The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told

00:00:00.000 Hello everybody. I'm probably in the most unlikely stage setting today that I don't know I've ever

00:00:23.080 been in, although I've been in some unlikely places. This is the house of Caiaphas, the high priest

00:00:30.400 during the time of Christ. It's the setting for part of The Chosen, one of the most successful

00:00:40.900 series, and I would say probably indisputably the most successful religiously based series

00:00:47.960 ever produced. I'm here today to talk with the creator, producer, director, and writer of that

00:00:54.900 series, Dallas Jenkins, who's invited us down here to see the studio and to see the sets and to talk

00:01:03.160 about how this most unlikely of all occurrences made its manifestation. So what did we talk about?

00:01:11.920 Well, the emergence of The Chosen as a spectacular success occurred on the heels of a relatively

00:01:20.480 cataclysmic failure. The precursor movie, so to speak, at least from a career perspective of

00:01:29.380 Dallas, was a failure. It launched as a Hollywood production and spiraled downward almost immediately,

00:01:37.900 and we talked about the desperation, the despair, and hopelessness that accompanied that failure,

00:01:47.320 and then the surprising and remarkable consequences that unfolded across time. And I don't want to spoil

00:01:58.360 the story. You have to hear it in its details to really understand what transpired. But out of the

00:02:06.160 ashes of that defeat, let's say, rose the radical success of The Chosen, very unlikely enterprise. And

00:02:13.360 I was extremely curious about how that happened. I wanted to know how it happened personally.

00:02:21.320 What was the response to the, what was Dallas's response to his failure? And how did the idea of

00:02:27.540 The Chosen make itself present? And what did that mean practically? And why did the audience respond?

00:02:34.160 And how was it financed? And what was the marketing approach? And why did that work? And what does it

00:02:39.900 mean for the culture, more broadly speaking? And what has been the effect worldwide? And how are we to

00:02:47.740 understand that? And we did what we could to investigate all those questions and to provide some,

00:02:55.080 at least, provisional answers to them in the 90 minutes that we were fortunate to talk today.

00:03:00.680 And so, if you're interested in that story, and it's an extremely interesting story about the

00:03:07.460 attempt to film the most interesting story ever told, you might say, then join us for this podcast.

00:03:15.780 Well, let's start by talking about where we are, because we're in this remarkable set,

00:03:23.100 part of a remarkable series. And so, let's talk about the set first, and then the series.

00:03:28.160 We are in Caiaphas' house. I preached Caiaphas. Now, it's in Texas, not Israel. We film in Texas.

00:03:34.900 Texans believe Jesus lived here anyway. So, that's why we film in Texas.

00:03:38.560 This is where he would choose to live.

00:03:39.860 Exactly. And when he comes back, he's coming to Texas first. But we built this set. This is a

00:03:45.120 season five set. It has not been released to the world yet. So, you're introducing Caiaphas'

00:03:49.280 set to the world. Chosen fans have not seen it yet. But this is the room in which not only

00:03:55.120 Caiaphas and Judas make a deal, but ultimately we'll see Jesus come for his quasi-trial. His

00:04:03.040 Sanhedrin trial took place at Caiaphas' house under cover of night, away from the traditional

00:04:08.480 place because they were trying to do it quickly. But with that uplifting, lighthearted note,

00:04:13.080 this is where we're filming this conversation is in Caiaphas' place.

00:04:15.280 Right. And this is part of a large number, a large macro set consisting of a number of

00:04:22.320 large buildings, each of which have sets built inside it. They're all soundproofed.

00:04:27.900 And when did you set all this up?

00:04:29.840 Well, season one of The Chosen was crowdfunded and at such a low budget. We were starting from

00:04:37.740 scratch. So, we were finding places to film and trying to make them look bigger. It was

00:04:43.520 after season two that we realized we have to have our own place. We can't just keep chasing

00:04:49.860 the kinds of places around the country that some of which don't exist. We need our own

00:04:54.400 home and we need to stay in one spot. And so, that's when we started to build some of these places

00:04:59.420 on here in Texas on a property owned by the Salvation Army. There's no pun intended on that.

00:05:06.360 It happens to just be the place that had hundreds of acres of open land and some already interesting

00:05:14.080 infrastructure. And so, we built these sound stages. So, right now, we're in a sound stage

00:05:18.400 that contains Caiaphas' house. 50 yards away is a potential place where we would film the Garden

00:05:25.800 of Gethsemane. There's another building that has Simon Peter's house, Pontius Pilate's house. We had

00:05:31.820 a place where we've got the room for the Last Supper. And then we've got a back lot where

00:05:36.240 we've got a first century Capernaum recreation. So, it's all over the place, but within about

00:05:41.840 half a mile of each other.

