Unpacking Belief (Joseph Choi)

What does it really mean to call yourself anything? Joseph Choi begins to explore his ongoing journey of faith deconstruction, reconstruction, and whatever it is now. But we end up through about the anxieties around labeling one's beliefs, between commitment and optionality, and abundance and scarcity mindsets (44 min)

Transcript

Heavily edited this for reading ease. (edit)

Joseph: I wanted to talk to you to explore what I believe because I still don’t really know. Over the past eight-ish years, I’ve been thinking more about things, but still haven’t… I have this giant 40-page doc that I sent you.00:00

Joseph: Originally it started as, I want to write a personal essay about what I believe. I had gone through deconstruction in college, tried to do reconstruction. It was to solve the personal problem of what to say when people ask me, “What religion are you?” Or “Are you Christian?”00:24

Joseph: I never know what to say. I was going to write this essay. But then as I wrote more notes, the more I uncovered of how much I don’t know how to explain it! So every conversation I have with someone is another layer in potentially figuring that out.00:41

Labels and Their Limits

Joseph: Do you think that there’s a benefit to labeling yourself?01:04

Henry: People don’t want to label themselves because it’s like shoehorning yourself. I understand that sentiment. Attaching yourself to a certain tradition has advantages.01:09

Henry: There’s a kind of knowledge that you can only really know by doing. The action that you take, not just reading. Any spiritual experience, a retreat or going to a concert, you feel that… I don’t know how you could explain that to someone.01:19

Henry: Being willing to be a part of tradition takes a level of commitment. We don’t want to label ourselves is because then I have to say yes to every part of it. But I think you’re missing out too, because you’re not willing to attach yourself to maybe the good parts.01:33

Henry: It’s almost like a faith that allows yourself to settle in this thing, not like you’re permanently there. When you’re too open, maybe that’s why people feel lost. The opposite is like, I am this, and anyone that’s not like this, you’re stuck. So there’s a fluidity to that.01:52

Joseph: I like that spectrum you just drew, open versus closed. I think of about things in terms of personality theory a lot. So big five, ocean, openness. It seems like the act of labeling or committing to a tradition is more of a closed mindset.02:10

Joseph: And it feels weird to say that because closed has all these weird connotations, but I just purely mean it in a personality sense. Letting go of the fear of, oh, maybe I’ll find something else. I don’t know if I want to commit to all the negatives, and the positives.02:31

Joseph: Also reminds me of modernism versus postmodernism of like, relativism. Do you want to just keep yourself open and decentralize or do you want to commit to this one thing? Also reminds me of relationships.02:47

Joseph: If you keep dating around, and you don’t actually commit to a thing, then you’re never actually going to know if that person is right. Like the committing comes… Not everyone agrees with this, but some people say, that are more of the mind of, courtship. Commitment comes before the relationship, rather than the other way around. Trial running the relationship, and then committing.03:02

Henry: I also think of relationships too, any kind of relationship. Commitment is a big deal in the faith. and we see that through not just one another, but through God. God committing to his people or Christ committing to the Church.03:28

Henry: And I love the metaphor, Christ is the head, right? The church is the body. That’s supposed to be a metaphor for marriage too. We’re both sacrificing for each other. Christ died for us first, right? So we’re willing to be sacrifices for other people. And I think that is pretty beautiful, in terms of what a relationship can look like.03:43

Henry: that it’s not about self-interest, but the interest of others. Putting others in front of your own interests, which is really hard to do. Because we’re always thinking about how to like me, right? It relates to commitment because there’s a lack of commitment in our modern society. and I would like to understand that.04:01

The Trap of Infinite Options

Henry: There’s an essay I like citing, called The Trouble with Optionality. It’s talking about this. We love options, both financially, but that has infected our way of thinking.04:21

Henry: If I can just be a consultant, I do whatever I want. He says the point of an option is to choose it eventually. The point of options is to commit at some point. So if your goal is marriage, then the point of dating is to eventually pick one person, if you believe in that.04:34

Henry: We feel safe when we have a lot of options, but the safest thing is committing, which is scary. So we lean back on this assumption that if I have more options, I can always go to something else if it doesn’t work out. But we’re missing something when you always feel that you can get out of it.04:49

Joseph: You said what I was thinking. It feels very counter-cultural to commit to things. These days we have a lack of commitment. There’s so much optionality: globalization, internet, whatever reasons you want to cite.05:11

