Category: Uncategorized

Thoughts and predictions about the Great American Revival

As I’ve written in previous posts, I think the United States is in the opening phases of a major Christian revival, on par with the first and second great awakenings. We’re currently passing through the later stages of a fourth turning, which will likely culminate in some sort of major armed conflict, though at this point I think we will actually avoid falling into a hot civil war.

But where most first turnings are followed by a period of reconciliation and national unity, I don’t think we’re going to get that this time. Instead, I think we’re going to go straight into a second turning, which is typically a period of spiritual awakening as the old religion either gets renewed or gets thrown out in favor of the new. The last second turning was in the 1960s and 1970s, and it gave us the religion of woke leftism. In this next great awakening, I think that’s all going to get thrown out.

Right now, we are still in the opening phases of a major national Christian revival. We saw this most clearly in the funeral services for Charlie Kirk, where public officials openly invoked the name of Christ—something that would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. But Christianity is returning to the mainstream culture in a big way now, and I think that trend is only going to continue to expand.

In broad terms, here is the trajectory that I think the Great American Revival is going to follow:

  1. It will start with a period of unity and good feelings, as the various Christian factions work together to get everyone converted and defeat the anti-Christian woke left.
  2. After the revival defeats the woke left and sweeps over the culture, it will begin to stall out, and the various Christian factions will begin to turn on each other.
  3. It will end with all of the Christian factions turning on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not just with anti-Mormon rhetoric, but with actual violence.

Currently, there is a cultural trend where men are turning increasingly to Christianity, while women are turning increasinly away from Christianity. I believe that the first phase of the Great American Revival will end when that trend line is broken, and women begin to turn to Christianity in large numbers.

Why will the begin to turn? Because leftist women tend to be miserable, and they also tend not to reproduce. The world has not yet lost the positive influence of its righteous, believing women, and within the next 5-10 years, I think that these women will succeed in bringing the culture back from the brink of nihilistic, anti-human, leftist despair. I am actually quite optimistic about this.

But after the revival has succeeded in overthrowing the old religion of woke leftism, either by destroying or recapturing our major cultural institutions or by building new ones to replace them, the revival will begin to stall. It is at this point that all of the major sectarian divisions between the various Christian factions—many of which go waaay back to the Reformation, the Great Schism, or even the Nicean council itself—will begin to come to the forefront.

Ever since Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, it has been divided against itself. It will not conquer our culture without all of those old fault lines and divisions coming to the surface again.

This is how we get to the third and final phase of the Great American Revival. As the infighting grows feircer, and the war of words becomes heated, a lot of new Christian converts are going to become disaffected with the churches they initially joined, and are going to start investigating other factions. As they begin to do this in large numbers, I think a very large portion of them are going to find and join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Obviously, as a member of the church myself, I’m more than a little biased. But there are many good reasons why I think this is going to happen. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced more or less constant exponential growth since its founding almost 200 years ago, and the period from 2022 to 2025 saw nearly a million new converts join the church worldwide. If current demographic trends continue, a hundred years from now the world population will be under 1 billion people, and something like 200 million of them will be latter-day saints.

There are other reasons, but my goal with this post is to give a broad picture rather than a deep dive. I’ll leave it to others to give their analysis. Bottom line, I think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to do exceptionally well in this Great American Revival, to the point where all of the other Christian factions will ultimately come to see the Church as a major threat.

Most other Christians—Protestant and Catholic—don’t even consider the “Mormons” to be Christian. So when the revival begins to stall out, and the old sectarian divisions begin to return, the other Christian factions are going to need a common enemy to unite them—and that enemy will be the latter-day saints.

The seeds of this have already been planted. Anti-Mormon rhetoric from Evangelical pastors like Mark Driscoll has inspired at least one mentally ill person to shoot up at least one of our churches, and there have been numerous arson attempts against our churches and temples that have failed and quietly not made the news.

