Latest / Solving the World's Greatest Problems / Episode 11 - What Every Jesus Movie Missed Before The Chosen | Dallas Jenkins

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Episode 11 - What Every Jesus Movie Missed Before The Chosen | Dallas Jenkins · Solving the World's Greatest Problems

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: For success in this business, I needed to be approved of and seen by Hollywood and given legitimacy by the press and by the public.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be approved of by somebody in the marketplace.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: But when I stopped caring about that and was genuinely okay if I never made another movie or TV show, um, that's when I believe God said, now you're ready for the chosen.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's not growth, it's not money, it's not resources that are inherently wrong.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's when you start to look at those things as responsible for or as the just reward for your efforts.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And this may sound like a coupche, but there is not an amount of success that the chosen could ever have that would make me feel like I'm responsible for it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm responsible for five loads and two fish.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Strongly encourage the warnings of don't let your ambition or the resources that come because of it take over and replace your surrender and brokenness.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Solving the world's greatest problems is an audacious proposal.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And yet no generation has mortality, capital, or tools that are.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: The time has come for entrepreneurs, investors, givers, commitments, to reclaim the church's ancient competence to the scale of brokenness into two big threats to do this asylum under its power for its glory together.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Top of the World's Greatest Problems Podcast.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: But what if there was one that highlighted real broken people?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the question Dallas Jenkins wanted to answer.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: The result?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Chosen.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: What started as a short film called The Shepherd inspired thousands of people to support the production of The Chosen Pilot.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: After that, it exploded into what is regarded as the most crowd-funded television series in history.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: After a successful seven seasons, The Chosen is wrapping up to a close.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Dallas opens up about failure, surrender, and the danger of success.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is a must-watch for any entrepreneur building something bigger than themselves.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let's have a talk with Dallas Jenkins.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: 528 days of filming, I think, is a stat.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_04: Seven, eight years.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_04: And it all comes to an end.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_04: So many emotions, I must imagine.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_04: What are you feeling?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's really funny that you ask what how are you feeling?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because for seven seasons, 528 days of filming, for the first 527 days, someone at some point would ask me, How are you feeling?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Are you excited?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: How's it going?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And part of it's a little trace of Asperger's that I have, part of it's my obsession and focus and all that.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I've always said I can't answer that question until it's done.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how I'm doing because it's not over yet.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not good yet.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: When it's good, when it's done, when I'm finished, then I can tell you how I'm feeling.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: My wife Mandy even says, give me, give me a feeling word right now, because I just don't some people call me Chet, uh Dallas GBT, because I just don't, I don't have that gear that in the moment I can appreciate what's going on until it's finished and I know how it turned out.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: On day 528, the last day of filming, I woke up and for the first time two things happened.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: One, I knew that I didn't have another episode or another day of filming or another season hanging over my head.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I also felt immense gratitude.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I felt joy.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like what I wish I could have felt maybe more often during filming.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I would have been better at celebrating a little bit more.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I woke up and I went out into the front yard.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: I always do every morning.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I go out front yard, step on, you know, barefoot in the grass, get a little exercise in, pray, um, listen to a devotional.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't listen to the devotional that morning because I was spending my time thanking God, just going, look what you've done.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Look what you've done.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I just kept saying that.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: What a thing you've done.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: What a thing you've done.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: I and it was real.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was, I was by myself.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I was just overwhelmed with gratitude.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that last day of filming, I truly enjoyed because I can finally answer your question and go, I'm feeling great.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm feeling joyous.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: We left everything on the field.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: We had no, there's nothing we didn't do that we wish we could have.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: There was no resource we wanted that we didn't get.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um the the story was told in the way we wanted to tell it, we did it with integrity.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: The cast and crew is intact and feels good.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I had vowed or hoped that the same kind of um it's a group of friends getting together to make this thing, and it doesn't matter who's watching or how many people are watching, we're gonna focus on honoring God and and the character and of Jesus and the gospels.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then when we're done, if people watch, that's great, but that's not what what we're doing it for.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we did that.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: And even up until the seventh season, when we when we were on set, we were not thinking about what had started with nobody watching, and then went to like a hundred people watching, and then a million people watching, and now it's hundreds of millions that did not change how we made the show.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: No matter how many bigger resources and opportunities we had, we kept that.