Joseph: But, as you were saying stuff before, I was thinking… is there a “why now” element to commitment and Christianity? I feel the cultural shift towards Christianity, single truth, and committing to things.05:28

Joseph: Do you think this is the central theme of Christianity, or is this the central theme of Christianity right now because of the time that we live in?05:48

Henry: I can make an argument for both.05:57

Henry: Society wise, there are too many options. Negative freedom and positive freedom? Negative is when you go to the grocery store and there’s a million options. Now you go on the internet, you can learn anything. But what? Even with AI, I can code anything, but what do I do? You can feel really overwhelmed. Everything seems possible, but you don’t have a direction.06:01

Henry: That’s where positive freedom comes in. The constraint is freeing when you don’t have as many options. When you feel like, God’s calling me to this, or people are suggesting this. There’s freedom in that, even though it seems like it’s the opposite. So that’s a societal thing.06:21

Henry: But this is a core value of faith because… it’s funny how so many things are very fundamental. You either get used to it because you’ve been in church for a long time or it’s just really hard to live out. Faith in anything is about commitment to what you believe in, whether it’s yourself, a company, science, or God.06:40

Beyond Idols

Henry: A big part of the faith is idolatry, which is worshiping things that you think are God that are not.07:06

Henry: In the Old Testament, idolatry was like the golden calf example. Anything could become an idol. Even serving in the church, thinking I’m a Christian could be an idol. There are mental, emotional, and spiritual idols. And maybe that relates to what you said about labeling. God, he’ll say, “I am, I am.” There’s no name for God. I liked using the Taoist notion of it. The name that can be named is not the real name.07:14

Joseph: Yeah. This is interesting. I think a common sentiment in people in-between, choosing one faith versus being pluralist is, why choose one? Is it possible to… by choosing one, you’re putting yourself in the position to potentially go too far, go too deep into becoming close-minded, almost like getting into a cult mindset or behavior.07:41

Joseph: But the way you framed idolatry, a Christian term, is a mechanism to combat that cult behavior. Because cult behavior is worshiping the institution, the people, or whatever other things. And you’re saying, avoid idolatry, commit to God itself, or God’s self, or whatever you want to call it.08:12

Joseph: So one thing I want to explore is, you said the point of an option is to choose one. Why?08:38

Joseph: For God, I could see that. That makes sense. Because if you choose God, that is truly the safest. The premise is that God is unconditionally loving, unconditionally powerful, and is the truth.08:47

Joseph: But if you’re choosing one other thing, that’s not necessarily true anymore, like if you’re choosing one spouse, or one career path or whatever else. Do you think that there’s, maybe it goes back to the balance thing you were talking about, but I guess marriage is pertinent because Christians believe in monogamy, which is interesting.09:00

Joseph: Why attach the Christian principle of commitment to who you decide to mate with?09:35

Marriage as Compounding Interest

Henry: I try to use a theological reason for it. If I use the metaphor of Christ and the church, you could say it’s monogamous because when we worship other gods, we are committing adultery or whatever you want to call it. And you can say it’s a serious offense. And then if you apply that and he says, well this is how marriage is supposed to be, then I guess we should take marriage seriously too. That comes out of that reading of it.09:42

Henry: Like you said, you could be for other things and, say your job. I’m not saying that for your job, I committed to working at Google or something, and that means you gotta work there forever.10:09

Henry: A different level is like if you are a Christian, what church do you go to? And committing to one of those. There’s a phenomenon maybe only in America, they call it church hopping, which is going from church to church., but then now I’m also like, I feel committed to a local church, but at the same time I don’t want to be afraid of going to another church just to understand how they worship or how things are different, because I’m afraid someone might think that I’m not committed. I don’t have that fear. It doesn’t mean that I’m not committed either.10:18

Joseph: Mm. So just to aggressively play devil’s advocate here. So if you’re checking out other churches… I don’t think it’d be wrong for you to go to one of those churches and switch, right? If you had a good reason or you felt compelled to. Same with career. but it kind of breaks when you talk about marriage, right? Why is that?10:48

Joseph: Not even the edge cases, but even more zoomed out from that. Just monogamy in general. Like why? But I guess that’s just, I mean, I know Jesus said it and that’s why Christians believe it, but I wonder why. Yeah.11:14

Henry: It’s like where is our safety net? Is it in the fact that I have all these options, I can go to anyone at any point? Or is it that you picked one and that’s what’s safe?11:29

