this is the way that he would describe it, or could it be that's actually how it is when the Christ returns, that this gets to a point that we can no longer have some of the tech that we're relying upon today and it's wiped off the earth or it's controlled by a consortium or an antichrist, and. And it comes down to the fact that we're set back in time considerably. I find that a, you know, just a fascinating thought. Thought experiment. And I don't have an answer. I'm just. I'm just, you know, those are. That's where my mind goes when I look at it.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Well, like I say, using AI to go into revelations and whatnot and all the other prophecies back in the Old Testament, that. That. And have it come up with some theories and some correlations, it would be intriguing, certainly, and turn you into an armchair eschatologist.
But like I say, I don't.
I know God will handle it, but AI, you know, if you want to challenge, like I say, I've gone in in AI and I've asked it scriptural questions, and it always stops short, you know, of saying, absolutely, this is true. If you want a challenge, I think try sharing the gospel with ChatGPT.
And as it comes back with each answer, you count it and see how close. It'll never accept Jesus Christ as its savior, but you might come close. And it may.
I think that someday, maybe, if you have a Sunday to waste, make that a sermon topic.
[00:53:53] Speaker B: Well, I thought this would be an interesting experiment. So when I was preparing for this interview, I go through, and most of this we've not even referred to the questions, just what's next?
Following my own curiosity. But at some point, I asked ChatGPT to take everything it knows about you and about this book.
[00:54:20] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: And to.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: If it were doing that may have helped me to finish.
There's a few typos in there. Hopefully it'll find those.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: It was. It was interesting to ask and to say, I said, if you were interviewing Ken Watts about this book that involves what you are, what kind of things would you ask? And so I've got a few here that it was just me against ChatGPT.
[00:54:47] Speaker A: I don't know how this is going.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: It's not that it was interesting where it went.
It leaned into the spiritual, which was interesting to me.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: So did I.
[00:54:56] Speaker B: In your story, who first senses that data might have a spiritual component? The scientist or the pastor?
[00:55:03] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, let me go back and say something else.
My engineer has a Monday morning meeting with his pastor and another member of the church who's a psychiatrist, and they get together every Monday. And the purpose of this meeting initially was to critique the pastor on his sermon. Maybe you do that with some of your members, I don't know.
But they wound up comically, comically referring to themselves as a mini trinity.
The engineer was God, the pastor was Jesus, and the psychiatrist was the Holy Spirit.
And my engineer runs every time when he's making these discoveries. He's running it off this mini trinity on Monday mornings. And the pastor is the one that comes back with a lot more of the references and examples, particularly the neurifact. You know, there is this evidence and that evidence, and so that's kind of a human intelligence sounding board. But you say, who discovered it first?
In my book, the AI program says at the first simulator competition, it says there was 11% probability that these impulsive decisions that Pilate made and because of this neurological artifact that we detected was a spiritual encounter.
But the pastor that he talks to in his mini trinity gives other corroborations of scriptural and spiritual evidence that says, you know, your AI program may be onto something here. I concur with what it's saying from a human, spiritual, pastoral, theologian perspective.
[00:56:43] Speaker B: It asks, you provide both a neuroengineer and a pastor. Do you see them as two halves in one search for truth, empirical and spiritual, or do you see them as conflicting worldviews?
[00:56:55] Speaker A: Well, because my engineer is a Christian, he doesn't have any.
I mean, he's accepting of the spiritual evidence that he uncovers. As a matter of fact, one, there's prayer in every chapter of this. And my engineer, when this AI program says, hey, this neurological thing that I observed, it doesn't correlate with anything in neurological data that I can find out there. But it did trigger what this pilot did. It may have been a spiritual interaction.
When that first comes out in my book, there's three people in the room.
The engineer, a female postdoc engineer who falls in love with my fighter pilot and another graduate student.
And they stop right then and say, you know, we may be on holy ground here.
We're sitting Here in a lab, but yet we are being told that we may have just witnessed a spiritual encounter. Let's stop and pray. And they stop and pray about it and just ask God, hey, whatever this is, God, just guide us, help us to, if this is a fluke, throw it in the dumpster. But if it's something, if there's something to this, lead us on. And actually, as the book progresses, there's more evidence and you know, one.
But back to the baseline of AI in the debrief of this engagement, where he does these three things and actually wins it.
My pilot, one of the comments he makes, he says, I was fighting against this AI autopilot and I realized that if I could deny him data, he's going to think less like a fighter pilot and more like a software engineer. And AI is driven by its data. Of course. That's why we're having all these gazillion data centers out there.