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm very grateful for that and proud of that.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, beautiful side.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: Any entrepreneur listening to this knows that no matter what the cost, as noble and as grand and as epic as this story is, that's a long time.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_04: There's a point in there where you say, Man, this is a long journey.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: What were those points where you said, I don't know that we're gonna finish this story.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know that we're gonna get to that.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_04: What were the points where it was tested most?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the first few seasons, I had no idea if we were gonna be able to keep going.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: When you when you have a crowd-funded project, and that project is growing faster than the crowd can keep up with financially.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's growing faster than I can keep up with skill-wise and resource-wise.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, when we made the first four episodes of the show, we genuinely didn't know if we were gonna have any money for the next four episodes.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Then we just get just enough for those four.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: We finished season one.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: People aren't really watching much.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's on a new app, it's costly.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: They don't it was when we decided to give the show away for free that actually the money started multiplying even more and the growth of the show started to happen.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so you put yourself in that position where you go, I publicly promised that we were going to keep the show free forever.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: I publicly promised that we weren't going to rely on Hollywood or traditional means to keep this show going.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: We made a deal with Come and See Foundation, which is a nonprofit that came in and decided and you know, and offered to help and said, Well, we'll we'll own the copyright of this now for you instead of you, but we'll also give you complete freedom.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: But we're going to be responsible for raising money for the show.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's that's a lot of control that I don't have.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I have control of the content, I can have control of what I make with the resources I'm given, but I have no control over those resources of getting those resources.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was never a point where I was like, I know exactly how this is going to end.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't until season four that Come and See had essentially guaranteed, we'll make sure you're able to finish.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I trusted them.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say, when you say, was there a point where you thought, I don't know if we're going to make it?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, well, that was the first three seasons.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know if we were going to make it.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: We were just following.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_04: So at some point that switches and give everybody, um, I appreciate the humility of it, but give everybody size and scope of the project.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_04: For people that are newer to this conversation, yeah.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_04: Come and see both what it looks like today, yeah, but the trajectory of what God might be doing with it.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got a really good visual for the to show the growth of the show.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: In season one, we uh we did um a scene from the gospels, the miracle of the fish.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: This is when Jesus tells Simon Peter to put his net on the other side of the boat.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: He'd been up all night fishing, and uh, and then uh there's this miraculous catch of fish.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the filming of that was miraculous.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: The filming of it was crazy, and we didn't have any of the tools we needed, and then somehow it just all came together at the last minute.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: But we were it was so small, it was so uh, you know, hands dirty.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the I'm in a lake in in in Texas, the water's freezing, the wind is blowing.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're I mean, it took uh significantly longer than we had to do it because it was just every element is going against us, and it's just totally fly by the seat of our pants.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Eight years later, seven seasons of filming later, we're finishing the filming of of the show, and we're doing the scene in the Gospels where Jesus does it again.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: So same lake, yeah, same boat, same people involved, and we're filming it on a sound stage that we've built of our own with a huge LED wall acting as the backdrop in a water tank with two huge techno cameras, with a crew that's twice the size that we had originally, and yet it still is the same mindset, the same approach.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: We still I'm that's what I'm most proud of, I think, of this project.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: We kept kept our heads about us and our hearts about us.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm like, this is a representation of what we could never have known at the beginning.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: But look at how far it's gone since then.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: We have more projects to do, there's more to come.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's new translation, new languages being translated almost every day.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's new countries that are grow where this project is growing.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: At any moment, God could stop it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know that.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it would have been enough.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: But so far there seems to be no evidence that this is that this is slow.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's amazing to see what God's doing.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, we're talking about 300 million views, you're talking about 200 million plus languages, as you said, and um 200 plus languages.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: 200 plus languages.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_04: 200 million, yeah.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_04: 200 plus languages.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: Just some incredible favor of what God's doing in that.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_04: I think one of the things that um really hooked me and endeared me to this early, really, it's through the lens of an entrepreneur.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Is it so oftentimes in characterizations of the story before, it was polished, it was so polished that as an entrepreneur, you look at it and he's like, Man, I know the brokenness of building a business, and I know the brokenness of life, and I know all of that.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_04: Like, that's missing.