Henry: It’s like the thing that does well is when you make a risk, when you take a bet and you go all in on something. Not to say that you should go in on meme coins, stuff like that. But, say you have all these choices of who to marry or what job to go to. I don’t know, I feel like there’s a lot of paralysis around which one, so you end up not choosing any?11:42

Joseph: Oh, I like that. Maybe there’s an economic principle behind marriage. It’s like the compounding, because that’s very compelling. Yeah.12:02

Henry: I think that’s very true for.. I’ll just use the word trust, which is another maybe faith-related word. Trust builds over time, right? With the same people seeing each other all the time, and that can break easily.12:10

Henry: I don’t think most of us are contemplating what that means or how to be friends over a long period of time. Sometimes we just cross paths and we don’t come back together and we don’t have to force anything to happen. But in a certain way, it’s more special because it’s volunteer or it can break at any point, but you want to pursue that.12:23

Joseph: Right. It’s like life itself. Temporary and voluntary, which makes it special. Yeah. Trust and connection. that’s interesting. The real safety net is the really strong trust and connection. Bonds that you build with someone, with one spouse.12:43

Reconciling Lenses on Truth

Joseph: There’s a meta conversation here where I’m like, I feel like what just happened is we were talking about the concept of commitment and paralysis of choices.13:06

Joseph: And then I was trying to explore the concept of why commitment. And then, we arrived at oh, because that’s what it says in the Bible. And there’s theological reasons for that as well. But then the thing that actually convinced me was the economic argument. It’s like, oh wait, the compounding.13:19

Joseph: You agreed with it, but then you brought in the Christian, background to then back it up for yourself.13:40

Joseph: So my question is, is that an automatic mechanism in your mind? Like when you are trying to believe something, or rationalize it or feel convicted about it. Is that your process?13:50

Joseph: Because I remember when I was more active in church, I would do that as well. I would bring up something from the Christian lens and now I don’t as much, and sometimes I do. It’s like, oh wait, that connects to this. And then my atheist friends know me as the Christian Guy who brings in all these Christian analogies, but to my Christian friends, I’m the one who brings in all these other weird things like the economic, whatever.14:04

Joseph: But I mean, the whole point of this podcast was the intersection of, tech and faith. So obviously you probably have both perspectives too, but I’m just curious what that balance is for you.14:30

Henry: Sometimes I feel like I’m bringing Christian stuff when I talk to tech people, but then I bring in tech stuff when I talk to Christians. And I don’t know if it’s just, I like dialogue and conversation, so it’s kind of a bouncing off thing.14:40

Henry: They’re already thinking a certain way, so I want to bring a different perspective or that’s what makes me think of a different perspective because it’s a jumping off point, if that makes sense.14:54

Henry: I don’t know if I’m actively trying to, and you could say that I think as a Christian you want, the point of being a Christian is simple. It can be simplified to just be, you want to be like Jesus, to think like Jesus. So, yeah, you can bring in The Bible or various theology or whatever. and maybe it’s related to the idol ideology thing is, I don’t want to be convinced because, some other reason, but that doesn’t mean that that other reason isn’t spiritual.15:03

Henry: We tend to create a secular sacred divide. Is spiritual and this is not. So one example would be like the right thing to do is to become a missionary, quit your job and the other one is like make a lot of money at some place and you donate. It sounds like a very ea way of thinking about it. And for me, I don’t really want to believe in that binary. There’s a lot of options in between, you know, on what your calling is. If God is to God of creativity, I, I just don’t know why we’re, we’re trying to fit into these boxes on that. It’s not the same as believing that God is our savior and stuff like that.15:35

Abundance as a Heavenly Mindset

Henry: I guess personally, I don’t want to think so economically, but I’m not opposed to using these metaphors. I’m trying to bring that into alignment with how I see the world through scripture and then how that relates. I think that economics is about, say, scarcity. Scarcity of resources, how we use them. Which is how the world works and that’s how we should live. But that’s not always the way I want to be thinking, but I’m not opposed to thinking that.16:10

Joseph: so interesting. Economics lens is scarcity based. So what school of thought is abundance based then?16:35

Henry: I don’t know what the school of thought is, I’m just… heavenly? I don’t know what that means, but…16:47

Joseph: The heavenly lens, guess is, is abundance based. Yeah, that makes sense. But what is, how do you define heavenly?16:51

Henry: I default to thinking scarcity based, because that’s just like our whole world, right? When we think the same way, we’re not really gonna get anywhere. So I want to think differently, change it up to see where that would lead to. I don’t necessarily know what that looks like.16:58

