I Don't Know You

Matt Heisler

A series of honest conversations, hosted by Matt Heisler, on exploring creativity and leadership within the faith based non-profit world as he seeks to ask the questions that help him understand his own journey in light of the perspectives and experiences his share. mattheisler.substack.com

2d ago

How a Kid Humming in Class Led Matt Smith to Rethink College

Description Dr. Matt Smith is the co-founder and president of Hildegard College in Costa Mesa, a micro-college that pairs the Great Books with a redemptive entrepreneurship lab. He spent a decade teaching at Azusa Pacific before leaving to build something new. We start in Yorba Linda, where a first-generation college kid who didn't read much was given two boxes of classics by his soccer coach and then, a few years later, a beat-up copy of The Hobbit by a kid in English class. From there we get into why grad school felt like a game he learned to win, why the most important parts of college happen in its margins, and what it took to re-risk his career on a new kind of school. We talk about failure resistance, a gaga ball pit that lost money, why teaching is a choreography of walking alongside someone and then stopping, and what AI can and can't do for a student. He also explains why language may be the most important thing a person can grow in. My hope is that this conversation makes you rethink what learning is for, and who you're walking alongside while they figure it out. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more like this, please consider subscribing. This is a passion project for me and the more I can fund this, the more time I can invest in it. 10 Lessons 1. Sometimes the gift that changes your life sits on a shelf for years. Matt’s soccer coach, Joe, was an older Italian gentleman who kept dropping off VHS tapes of 1970s Italian soccer. One day he brought two boxes instead, so heavy a seventh grader could barely carry them: a full set of the Great Books of the Western World. Matt wasn’t a reader. The books went on a shelf in the family room and nobody touched them. But they were there, and when he was ready they were waiting. [08:44] 2. The book that opens a door is often handed to you by accident. In ninth grade, during silent reading, Matt was unknowingly humming a song. The kid in front of him, Eric, turned around and said he knew it. A moment later Eric dug a tattered paperback out of his backpack and handed it over: The Hobbit. Matt read it and all three Lord of the Rings books over the next couple of months. For the first time, reading wasn’t just enjoyable. It changed how he thought about people and about his own moral and spiritual life. [10:19] 3. You can win the game of school and still not be educated. Matt says plainly that he treated school, and later grad school, as a game. If you figured out how to play it, you did fine. He admits he doesn’t remember growing much as an intellectual or a teacher in his doctoral years. His analogy is a car-building course where you spend sixteen weeks comparing spark plug designs. That frustration became part of Hildegard’s design. [16:04] 4. The most important parts of college usually happen in its margins. At APU, Matt noticed that the experiences students valued most sat at the edges of the curriculum. These were the aha moments when a student connects Dante back to Plato, building something real, and being mentored by a professor. Teaching four courses a semester, he could only get to know about 5% of his students, usually the ones who came by for espresso. Graduates say faculty relationships are what made college worth it, yet the business model doesn’t run on them. Hildegard puts those three experiences at the center. [25:00] 5. Entrepreneurship can come from refusing to concede. Matt doesn’t describe Hildegard as an idea he had. He describes it as something he wasn’t willing to give up on: that students could get a better, more personal education for a lot less money. He and his wife had watched the highs and lows add up for years. Borrowing a term from Praxis, he decided it was time to re-risk, to put his career back on the line for the thing he believed in. [23:30] 6. Redemptive business goes past “do no harm.” Hildegard doesn’t teach hustle culture. Matt describes redemptive entrepreneurship as moving past exploitation, and past merely ethical business, toward work whose real aim is loving your neighbor and helping the most vulnerable flourish. That aim should be real, not copy buried on a website. He also pushes back on the idea that you make your money first and do “kingdom work” later. To him that’s just another way of secularizing business. [46:06] 7. Failure resistance is a muscle you build on purpose. Hildegard is openly anti-coddling. Students are invited to raise any honest objection, and reading hard old books gives them the muscle memory not to flinch at anything new. The same goes for ventures. One student built a beautiful wooden gaga ball pit for a school, outside his business model, and lost money because he never priced in his own time and labor. He’ll never forget that lesson again. [57:32] 8. Learning is something only you can do for yourself. A teacher can tell 250 students to memorize everything. That only means they can say it back. Studying moral philosophy doesn’t make you good; you have to choose the good in actual life, and no teacher can do that for you. This is why Matt says employers mostly want teachability, perseverance, adaptability, and above all initiative. [1:07:21] 9. Teaching is a choreography of walking alongside, then stopping. Matt’s working definition of teaching: lead a student into unknown territory, then pull back artfully and see how far they’ll walk on their own. In the lab, a student gets a value proposition framework, then a customer discovery template, and then asks who they should interview. At that point the right answer is: figure it out. [1:09:15] 10. AI can help you get what you want, but it can’t tell you what you want. An advisor’s analogy: you find a genie with one wish, but you can’t wish for what you want, only for what will help you get there. The worst uses of AI hand it the problem, the goal, and the means all at once. Matt says AI fluency should be measured by the quality of what you actually build and the good it does, which starts with deep thinking you do yourself. [1:19:29] Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Oct 14