00:05:44.200 Well, let's familiarize everybody watching and listening with the story of the chosen

00:05:51.580 in the broadest possible sense. You just pointed out that it was crowdfunded to begin with.

00:05:58.560 Yeah. And so, why don't you start at the beginning of the vision for this series and the ambition for

00:06:04.880 this series and just tell the story because lots of people who are engaged in this podcast won't know

00:06:12.760 it.

00:06:13.620 It was birthed from failure. So, for coming up on 20 years leading up to 2017, I've been a filmmaker for

00:06:22.040 that long. I've made several films with varying degrees of success, but all independent outside

00:06:27.160 of the studio system. When you hear the term indie film or independent film, it means not financed by

00:06:31.380 the studios. And so, I had varying degrees of success, but I was very eager to make a film

00:06:36.120 that was either financed or affirmed or endorsed by Hollywood. And I finally got a chance to do that

00:06:42.100 in 2016. It released in 2017. So, January 20th, 2017, turned out to be the lowest moment of my life,

00:06:51.560 or at least my career, because the film that I had gotten a chance to make released in theaters

00:06:56.380 around the country with several big Hollywood studios attached and working on it, and it completely

00:07:01.720 failed.

00:07:02.120 And that was which film?

00:07:03.160 It was called The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. And the fact that you haven't heard of it is part of

00:07:07.140 the reason why it didn't do very well. So, what happens is, on a Friday afternoon,

00:07:12.980 a math equation takes place. The numbers come in from the East Coast, and you can then decipher

00:07:19.700 how a movie is going to do that day, how it's going to do that weekend, and most often, how it's

00:07:24.280 going to do for the life of it. And within a couple hours, I went from being a filmmaker who had a very

00:07:29.000 bright future to a filmmaker with no future, because the movie bombed. The other stories that we were

00:07:34.640 hoping to tell with these companies, the companies said, no, never mind. Apparently, clearly, we don't

00:07:40.580 understand this audience, this approach, the kind of faith-based filmmaking. And so, out of that,

00:07:49.600 I was home alone with my wife, Amanda, and we were crying and praying and confused, because

00:07:56.640 you hear all the time, God's not the author of failure.

00:08:00.520 And so, when you fail, you must assume that the calling that you thought you'd received to do this

00:08:07.200 work must not have been a true calling. Anytime we feel called to something, it's hard to decipher

00:08:14.040 sometimes whether it's a calling from God or a temptation or just a desire, a fleshly desire.

00:08:20.220 And sometimes it's a fleshly desire, and it's okay. When we choose what we're going to eat for dinner

00:08:25.420 tonight, I don't wait for God to reveal it to me. I just have a desire for something, and it's fine.

00:08:30.300 But I had spent, you know, two years of my life developing this story and seeing so many moments

00:08:35.420 throughout that where doors were opening and God clearly seemed to be present. And so, then,

00:08:40.460 when it failed, I thought, I guess I was wrong. I guess God wasn't present and wasn't calling me to

00:08:45.800 this. And so, in the midst of my devastation, Amanda came to me and said, I feel very strongly

00:08:55.220 and clearly like God is putting it on my heart. Open the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the

00:08:59.900 Gospels. I don't know why, I just know that that's what we're supposed to do. So, we opened the Bible

00:09:06.420 to the feeding of the 5,000, a story I've heard many times before. I've been a believer as long as

00:09:10.980 I can remember. So, what about that story was for us? Well, the thing that we noticed in that story

00:09:18.120 was that Jesus had been preaching for several days. The disciples come to him and they say,

00:09:24.340 Master, the people are hungry. We need to send them home to get food. And what I hadn't noticed

00:09:30.020 before in the story was that Jesus didn't say, Oh, good point. I hadn't realized that. We should get

00:09:36.020 this taken care of. He already knew it. In fact, it was his fault they were hungry. He'd been talking

00:09:42.200 for two days, two, three days. And his response was, Oh, no, we can't send them home because they're

00:09:47.460 so hungry they'll faint along the way. So, we realized in that moment, just because you're at

00:09:53.740 a place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God's not in it. And in fact, it may mean

00:09:58.780 he is in it. Depending on your theology, he either allowed it or he caused it. But being brought to that

00:10:05.100 place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God—

00:10:09.300 You're being abandoned.

00:10:10.400 Right.

00:10:11.200 It may be—

00:10:11.980 Or even necessarily that you were wrong.

00:10:14.540 Why did God tell the Israelites to camp out at the edge of the Red Sea? In advance of the

00:10:20.880 Israelites being pursued by the Egyptians, he said, Go to the edge of the Red Sea and camp out. He put

00:10:26.700 them in this place where they had no place to go. When the Egyptians came and pursued them,

00:10:33.200 they had no escape. And he put them there on purpose. And he says three times in a span of

00:10:39.040 several verses so that I will get glory.