Henry: As an example, like Jesus miracles with feeding the 5,000 or whatever, right? It’s like, what does that even mean? He could just multiply a bunch of stuff? Was it there a mindset thing? The kid had a lot of faith or something? There’s a lot of ways to think through that too.17:11

Henry: I don’t think open source was a Christian thing. it wasn’t started by Christians per se, but maybe they were influenced by Christian principles, whether they believe that or not. I mean, that’s just how I’m seeing it. Most of the time you’re like, well, if you do something and you give it away for free, why would you do that?17:24

Henry: And ironically, when I mention open source to Christians, they’re the ones that ask that too. How do you make money? How do you live? Like asking me, are you okay ? You know, like, what’s the point of doing that? I think it’s funny. I would’ve thought that if we’re thinking from this point of view, it’s like they could just say, that’s awesome. That’s the first response. But no, it’s like, how do you make money?17:43

Joseph: Yeah. Okay. So now I’m uncovering like, another principle that I believe. Okay, so the first thing was, commitment. I really like Christianity because of the emphasis on commitment.18:07

Joseph: Second thing is emphasis on abundance. Abundance is not, I don’t think abundance mindset originates in Christianity necessarily, but Jesus was definitely all about abundance for sure.18:20

Henry: I just think of Genesis itself, God creating this whole world. I mean, you could ask the question why he’d do it. One way of putting it is like It was out of abundance of desiring to create, to be cre… Being creative itself is abundance, if you think about it.18:37

Henry: That’s how I’m kind of seeing it. Maybe one of the ways we are created in God’s image is that we are creative. So we desire to, to be abundant. To share and to give.18:55

Joseph: Right. Yeah, we’re creators.19:07

Henry: Not in the the YouTuber creator sense.19:09

Joseph: We’re content creators.19:13

Joseph: Okay. Well, I’ll go back to the other thing you were saying again. Protestantism kind of creates the secular sacred divide. Kind of this like dualism.19:17

Henry: I think that it kind of lends itself to that thinking.19:25

Joseph: What do you think about that? Is that just yet another spectrum? Dualism to non-dualism. It’s like somewhere in the middle, like they’re both val because like, you could definitely view Christianity through both lenses, I feel like, and it’s probably issues with both, maybe?19:28

Henry: There’s a tension there.19:44

The Importance of Embodiment

Henry: Oh, okay. I think I want to relate that feeling of separation of the dichotomy with the lack of embodiment. That’s a different word I would use.19:45

Henry: I would say that’s a core part of the faith too. And you might be like, why is that related? Part of it is that, John 1, like the word became flesh, meaning God became embodied. So like how is that not a core part of the faith, right?19:55

Henry: This is literally talking about how God, who we generally think of as spiritual, he doesn’t show himself to us. Or at least that’s not what people thought. When Christ came, it’s telling us the body is important. And I always wanna come back to that. Cause he could have came in a, in a different form, right? Or he could have not came as a person.20:09

Henry: And this is getting really into the weeds, but especially if you’re not a Christian listening. Baptism, communion, these kind of liturgies that we partake in.20:29

Henry: I’ll just say communion, then. We do an ordinary act that we say has, you know, spiritual significance, right? We’re just eating bread and wine, crackers and grape juice, or whatever you wanna call it.20:37

Henry: And my tension in terms of, you said the spectrum, is like, okay, should I think of this as purely symbolic or should I think of this as like literally doing something physically?20:51

Henry: In Catholicism they have like this concept called transubstantiation, which is like when you eat the bread and the wine, it like turns into Christ’s body and blood. They mean that literally. But then also in this old way, I don’t even know how to explain it. So like most people like Protestants would be like, that’s weird. Like what does that even mean?21:02

Henry: I don’t think any Protestant thinks this, but it’s like, is what we’re doing purely symbolic? It’s just like making me think something in my head, right.21:19

Henry: Because at that point I’m like, let’s go really extreme. We’re gonna do VR church and do I even have to eat it anymore? I can virtually eat the bread, right? Or not even eat it, just like think I’m eating it. That just seems absurd to me, right?21:30

Henry: So I don’t know like where to think about that, but I just think there’s a tension there. And that’s something that people are arguing about for like, you know, thousands of years or whatever. But I think that’s an interesting example.21:43

Joseph: That’s so interesting. VRChat communion. Would that be, would that be legit or not?21:55