And there’s also plenty of historical precedent. In 19th century Missouri, the anti-Mormon violence got so bad that we were driven violently from the state by the state militia, after suffering rapes, beatings, massacres, and the destruction or theft of most of our material belongings. There is a reason why the Mormons made the pioneer trek to Utah, when the territory was little more than an empty high altitude desert.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the wild card that makes this Christian revival different from all the other ones in our nation’s past. It’s a very unique (and uniquely American) Christian denomination that has a tendency to unite all of the other factions against it. And ultimately, I think that’s how the Great American Revival will end.

There Is No “AI Bubble”

In my various and sundry travels over this desolate wilderness we call the internet, I’ve recently heard a lot of people talk about this thing they’re calling the “AI bubble.” The basic theory is that all of this AI development is being artificially propped up, that it isn’t nearly as profitable or as transformative as the AI proponents claim. When the music stops and the curtain gets pulled back, all of these AI companies will collapse, and all of this AI that nobody asked for will get scaled back to something normal. Or something like that.

But here’s the thing… the fact that so many people are talking about the “AI bubble,” to the point that it’s now a talking point, is pretty strong evidence that it’s not actually a bubble. When a true economic bubble happens, nobody calls it a “bubble” because everyone is so euphoric about it. Indeed, it’s that very euphoria that fuels the bubble. Housing prices only go up, donchaknow. AOL and Pets.com is totally the way of the future. So shut up and mortgage your house so you can buy the latest tulip.

With AI, though, it seems that all of the most vocal people are anti-AI and want it all to go away. Indeed, the main driver of all this “AI bubble” talk seems to be fear that AI will drive large numbers of people out of work. So what’s actually happening?

I do think there is a bubble in our economy, but I don’t think it’s being driven by AI. Rather, I think what we have is a debt bubble, which is very close to unwinding in a catastrophic way. The only way to stop that from happening is to grow the economy faster than the debt bubble is inflating, but at this point, the only way to do that is through some hugely transformative new technology, such as generative AI.

So all of the forces that want to keep propping up this debt bubble have turned to AI as the salvation of our economy, pumping billions and billions of dollars into it in the hopes that it will yield the sort of economic growth that will allow them to keep growing the debt. But for ordinary people, it’s a lose-lose scenario, since if AI succeeds, lots of us will be out of work… but if AI fails, the economy collapses and lots of us will also be out of work. Hence why so many ordinary people see AI itself as the problem.

Here’s what I think is ultimately going to happen: AI will prove to be super transformative in the long run, just like the internet, but it won’t save us from the debt bubble the way that our business and political elites so desperately hope that it will. The debt bubble is going to pop, and we are going to have to face up to the consequences of decades of very bad fiscal and monetary policy, with or without AI. But after the dust settles, AI will play a major role in the rebuilding of the economy, for good or for ill.

December reading recap

Books I Finished

Lando by Louis L’Amour

Conan the Bold by John Maddox Roberts

Neighbors by Jan T. Gross

Smartphone Nation by Kaitlyn Regehr

Artificial You by Susan Schneider

Sackett by Louis L’Amour

The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell

The Man Called Noon by Louis L’Amour

Books I DNFed

  • Masada by Jodi Magness
  • Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo
  • Let’s Talk About Misconceptions with DNA and the Book of Mormon by John M. Butler & Ugo A. Perego
  • Writing As a Sacred Path by Jill Jepso
  • The Last Human Job by Allison Pugh
  • The Lost Empire of Atlantis by Gavin Menzico
  • Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb
  • Searches by Vauhini Varg

Did I predict it?

On July 24th, 2024, eleven days after the Butler Pennsylvania assassination attempt on President Trump’s life, I posted the following prediction:

9. In the first year of Trump’s second term in office, at least one of the following three things will happen: A second global pandemic,

Nope.

A domestic terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, or

No, thank goodness.

A major banking collapse and/or sovereign debt crisis that destroys the global economy.

No, though not for lack of trying. Seriously, I think this was one of the biggest unspoken goals of the Schumer shutdown earlier this year: to crash Trump’s economy in a way that benefits Democrats in the 2026 midterms. Thankfully, it seems to have failed.