How a Backhanded Compliment Shaped Hyatt Moore's Life as a Writer

Description Hyatt Moore has been a graphic designer, an art director at a surf magazine, an editor, a book designer, the president of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and — for the last twenty-some years — a full-time painter. Underneath all of it, the one constant has been writing. In this second conversation, we go narrow on purpose: how he became a writer, who told him he wasn’t one, what writing does to a person over the course of a life, and why he’s spending this season of his life putting a hundred short chapters into the world one week at a time. We talk about writer’s block as a thinking problem, the sailing metaphor that pulled a discouraged artist out of a hole, the church board crisis he journaled his way through, and the three things he says get in the way of all of us. My hope is that if you’ve been telling yourself you’ll write it down eventually, this is the conversation that makes you start. Enjoy. 10 Lessons from the Conversation 1. The left brain doesn’t trust the right brain, and that’s why most ideas die. Hyatt opens on something he’s been coaching his creator cohort through: the logical mind looks at the creative mind’s idea and immediately says no, not that. We kill our own good ideas faster than any critic could. His instruction to the group is blunt — let it come out, don’t doubt yourself too quickly. This is also, not coincidentally, the whole argument of the book he’s writing. [00:50] 2. Nobody appoints you a writer. You do the thing, and that makes you the thing. The best story in this episode is about linguistics. Hyatt was at an organization full of linguists, some brilliant and some doing it because the job required it, and the self-doubt ran deep. One of the architects of the whole system used to give a pep talk: what does a linguist do? Language stuff. What are you doing? Language stuff. Then you’re a linguist — now quit dodging it. Hyatt took that framework and applied it to writing, and it’s the cleanest answer I’ve heard to the question of when you get to call yourself something. [09:29] 3. A left-handed compliment can be the thing that clarifies you. Hyatt once wrote a letter for a woman who had lost her husband in a terrible accident. People saw it. It was good. His boss thanked him for it and said: that was a great piece of writing, especially since you’re not a writer. Hyatt’s response wasn’t to be wounded by it — he turned it into a question he’s been answering ever since. Well, when are you a writer?[09:01] 4. What was burning in you as a child is probably still burning. One of the questions Hyatt puts to his cohort is: what was in you early, before anyone shaped it? His own answer is a memory of being about eight years old, making a four-page newspaper out of a single sheet of typing paper — typed, handwritten, with his own drawings and layout. One copy. No photocopiers. So he wrote 5¢ a read at the top and passed it around the family. Publication designer, editor, book designer, writer. It was all there at eight. [05:01] 5. You don’t know what you think until you write it. Asked whether his writing surprises him, Hyatt says yes — with the hundred articles for this book, he’d start with a concept and find that other things arrived as he went, endings he hadn’t seen when he began. This is the part of writing that can’t be replaced by thinking harder beforehand. The page produces thoughts that the mind on its own would not have produced. [20:29] 6. Writer’s block is a thinking problem, not a writing problem. When Hyatt runs his cohort through a writing exercise, the instruction is: don’t think, just start. No head-scratching, no blank-stare paralysis. He defines writer’s block as thinking too much, and locates it almost entirely in the first sentence — because a blank page isn’t a maze with a right path, it’s open in every direction, and that’s precisely what makes it hard. The fix is to narrow it down and start moving. [21:27] 7. Starting badly still gets you there — the route recalculates. Hyatt’s metaphor for this is GPS, which he also uses for God’s guidance. You enter the destination, it gives you a route, and then you get off it — an errand, a wrong turn, you’re somewhere else entirely. It doesn’t scold you. It reroutes from where you actually are. Writing works the same way: start, and you’ll get there another way. Maybe you throw page one out, but page one is how you got to page two. [23:12] 8. Writing and painting are the same instinct in two different mediums — and both are about restraint. People ask Hyatt how he can have two gifts so different. He says they aren’t that different; they’re both storytelling, just different skills. One is spatial and seen instantly, one is linear and takes commitment from the audience. But the discipline is identical: you can overpaint and you can overwrite. Explaining too much is a failure to respect the reader’s intelligence to fill in the rest — like telling a joke and then explaining it. You’ve ruined it. [15:38] 9. Writing can repair something even if nobody else ever reads it. I asked whether writing had ever repaired a relationship. Hyatt’s answer started as a no and became a yes. Years ago he chaired the board of a struggling church that had hired the wrong pastor. As chairman he had to stay neutral in the room while privately holding a side, and it went on a long time with no solution. He started writing it down — not for anyone, never shown to anyone. It helped him, and because it helped him, it helped him with those people. Writing clarifies.[26:00] 10. Sin, self-doubt, and energy. Those are the three. Asked for the mindset that’s been both superpower and hindrance, Hyatt names communication as the gift — writing, painting, speaking — and traces it back to God as a communicator, with each of us holding some sliver of what He is. Then he names what gets in the way: sin, first and without elaboration. Self-doubt, the hundred reasons and the old failures you can’t forget. And energy, which we take entirely for granted until it’s gone — he spent a month on the couch with a-fib a few summers back and learned that when the body has no energy, neither does the imagination. [32:13] Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 16