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_04: But when I think about like the first scenes that hooked me, I'd translate it as Peter, a business owner, an entrepreneur, yes, with a struggling business, some tensions at home, yeah, brokenness and family.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_04: For me, that hooked me right away.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_04: When did you know that the humanity and the brokenness element was going to be such a distinctive pull of this?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really great question.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that was the actual impetus for the show.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a we decided to do a show and then discovered that one of the good ways to do this show might be to focus on the humanity and the brokenness.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: It came from a place of I did a short film for my church's Christmas Eve service in 2017, which came out of failure.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: I had my big Hollywood opportunity, my movie completely failed and bombed, and I had no knowledge of where what I was doing next.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so then I did the short film filmed on my friend's farm in Illinois, 20 minutes from my house, behind a barn, and it was about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And what resonated about that short film was that um we were showing the before.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: So in the gospels, we know that there were shepherds out in the field watching their flocks by night.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared before them, and the glory of the Lord showed around them, and they were very afraid, and a multitude of heavenly hosts saying, Glory to God in the highest, peace be on earth to men, you know, on earth to good to good men.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't know in the gospels until we look into the history and the culture and all of that, what it would have been like for shepherds, how outcast they were, how they were the lowest of the low in the in society.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: They would have been dirty, smelly, what their day would have been like.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's not in the gospels, but it's true.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so focusing on that and focusing on the before, so that when the miracle happens, when the God moment happens and it's huge, it's even more resonant because we as the viewer have identified with and been able to connect to the humanity of these struggling people.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that we hadn't seen in Jesus' projects before.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: We always see Jesus then did this and then did that, and we meet the people in their miracle, but we don't see the before, and rarely do we see the after.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how people responded to that short film was so strong.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the other thing that was really interesting about it: people imprisoned, people at halfway houses, people who had experienced significant failure, people who were outcast, were saying, I've never felt so seen.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: This, I when the when the miracle happened, when the big moment happened, the response the viewers were having of this almost transcendent response, yeah, of I'm watching this miracle happen and it's impacting me personally, not just a story in a on on black and white pages, yeah.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: That I'm like, that's really interesting.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: God is amazing.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's I connected with this shepherd, I feel outcast, and God can choose me to do something extraordinary or do an extraordinary work in me as well.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought there's a show there.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's there's a show that focuses on instead of rushing through the miracles and the Bible verses like a movie, we're going to take our time and build out what the before would have been so that the viewer can say, you know what?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if I can see Jesus through the eyes of those who actually met him, yeah, I can be changed and impacted in the same way that they were.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the way to do that is to identify with the before.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so from the beginning, when I first got down in the basement with my co-writers and we started sketching out what we wanted the show to be and who the main characters were going to be and what the stories were gonna look like, we wrote on the wall in big letters authenticity.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: We are going to strive for authenticity no matter what.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the story is not polished.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is not about successful people, it is not about achievers.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: It is not about high achievement that comes from doing great things.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's about Jesus shows up in the before, he shows up in the muck, he shows up in the wilderness, he shows up to the lowest of the low.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a big lesson in that for I think those of us who are more achievement-minded, those of us who've had some success, the viewers and listeners of this show who um are entrepreneurs and who rely on numbers and and and most of them um who if when it works, the success is usually pretty significant.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um that happens, of course, not all the time, but typically the people who are seeking out shows like this are striving, they're achieving, they want, they want tools to help them get better so that they can have success.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's important.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: I listen to these podcasts too.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't have the five loaves and two fish plan, if you're not thinking, my job is not to feed the 5,000, it's only to provide the loaves and fish, which is what God had someone tell me when I was at my lowest point.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you get to a place where you are trying to get ahead of what God has for you and you are skipping past the before, you're skipping past the brokenness, you're skipping past the humility that always preceded these miracles, um, you will miss out on the beauty and joy of what God has for you.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you may have success, but you're gonna miss out on the best part of it, which is when you are in God's will.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I want to come back to that in a second, but just to keep hitting on that idea of like so oftentimes that we look at Peter one-dimensional.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_04: We look at him as like, hey, he's on, you know, carved and etched in stone, the hall of heroes.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_04: What does it look like?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_04: And we haven't seen the humanity side.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_04: And yet, if you were translating that like first passages, Christ encounters an entrepreneur, tells him to let go of his business.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_04: He walks away from his business.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_04: He's dealing with deep personal pain in his marriage.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: There's some very, very deep sides of that.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_04: And we miss the marketplace.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_04: One of the things I've loved about this series is it's going on, we see different places where entrepreneurs kind of come into the conversation.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_04: Whether it's, you know, selling oil, different businesses, the commerce side of it.