00:10:42.800 It's a tricky problem, eh? Because you don't want to be opaque to failure. I mean, it's a terrible

00:10:49.320 problem. You don't want to be opaque to failure. And being persistent and being opaque to failure are

00:10:56.240 often hard to distinguish. How do you know if you're assiduously pursuing your goals in the face of

00:11:04.220 trouble and opposition or stubbornly clinging to your tyrannical failures, right? Very hard thing to—that's

00:11:12.080 part of that problem of separating the wheat from the chaff or discriminating the spirits. And so,

00:11:17.720 you had spent a lot of time in your career trying to get in a position where you were attractive to

00:11:25.400 the mainstream Hollywood studios. That had happened. It seemed, as far as you were concerned, that you

00:11:31.200 were pursuing the right path. Then you get devastating news and in relatively short order that at least

00:11:37.220 part of what you had envisioned just wasn't going to happen. And you must have been wondering at that

00:11:42.120 point, too. And I'm curious about what you think about that now. Do you have some sense of why the

00:11:48.740 film—I mean, there's lots of reasons films don't succeed, many, like any product. First of all, the

00:11:54.260 probability that any product is going to succeed, even if it's a good product, is low. Everything has

00:11:59.460 to be timed exactly right, including things you can't control. But so, what did you conclude at that

00:12:05.980 moment along with your wife that was the nature, let's say, of the failure? And then let's go back to

00:12:11.140 the story of the feeding. Yeah. So, that didn't happen until that night. So, in the midst of the

00:12:17.400 failure, you're wrestling with what caused it. And for me, as an analyzer, I analyze well. I solve

00:12:24.060 problems. I wrestle with causes and effects. It's one of the things that I'm fairly good at. And then

00:12:31.220 I'm realizing maybe I'm not good at it. Maybe I'm not. So, there's the calling. Yeah, yeah. For sure.

00:12:36.720 There's the calling. There's the spiritual direction that I believe God had given me. Now

00:12:42.380 I'm questioning whether that's real. Real. Yeah, well, that's the thing about— And then there's

00:12:46.160 the surface. There's the practical. What mistakes did I make to bring me to this? Yeah, well, that's

00:12:52.480 an unpacking of levels, right? I mean, there's actually some psychological rules for approaching

00:12:58.040 a situation like that because any failure brings up the specter of cataclysmic, characterological

00:13:06.640 inadequacy, right? Did I fail because— I'm going to pretend that I know what you just said.

00:13:10.260 Well, did I fail because I made a strategic error or did I fail because there's something

00:13:14.980 fundamentally wrong with me at a very deep level? Yes.

00:13:17.860 Okay. So, one of the things that happens to people who are depressed, and it's actually

00:13:22.160 one of the hallmarks of depression, is that every time someone who has a proclivity towards

00:13:28.920 depression faces an obstacle or fails, they immediately move from contemplation of a mere

00:13:36.740 strategic error to analysis of a fundamental characterological flaw. Right.

00:13:42.000 Now, and so there's actually some rules for this. The rule is that if something happens to

00:13:46.900 you, that's negative, you should presume the least amount of error possible and then

00:13:53.580 work downward. It's sort of like the presumption of innocence in the legal realm.

00:13:57.180 Yes.

00:13:57.600 Right. You don't want to take yourself apart any more than is necessary. It's also a good

00:14:01.960 rule of thumb in arguments, let's say, or disputes with your partner, right? You want

00:14:06.400 to start with your wife or your husband. You want to start with the assumption that the

00:14:10.040 problem between you is a strategic and practical problem rather than an indication that the

00:14:15.540 whole marriage should be thrown up in the air and you should leave.

00:14:18.500 Right.

00:14:18.940 Okay. So, now you see this major failure and you're trying to figure out, well, is this

00:14:23.480 a strategic error or did I do something? Is there something wrong fundamentally with my

00:14:27.620 relationship with reality?

00:14:29.080 So, in the afternoon, Friday afternoon, it was the latter. I'm so consumed by that that

00:14:34.260 I don't have room in my head or heart to start to wrestle yet with the practical, was

00:14:41.160 it a mistake, a strategic error? Right now, it's a, have the last 20 years of my

00:14:45.480 life led to this.

00:14:46.900 Right.

00:14:48.140 I need to learn how to drive a bus so that I can provide for my family. Right.

00:14:51.980 Right. So, that's what I'm worried about.

00:14:53.060 Right. So, everything is destabilized maybe as far as you're concerned.