How One Student's Email Confirmed Rebecca Kindreich's Career Calling

Description Rebecca Kindreich was the youngest of four, born the year her dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and she’s been in caring mode ever since. After years working with developmentally disabled adults and watching therapists turn them away. She went back for her master’s in social work, spent five years as a floating medical social worker at UCI Medical Center, and then led the counseling center at Concordia University Irvine for twelve years. There, sitting in on crisis assessments, she kept hearing the same story from students: the struggle started in middle school, and nobody intervened. In 2021 she left to build SEEDS, bringing therapy, teacher consultation, parent education, and classroom curriculum directly onto the campuses of Christian private schools that don’t receive public mental health funding. In this conversation we talk about the barriers that keep families from ever starting therapy, the student email that told her SEEDS had to exist, and growing from three people to twenty-one. We also get into kids, phones, and AI, and what it looks like to discern which advice to take. *This episode includes discussion of youth suicide. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more like this, please consider subscribing. This is a passion project for me and the more I can fund this, the more time I can invest in it. 10 Lessons 1. Born Into Caring Mode Rebecca’s dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s the year she was born, and she was the youngest of four. Her family moved from California to Ohio when she was six so he could be near his family. Her oldest sister went into social work, and Rebecca looked up to her. On the cross-country team, where she was captain three years running, teammates kept coming to her just to talk. Psychology was the class that simply made sense. ~11:39 2. The Gap You Find by Driving People to Appointments After college she worked with high-functioning developmentally disabled adults, some with a dual mental health diagnosis. She and her staff would take them to therapy appointments and find no one who knew how — or was willing — to work with them. That frustration is what sent her back for her master’s. The work eventually taught her how hard therapy is, and why that niche is so underserved. ~15:31 3. Stabilize, Discharge, Repeat As a per-diem floater at UCI Medical Center, Rebecca moved between the locked psych unit, labor and delivery, burn, cancer, and the ER. The pattern was a band-aid on everything: patients were stabilized and sent out, and some came back. The question that stuck with her was the one the system didn’t answer — where do they go now? ~18:12 4. It Started Way Before At Concordia, Rebecca was called in whenever a student was highly suicidal. In the history-taking, she kept hearing the same thing, even before COVID: the struggle began in middle school or high school, there was no intervention, and it snowballed into a crisis by college. SEEDS is her answer to that timeline. ~20:44 5. Mental Health Doesn’t Discriminate — Funding Does Public schools get some federal and state mental health funding. Christian private schools don’t, and they already pay teachers far less. Rebecca’s point is simple: mental health struggles exist whether a school is Christian or not, and these schools had no way to pay for support. ~21:51 6. Every Barrier Is a Kid Who Never Starts Most families at these schools are middle income and stretching to cover tuition — they don’t have $150 a week for therapy. Christian therapists cost more or carry waitlists of three months, six months, even a year. And after 4pm, family schedules are already full. Putting therapists on campus removes the cost, the wait, and the drive at once. Yes, a kid gets pulled from class — but a kid consumed by anxiety isn’t absorbing the history lesson anyway. ~38:15 7. A Referral Takes It Off the Teacher’s Plate Teachers are burning out on mental health issues they were never trained to carry. From her university years, Rebecca learned that once a professor knew a student was connected to care, they could set it down and get back to teaching. That’s why SEEDS includes teacher training and on-the-spot consultation, not just therapy. ~34:23 8. “Please Help Me. I Need Help.” SEEDS piloted at a single school in August 2021. Before school even started, a family who had called more than fifteen therapists reached her. Within the first three months, a student read the SEEDS information and emailed Rebecca directly asking for help. The next year, five new schools approached SEEDS without any marketing. ~42:40 9. Knock Off Doing the Direct Work In the first three months, a mentor told Rebecca plainly: if SEEDS is going to become a real nonprofit, she has to stop seeing clients and let others do that work. She still steps in on high-risk cases, but she admits sitting in trainings sometimes makes her sad — it looks fun, and she wonders whether she’ll lose the skills. ~54:39 10. The Budget Makes You Less Human Asked what’s making her less human, Rebecca’s answer is the budget. Negotiating contracts and scholarships pulls her out of her comfort zone, and her instinct is to give care to everyone for free. Her board’s reminder is the founder’s tension in one line: this is a business, and if you can’t pay your people, they’ll leave. ~57:13 Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 9