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Nathaniel is an architect, failed architect, loses everything.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_04: Horrific moment that you see is a part of his story.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_04: There's a redemption part of it.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: You see the marketplace.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_04: How did this help you see that the gospel was really rooted in the marketplace in the beginning?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: What if what have we done in the telling of the story to miss that, to take that out?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: We've we've almost taken the marketplace out of Jesus' story.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a there's a common misperception about the gospels and about the about the gospel and about the life of following Jesus.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Where we go, the the noble, the noble path is to give up everything and follow him.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because those are some of the examples we see in the gospels.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's mention in the gospels and in the New Testament, and obviously throughout the whole Bible, of entrepreneurs, of business people who are involved in this story, and they're not always asked to give everything up.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, the majority of the time, they're needed to finance the ministry.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're needed to keep the ministry going.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then they're told, in in your work, in your career, um, there's still this lesson of, you know, it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of an eel.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there's consistent warnings, but there's not, other than that example of the rich young ruler, there's not too many examples of, I want you to stop doing that and now just give up everything and all you're just gonna be a missionary.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's more non-missionaries in the Bible than there are missionaries.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that gets lost often.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think because we're so concerned about the dangers of success that they can draw you away from a personal relationship with Jesus, which is true, they can, then we we focus so much on the give up everything and follow him part that we miss out on.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, what if you're not called to give up everything?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Then what?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, then where do you find your humility, surrender, brokenness, all the things that come from um poverty or failure?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what's really interesting.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: My wife, who is the heart of the chosen and who hears from the Lord and seeks him out more than even I do.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: When we were first starting this project, God had her in the book of Exodus frequently, and she was trying to figure out why.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it was always these big stories of major successes, victories, and then the dangers and the fallout and the brokenness that happened after that.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: The huge mistakes, the hubris.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, I think God's warning us about success.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: We were just experiencing failure.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And in our failure, I found more closeness to Jesus than I'd ever had in my life.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was seeing miracles, I was seeing God's voice, I was hearing God's voice.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was seeing things, I I had a richness.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I that the pardon the pun, but I had a richness to my life with no future and limited resources and actually no job after a certain point that I hadn't experienced before.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, success might be coming because God keeps warning us about it.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we we we sometimes find that there it seems more noble to focus on poverty and focus on ministry, um, a ministry calling.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we forget that there's people who also in scripture were not called to ministry as a as a as a career, but yet we're given many warnings about what humility looks like and surrender looks like even in your success.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like success shouldn't happen, but beware of it because it couldn't it can change you in the wrong way.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that's uh the reason that you often see in the show people dealing with failure and success.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: We oftentimes show um even religious leaders who have wealth, um, the trappings of that, but also some of the beauty that comes from having a platform and having opportunity and being able to finance ministry.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: We see that a lot too.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: We see the we see the benefits of successful business and how that can lead to more ministry.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I can't answer why we don't focus on.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That more in in uh in the Christian world, other than I it just doesn't seem quite as noble and it seems less relatable to most people who aren't successful or don't have their own businesses.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: But God is has a message for everyone, including the wealthy.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Trafficking, structural hunger, a billion people without the Bible in their language.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: These aren't unsolvable.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're just uncoordinated.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: At solving the world's greatest problems, we're a community of givers taking on the root causes of the world's deepest suffering.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we're taking them on together.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: We've identified more than 30 of the world's greatest problems.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the list keeps growing.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: We work alongside the entrepreneurs, investors, and ministry leaders already in the fight, and we fund the breakthroughs happening right now.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where it starts.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Choose your problem and start your journey with one of our foundation courses.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: You won't just hear about the work, but see the breakthroughs.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And give directly towards them.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Come on your own, bring a few friends, or host a room that's at the table.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Come join the fight and find your people.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Learn more at solving.org.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Under its power for its glory together.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: How do you distinguish between I mean, you've experienced, as you said, that tough season.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_04: You've experienced a season of growth.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: I think oftentimes in the church, maybe over the last decade or so, we have discouraged ambition.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe we've seen what happens after the success and not being able to handle it.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_04: How do you reconcile this tension of like radical humility and this God-sized ambition?