Henry: During Covid, I think there was like some funny meme about . I think they’re baptizing kids using like a water gun because of like social distancing, like stuff like that. So I’m like, I don’t know, do we just like, because of the situation, we changed it anyway. So it’s like things that we thought were like so important, we changed them.22:01

Joseph: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I guess that’s the tension. There’ll always be, I dunno, I, I feel like we’re gonna be all right.22:20

Joseph: I feel like there’s always people on both sides of this that are like the Luddites versus the innovators, and you are like, we end up landing somewhere in the middle. I mean, in the end, you end up adapting. And changing, like, both sides are always, I feel like the world is always changing, so maybe VRChat communion actually is..22:29

Henry: What it just takes is a Christian that happens to like VRChat and they’re already in a community, or they become a Christian later, they’re like, I’m gonna do it. because no one else would do it. It makes sense that the younger people would do it because they think it’s normal. And then older people would never do it because they don’t know it exists or they think it’s like from Satan or something. So yeah.22:47

Pharisees to Heretics

Joseph: So what do you think about like, people that seem to… I guess that’s different, like people that misrepresent the faith? I mean, I guess there’s a difference between misrepresenting and like Like I, I would define misrepresenting as someone who is Christian, says they’re Christian and maybe does Christian practices, but their character is not actually consistent with Jesus maybe versus someone whose character’s very consistent, but just does, but just kind of like breaks the rules, like and does VRChat communion.23:07

Henry: That is a great question. I don’t know where to start with that. You could argue for both. Jesus was challenging the people of that time. The Pharisees, they were the ones that followed the rules. They knew the Bible, the Old Testament. And they did not know God.23:45

Henry: So that’s actually something that any Christian should be asking themselves, like, am I gonna be the Pharisee. Right now, and at the end of my life when like, you know, if you believe that, and then God is like, you know, there’s that, there’s a verse where it’s like, um, they’re like, um, we perform miracles in your name. So literally they were doing miracles. You know, we cast out demons, all these crazy things, and God’s like, I never knew you. I mean, that would be I horrible to think, right? God’s like, no, I didn’t know who you were like at all.24:01

Henry: I really like this sermon I listened to and it was like, we’re always trying to do things for God, but we should think about doing things with God. So this might go back to idolatry and commitment. I think I know what God wants, right? So I did this thing for, I gave you this gift, and at the end of your life he’s like, I didn’t know who you were. So you think you know God, but does God know you? And that’s like the real question.24:30

Henry: And there’s a lot to say about that. It’s like, what does that even mean? How would I know? And this gets into this aspect of like what we would call like discernment, which is like whether you should make a decision or not, right? But then also our intimacy, which is another word in Christianity, with God.24:52

Henry: And I think that this is very hard to do in practice and I can talk about all day and I, you know, that doesn’t mean I’m being close to you. You could be a pastor, you could be a missionary, and you’re not close to God because you’re just following these habits. Going to church in the Bible. All good things. But it’s funny how you can miss the whole point even doing all those things, right? Not that we shouldn’t do those things, it’s just that sometimes those things, and go back to idolatry, those could become the idols. That doesn’t mean they are per se, right?25:08

Henry: But they could be a pastor and they, they fall away, they commit some sin, you know, like these kinds of things versus someone that I guess people would see as doing a lot of bad things, but then they repent and they really truly are like, wow, I am nothing without you, God. They have that humbleness to them, right? So that comes back to like pride essentially.25:41

Joseph: I like that. I keep pointing out spectrums. I really like spectrums, but like the, it’s like the pharisee to heretic spectrum. Don’t… it’s good to be probably somewhere in the middle.26:08

Henry: Yeah. Middle is like golden mean middle. I think that’s Aristotle. It’s not like 50%. You can’t really measure that. What does it mean to be courageous versus like reckless? Virtue involves people, right? And that involves character. And it probably involves looking at their whole life.26:18

Joseph: My, my brain is like evolving as we speak. Um, ,I’m writing down all these notes, by the way. This is like really good stuff.26:36

Parables, Miracles, and Game Theory

Joseph: Okay, another thing, as we were talking about finding different justifications for the same truths. It kind of brings me back to why believe in the actual I guess I don’t know what to call it historical slash literal slash religious stuff?26:45