How Three Generations at One Camp Shaped Rod Fletcher’s Definition of Home

Description Rod Fletcher’s grandmother took a job as the camp secretary at Campus by the Sea in 1953. His father grew up there. His parents met there — the lifeguard and the camper, breaking a rule the camp still enforces. Rod’s first summer was 1974, and he was five. Seventy years later, after InterVarsity decided to get out of the camping business and a group of former family campers formed a nonprofit to rescue the place, Rod found himself on the search committee for a new director — and got hired into the job himself. In this conversation, recorded live with a room full of Barnabas Associates, Rod and his wife Heather talk about what it’s actually like to live where you serve: 39 people sharing every meal, trash and groceries hauled in by boat twice a week, ten-cent water, worship happening outside your front door every night. They talk about the church in Avalon that shut down and what sprang up in its absence, the cove next door Rod thinks could be a second camp, and how they handle conflict in a community where nobody can go home at the end of the day. And Rod closes with three pieces of advice for people in their twenties that I’ve thought about every week since. Lessons 1. A Widow, a Secretary Job, and Seventy Years of Consequence Rod’s dad was born to a widow — his own father died while she was pregnant. She never remarried and never had more children. In 1953 she took a job as the camp secretary and spent her summers helping build the place alongside InterVarsity’s Southern California director. Rod’s dad’s first summer was at ten. Nobody in that story could have known they were starting something that would still be running three generations later. ~04:15 2. The Original Rule Breaker Rod’s dad was an eighteen-year-old lifeguard. His mom was a camper down from UCSB. Staff are not allowed to fraternize with campers — then or now. Rod calls his father “the original rule breaker,” and notes that it worked out. It’s the kind of family lore that tells you what a place means to the people who came up in it. ~04:49 3. He Hired Him and He Hired Me When InterVarsity decided to stop owning camps after seventy years, a group of former family campers formed a nonprofit board and effectively rescued the property — subleasing for a year, then securing a lease. Rod was on that board. He was also on the search committee for the next director, since the sitting one was retiring. The line he uses: “I hired him and he hired me.” ~07:26 4. The Miracle Isn’t That He’s There Rod had spent twenty years as head of a school in Texas before that role wrapped up and they came out to camp three years ago. But he’s clear-eyed about the actual miracle: he already loved the place — the diving, the fishing, all of it. Heather is the one God had to move. His marriage advice on the subject is blunt: don’t try to convince your wife to move to a rustic, dirty island. ~08:01 5. Messy, Beautiful No roads. No phones. A house that’s tiny but sits on the cliff over the beach. Praise and worship happening outside the front door every single night — which Rod describes as awesome and really weird in the same breath. When someone in the room offers “messy, beautiful” as a description, he takes it immediately. There’s no line between his life and his work. ~08:35 6. Fletcher Friday and Money Monday Thirty-nine people currently live at camp, and they do everything together — every meal, every day. The rhythms have names: Fletcher Friday, Money Monday for talking about investing, Wednesday Bible study, Saturday movie night. Rod calls it massive discipleship, life on life. Heather notes she didn’t even go to movie night that week. ~09:09 7. Everything Comes By Boat The camp sits in a canyon with no road access — two miles straight up and five down to Avalon on foot. So trash goes out by boat twice a week and groceries come in by boat twice a week. Gas runs around eight dollars a gallon. Water is over ten cents a gallon, roughly thirty times what the mainland pays. Heather’s reaction on arrival: we have to do what? ~15:26 8. The Church Closed and the Town Got Healthier Avalon had a church that stood for 150 years. Two years ago, after a season of genuinely hard things, it shut down. What Rod expected was a spiritual vacuum. What happened instead: a cowboy fellowship at the horse ranch, a Sunday morning fellowship, a Thursday night fellowship, YWAM moving in, another church planting. None of them are a church in a building. His read is that the town is doing better spiritually now than it was when it had one. ~12:42 9. Venting Is Vilifying Heather’s contribution on managing conflict in a community where nobody gets to go home: they have an explicit anti-venting policy. The instinct people have is to check — am I crazy, or are you experiencing this too? — and she’s coached the staff hard against it. If you have a problem with someone, go to them. It’s accentuated in a place like this, but she says it’s the only way that ever works. ~23:46 10. Manners Are the New Superpower Asked what he’d tell a room full of people in their twenties, Rod gives three. Pay me now or pay me later — everything costs more later, so put in the work now. Manners are the new superpower — show up, do what you said, don’t whine, be on time, write handwritten notes, and you will stand out almost effortlessly because most people don’t do the basic stuff. And: people grow into the conversations around them, so choose the rooms you’re in on purpose. ~24:28 Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 26