So it looks like this prediction was a swing and a miss—though it could just be that the timing is off. After all, the day after the 2020 elections, I predicted in my personal journal that we were about to experience a rash of major political assassinations, but that didn’t start to play out until after the 2024 elections. The hardest part about making predictions is the timing, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if one (or all) of these things happen by the end of 2028.

Last update of the year

Things have been crazy busy around here, which is why I’ve been more intermittent about blogging. Our oldest daughter recently came down with pneumonia, after nearly a month of fighting through this low-level cold that everyone seems to have gotten (our son fought it off, but not our daughter, apparently). So that’s been the latest crazy thing. Thank God for anti-biotics.

Besides all that, there’s Christmas, of course, which is actually going to be kind of low key this year (just us, the in-laws, and my brother-in-law), but of course there’s still a lot that goes into that, especially with small kids.

So things have been super busy on the home front—so much that I’ve had to radically rethink a few things on the writing front. I’ll write a longer post about this later, perhaps in the new year, but the short version is that I’ve decided to stop tracking daily word count and start tracking daily average words-per-hour instead. I’m currently in a season of life where I can’t put as many words on the page, and I don’t want that to be an obstacle between me and my family. I can, however, practice just enough writing each day to keep my skills sharp, so that when I do get the opportunity to be more productive, I can fully take advantage of that.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. It’s been a month! More at the start of the year.

ChatGPT writes a sword and planet novel for the modern age

Last week, I posted the AI-generated synopsis for a trashy romantasy novel that hits all of the hottest current tropes. This week, I thought it would be fun to do something similar, but to pick a genre that has fallen out of favor in the last 50 years and see if we can’t update it for modern tastes.

So I asked ChatGPT to list some subgenres that were popular 50+ years ago but have fallen sharply out of favor in our current time, then list some of the tropes that define that genre, and combine those tropes with more popular tropes today. The subgenre we went with was sword and planet, and after going back and forth a few times, I think we came up with something decent, if not great.

(FYI, I went back and forth with the AI a lot more times with this one than with the trashy romantasy novel. As a result, it has a lot more of my own fingerprints on it, which you can probably tell if you read it closely enough. But I did rely heavily on the AI.)

Star-Crowned

Ava Mendoza is a brilliant but shy engineering graduate student who has never once seen herself as important, beautiful, or heroic. She prefers equations to people, and predictable routine to anything resembling danger. So when a late-night experiment catastrophically collapses into a quantum anomaly and a wormhole drags her out of her own world entirely, she has no idea she is about to become the center of another world’s prophecy.

She wakes in a burning red desert beneath a sun that flickers like a faulty light—sometimes blinding, sometimes dim, always unstable. Before she can orient herself, the sand erupts into a crystalline predator that hunts using refracted solar flares. Death seems certain until sky-clan warriors descend on insect-wing gliders and drag her to safety through a blur of heat and blade-light.

The moment they spot the battered silver watch on her wrist, everything changes. To Ava it’s a sentimental relic from her father; to the sky-clans it is the legendary “Clock of Worlds,” the unmistakable sign of their prophesied Star-Crowned Princess. She insists they’re mistaken, but the hope in their eyes is too hungry, too desperate. And their leader, Kade Thorne—scarred, disciplined, unexpectedly gentle—treats her with a respect she doesn’t know how to process.

Aelion is a world in collapse. Its red sun flares unpredictably, unleashing radiation storms capable of wiping out whole regions. Long ago, a lost civilization built the Aureole Shield, a planet-spanning defense lattice meant to regulate the sun’s tantrums. But now the shield is failing, and only a tyrant thrives in the chaos.

High Imperator Veylor—ruthless, brilliant, and dying slowly from radiation poisoning—has convinced many that only he can save the world. He sees in Ava the perfect weapon: a beautiful, exotic woman whom the people already whisper about in half-remembered prophecy. If he enslaves her, he doesn’t just possess her; he possesses their hope, their fear, their future. It’s not her power he wants. It’s her image. Her symbolism. Her body as a banner of conquest.