Joseph: Because pastors, like so many people that go to seminary end up losing their faith, unfortunately because of, I don’t know, my, in my perspective, it’s like once you know too much, it can be hard to hold so many different types of truth in your head at the same time, like the spiritual truth and the scientific truth and anthropological truth and the, you know, economic whatever.27:14

Joseph: I feel like your faith is just, has to change like the, the way that it looks. It just has to end up looking different.27:44

Joseph: And then I was also just thinking.. You could even view it through an elitist lens. Like, is Christianity for the masses in a way, or is religion for the masses? Like if you . If you know that there are certain truths about the world and you feel close to God, um, but you’re trying to figure out a way to get everyone to see that truth, how do you do that?27:54

Joseph: Well, the way that Jesus did it was parables. And like, if you want to, if you want people to believe in abundance, then I don’t know, maybe perform a Miracle. Feed the 5,000.28:22

Joseph: You could also believe in abundance through, through other means. Um, game theory, maybe, I don’t know. I saw this YouTube video on game theory o of like lo long term game theory where tit for tat or whatever, like basically being more generous to a certain extent, actually benefits you and the entire world in the long term. So like you could, you know, maybe you could make that argument.28:33

Henry: Yeah. Iterative prisoner dilemma. Scott Alexander had the thing about this. He was actually asking the question, why did Christianity like rise? Like why is it so popular? Why did it grow so fast? And think about like how to use that so that EA could become like Christianity.29:00

Henry: Another thing was that Christianity would always choose to cooperate. Normally you would never do that because everyone always takes advantage of you, right? You always cooperate, they always defect. You always get the short end of the stick.29:16

Henry: But maybe the way it worked out is that so many people did it. People are getting martyred. During the black death, people were like helping them when everyone else left. People realized that just helping people was just better. Maybe particularly so for the people back then. They were just super Christians or whatever, and they were willing to lay down their lives, which is what Christ asked us to do.29:29

Henry: And if you ask a random person that were Christian on the street here, would you do that? Are we willing to give up… not even just our lives? Are we willing to give up our nice jobs and our middle class life? Probably not.29:52

Henry: The other question I already forgot, but I thought it was really good too.30:02

Joseph: Yeah. yeah. The previous one was like, if you’re very close to the truth because you’ve, because, you know, know God, whatever, however you wanna define that, is religion, like simply a way to help others understand the truth? a more compressible kind of easy to understand way.30:05

Joseph: Do church, do pastors? I don’t know. And maybe that’s the reason why pastors lose their faith because they, they feel too burdened by like, here’s, here’s what I know about church history and anthropology or whatever. And I’m just speaking in a way that feels inauthentic to my church.30:29

Henry: Great question. And then there’s over reliance on pastors. Should we even have a pastor? Or just like, what, what does a pastor even mean? Or what is the future of what a pastor is?30:51

Henry: That might be more palatable way of putting it is like, do we have to do things the same way as before? Why are we relying on professional pastor versus lay people? And that depends on how you govern yourselves. Maybe I want more lay people or maybe I want a smaller church. Maybe I don’t believe that megachurches are good for the faith.31:03

Henry: But maybe that everyone has a role. That’s another point of way of putting it. Maybe that’s good to get people in, but then later you gotta find like a small church, to grow, to mature in the faith. Your message is basically gonna be diluted. It almost has to be, right? Like, say you have a stadium full of people. I mean, you can’t say the most specific thing because, there’s no context. And it has to be a very global context, right?31:25

Henry: That’s why small group is really important for a church, right? You go to a church, but then I think you can grow because there’s literally only a few people. You do a Bible study, you talk together, you explore the faith together. Or just one-on-one.31:50

Henry: I don’t wanna say that like, this is bad. It’s like there are different uses or different approaches.32:03

Henry: And I see that in open source too. The huge corporate open source, like Google has Chrome, right? And I think we talked about this earlier. And then like your side project and like everything in between.32:10

Joseph: This is so fascinating. This is a marketing funnel. Like you bring in, like, you, like the message always has to be diluted.32:19

Joseph: If I write a tweet that’s specifically talking to this tam of 10,000 people, the algo is gonna make it reach 10,000 people.32:26

Joseph: And, and the purpose of that is just to get attention. But then if I actually want to talk, like, have nuance, if I put that out into the void, it’s not gonna get any views because it, it doesn’t have that mimetic kind of legs.32:36

Henry: The only counterpoint is that. It does seem like the nuance and niche can do really well too. You just slowly grow. I think Visa has a post, I think it was called like… Most people wait. Everyone’s always talking about catering to most people.32:53