00:14:56.740 So, God brings us to the latter. He's saying, He's helping us wrestle with our calling and

00:15:04.180 His first message to us, or at least what we are wrestling with, is the macro level, the

00:15:12.140 foundation to your point. Was I wrong all along? So, in that moment, reading that story of

00:15:19.300 the Feet of the 5,000 was very comforting because it's a, okay, this doesn't necessarily

00:15:24.340 mean that God's abandoned me to your point or that I'm fundamentally flawed in my calling.

00:15:30.360 Now, I don't know what's next. I don't know.

00:15:32.720 Right. But you don't have to draw that conclusion.

00:15:35.520 That.

00:15:35.720 So, in the story of Job, I mean, the decisions, Job makes a series of decisions in the aftermath

00:15:41.780 of his cataclysmic failure, let's say, which is multidimensional, right? Because he loses

00:15:46.900 his enterprise. He loses many of the members of his family. He ends up ill and disfigured.

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00:17:02.100 Accusing him of moral impropriety of the sort that would lead to that outcome. And Job's decision at that

00:17:07.900 point is not to lose faith in the essential goodness of his being, even though he recognizes that he's

00:17:14.540 flawed like every other person, or to lose faith in the benevolence of the divine, let's say. And so,

00:17:22.620 he goes to the bottom. His wife says to him, there's nothing left for you except to curse God and die.

00:17:29.920 Right? That's her conclusion, given the dismal circumstances. But he doesn't do that. He

00:17:34.840 maintains faith in himself, and he maintains faith in the benevolence of existence, even though

00:17:40.000 he can't necessarily perceive it at that moment. Yeah. So, I'll get to that, because what I did

00:17:46.660 was, in the moment, I'm struggling with faith in myself, for sure. Struggling with faith in my

00:17:51.400 ability to hear God's voice and know what I'm supposed to be doing. And God brings in this reminder

00:17:58.020 of a story that makes me feel a little bit better of foundation. Right. And this came to your wife's

00:18:02.980 mind, this story. Yeah. That's why you investigated it. Yes. That's her contradiction. She was not Job's

00:18:07.800 wife. She did not say, God, I. Right. Right. She said, well, that's open. That's interesting. So,

00:18:11.400 one of the things that does happen to people in circumstances like this, and it's worth noting

00:18:15.920 psychologically, is that if you are wrestling with a very complex problem, you can watch memories and

00:18:24.060 images flit through your mind. Yes. You can think of it, your imagination, what your imagination is

00:18:29.480 trying to do is to sketch out the nature of the new landscape. And it might offer a hint in the form of

00:18:37.580 reference to something read or something encountered that you can then pursue, right?

00:18:43.220 Right. So, it'd be like your wife's imagination had gripped onto the notion that there was some

00:18:48.320 possibility that there was a nugget of information embedded in that particular story that would be

00:18:53.680 useful for this situation. Right. Right. We'd call that an intuition. Yes. But it's a revelation,

00:18:58.260 too. Yes. That's another way of thinking about it. Yes.

00:19:00.080 Okay. So, you took that seriously and you read the story. Right. So, in the midst of it,

00:19:04.700 this is why you're who you are. I wouldn't have put it this way, but we were also unknowingly

00:19:10.000 wrestling, whether it's an intuition or a revelation, and here's why. Yeah. Because our

00:19:14.640 conclusion from the story that we were reading was, okay, right now, we are at that point of

00:19:19.420 hunger and desperation. The next step is the miracle. Jesus brought them to that place so that

00:19:25.900 they were hungry and desperate, so that the only solution to their problem was a miracle,

00:19:30.220 the thing that only he could do. Now, yeah. You know, you mentioned the Exodus story.

00:19:35.540 One of the, what would you say? God, if I remember correctly, God justifies his actions in hardening

00:19:45.160 the heart of the Pharaoh because that increases the majesty of his eventual victory.

00:19:51.960 So that I will get glory. Yes, exactly.

00:19:54.000 Three times in one chapter. Yeah, right, right, right. So,

00:19:57.060 that's a very complicated thing to unpack, and I don't remember if we went into that in the Exodus

00:20:01.620 seminar in the Daily Wire series, but I suspect so. And so, what you're doing is you're laying out

00:20:10.000 the narrative of those events to point out the, what would you say? It's the magnification of

00:20:17.000 what happens that's beneficial by the precursor of the tragic. And it is definitely the case that

00:20:23.600 there's this dynamic in our life that what's good would not be as good as it is unless it could be

00:20:29.960 contrasted with suffering and misery, right? You need that expanse of experience for things to have

00:20:35.780 their majesty. That's a good way of thinking about it to him.

00:20:38.980 So, in the moment, a bad thing has happened, but it's the precursor to something great. So,

00:20:45.660 what is it? We know that Jesus is about to do something extraordinary in the feeding of the

00:20:51.780 5,000. So, what is God about to do with us? And we're thinking—

00:20:55.340 So, that's at least a possibility then.