How One Word Shouted at His Car in Uganda Shaped Jeff Davis’s View of Himself

Description Jeff Davis has spent forty-five years married to his high school sweetheart, twenty years in corporate tech, and twenty more in ministry and nonprofit work. This conversation went almost nowhere I planned. We started with a word he picked up in Uganda, Mazungu, which literally means “white man busily running around looking at his watch,” and spent the first half hour on what cross-cultural work does to a Westerner’s sense of superiority. From there Jeff walked me through the curriculum he’d design for Gen-Z if anyone let him, the moment he realized his corporate ladder was leaning against the wrong wall, and why he says the hardest thing he’s ever done isn’t raising two daughters, it’s staying married well. His wisdom on marriage, family, and leadership is something I really appreciate and I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to speak with him. Lessons from Jeff 1. Mazungu — The White Man Looking at His WatchJeff picked the word up in Uganda by hearing children shout it at his car and then asking what it meant. The literal translation is a white man busily running around looking at his watch — a piece of colonial residue baked into everyday speech. What makes it land is that Jeff doesn’t flinch from it. He treats it the way he’d treat gringo: self-deprecating, field-leveling, and true enough to be useful.~01:56 2. Fail in Their Language and the Barrier DropsThe fastest way into a relationship abroad, Jeff says, is to attempt a greeting badly. People laugh at how miserably you’re failing — and in that moment the hierarchy inverts. They become the expert, you become the student, and suddenly there’s a project the two of you are working on together. The project is you.~00:38 3. The English Camp That Wasn’t About VocabularyIn Cambodia, Jeff’s team ran an English camp and discovered students weren’t coming for vocabulary. They came to hear pronunciation from a native speaker. That single, narrow thing people actually wanted turned into the opening for everything else the trip was there to do.~07:03 4. You Arrive With Superiority Whether You’re Humble or NotJeff admits to feeling less superior for being monolingual, but the sharper observation follows: coming from the West, you show up with a sense of superiority regardless of your character, and it takes time to even notice it before you can set it down.~08:21 5. Sheer Randomness, Not MeritThe place he was born put resources in his hands. Jeff’s read on the person across from him who has none: they probably work harder than him and they’re probably smarter than him. Once that lands, the relationship stops being patron-and-client and becomes person-to-person — which is the only foundation worth building on.~08:51 6. The Curriculum He’d Build for Gen ZGiven the chance, Jeff would teach cross-cultural experience, language learning, history, literature, Bible — and other religious writings alongside it, specifically so students would have something to compare against. His logic mirrors his travel philosophy: you understand where you’re standing only by engaging something alien to it.~09:53 7. The Scottish Enlightenment Nobody Talks AboutJeff traces American ideas about equality not to the French Enlightenment but to the Scottish one, and to fifty years of preaching that preceded the founders — the Judeo-Christian ethic arriving through pulpits rather than being invented in a room. He notes it emerged out of four centuries of feudalism and injustice, which is what makes it remarkable rather than inevitable.~16:25 8. The Book That Didn’t Feel RightAs a high schooler just after the civil rights era, Jeff read The Light and the Glory — a widely accepted book in Christian circles arguing America’s westward conquest did indigenous nations a favor. He couldn’t articulate why at the time, but it didn’t sit right. Learning to trust that instinct against the consensus of his own community is the quiet skill underneath most of this conversation.~23:07 9. The Testimony He Used to EnvyJeff has no dramatic conversion story — no rescue from addiction or crime, just faith absorbed at home and taken for granted through adolescence. He used to envy people whose testimonies had teeth. At sixty-six, he understands the dramatic testimony comes at a great cost, and that he never had to pay it.~30:05 10. Climbing a Ladder Leaning Against the Wrong WallTwenty years into a successful tech career, disillusioned, Jeff told the dean at Azusa Pacific that he couldn’t afford him. The dean didn’t blink: the money’s your problem, figure that out, I’ll give you a job. That answer reframed the whole thing, and Jeff took the job — eventually taking a 50% pay cut while Julie saw the security they’d lose and he saw only the opportunity.~33:30 11. Raising Kids is Easy, Maintaining a Marriage is The Real WorkForty-five years in, Jeff says raising kids was easy — maintaining a harmonious marriage is the most thrilling and challenging thing he’s ever done. He describes needing someone five-foot-four who could stand toe to toe with him, and calls being broken on her the thing that finally made him dependent on God. ~35:00 Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 19

How the Pope's Essay (on AI) Confirmed Ian Heisler's Convictions On The Importance of The Classroom.

