The Calling
I want to be honest with you about why I’m doing this. Not the polished version, but the real one. I feel like God called me to this work. That’s not a metaphor or a marketing angle. I genuinely believe it. When I look at what’s happening in the world right now, I see so much hopelessness, so much confusion, so much misinformation layered on top of real and legitimate hype. I see people making huge life decisions based on fear. I see smart people walking away from their expertise because they’ve been convinced it’s obsolete. And I feel a deep sense of: someone needs to say something steady and true here.
Here’s the thing people don’t always know about me. I spent years building movements. Woke Folks. Civics Unplugged. Edge City. By external metrics, those were successful. They got press, they attracted funding, they moved people. But I reached a point where I had to be honest with myself: those movements did not accrue back to me, and more importantly, they did not point to God. I was using God-given gifts to make rich people richer. I was building on foundations that looked impressive but left me depleted. That pattern, that consistent gap between effort and alignment, is what gave birth to my entire concept of return-on-energy. When your return on energy is consistently terrible despite your best efforts, the problem is not effort. The problem is direction.
The pivot happened when I said: no more building for the world. Time to kingdom build. I’m done using God’s gifts to serve someone else’s vision while my own calling collects dust. That was scary to say out loud. It meant walking away from things that were working by every conventional measure. But the Holy Spirit does not grade on conventional measures.
I also see enormous opportunity. Not in the exploitative sense, but in the honest sense. There are real businesses to be built helping real people transition into this next generation of their careers and their lives. That transition requires trust. It requires working with someone who takes your situation seriously, who doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, who is genuinely invested in your outcome. I think I’ve been placed in a position to be that person for some people, and I take that seriously.
I went to SXSW in March 2026. I hosted panels. I met the mayor of Austin. I watched rooms full of smart, accomplished people lean forward when I talked about applied AI, hungry for someone to just tell them what’s real and what to do about it. That experience confirmed something I’d been feeling for a long time: I feel like an artist that’s so early in the days before it blows up. The demand for honest, grounded AI guidance is enormous, and the supply of people who can deliver it with integrity is tiny. That gap is where I believe God placed me.
What I keep coming back to is a particular kind of person this moment calls for: someone who can be trusted to tell the truth when everyone else is selling something. Someone who can hold the complexity of this without collapsing it into simple narratives. Someone who has done the work themselves, not just theorized about it. The calling isn’t to be an AI influencer or an AI celebrity. It’s to be useful, with integrity, to people who are genuinely trying to figure out what to do. That’s what I hope this guide is. That’s what I’m aiming for every time I sit down to build or write or teach.
My authority here doesn’t come from credentials. It comes from fruit. I was an atheist. I built things the world celebrated while my spirit starved. Then God got hold of me, and everything changed. That journey is the credential. When someone asks why they should listen to me, the answer is: look at the fruit. Look at the people whose lives have changed. Look at my accountability partner Tim, who started out terrified of AI and is now leading the first international Applied AI Society chapter in Bordeaux. That’s not my doing. That’s God working through alignment.
If any part of this has been genuinely useful to you, that’s the thing I wanted most. Go build something. Go serve someone. Use these tools well, hold your mission clearly, and trust that the work you’re called to do is still worth doing. It’s more possible than ever.
Key Takeaway
This work comes from a calling to serve people navigating a confusing and high-stakes moment with honesty, clarity, and real-world grounding.