00:20:57.180 Yeah, maybe. We're thinking tonight, the numbers might so dramatically shift in a miraculous way

00:21:03.480 that God will get glory and that our movie will actually surprise and counteract the math equation

00:21:10.160 that has taken place. And so, we're thinking, don't be surprised if tonight the numbers magically,

00:21:16.340 completely, supernaturally, miraculously turn around. The math equation that Hollywood is used

00:21:21.080 to is upended. And what is about to happen to us is what happened to the people who were hungry and

00:21:25.700 desperate 2,000 years ago. So, that night, the numbers got worse. So, now we're going, okay.

00:21:35.160 So much for that hypothesis.

00:21:36.360 Yes. So, we're back to square one. And now I go to the former. When you had the two

00:21:40.920 options of, is it a practical mistake? Is it an error that was made? Or is it a foundational problem?

00:21:47.300 Okay. Well, I'm going to go now to the—my brain is now back to how I normally am. And I'm going to do

00:21:54.340 what I normally do. I'm going to get online. I'm going to pull up Microsoft Word. And I'm going to do

00:21:59.100 a 15-page memo analyzing all the errors and strategies that were mistaken to lead me to this point.

00:22:05.700 So, I'm writing it out. This is what I did wrong. To my credit, I'm taking blame. I'm not putting

00:22:12.300 blame on anyone else. I was wrong. I missed it. I'm on page 14 of my 15-page memo analyzing everything

00:22:18.420 that went wrong. Ping pops—something pops up on my computer. It's 4 o'clock in the morning.

00:22:24.040 Message pops up on Facebook Messenger from someone I've never met. We're friends on Facebook. We've

00:22:30.540 talked maybe once a year. Doesn't say hi. Doesn't say hello. Just ping.

00:22:35.700 Remember, your job is not to feed the 5,000. It's only to provide the loaves and fish.

00:22:43.840 So, I pause for a moment. I wonder if genuinely, with my computer recording what Amanda and I

00:22:49.820 talked about today, how does this person know to speak to this thing we've been wrestling

00:22:54.640 with all day?

00:22:55.260 Yeah, that's a weird coincidence, to say the least.

00:22:59.340 Yeah. So, I didn't say, hey, Alex, nice to hear from you. I just go, what are you doing

00:23:04.180 up at 4 in the morning? Because I'm trying to analyze. He says, oh, I'm in Romania. I'm

00:23:09.400 on the other side of the world right now. I just heard about your movie, and I wanted to

00:23:12.920 say that. And I said, before I respond, can I ask you why you told me that? He said, oh,

00:23:20.460 that wasn't me. God told me to tell you that.

00:23:23.540 Okay. So, tell me the message again.

00:23:26.360 Remember, your job is not to feed the 5,000. It's only to provide the loaves and fish.

00:23:31.760 Okay. So, what did you make of that?

00:23:33.260 Yeah. So, I first had to—my life changed in that moment because my question about whether

00:23:43.740 or not God was present was clearly answered. He's telling—I found out later that Alex

00:23:49.520 said he was walking home from the grocery store, and he looked up my movie, saw it was

00:23:54.200 a failure. He had enjoyed it. He had seen it himself. He was disappointed. And he felt

00:23:58.500 just as clearly as my wife had felt God putting her into the story of the feeding 5,000, he

00:24:03.040 felt God putting it on his heart. Tell Dallas, it's not his job to feed the 5,000. It's

00:24:07.200 only to provide the loaves and fish. And he said, no, I barely know Dallas. That's a very

00:24:12.360 condescending thing to say to somebody who's clearly—

00:24:14.500 Well, and a strange thing. It's like its meaning is opaque.

00:24:18.020 Yes. It's a very particular reference, right?

00:24:21.380 Right, right.

00:24:23.080 Contextless.

00:24:23.760 Yes. So, he wrestles with that and doesn't want to do that and thinks ultimately, well, God won't

00:24:28.180 let me off the mat. He keeps pressing this into me. So, okay, I'm going to share this

00:24:33.680 with Dallas. It's four in the morning back there anyway, so he won't see it for a while

00:24:37.680 anyway. And of course, he gets this immediate response and informs me that God had been

00:24:42.620 pressing it on his heart to tell me that. So, two things happened. Number one, it all hit

00:24:49.260 me in that moment. Like, I understood what he meant, and that's what you're asking.