Description Today I’m joined by my brother Ian — one of my closest friends, an incredible poet, writer, and teacher of seven-plus years — for a conversation I’ve been looking forward to for a while and is really special as it is my twentieth episode (thanks for continuing to listen). We both read the Pope’s new encyclical on AI, technology, and human dignity. Our conversation ranges from what stuck with us, what it means for how Ian teaches, and how I parent, and build things with AI every day. Fair warning going in: I use AI constantly — this conversation isn’t anti-AI (at least from my point of view), it’s a “how do we use this well/can we use this well” conversation. Enjoy. Lessons 1. Two building projects: Babel vs. Nehemiah 00:00–19:45 The Pope frames the whole encyclical around two images: the Tower of Babel — a unified, impressive project built without reference to God, that sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and ends in confusion — versus Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, a humbler, collaborative, dignified project. Ian reads the Pope’s own language on Babel (”sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing”) and calls it the interpretive lens for the rest of the letter. * Ian’s overall take: multi-layered, doesn’t even get to AI directly until nearly halfway through — grounded first in Catholic social doctrine. * Ian self-describes as leaning “Luddite” (Matt pushes back — “cautious,” not Luddite) but says the letter surfaced dangers he hadn’t considered, especially effects on the global poor and lower-income workers, not just wealthy tech users. * Despite the warnings, both agree the letter’s overall tone is hopeful, not fatalistic — it appeals to leaders to steer AI deliberately rather than treating its trajectory as inevitable. * Tangent: the “self-fulfilling prophecy” logic of “we have to keep optimizing/innovating because that’s just what you do” (Instagram reel reference). 2. The technocratic paradigm & “using power well” 19:45–33:55 Centered on the Romano Guardini quote from paragraph 95 — “Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well” — and Pope Francis’s earlier term “the technocratic paradigm” (¶92): the logic of efficiency, control, and profit shaping personal, social, and economic decisions. * Matt’s question: has any era actually used power well, or is this just the permanent human condition (the Fall)? * Rabbit trail: they Google Romano Guardini (1885–1968) — lived through both World Wars, which frames the quote historically. * Matt only half-jokingly stakes out a monarchist position; Ian counters with George Washington voluntarily relinquishing power after two terms as a counterexample of power used well. * Ian’s key read: the technocratic paradigm makes technology more than a tool — it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, reducing creation to something to exploit and people to “cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency” (¶93). 3. Does AI level the playing field, or concentrate power? 33:55–47:46 Matt’s question, tied to paragraph 108: is AI an amplifier for those who already have resources (design bias, business logic baked into models — e.g., the Google Gemini historical-image controversy) or a leveling force for the average person (e.g., Matt building his own half-Ironman training app in a couple hours with no coding background)? * Ian’s pushback: individual convenience isn’t the same as global equity — the Pope is thinking at the scale of nations and supply chains, not just individual hustle. * The “genie in a bottle” illusion: prompts feel weightless but sit on top of real infrastructure — data centers, water and power consumption for cooling, and (ties to later chapters) labor in the majority world extracting the materials and running the infrastructure that makes AI possible. * Shared conclusion: AI can lower the barrier to entry for individuals with ideas, but that doesn’t cancel out the larger pattern the Pope is naming — the people already holding capital, data, and expertise still benefit most. 4. “Cultivated, not built”: AI in Ian’s classroom 47:46–1:08:00 The heart of the education conversation. Starting from paragraph 104’s point that AI is never morally neutral — every model embodies choices about what it measures, ignores, and optimizes — Matt asks whether Ian distinguishes between “cultivating” and “building” a student. * Ian prefers “cultivation” as the education metaphor: ongoing, slow, never a one-time finished product — closer to tending land than assembling a thing. * Real policy detail: Ian’s school moved to fully handwritten, in-class work once ChatGPT went free ~2 years ago, because there’s no reliable way to verify authorship of anything typed at home. Matt calls it a hard line; Ian says he doesn’t know a more effective alternative if the goal is guaranteeing kids actually think for themselves. * Direct question: has Ian seen students lose the ability to sit with hard questions or tolerate difficulty because of AI/instant-answer culture? Ian: yes, sees it constantly — the “fill out the worksheet as fast as possible, then check out” mindset. Learning that comes fast doesn’t get valued or retained; things that took a year (like finally speaking up in a seminar) stick. * Riff on paragraph 100 — AI’s simulated care and the risk of losing “the very desire to form genuine human connections.” Extended into a broader point: TikTok/social media isn’t a neutral tool either — “tools don’t use you back,” but attention-economy products do. “You are the product.” * That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis) comes up as a parallel — the disembodied, reanimated head that the human characters believe they control but is actually being animated by an outside force — as a picture of the spiritual dimension behind powerful technology, regardless of whether its builders believe in the spiritual world. 5. Two loves, limitation, and the fruit of patience 1:08:00–1:18:07 Drawing on paragraphs 118, 120, and 130 — the “two cities/two loves” framing (love of self vs. love of God and neighbor) and the idea that humanity flourishes through its limitations, not despite them. * Ian reads paragraph 120 in full as one of his favorite passages in the whole document — the point that eliminating suffering would also extinguish love and desire, and that “the wonders of the soul” only occur through the interplay of freedom, failure, dreams, and disappointment. * Matt connects this to efficiency as an idol: wanting to get through pain quickly and “learn everything about it as fast as possible” is never actually how growth happens. Patience, like the fruit of the Spirit, is cultivated, not built. * Concrete example: information you look up instantly (Matt’s margarita-history example) doesn’t stick the way information earned slowly does — ties directly back to what Ian sees in students. 6. Closing reflections: slowness, parenthood, and craftsmanship 1:18:07–1:27:00 * Matt reflects on the paradox of his current season as a new dad — life feels fast, but he wants to be more intentional about slowing down and being deliberate about what he’s “cultivating” in his family, since “so much of how we do life is how we’re taught.” * Ian’s personal takeaway from the encyclical: conviction to prioritize interruptions from real people (e.g., a student who wants to talk) over routine/efficiency, and more awareness of how AI’s costs land hardest on the poor and the majority world — a blind spot he named in himself. * Malcolm Guite’s Arthurian narrative poems (Ian corrects Matt on-air: it’s a quartet, not trilogy — first is Galahad) come up as a picture of the “sweat equity” and cultivation baked into real craftsmanship, contrasted with what a single AI prompt can generate. Extends into a short reflection on the beauty of expertise and craft generally (coding included) as part of how God wired creativity into the world. Connector Questions Question from our last guest: What is one habit you know you need but haven’t started yet? Ian’s question for the next guest: What is something that’s making your life more disembodied or less human — and how could you rehumanize your life more? Guest Background Notes Guest: Ian Heisler, Matt’s brotherReference material discussed on the episode:- The Pope’s 2026 encyclical (full text/audio, ~3 hrs at normal speed)- C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength- Malcolm Guite’s Arthurian poetry quartet (starting with Galahad) Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 12