Everything that you put in your cloud or on your onedrive is going in a data center somewhere. And all your data and then all the knowledge, all this stuff that the AI goes out there and accesses is out there in these data centers.
But so if, if you ever cut off the data, AI is just a bunch of algorithms that hit a dead end if it can't find any data.
God provides us data, I think, through the Holy Spirit.
[00:59:10] Speaker B: The line or the intersection between the technology and the faith is so clear in this novel. And historically, I'm thinking back to Galileo. I'm thinking back to times when the Church, at least the Roman Catholic Church and scientists or philosophers would converge in some way.
And it seems that the Vatican excommunicated in many cases. Many cases. It was seen as heretical, but there was always an interest in it.
The way that Echo in the Name of the Rose, the way that he portrayed it. He is. It's almost like a race between Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and Islam to see who can build the biggest library.
And the library is containing all the truth. We want the Christian library to be the biggest library is the way that it was presenting it. And I'm wondering, when you think back to maybe a Dan Brown novel or whatever, do you think that somewhere in the Vatican that they're studying AI?
[01:00:24] Speaker A: I don't know how much budget they have for R and D, but I know a lot of Christian engineers, I mean, a lot of them at Capshaw, and I've shared this with a lot of them, Jerry.
But I think that they would do well to use it as a tool I don't think they ever use it to supplant scripture and spiritual events and what we know of.
I mean, there's a lot of empirical evidence. I mean, there's historical evidence of Christ as existed, and you can go back and look at just historical writings.
But I think it's a tool and I think that it has to be guarded.
There have to be boundary conditions.
And of course you want it to be able to get as much data as it can.
And there are some liberal biases in.
[01:01:24] Speaker B: There right now at times when you see things like. And the way that we've. I think I talked about this at Capshaw. I know we use the phrase here when something new is presented. So if it's an iPhone or if it's a movie or whatever it might be, we ask the question, is this something we receive, something we can redeem or something that we just have to reject? So if you look at something like baseball, baseball is neither. It's amoral, it's neither good nor bad. So we can just receive that. We don't have to make it Christian. Baseball, if you look at something that's inherently sinful or wrong, pornography, you can't make Christian porn.
So that has to be just outright rejected. So then there's some things that we can redeem.
Maybe it's music. We can take music that. A style of music. You take country or hip hop or whatever the genre may be. And there may be ways that you can take that and redeem it for Christian purposes. So when it comes to AI, which category would you put that in?
[01:02:27] Speaker A: Oh, I think it can be redeemed.
I think there's. There's absolute evil with it. And I mean, I'm sad to see that.
Chad, GPT says they're going to start putting erotica out there. Yeah, it was just recently in the news.
[01:02:44] Speaker B: That's sad.
[01:02:45] Speaker A: I hate to see that because all the people that are vulnerable to that are going to be seduced.
[01:02:49] Speaker B: So we don't just receive it as is, we redeem it. Have you looked into at all, into the companies like glue, that are trying to.
To program and create boundaries for AI from a Christian vantage point?
[01:03:06] Speaker A: I mean, recently there was. Somebody was advertising, hey, we got this AI tool out there. You can talk to Jesus and it goes out.
[01:03:12] Speaker B: That's dangerous.
[01:03:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's going out looking, trying to answer it. I'd say that's. I wouldn't waste my time on that.
I prefer prayer.
[01:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah. I just go back to the book.
[01:03:24] Speaker A: Back to the foundation. It's worked for since, since day one.
[01:03:27] Speaker B: Right. And I think that, I think that's a good, a good warning.
We don't know where this is going to go or, you know, what the. If it has an end in sight, so to speak, in the evolution of AI. And you know, we just got back from England and it, you know, every day, one of the silly things I do for entertainment, I would sit down and watch Parliament.
[01:03:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:51] Speaker B: What they're discussing and they're debating on a high level. I mean, they're getting close to. Do we need to have some sort of an electronic ID so that you can prove when you want to do a transaction, financial transaction, you can prove that it's you.
And so, you know, that would begin probably with a card of some sort, which seems to be fine. But even in their debates they were hinting at, well, if we could implant something at some point, you know, and that, that idea of the market beast getting closer and closer, that would give someone an authority, power to say, I can shut off all of your financial access if you don't behave.