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_04: How do you live in that tension?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've I've had a front row seat to multiple wild growth experiences and successes.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: My own father is one of them.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've been part of significant projects or ministries that grew immeasurably.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I've seen wonderful results from that, and I've also seen fallout and crashing out and scandal and failure that came as a result of that growth.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: But when I look back on it, it's never the growth that was bad.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: People's lives were being changed.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was part of a church that was that that that was changing people's lives on a daily basis.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: That didn't stop, nor was it invalid when we also experienced some scandal and some failure.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's not the ambition or the growth that is inherently wrong.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's not even the money and the resources that come from growth that are inherently wrong.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um because what happens when a church or a ministry is growing significantly is more lives are being changed.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: People are being saved.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: That is a good thing.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that is oftentimes um perhaps maybe not the caused by, but certainly used by God to further it, to give more resources to people so that the ministry can expand.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: But what I've learned from those experiences, both personally and observing, is that God doesn't need you specifically for that growth.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that the change that he does in you is actually separate from that.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so what happens to some people is they start to mistake the growth and the resources as either a coming from their own efforts, yeah, or as a necessity for what's happening, not as a gift or as a reward or as reward might even be the wrong word, but as a as presenting an opportunity.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens is they start to feel responsible for it.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I've been given so much.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I want to be a good steward, which is true, but I also need to make sure I don't screw this up.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I need to keep doing what I'm doing, and I need to make sure that I control it, and I need to make sure that I hire all the right people and make all the right decisions.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And oh shoot, I just made a wrong decision.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now I might fail here and now I might fail.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and and so I think that that has led to a fear and a concern of megachurches, of big ministries, of I mean, gosh, the moment the chosen started to grow and we started to have more opportunities.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: I started seeing comments in the comments section of like, make sure you don't go Hollywood, make sure you don't get too per full of yourself.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, okay, that's none of your business.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've got this, but but the warnings were coming from a healthy place of like we've seen this happen before, where people grew and got successful and then crashed and burned.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I I bel I truly believe that there are steps that happen along the way.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's all little things.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's um it's like little white lies, like, uh, tell them I'm not available when someone calls for you.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: We start to justify some of those things because we see how good business practices and good the lessons we've learned from these all these great books that we've all read about building a business and how to lead people and how to they all worked and they all did well.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we start to rely on those things and see those as responsible for our success.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of looking at them as just tools to help enhance what God is doing.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so um I think that that's what I have been conscious of in these eight years and and and plan to never lose sight of this is that um it's not growth, it's not money, it's not resources that are inherently wrong.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's when you start to look at those things as responsible for or as the just reward for your efforts.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this may sound like a cliche, but there is not an amount of success that the chosen could ever have that would make me feel like I'm responsible for it.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm responsible for five loaves and two fish, and I'm good at it, and I've made good five loaves and two fish.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: I won't be falsely modest about the fact that I've worked hard, I've earned the right to make five loaves and two fish and to give them to God, and I'm watching him multiply them.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: But to say that I'm responsible for the 5,000 people who've been fed by my five loaves and two fish would be as ludicrous as it would have been for the boy to tell his parents, I fed five thousand people today, mom and dad, because I gave it to Jesus.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: That would that would be crazy.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's it's the fear of the hubris that I think causes a lot of us to uh to to tamp down or caution against ambition.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And but I think that's a wrong way of looking at it.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think we need to encourage ambition, but strongly encourage the warnings of yeah, don't let your ambition or the resources that come because of it take over and replace your surrender and brokenness.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I love how you know John depicted this in House of David and just set showed like the visual picture of like when the hand of God is on Saul, what was possible, when the hand was removed, how you're just fighting uphill.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_04: And that visual picture, I think, for most entrepreneurs should strike that fear of like, man, may I be faithful?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_04: May I stand in the will of God and not exceed that.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: And may I be willing when the success comes to not see that as my new requirement for my future?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what if it all goes away?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Are you okay with that?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're not, then your ambition has taken over your surrender.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_04: I want to come back to something you said about criticism.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_04: In business and entrepreneurship, so oftentimes, you know, you listen to your customers, you listen to your some critics, but there's a filter that we run that through.
• 29:57
  unknown: Yeah.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_04: Something so weighty as this, the excellence of which you're doing it, you're you're you've got the Hollywood kind of conversation, you've got the theological conversations, they're all clashing in this.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_04: How do you develop the mechanism and the filter of what criticism to listen to and what to ignore and push forward?