00:24:52.500 So, in the story of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus could have, assuming you believe the

00:25:00.740 story and you believe all the stories of the miracles that he performed, he could have

00:25:04.740 manifested loaves and fish from nothing. And he could have fed 5,000 people, and the loaves

00:25:10.540 and fish could have just emerged in their laps. But he says, I need food. Someone bring me some

00:25:17.200 food. Bring me something. And a boy brings five loaves and two fish. And Jesus takes those

00:25:23.320 five loaves and two fish, and he blesses them, and then multiplies them to the point where

00:25:29.220 we can feed 5,000 people. And so, why does he do that? Why does he involve us, or in the

00:25:36.740 case of this story, the boy, in the process when he doesn't have to? So, the principle of

00:25:44.240 your job is to not be responsible to feed 5,000, to not think of the results. I'm a results

00:25:49.660 guy. I'm a problem solver. I'm a—the numbers didn't match. We didn't feed 5,000. We—it

00:25:57.220 failed. And this gentleman is telling me, no, no, that's not your job to worry about. You

00:26:02.780 didn't fail.

00:26:04.120 I see. So, you're looking at the wrong marker of success in relationship to your endeavor.

00:26:08.500 So, as long as you did the right thing all the way along, which is something you have

00:26:13.560 to contend with in relationship to your conscience, the outcome is not the measure.

00:26:18.920 Correct. So, in that moment, when I'm literally analyzing what I did wrong, coming off of a

00:26:26.820 day of wrestling with the story of defeating the 5,000, this gentleman, randomly, out of

00:26:32.320 the blue, tells me it's not that. It's not that you failed, per se. It's not that you—you—now,

00:26:38.860 we could argue about, did I make the best five loaves and two fish? Was the recipe a good recipe?

00:26:43.860 Yeah. Yeah.

00:26:45.240 So, back to Job. So, you see, this is exactly the issue that's dealt with in Job, because part

00:26:51.760 of the subtext of Job is the problem with assessment of a situation—what? What would

00:27:02.120 you say? Using anything but proper intent as the measure.

00:27:08.220 Right.

00:27:08.420 Now, and the reason for that, it's fairly straightforward, is sometimes things that are radically successful

00:27:14.360 fail in the measurable moment. I'll give you an example. So, for example, Nietzsche's book,

00:27:20.860 Beyond Good and Evil, I think it sold 200 copies in his lifetime.

00:27:25.820 Right.

00:27:26.720 Yeah. So, it was a cataclysmic failure, but it was maybe the most impactful book of philosophy

00:27:34.500 in the last 150 years. He didn't know. Right. And then there's the contrary situation where

00:27:41.300 you succeed beyond your wildest dreams in the moment, but it's hollow, and you've sold your soul

00:27:47.780 for it. And everything that comes flooding towards you, which looks like success, is actually the

00:27:53.260 means for your destruction. Right? So, Job does wrestle with this. He says, in effect, to himself

00:28:01.300 and to his friends and to God, that he's in no position to judge what's happened to him,

00:28:07.060 in part because he doesn't have the omniscient view necessary to take all things into account.

00:28:14.340 Right. And so, he's unwilling to condemn himself or God, for that matter, because of this momentary

00:28:21.740 failure, cataclysmic though it is, because everything has not yet been revealed. Now,

00:28:28.020 that's complicated because it still leaves us in an uncomfortable situation, which is,

00:28:32.960 well, if you can't use the result as the marker for success or failure,

00:28:40.860 what do you use as a marker? So, now you went over your conduct, you got this message and you

00:28:49.800 presumed, I'm leaping ahead a bit, my suspicion is that you presumed that perhaps this hadn't been

00:28:57.680 a failure. Like, how did you make the judgment? Well, how did that change your judgment of the

00:29:01.320 situation? It took a year and I think it's still taking place today as you and I talk about this

00:29:06.780 show that, spoiler alert, has become one of the most successful shows in the world and I have

00:29:11.980 gotten some of those things that I used to pursue. But it's different now. So, we'll put a pin in that.

00:29:18.880 Yeah. We'll come back to this moment. Yeah, okay. I don't know yet. I'm going, okay, so he's right.

00:29:24.680 So, you set the stage. So, this could be successful. And so, you did your part. That's

00:29:30.360 the message. The message is you did your part. Yeah. But the, did I do a good job? Was the fish

00:29:38.560 and loaves the best? I don't know yet. I don't know what the reason is for this because if the

00:29:44.920 feeding, if the result, the miracle isn't a good result for the resurrection of Gavin Stone,

00:29:51.220 the name of the movie. Yeah. If it's still failing, if it's never going to succeed,

00:29:55.900 then what is the, I gave my loaves and fish. He's just saying to me in that moment, don't worry about

00:30:00.940 it. Be okay. Because I'm wrestling with what's, so what's the next step? And I don't know.