And so I think that's something that as Christians, we can't just ignore these things. I don't think we have to demonize everything in that regard. It can be helpful if we can take it, as you said, redeem it for God's glory, use it for his purposes. But we can only do that if we try to understand it to some degree.
We have to also be aware that the enemy can use it too. Right. He's trying to bend it for his.
[01:05:02] Speaker A: Purposes with this erotica thing that's happening right now.
[01:05:05] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:05:06] Speaker A: Satan's getting his claws into it.
[01:05:08] Speaker B: Right. And so whatever it may be, I would say, especially for parents, our kids are going to adopt these things quicker than we will. And so for the good parent, the Christian parent, read these books, see how it can be used for good. Don't, don't demonize it outright, but simultaneously be aware that, you know, anything that you, anything the devil can use, he will use.
And he will certainly try to use this for his purposes as well.
If people want to read the book, if they want to learn more, how can they find out more about the book?
[01:05:45] Speaker A: So it's on Amazon and it's nurefact with an I N E U R I F A C T. I have a website out there and I came up with that name because it's a non dictionary word. I didn't have any trouble getting the domain name.
[01:05:55] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[01:05:56] Speaker A: So it's out there. And if you Go to the website. There's a number of videos out there. I give a video description of each one of the characters. Most of them are based on people I know.
There's this parallel plot going on with the engineer and his brother. And it's based on my relationship with my brother, who I lost at age 68. MSA multiple system atrophy, a terrible neurological disease. And I wrote him into this book.
But there's a good, good video summaries out there and actually there's a 20 minute session that I don't want. You know, Dr. Murray Wilton in Huntsville, he did.
I have a Bible study every week with him, but I sat down and ran some of my novel premises by him and he gives an excellent scriptural corroboration.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: Excellent.
[01:06:41] Speaker A: He says, you weren't too far off out of your lane in writing this, so I felt better. But that's a video that's out there on my website. It's scriptural corroboration for the themes in the novel. It's fiction.
But I've had multiple people, most recently a fellow squadron mate I flew with back in the 70s, come in and said, I'm not a Christian, not a religious person, but I've had some things happen to me that you describe in your book. It's caused me to revisit that. So I hope it's intriguing enough that the non Christian will read it.
I've sensed these type of things. Maybe the Holy Spirit was actually talking to me, not necessarily a Christian. So if I have, in fact, I already feel like I'm success because I got one person that's come back and.
[01:07:21] Speaker B: Told me, well, I think there will be many more. Yeah. I'll close with a question from ChatGPT.
[01:07:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:07:27] Speaker B: Would you ever consider AI as a CO writer?
[01:07:29] Speaker A: As a co writer. You know, in the aerospace defense business, you know, writing proposals is, you know, the government puts out these RFPs and they go home for Thanksgiving and you guys spend Christmas and Thanksgiving, Christmas working on the proposal. I know companies right now that they put all their proposals into their database and because a lot of it has to be based on past experience, everything else. And they're using AI to write their proposals and it's saved them a lot of the inefficiencies of that process. It's cleaned it up. So I'd say that AI is. What was the question there?
[01:08:04] Speaker B: That would you consider AI as a co writer?
[01:08:10] Speaker A: I think that like your sermons, I would use it after the fact. And that's what a lot of people they use it as an editor to clean it up. And it would have found my typos if I'd have used it.
[01:08:20] Speaker B: Well, you know, I think the fact that it asked that question and it showed some interest from its perspective.
[01:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah. It's marketing too. Yeah.
[01:08:27] Speaker B: So it must have felt like you're doing something right.
[01:08:30] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I think I'm advancing. I think overall I'm advancing the cause of AI. I'm doing it over on the spiritual side of the meter rather than the evil side of the meter.
And again, as an engineer, I think has redeemable attributes as you described there. But to coin an oft used phrase, trust but verify.
[01:08:51] Speaker B: Oh, that's very good. Ronald Reagan.
Do you think there will be a follow up?
[01:08:56] Speaker A: I left a Get off the stage. I left a couple of on ramps to future novels, but it was a.
We'll see. You know, Top Gun 3 is going to come out next year probably.
And you know, as somebody who flew, I thought the. The tactical part of it was pretty cheesy, you know, but mine's more tactically relevant and real than Top Gun has been, so I would hope somebody would make a movie of it.
[01:09:21] Speaker B: Well, we'll pray for that to happen.
[01:09:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:09:24] Speaker B: Thank you again for joining me in the studio.
[01:09:25] Speaker A: It's my pleasure. Thanks, Zach.