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I have what I think God has granted me as a superpower.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: In that um, when by the time the chosen started, and I will say this, and I say this to aspiring filmmakers, I say this to aspiring entrepreneurs over and over again, that the greatest gift that I've received in this project, and probably what's most responsible for my success in this project, has been the brokenness and surrender and the getting rid of the narcissism and need for affirmation that I had all the way up until I was, I guess, what, 42 or 43 years old.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh affirmation was my drug of choice.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um legitimacy was um what I believed was a key uh metric for success in this business.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: I needed to be approved of and seen by Hollywood and given legitimacy by the press and by by the public.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, uh it's hard to get fully rid of that because you know that you, you know, if you're if you're not succeeding in some way, you can't keep going.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you you need to be approved of by somebody in the marketplace.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: But when I stopped caring about that and was genuinely okay if I never made another movie or TV show, um, that's when I believe God said, now you're ready for the chosen.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so the five and two plan of constantly every day going, I'm only responsible for five loaves and two fish, has been my superpower.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: I genuinely don't care what others think.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care about the criticism.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the other thing you gotta not care about the praise either.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way to get to that point is to change your habits.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where some of our business books are helpful.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my favorite book on my Mount Rushmore of books is the um The Power of Habit.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and one of the habits that I started developing was that when I felt the need or the impulse for seeking approval or for humble bragging or for bragging or for starting to take credit or for hoping that someone notices what I'm doing or looking forward to the fame I'm gonna get from this particular success, replace it immediately with scripture.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, talk to someone if you're not an expert on um key Bible verses related to finding your worth in God.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the Bible talks about the fear of man and how destructive that is.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Fear of man is means I care about what others think of me more than I think about what God thinks of me.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: That was me for the first 42 years of my life.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I had my failure, and um God broke me and I started on the five and two plan, and I stopped caring about affirmation, and I started developing new habits.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And when you develop those new habits, even on a spiritual side of things, I became a different person.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: My wife will be the first to tell you, he is different.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is real, he doesn't care about the fame anymore.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: And now I'm getting it, and I'm getting more success, more success than I ever dreamed of.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I genuinely am fine without it.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_04: Who diagnosed you?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_04: Who called that out?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_04: Oftentimes we can come to some of those conclusions ourselves because the bumpy road of entrepreneurship, but who was it in your life that really helped you call out?
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_04: Like, hey, you're addicted to affirmation.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: It it actually was um a result of my struggles with pornography, where I had a relapse in it.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to my our uh good friend of mine who's also an extraordinary therapist and counselor named Garrett Higby, who um is one of the forefront forerunners of the Bible-based counseling as opposed to just kind of personality-based or or um psychologically based counseling, but really rooting it in scripture.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: And he pointed out to me that my pornography, which is by definition a kind of self-focus, you're not you're not sharing your self and and you know, to at the risk of sounding, you know, adult here, but you're not sharing your sexuality with someone else.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're you're only focusing on yourself.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that combined with um my desire to perform, he just said, you you're you're performance-based.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think he he diagnosed me as you have a need for affirmation.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: He just said, you have a need to perform.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, then, of course, by my definition, performance for others means um uh is kind of a result of a of a focus on self, a sense of narcissism that leads you to believe you're worthy of performing for others, that others should be listening and hearing to you.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, every single actor in the world, every single public speaker, every single performer has a trace of narcissism.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: You have to believe you're you're qualified to to step on stage in front of people or whatever, on some level.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: But um, it was it was my counselor, it was my therapist, it was my wife um who saw my struggles, um, and I was willing to listen.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was willing, I was seeking out uh what I feel like this pornography struggle is about more than just lust.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's something, there's a deeper thing that I need to get to the root of.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I started to look at the patterns of other people who struggled with pornography, and there's tended to be a similarity of focus on self combined with a need to put to to show off in some way, which you you think wouldn't be a natural connection point.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a it's it's part of a focus on self.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_04: How does that?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: Go well, yeah.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I just it was it was those people in my life who kind of helped diagnose it.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it was the the biggest thing was, well, what do I do about it?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: And my and and Garrett Higby said, you have to start replacing your thoughts with scripture.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm someone who, when I started having thoughts, I would dwell in them because I'm a good thinker, I'm a problem solver.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I started just almost like Pavlov's dog, like every time the temptation would come, I'd and this is this is true of pornography, but it was also true of intrusive thoughts of wanting affirmation and seeking fame, just instantly.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he gave me a a bunch of scriptures about fearing God over man and finding my my my faith in or my my worth in God, and it just slowly but surely changed me.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_04: When you think about the element of control in this uh line of work, you start getting success and praise.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: And there's an element of that because of the detail, the high quality, the focus to it.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_04: And then people get accustomed to it.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_04: How do you manage?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_04: You mentioned narcissism, you control, creativity, excellence.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_04: How do you balance continuing to be excellence and managing control?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_04: What does that look like these last couple of seasons?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain or elaborate on the managing control, what you need?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: Well, when you think about creative control, I think at some level, again, the the beauty of such high quality of this is uh an intense fixation on excellence.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_04: How do you manage that control element, high quality with a growing team, growing stuff, delegation?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_04: Like what is that balance and that tension?