Henry: Oh, this is funny. This is already relating back to the commitment thing. I think he said, you know, you’re not trying to get married to most people. You’re not trying to work at most companies, blah, blah, blah.33:08

Henry: So you’re.. And he’s like, I’m just trying to tell this to myself. I’m writing for very smart people or very thoughtful people or whatever. And it’s just like trying to find them.33:19

Henry: Kevin Kwak he has a thing, sending tweets or like a tuning fork into the universe, trying to find people that resonate with you.33:29

Joseph: Interesting. This makes me just think of the concept of art in general. I think that, uh, Rick Rubin also said something about the tuning fork to the universe.33:35

Joseph: But like, is that true? Is that really true? Like, I, like, in order to get the, well, actually, I. For Christianity. If the goal is to get the most number of people to truth, then how do you do that? Is it possible to do that by training up a thousand Visas? Maybe that’s it. Maybe you train up a thousand Visas in all of their different verticals and niches and have them tweet niche tweets.33:44

Henry: I mean, it started with the 12 disciples, right? So, so there’s that, but there’s also like, what is our role as Christians?34:18

Henry: Evangelism has a really bad rap in the way it’s done and, and thought of. But Christ is the head and the church is the body of Christ. So there’s another verse that says, we are his hands and feet, or you know, like, or we are different parts of the body. And I love that metaphor because it’s saying that we are unique, but we’re also unified, right?34:28

Henry: We don’t lose our individuality in being the church, but we are a part of the same body. When one part hurts, you know, I will hurt as well. Solidarity, right? We’re all uniquely placed to be able to help people in where we are. The pastor’s role is to help build the church, but they obviously don’t know anything about other stuff.34:46

Henry: They didn’t go to med school or they didn’t, they’re not a lawyer, they’re not a tech person. They have nothing to say about that. In a way they’re not called to do that. But we might be because we’re the other people and we’re going out to these places, right? We can’t put all this reliance on a pastor and we shouldn’t. None of us are God. Pastor’s definitely not God. They have a special role, I guess. We shouldn’t try to be other people. If I’m the foot, I shouldn’t try to be a hand. That might be really helpful too.35:10

Henry: But I keep coming back. Maybe that is kind of like commitment too. I don’t wanna take it too literally, but I don’t know that I’m a foot in the body and I shouldn’t be a hand, but I’m just saying that I feel like there’s something there. We mentioned like the idea of spiritual gifts that have been given to us and trying to like hone in on those. Doesn’t mean you can’t do other things.35:37

Organizational Structures

Joseph: I’m curious about the political side, or not political, but forms of organization. So if you had a flat organization, let’s say it’s the 12 disciples, maybe it’s a republic.35:54

Joseph: It’s a republic, and you have these 12 disciples, and they’re all equal. They’re all in different functions and industries or whatever you want to call it, horizontals and verticals. They have different skills, different interests.36:08

Joseph: One thing I’ve seen lately in the tech industry is certain startups get funded because the investor is the same religion as the founder.36:20

Henry: No way.36:31

Joseph: Yeah. Not because. But the intro is made, or this is an entrepreneur who has my values. I want them to have more influence in the world and the way that they run their startup is going to be with the values that I have. So, of course, I’ll fund this startup.36:33

Joseph: Maybe you give funding to a nonprofit that you believe in its principles. My observation is that hierarchical organization and capital create influence. And maybe that’s one of the benefits of top-down governance.36:50

Henry: Catholic church for sure. I don’t think that having flat is the way to go for everything. These small groups, they work because everyone’s already on the same page. Once you bring in new people, and you open it up, they’re not on the same page probably.37:18

Henry: Or it takes time to onboard. Culturally too, not just, say it’s a company, technically. What’s it called, eternal September where they’re talking about forums and new people come in, then they influence, say Reddit and it changes the whole culture and then everyone leaves after X years because the culture was not established and core enough to not change in a way that completely changed the whole thing.37:35

Henry: Religions, I don’t know if it’s do a good job, I wouldn’t use the word good. They’re still there. Most of them have been around for a long time. So if we’re talking about building institutions that last. That’s one of them. And you can argue it’s because it’s about God, but maybe that is the reason. And, maybe that’s what convinces all these tech people to try to make their own cults and religions. because they realize that, they want to influence.38:01

Joseph: Yeah. That’s interesting. Culture needs. Well, yeah. I have two takeaways for my business, because I’m building an online community or it’s a members club. And, I’ve been thinking a lot about how do you, yeah.38:26

