You scroll past a video. A politician says something outrageous, or a scene unfolds that looks completely real. A few years ago you would have believed it without a second thought. Now you cannot be sure any of it happened.

That collapse of certainty is what James McLeod means when he reaches for two words he admits should not belong in the same sentence. “Amazing and terrifying,” he says of the AI revolution, and he insists both are the right description. The tools that now generate photorealistic video from a single line of text are a marvel. They are also, in his telling, a threat to our ability to know what is real at all. “You don’t really know,” he says, “if what you just saw when you scroll TikTok was real or not.”

McLeod has earned the right to an opinion here. He spent 23 years as a Navy public affairs officer before retiring last year. Long before that, in 1995, he and his family built a television station from the ground up, the same station he still runs today and was sitting inside during this interview. He is a father of eight and a grandfather of five, and these days he builds AI apps and advises businesses on the technology. He sat down with Rabbi Rami Goldberg on Biblical Money, the video podcast from Israel365 where Goldberg talks with business leaders of faith about work, money, and belief. What followed was one of the more clear-eyed conversations you will hear about what AI is doing to our families, our faith, and our sense of time.

The vacuum nobody wants to fill

McLeod has watched this movie before, and he tells it as a story against himself. His wife, Beth Shan, whose name he notes is a good Hebrew one, grew up in a strict evangelical home with no television. “The only thing you could watch in the living room was the microwave,” he jokes. Within seven years of marrying her, he had not only brought a TV into her life, he had built a station and started making television, which put him in hot water with his in-laws for a while.

He tells that story to make a serious point. A generation of evangelical Christians once treated television as innately evil and simply avoided it. “If you create a vacuum,” McLeod says, “something’s going to fill it.” Because faithful families stepped back rather than stepping in, the medium filled up with junk. He sees the exact same fork in the road with AI, and he hears the same fear in the same voices, that the technology is dangerous and ought to be shunned.

His answer is not to dismiss the danger but to reframe it. AI, he says, is a tool, and he compares it to a chainsaw. You can get an enormous amount of work done with one, but you do not want to be on the wrong end of it. The task is to learn to wield it. He sees this as an inflection point for the church: either believers embrace the technology and pour good into it, or they leave the vacuum open and end up worse off than they were with broadcast television.

The cost he is not ignoring

For all his optimism about the tools, McLeod does not soft-pedal what screens are doing to people, especially the young. He calls this the most difficult generation in human history to raise children in, not because the content is always bad but because the distraction itself is corrosive. He describes the doom scroll in neurochemical terms: instead of earning a dopamine hit by doing something productive, kids and adults alike chase the next funny clip until the reward system wears down. The result, he warns, is a generation whose social skills never fully develop, watching connection get quietly stolen one video at a time.

Even good content, he acknowledges, does not exempt you. When Goldberg pressed him on whether there is something inherently damaging about the scrolling itself, even when what you are watching is rabbis and preachers, McLeod did not flinch. Anything in excess is worth worrying about, he said. The medium can leave you dopamine-dependent no matter how wholesome the material. Which brings him back to the word he returns to again and again: intentional.

Reclaiming the Sabbath

If distraction is the disease, both men landed on the same prescription, and it is an old one. Goldberg described his own practice: come Friday night, the phones go away and the lights are set, whatever is on stays on and whatever is off stays off, and he walks to synagogue with his sons, unplugged and present with his faith community. He pointed to the Jewish custom of pronouncing a hundred blessings across an ordinary day, a discipline of noticing that a fruit came from the tree and a vegetable from the ground, as a model of the intentionality the moment demands.

McLeod, for his part, was honest that his own family honored Sundays but never unplugged as fully as he now wishes they had when the kids were young, something he is working to correct. He sees the tide turning, though, with a biblical principle he thinks is coming back into view: take the screen, put it somewhere you cannot reach it, and give twenty-four hours to a nap, a long meal, a walk with people you love. Goldberg noted that ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, President Trump had even called for Americans to embrace a Sabbath, and wondered aloud whether Christians would take him up on it.

The principle, both agreed, holds whether you are a person of deep faith or none at all. That is exactly the argument at the heart of Shabbat Revolution: A Practical Guide to Weekly Renewal, a book by Rabbi Elie Mischel, Israel365’s Director of Education. Shabbat, Rabbi Mischel writes, was never meant for Jews alone. It is a gift offered to the whole world, a weekly act of renewal that anyone can practice and that a distracted, exhausted culture needs more than it knows.

“Buy back your time,” and a rabbi’s skepticism

McLeod’s current work sharpens the same theme. His company builds tools, including a business operating system called VelocityHub, designed to automate the repetitive tasks a business owner dreads, the reporting and busywork, so owners can, in his phrase, buy back their time. Free up the hours, he argues, and you can redirect your best people toward customers and craft, and redirect yourself toward family, faith, and legacy.

Goldberg pushed back, and it made for the sharpest exchange of the conversation. Every technology of his career promised to save time, he pointed out, from the fax machine to email to spreadsheets to accounting software, and yet he still works ten-hour days, arguably more distracted than before. He has learned to be skeptical of the time-savings pitch.

McLeod conceded the point rather than dodging it, and used it to make his case stronger. The tools can hand you two hours back, he said, but if you pour those hours straight back into more of the same work, you have not reclaimed anything. He named the culprit plainly: grind culture, the endless chase after something you will never actually catch, sometimes rooted in identity, sometimes in simple greed. How much is enough? “A little bit more.” Technology cannot fix that. Only intentionality can.

And that is where the whole conversation quietly comes to rest. The striking thing about talking AI with James McLeod is how fast a discussion of the most advanced technology on earth keeps returning to one of the oldest instructions in the Bible. Every tool of the last century arrived promising to give us our time back, and somehow we ended up busier and more scattered than before. The problem was never the tools. It was us, and what we chose to do with the space they opened up.

That is why the answer both men kept reaching for was not a better device but a deliberate stop. A day with the screen out of reach. A meal that runs long. A walk with the people you love. More technology will not fix what ails us. More Shabbat, more intentionality, and more clarity about why we are here in the first place just might.

Watch the full conversation between Rabbi Rami Goldberg and James McLeod at Biblical Money.