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so what I've learned is that on one hand, there's books on this and lessons on this on delegation and on empowering others.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I've learned that that applies to your areas of weakness and your areas where there are other people who are just better than you at that thing than you are.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there are some things that you are called to or that you've been gifted with where you're better at everyone else at it.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm better at everyone else on my team at the directing and leading of this particular show and this story.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: And um I'm better at the I'm better at the macro level than others are.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm better at uh figuring out how to take all these different departments and all these different elements and all these different resources and knowing how to apply them.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm good at that.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: I admit that.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna control that.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I also need to make sure that no one impacts what God has uniquely called me to steward, which is the telling of this particular story.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna get input from pastors and from people I trust, but ultimately I'm responsible for the final product, and that can never change.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I've told that to Hollywood Studios, I've told that to the Cum and C Foundation when they came on board, and they, of course, totally agreed.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: So there is a piece that you do have to recognize in yourself where you go, no, no, I'm responsible for this, so I have to control this.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's okay to be a control freak on some things.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: What starts to break people down is when they when they don't know the difference between what you're good at and what others are better at, or they don't know the difference between what you can sustain.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: And there's only so much you can sustain.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: So every company reaches a point where when it's growing, where you go, I'm not just physical, I don't have more than 24 hours in a day.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Again, we've we've heard all this at conferences.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying anything new.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where I think the delegation and the trust comes in in others.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: But we sometimes just start to apply that to everything.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: You go, no, no, there's still some things that I've been called by God to do that I've been that I'm that I'm responsible for.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't abdicate my responsibility in the name of delegation, because sometimes you over-delegate and you start to go, um, okay, this didn't quite work.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: My mistake was in who I chose to do it.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, sometimes your mistake is you didn't, you didn't have a good enough eye on it.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't, you, you, you, you, you abdicated your responsibility.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so you do still need to keep your finger on the pulse of the temperature of everything that's going on in your company, even if you aren't doing it yourself.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: You're still responsible for the final product.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: So um, I'll I'll close this this uh topic with this.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, sorry, it's your job to do that.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm saying what I want to say about this is the best direction, the best um description of a director I ever heard um was that the director is the immune system for the film.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this applies to every business.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: You've got multiple departments, and all of them are going to be focused on their thing.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: So in film, the makeup department, if it was up to them, they would have unlimited time to be perfect with the hair and makeup, but they don't.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have unlimited time.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was up to the um uh cinematographer, the the actors would all stand perfectly still in this perfect light and wouldn't move around much.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: If it was up to the audio guy, they would stand in front of a microphone and speak into it.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: If it was up to the actor, they'd wander the set and wouldn't have to worry about any of that stuff.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: My job is to allow in the best of each department and each person and keep out what's going to conflict with or or in intrude on another department or what's best for the project.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just letting in the best, keeping out the worst, and the immune system for the film.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's true of every leader of every organization.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_04: I love that.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: When you look back with the scope of things, and we kind of become more reflective of the grand arc of this.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_04: We use the language as entrepreneurs like we're solving a problem.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_04: We've used this as an organization with this initiative of solving big problems.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_04: What do you feel like the problem was that chosen solved?
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's the first time I've been asked that.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really great question.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um I saw as a believer, and I know a bunch of non-believers as well, that when it came to media depictions, artistic depictions of Jesus, of the gospel, of the people around Jesus, of this extraordinary 33-year period of time and history that changed the world, and has had more artistic depictions, depictions of it than any other, I found very little that I could connect with, emotionally respond to, have a reaction to in the same way that I did to so many other pieces of art and stories.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, that's a problem, that the greatest story ever told is often depicted in a distant, formal, so reverent that you can't really connect with it way.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that when I did these short films or vignettes for my church about Jesus, um, and we would show it on a Good Friday service or Christmas service, the response, the guttural response to Jesus telling a joke, to uh someone feeling a personal connection to Jesus, to identifying with pain before the miracle happened.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, yeah, there's something missing in this culture that when I look for media and artistic depictions of the greatest story ever told, and art is oftentimes the key to an emotional or spiritual or intellectual connection with something, we are sorely lacking.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought there's something to this human, authentic approach given by someone who loves the Bible and believes in it and is surrendered to Jesus.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've seen interesting artistic human approaches to it, but they're made by people who are like trying to find something new, trying to tell the story in a new way.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, no, no, I love the Bible.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was a Bible major in college.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: I studied under and learned from some of the most, some of the best Bible teachers and Bible lovers of all time.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna bring that foundation to a human, authentic, intimate, playful approach to the gospel story.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's the problem I believe I'm solving.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm solving a problem of we haven't seen this in a way that we can truly connect with.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I'm hearing from everywhere I go, all over the world.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing people say to me, eight out of ten times at least, is it feels so human.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: It feels so real.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: I could connect with it for the first time.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: I feel seen for the first time.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus can call me too, even though I'm autistic or even though I'm a failure.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that That's the problem that I think we're solving.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: When you look ahead, finish us a little bit with this idea of what comes next.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_04: And when I think about that, I've heard you talk about some of the potential projects and kind of the lives of the apostles.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_04: What's the element of that story?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_04: Is it depicting what it means to be bold and courageous and risking your very lives and and how so many of those stories ends?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: What what's the humanity element of those chapters that need to be told?