00:30:06.220 And God's economy of time is different from humanity's economy of time. So, I'm wanting

00:30:10.740 the answer now. Yeah, yeah. He's saying you won't, you don't have that answer now. Just know,

00:30:15.320 just stop thinking about the result. Think more about the five loaves and two fish. And so,

00:30:20.740 for me, as someone who over 40 years of my life had always measured myself by the results,

00:30:28.020 was seeking a particular result, affirmation was my drug of choice. Legitimacy was my drug of choice.

00:30:35.320 It was my voice, my vice. Narcissism was my struggle. In this moment, I think that the feeding

00:30:42.180 of the 5,000 refers to many things. It refers to financial success. It refers to Hollywood legitimacy.

00:30:49.740 It refers to what people think of me, the audience. The audience rejected what I was

00:30:56.040 bringing to them, right? So did Hollywood. So did anything that I was seeking. So, okay,

00:31:02.740 well, that's nice to hear. But in that moment, I realized from now on, and I became a different

00:31:08.240 person that night or that morning, four o'clock in the morning. Okay. God, as long as I am in your will,

00:31:15.860 as long as I am providing five loaves and two fish that you deem acceptable, the transaction's over.

00:31:23.400 No longer will I seek the feeding. I'm not going to be the boy who provides the five loaves and two

00:31:31.020 fish, sees it multiplied, goes home to his parents and says, look, mom and dad, I fed 5,000 people

00:31:35.440 today. That would be ludicrous. So I'm not only not responsible for the failure, I mean, in a manner

00:31:42.580 of speaking. Of course, I'm sure, of course I made some mistakes. Of course, the movie wasn't good

00:31:46.360 enough to achieve its correct box office. That's exactly what Job says. Yes. So, but now my focus

00:31:53.780 is going to be on just the transaction, for lack of a better term, between myself and God. Okay,

00:31:59.560 okay. So one of the things that I've been talking to audiences about as I travel around the world and

00:32:05.260 lecture is a theory of, what would you say, the relationship between truth and adventure.

00:32:12.560 Sure. So here's a way of conceptualizing faith in the truth.

00:32:18.620 Whatever happens if you tell the truth is the best thing that could possibly happen,

00:32:24.520 no matter how it looks to you. Right. So this is because, you see, you got to make a decision both

00:32:30.700 ways. You can say, I'm going to judge the validity and utility of my utterance based on the result that

00:32:38.320 I can see. Sure. Now, the problem with that is you can't see everything. Right. Right. And that brings

00:32:44.220 up those other problems we described. It could be a cataclysmic failure in the moment, but a long-term

00:32:49.400 success or a cataclysmic success in the moment, a long-term failure. If you use the results as the

00:32:55.460 measure, those errors exist. Okay, the alternative is to flip that and say, no, because of my ignorance

00:33:01.440 in relationship to the adjudication of outcomes, I'm going to concentrate on the process and I'm

00:33:06.940 going to make the assumption, and that becomes a standard of faith, that whatever happens if I say

00:33:15.760 what I believe to be true is the best outcome, regardless of how it looks to me. Right.

00:33:19.940 And so that's analogous to the, what would you say, conclusion you drew about even, you

00:33:30.240 might say, a cognitive error that made you susceptible to taking yourself apart in the

00:33:34.280 aftermath of the collapse of your movie. Yes. Right. Now, you still have a problem, which

00:33:39.860 would be, you know, are you just rationalizing? You know, you failed by any reasonable standard

00:33:45.280 of failure. Now you're saying, well, I did everything right and I'm not going to take the failure

00:33:49.280 to heart. Well, I'm not saying I did everything right. Well, okay, fair enough. You didn't say

00:33:52.540 that. I'm saying that's not how I'm going to measure ultimate success here. So what's

00:34:00.180 interesting is I would conclude, and I think I concluded it in that moment, and I certainly

00:34:04.140 conclude it now. In fact, hundreds of millions of people around the world believe the conclusion

00:34:10.260 I'm about to tell you, which is the resurrection of Gavin Stone, that movie was in a sense almost

00:34:14.860 sacrificed at the altar of my own. The measurement of the success wasn't Gavin Stone's financial

00:34:23.120 results because those never went, those never improved. It maintained its failure. So then

00:34:28.720 what's the success? Yeah.

00:34:30.060 Well, it's not necessarily that Nietzsche's book ended up, even though it only sold 200 copies,

00:34:38.920 ended up still having impact. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, that movie is not, in 50 years,

00:34:43.600 people aren't going to say, even though it only did $2.3 million, it inspired millions

00:34:48.980 of people. That movie is the, again, I don't know if I have a better term for it, kind of

00:34:55.740 sacrifice because the story that God is telling in this moment is at the risk of sounding arrogant,

00:35:03.260 my story. It's ultimately, again, skipping ahead for a moment. The chosen became the thing

00:35:10.460 that was the outcome. Well, you said something, okay, now you said something that I thought was

00:35:15.460 crucial and I'm hoping I can reproduce it. And I'm sure I don't have this exactly right, but you said

00:35:22.520 something like you determined at that moment that the outcome wasn't the proper measure and then you

00:35:29.640 described how using the outcome as the measure could be contaminated by your own self-interest,

00:35:35.100 your pride, your desire to be attractive to people, to be accepted in Hollywood, all of that.