Joseph: How do you organize people? Do you sort them by small groups? Do you sort the small groups by industry? Function? Stage of maturity like you would for different age groups in a church?38:47

Joseph: And then for culture? I think there’s implicit things that I, I’ve noticed the evolution, my first cohort of 50 people joined, they had a certain culture, and then the next a hundred people joined, slightly different. And I’m starting to feel the shift and I feel like I don’t have, actually don’t have a ton of control over it.38:58

Joseph: I vet the members, but even me getting the inbounds of the applications is just, I’m just subjecting myself to the market itself. Like what kinds of people are out there and what they feel and what they need.39:17

Joseph: So, actually action item for me is, need to be very clear about the culture, the foundation of the culture and the guiding principles, because things will change as new cohorts come and leave. But you have to, there has to be something that stays. Yeah.39:31

Henry: I think that’s how it is with the church. It’s supposed to be a place where the only reason why we’re gathering is God. So everything else in a way shouldn’t matter. Not how it plays out in practice.39:49

Henry: But that’s okay. because we still have, that’s the ideal. If I go back to, we’re all flawed people and we should acknowledge that. So if anything, we should expect that the church should be flawed, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try to work to that, right?40:02

Henry: At the same time working towards it know that that will never be perfect. I think that should be another core principle. I don’t know what the word is, never be perfect until heaven is that there is no perfection. There is no certainty.40:17

Henry: And I really want to emphasize the idea there’s no system that we can create that will get rid of all of our problems.40:32

Henry: That doesn’t mean we give up. I’m just saying that, there’s no a hundred percent, if that makes sense. And I find that we do, that we can’t help but think that way. Outsourcing everything until what are we even doing? Before it could be as simple as math on the calculator. But now we’re outsourcing our thinking, our imagination, and maybe our morality. Our ability to even make choices and a judgment. That’s finally related to optionality too, I’m not even making a choice anymore because the AI will do it for me. What am I at that point?40:39

Joseph: What do you think you’re, what part of the body are you, I’m just curious. Like in the because like you, you, you seem to, you know a lot about . . I mean, you’re teaching me now about community business. I’m the one who’s trying to build this like online community as my main business. And you kind of know a lot of the, you like understand the principles behind it. Um, I’m just thinking like, what is like…41:12

Henry: I can say a lot of stuff and it sounds nice, but reality is messy. There’s drama in open source, there’s drama in the church. That doesn’t mean we can’t use these principles, it’s just that it’ll hit reality and we have to readjust. And I do have a lot of experience from doing these things too. Both good and bad, which has shaped how I think about it.41:40

Henry: I’m trying to figure that out too. I’m trying to figure out like how to share it or how to talk about it, or how I can be helpful. It’s the same tension in both sides.41:58

Henry: I can say a lot of stuff, and it sounds nice, but reality is messy. There’s drama in open source; there’s drama in the church. That doesn’t mean we can’t use these principles; it’s just that reality will hit, and we have to readjust. I have a lot of experience from doing these things, both good and bad, which has shaped how I think about it.41:40

Henry: I’m trying to figure that out too. I’m trying to figure out how to share it, how to talk about it, or how I can be helpful. It’s the same tension on both sides.41:58

Henry: People in the church don’t understand technology, or even what I do or my experiences. So, I have a hard time sharing that. And people in tech aren’t that open to discussing this stuff, even though I feel like it would help a lot.42:08

Henry: Maybe that’s what this podcast is for. We’re not trying to produce this thing. I’m not doing it every week. It’s just putting it out there. And if someone gets something out of it, awesome.42:27

Joseph: That’s good. There’s the trouble with making art. I’ll send you this YouTube video. When you have a vision in your head versus when you create it in reality, it becomes more flawed. The actual work of art involves iterating on that first thing that is clearly not what you had in your head.42:37

Joseph: And then, mastering the work of actually turning it into something that impacts or resonates with other people.42:59

Joseph: I struggle with that too. I write so much. I have this 40-page doc, and I haven’t really put it out into the world. Same thing with Twitter.43:09

Joseph: I had a lot of thoughts on consumer tech over the past year, and it was all in my notes. Then I just started putting it out into tweets, and it’s actually starting to resonate. I’m building the community business off of that. But I’m trying to get better at that in the personal philosophy and ideas space too, because I want to be able to impact and resonate.43:20

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