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here's the beauty of the stories we s we want to tell.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Applying kind of our approach and our principles of storytelling to these Bible stories.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: The common theme is authenticity, humanity.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the cool thing.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: Every story has a different I don't want to dismiss it by using these terms, but every story has a different character arc.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: The story of Moses, the story of Joseph, the story of David, the story of the Apostle Paul, the story of the disciples after the resurrection.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: All of these stories are different in terms of what specific lesson the person needed to learn, what God was doing through it, what God was teaching, uh, what the results were.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know yet some of what God's going to want to say through these stor through these shows and movies to the world.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I know already, like, okay, Moses.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: Moses is a story of brokenness and surrender and of being unworthy to do something extraordinary.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's my story too.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so there that that that there's something there.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that may be different from Joseph's story, which is kind of the opposite.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: He was brilliant and was given all these dreams and was a problem solver and kind of earned his way and worked his way up the system to be granted all this favor.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what did he do with it?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: And did he remain humble?
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: What did he remain, you know, there's different elements in each story, but the common theme of every story that we tell in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and every story that I've heard, is that brokenness and surrender always precedes revival and redemption.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the most common theme that will run through all of the stories that I want to tell is that um before God gives favor, before God gives um, and by that I mean true favor, like his favor.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not talking about money.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: Plenty of people get tons and tons of money from their careers and from their ministries, and God never breaks them of that.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: They just kind of and they never fully embraced the brokenness humility piece.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And God goes, Okay, I'll let you have your money.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the worst thing that can happen.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the common theme of all of our stories is you better get broken at some point.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: You better, you better break, you better surrender, or you're gonna be wealthy financially.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's worse.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: Any more seven-part series, or are we done with seven seasons are never happening again from a show that I am in charge of.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: I promise you that.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: That is never happening again.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm grateful for it.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad I did it.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: Three seasons of shows is probably the limit moving forward.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: God may change my heart on that, but I am uh I'm 51 now.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there's only so long that I can keep uh keep up, keep this up.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: So and there's only so long I can, I can, I can work with the same people for that long.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so some of them uh are coming with me forever, but others I'm like, uh yeah.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: We had a good run.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that's all right.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: Dallas, I'm really grateful for your candor.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_04: I'm really grateful for both your personal authenticity, but the way that you focused in on that.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I pray that as entrepreneurs encounter it, that they encounter the gospel in a way that they haven't ever before.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that as you said, the humanity and the brokenness element, it's something that as entrepreneurs and investors, we deeply resonate with.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_04: And so thank you for being faithful to telling it that way.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I have no I have no other choice.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: It would be um, and I and I mean that in a good way.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: I may God have mercy on my soul if after all of this ridiculous success based on impossible math that I'm not capable of doing myself, if I ever started to go.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: All right, look out, world, I've got more to come, look what I've done so far.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there are many people in my life, you probably included, who would go, whoa, no, no, no.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's silly.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so I this it actually has gotten easier and easier as the as the years have gone by because it's gotten so big that I'm like, geez, I'm never, I'm never gonna be this good.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope I hope it never changes.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: Pray it never changes.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: Well, friends, you know, at the end of every episode, we don't want to leave you with just hype in a conversation.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_04: And today's really encouragement and challenge is pretty direct.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I would can't encourage you enough to start at the beginning.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_04: Start at the beginning of chosen, don't do it alone.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_04: Do it with your spouse, do it with your family, engage in it because there are angles to this story that they will see that you might not see.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: But I want you to dive into it because you will see so many entrepreneurs, so many people and stories and lessons and things that you experience that we've never seen in maybe the churches we've grown up in, the places where we've grown up in.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_04: And it just makes the gospel this get-to joy-filled experience that maybe you've been missing.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_04: So check that out.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's great to be with you.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_04: We look forward to seeing you guys on the next episode.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are your next steps?
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: Give together, meet friends, and discover how you can go further.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: Join us on a call, and we'll give you a 30-minute overview of giving funds and how they work.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Visit solving.org to join the call today.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: Pick a fund and step into the story.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: Breakthroughs are happening right now.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: God is already at work, and you're invited to join him.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: To learn more, visit solving.org.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's solving.org.
• 50:00
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• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and we hope that you join us in solving the world's greatest problems.