Ava flees with Kade and a small fellowship—Syrin the guilt-stricken telepath, Pira the razor-tongued scout, and Talen the scholar-priest whose fascination with Earthborn oddities borders on worship. Their journey across Aelion is lush, terrifying, and breathtaking: crystal forests humming with ancient data, floating citadels trembling on failing grav-cores, ruins haunted by swarming nanites humming like ghosts of the old world.

And between dangers, Ava and Kade move closer. They share warmth on freezing nights; they exchange glances that linger too long; he corrects her sword stance with hands that hover at her hips longer than necessary; she teases him about his old-fashioned courtesy. When Veylor’s hunters ambush them and Kade draws a battered Colt Peacemaker revolver—an impossibly out-of-place Earth weapon—Ava realizes he’s been hiding a truth as wild as her own.

He came from Earth too. Born in 1887, swept through a wormhole in a lightning storm, stranded here decades before she was born. The admission ties them together in ways neither is ready to voice.

But Veylor’s net tightens. He spreads word that Ava is his destined bride, his divine right. The Aureole Shield’s core is sealed behind defenses only his personal slaves and prisoners may pass. No army can storm it. No warrior can break in. And no other path leads to saving the world.

Ava understands the truth with terrible clarity: if she wants to reach the shield, she must let Veylor take her.

It is the most frightening decision she has ever made, and the bravest. She and Kade plan her “capture” together. He hates it—nearly breaks when she touches his cheek in reassurance—but he promises he will come for her. Not as a hero rescuing a damsel, but as her partner fulfilling the dangerous, brilliant plan she created.

When Ava surrenders to Veylor’s forces, the tyrant is ecstatic. He displays her like a trophy. He mistakes her trembling for fear, not strategy. He believes she is broken. He believes he has won. And because he assumes she is powerless, he brings her into the holy of holies: the Aureole Shield’s control chamber, a throne of living metal and starlight older than memory.

He demands she activate the shield for him.
Instead, she rewires it beneath his nose.

Ava uses her engineering expertise—her intuition, her quick thinking, her Earthborn perspective—to sabotage his takeover, reroute the shield’s systems, and trigger a hard reset that locks him out permanently. When Veylor lunges at her in rage, Kade storms into the chamber, fighting the tyrant in a brutal, desperate duel while Ava works to bring the shield back online.

The Aureole Shield ignites in a cascade of radiance. Aelion’s sun stabilizes for the first time in centuries. Veylor dies screaming that only he deserved its power.

And then—unexpectedly—the energy surge tears open a new wormhole. A shimmering, perfect doorway home.

For the first time since the desert, Ava falters. Earth calls to her with familiar, safe monotony: her graduate program, her half-finished research, her tiny apartment filled with loneliness she once endured without question. Returning would be easy. Predictable. The life she knew.

But she is no longer the woman who left. Aelion has carved her into something new—braver, bolder, desired, seen. She wants Kade. She wants the sky-clans. She wants to live vividly, fiercely, unapologetically. She wants to be what she has become.

She turns away as the wormhole closes on its own.

In the days that follow, she embraces her destiny fully. Ava dons the ceremonial finery of the sky-clans—not as a costume, but as her true skin: elegant, powerful, sensual. She becomes the Star-Crowned Princess by choice, not prophecy. Kade bows to her not out of submission, but devotion. She takes his hand as an equal, radiant and unafraid.

The shy engineer is gone.
In her place stands the woman who saved a world—and claimed her own heart in the process.

Ava Star-Crowned, Princess of Aelion.
A warrior’s beloved.
A world’s hope.
A legend just beginning.

What do you think? Is it something you might want to read? I’m not gonna lie: there’s a part of me that’s tempted to write AI slop, and a novel like this is something I could happily run with.