How the Space Between the Promise and the Land Shaped Josh Henry's Patience

Description Today, I’m joined by my friend Josh Henry. He’s been part of my story for over a decade. We met working together at Apple, and I got to watch him go from there into A21, an anti-trafficking organization where he eventually became my boss as I contracted with them through college. He’s a husband, a father, and a pastor, and lives out in Nashville. This was a really special conversation for me as it pulls on some of the biggest questions I’m wrestling with in this season: what it actually looks like to be faithful and wholehearted in a season where you can’t yet see what God’s doing. Enjoy. Lessons From Josh 1. The Trifecta That Confirmed a Calling - Josh didn’t move continents on a whim. He moved on the collision of three separate certainties: a woman he was in awe of, a cause he’d fallen in love with, and a whispered inner impression from the Holy Spirit about a city — Newport Beach — he hadn’t even lived in yet. When all three lined up, the decision stopped feeling like a risk and started feeling like obedience. ~14:30 2. Nick and Chris “Charge Hell With a Water Pistol” - Josh’s early leaders at A21 modeled a specific kind of faith — aware of darkness, unwilling to hide from it. Being immersed in that visionary, socially engaged leadership didn’t just teach him a leadership style. It became a mirror that showed him who he already wanted to be. ~19:02 3. Chris Caine Found Her Calling at 40 - One of the freeing moments in the conversation: Josh’s leader didn’t discover the cause that would define her ministry until midlife. Her example taught him never to put God’s leading into a box of preferences or a fixed identity — obedience doesn’t have an age limit. ~23:16 4. Identity Received, Not Achieved - Leaning on Tim Keller, Josh names the trap almost every driven person falls into — tying worth to output. The gospel flips it: you’re already a son or daughter, so the work becomes something you’re free to do well, not something you need to succeed at to be somebody. ~25:31 5. “My Hour Has Not Yet Come” - Josh points to Jesus’s own repeated acknowledgment of timing that wasn’t his to control. Living in “the space between” the promise and its fulfillment — what Josh calls hope deferred — is where trust actually gets built, not around it. ~27:02 6. Wholehearted Even Without an Outlet - While waiting years for a platform to preach, Josh wrote sermons with no audience — simply because faithfulness in the wait looked like doing the work before anyone gave him permission to. He calls it enrolling in “the school of timing.” ~29:49 7. The Painting Is Still Being Made - Trusting a process you can’t see the end of, Josh compares it to paint hitting a canvas — you don’t know yet if it’s a Jackson Pollock or a Picasso, but it’s still going to be beautiful in its own right once it’s finished. ~37:31 8. Content Dreamers, Not a Contradiction - Being satisfied with today and still dreaming toward tomorrow aren’t opposites. Josh preached an entire message on this to his students, insisting contentment and ambition can live in the same heart at the same time. ~41:56 9. Convictions You Don’t Set Get Set For You - On raising two young kids in a hyperconnected culture, Josh’s most quotable line of the conversation: if you don’t decide your family’s priorities on purpose, the culture will decide them for you by default. ~53:10 10. A Great Conversation Is What Makes His Heart Say Yes - Asked what makes him feel most alive, Josh didn’t point to ministry wins or metrics. He pointed to the table — to shared meals and honest conversation — calling it a preview of what heaven itself might mostly be like. ~58:33 Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe
Aug 5