Or maybe… what if I wrote a book of interesting novel prompts for generative AI, designed for someone to copy-paste into ChatGPT (or their AI model of choice) themselves and have the AI write the story for them? The AI could then adapt the story to the reader, based on their reactions and what they like about it. What do you think? Would you buy a book like that?

Slop is not an AI problem

I don’t generally have much time these days to argue with strangers on the internet. While on the whole, that’s certainly a good thing, it also means that I tend to be out of the loop when it comes to most of the current cultural debates.

One term that I see a lot of these days is “AI slop.” It’s always used in a derrogatory way, and seems to be paired with the ongoing debate about the ethics or desireability of AI generated content, in various settings. I haven’t been following that debate very closely, but I can tell that there are some very strong anti-AI feelings out there, and some very vocal and passionate people espousing them.

But is the “slop” really an AI problem, or a symptom of something greater? I tend to think the latter, and here’s why.

I watched this video recently, about how most restaurants these days are producing literal slop. According to Matt Walsh, the reason (in case you don’t have twenty minutes to watch the video) is basically that all of these restaurants have been taken over by investors who are looking to maximize the value of their investment, and the best way to do that is to cut costs down to the bone and put out a minimum viable product.

It strikes me that “minimum viable product” is basically just another way of saying “slop.” It’s just barely good enough that people will generally consume it, but not so great that it takes a lot of time or energy to produce. As an example:

My kids love watching lego videos. In fact, they are starting to become low-key addicted to them (which we are doing our best to keep from getting worse). But within this genre on YouTube, there are some really good videos, like the one above… and this one, which my daughter insists on watching every day.

The first video features some truly elegant designs, with a detailed breakdown not only of how to build them, but how they operate, complete with foot paths, frame paths, etc. Even after watching the video some two or three dozen times, I am genuinely impressed by some of these models.

The second video is an obvious copycat video, with some slap-dash, crappy designs that look like zero thought went into them at all. I mean, seriously? Square wheels? And what’s with the two-legged walker, with the weight on the far back? More like “dragger” than “walker”—at least give the thing a wheel! And the tilt-rover? All the weight is on the back wheel, but the thing is front-wheel drive—of course it’s going to fail all the tests!

But even though the content itself is obvious copycat slop, slapped together quickly in order to capitalize on a trend within the genre (the YouTuber even tries to “hack” the algorithm by mashing two videos together, kind of like how some authors mash books together in order to maximize KENP page reads), my daughter still wants to watch this video more than the higher quality video. Why? Probably because of the flashier visuals and music, which makes the slop more appealing on a surface level.

Here’s the thing, though: as far as I can tell, there was no AI involved in making the lego video slop. It appears that the YouTuber actually built and actually tested these lego models. I could be wrong about this, of course, but I’ve watched these videos so many times with my kids that if there were any AI-isms in the video, I think I’d be able to spot them.

And then, we get something like this:

From what I can tell, every part of this video is made with AI, down to the actual writing (what kind of human would write “tunnels run like sacred veins”?) and the musical performance—and of course, the stunning visuals. But is it slop? The YouTuber appears to be a shitposter and meme-artist, which means he probably made this thing for the love of making it. And after watching it a couple of times, it really shows. Not like it’s fine art, of course, but there is so much packed in here—so many easter eggs and veiled cultural references—that even after watching it a dozen times, I am genuinely impressed.

So is that slop? It’s obviously AI, but is it a “minimum viable product”? I honestly don’t think so. Rather, I think the creator had something burning within him that he wanted to create, and he poured all of that into his creation, using AI tools to do all the things that he otherwise couldn’t have done. And the result is genuinely impressive. Seriously, I can’t stop watching it.

So is “slop” an AI problem? I don’t think so. Rather, I think that the explosion in poor-quality AI generated content is revealing our modern, capitalist, consumer culture’s tendency to settle for a minimum viable product rather than strive for excellence and greatness. We were getting slop long before we had AI. The only thing that’s fundamentally changed is that AI is increasing the quantity—and frankly, the quality—of the slop.