How Learning to Soothe His Newborn Daughter Shaped Peter Varberg's Coaching

Description Today I’m joined by Peter Varberg. He grew up a missionary kid in Tacloban, Philippines — the kind of upbringing where his dad’s name opened doors before he ever said a word himself, and being blonde and blue-eyed in a country where that stood out meant he never really got to be anonymous. He studied film almost by accident, won “Film of the Year” as a freshman with a borrowed camera, and eventually found his way into sales and coaching. We talk about the real difference between managing people and leading them, what nearly two decades of missionary-family duty taught him about doing work , and how becoming a father less than a year into marriage cracked open everything he thought he understood about provision. We talk about how knowing when to pause something is important and that most of what shapes us doesn’t look like a plan while we’re living it — usually you only see the hand that was guiding you once you look back. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more like this, please consider subscribing. This is a passion project for me and the more I can fund this, the more time I can invest in it. Lessons from Peter 1. Coaching and therapy solve different problems, and knowing the line matters. Peter went through ICF (International Coaching Federation) training that drew a clear distinction: therapy looks backward, processing where a pattern started and unlearning it; coaching looks forward, setting goals and taking action. He’s upfront that the line gets blurry in practice, and that part of coaching well is knowing when to point someone toward a therapist instead of trying to be one. (13:00–15:00) 2. Growing up in a “fishbowl” taught him to carry expectations before he ever chose his own. As a missionary kid in Tacloban, Peter couldn’t go anywhere without people already knowing his father — a six-foot-three American pastor who spoke five languages and knew everybody in the city. That visibility came with a quiet pressure: his actions reflected on his parents’ reputation, and he absorbed a heightened sense of duty and responsibility long before he understood he was absorbing it. All three siblings, he notes, ended up in therapy working through some version of the same thing — a reminder that even a genuinely good upbringing can wire in patterns worth examining as an adult. (18:00–21:00) 3. “Nobody ends up doing what they studied” — so he picked his major out of curiosity, not certainty. As kids, Peter’s dad walked him and his brother around Tacloban to interview successful people in different fields about how they’d chosen their careers — his own version of a podcast, years before podcasts existed. The lesson Peter actually walked away with was almost a joke: since so few people end up in the field they studied, he decided to study what was simply interesting to him. That’s how a video-editing hobby became a double major in graphic design and film. (27:00–30:00) 4. He built his early film career on effort, not innate talent. As a freshman intro-to-film student, Peter borrowed a friend’s Canon 5D Mark II — brand new technology at the time — while everyone else was still shooting on mini-DV tape. The film wasn’t exceptional, he admits, but it looked like a movie next to everyone else’s student work, and he won Film of the Year as a freshman. From there he went all-in: building his own camera dollies out of PVC pipe and skateboard wheels, welding jibs with a friend, chasing every new technique he could find on YouTube. (36:00–40:00) 5. His daughter’s inability to self-soothe became his sharpest leadership lesson yet. Peter went down a rabbit hole on “assisted naps” and newborn brain development — kids under a certain age physically cannot calm themselves down, so a crying baby isn’t being difficult, it’s in genuine fight-or-flight. That reframe from “why won’t you just settle” to “this is medically incapable of self-soothing yet” produced compassion instead of frustration. He maps the same insight directly onto coaching: leaders who are “unconsciously competent” at their own jobs often can’t see that a new hire’s mistakes aren’t laziness — it’s literally their first time doing this. (52:00–58:00) 6. “Work is not the enemy” — and he wants to build something around that conviction. Peter is sitting on one recorded episode of a podcast he hasn’t finished launching, built around the idea (inspired by Tim Keller’s Every Good Endeavor) that culture treats work as something to escape rather than as part of our design. Coming from a family of missionaries on both sides, he’s wrestled directly with the sacred-versus-secular question — pastor or missionary vs. a “regular” job — and landed on the conviction that work itself is good, not a necessary evil to be minimized. (58:00–1:03:00) 7. Pausing a good idea can be the healthiest decision, not a failure of nerve. One of Peter’s own coaches pushed him to book a recording date for his podcast on the spot — and he did, and it worked. But he’s just as quick to push back on hustle-culture coaching that treats every unfulfilled dream as fear in disguise. His actual framework: look honestly at your current capacity and priorities, and if there’s nothing left to give something, pausing it is a healthy call — not a leap of faith you’re too scared to take. (58:00–1:03:00) 8. Marriage and a baby eight months later pushed him into a season of “I don’t have enough” — until it wasn’t.Peter got married about a year and a half before this conversation, then found out they were expecting just eight months in. He describes months of feeling like he lacked the capacity, in his own strength, to meet the need he thought he needed to meet — a kind of slow-motion Gideon story. Once the baby arrived, he could finally see that the provision he needed had been there all along; he just couldn’t access it by force of will. (1:05:00–1:08:00) 9. You can only see God’s faithfulness by looking backward, never forward. Closing the conversation, Peter lands on the image of rowing a boat — facing backward toward where you’ve been, with no way to see what’s ahead. He connects it to “your word is a lamp unto my feet”: in the ancient world, a lamp only lit the very next step, not the whole road. The takeaway isn’t to demand more clarity before moving — it’s to trust that the next step is the only one you’re owed right now. (1:10:00–1:12:00) Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe

A series of honest conversations, hosted by Matt Heisler, on exploring creativity and leadership within the faith based non-profit world as he seeks to ask the questions that help him understand his own journey in light of the perspectives and experiences his share. mattheisler.substack.com

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Matt Heisler
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2026
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26
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Clean
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© Matt Heisler
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