00:35:40.300 So, there's a pride element to that. You said instead that you were going to adjudicate the

00:35:45.140 moral acceptability of your actions by what? By determining whether they were an accurate,

00:35:53.020 a genuine reflection of your relationship with God? Yes.

00:35:56.100 Okay. What does that mean exactly to you? Take that apart because it's analogous to this notion of

00:36:02.520 the truth will set you free as a definition, right? So, you said you're switching the criteria that

00:36:08.640 you're using. Yes.

00:36:09.660 Okay. How did you come up with the new criteria and how do you know that you're genuinely applying

00:36:16.100 those criteria in a way that isn't contaminated, let's say, by pride and self-interest?

00:36:20.980 I actually wrote about it on Facebook a few days later. I did this long post where I just said,

00:36:26.120 okay, I'm not going to pretend that I can convince you to go see this movie now. I've

00:36:30.740 surrendered it. Here's what's happened. It failed. Period. End of sentence. Now what? Why do I feel,

00:36:36.500 I actually used the word free, why do I feel more freedom right now than at any other time in my life?

00:36:42.140 The truth will set you free. What does that freedom come from?

00:36:44.660 And that was the experience you had.

00:36:45.980 Oh, absolutely. So, in that moment, I went from, how do I wrestle with this? How do I understand?

00:36:50.380 How do I, what went wrong? Was it me? Was it God? Was it Satan? Was it my friends? Was it the

00:36:55.060 studio? What brought me to this place? It didn't matter anymore. In my life right now, for the first

00:37:01.660 time in decades, I was perfectly willing to never make another film or TV show if that's what God

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00:38:03.460 for three months free. Now, I didn't know if that was what God wanted. I didn't know what the future

00:38:10.140 held. How do you think that transformation came about? I mean, it's linked to this message that

00:38:15.920 you had received and the timeliness of that, but— And the delivery of the message, the fact that the

00:38:20.000 message was—could you call this a coincidence? Could you call it— Well, it's quite a coincidence.

00:38:24.780 It's such an extraordinary coincidence. Similar, I've heard your story. You talk about your wife,

00:38:29.880 what God put on her heart, how she knew when— Yeah, right. You know, and you go, I—

00:38:33.960 Yes, it's quite a coincidence. It's such a coincidence that I must—

00:38:38.480 You're kind of screwed both ways when a coincidence like that shows up.

00:38:41.460 Yes. Because you either don't believe it or you believe it. It's like both are absurd in a way.

00:38:46.320 The secularist or the humanist or the atheist would say, Dallas, it is a coincidence.

00:38:49.820 Right. These things happen all the time. I can't—

00:38:54.320 I don't even know how you would calculate the odds of a coincidence like that.

00:38:57.520 Correct. I can't. And so, I must accept God is clearly in this. He is clearly communicating to

00:39:04.340 me. What must I draw from this? Well, I went to—I've attended business seminars. Every filmmaker

00:39:10.940 will tell you to have a plan, five-year plan. Where are you going to be at in five years?

00:39:15.140 Right, right, right. Yeah.

00:39:15.600 And Phil Vischer, who's the creator of VeggieTales and had a—which was 25 years ago, huge. And then he

00:39:22.420 had a similar crisis of faith. He lost it all. He was left barren and found that God was trying to

00:39:29.760 just get his attention. He was—God was saying to him, I don't care what you do for me. I care that

00:39:33.640 you're doing it with me. I want you. I don't care about what you're giving me. That was his ultimate

00:39:37.680 message. I'll let him speak for himself. But one of the things he said to me was, where you're at in

00:39:42.800 five years is none of your business. So, that, for me, was an extraordinary thought because I'm

00:39:50.640 someone— Yeah, that's a weird one too, right? Because I do believe that it's useful for people

00:39:55.220 to flesh out a vision, right? But you have to do that in a kind of a detached way. You have to

00:40:01.880 understand that that's a first-pass approximation and it's necessary, but you don't want to fall in

00:40:07.560 love with it. You don't want to be wedded to it. You don't want to worship it as a final end,

00:40:11.400 let's say. Now, it's also interesting that this message you got, it's so pointed in relationship

00:40:16.860 to how your attitude changed because you said, this is the other part of this that's

00:40:24.040 too coincidental in a way, because what your friend from—the message delivered from Romania

00:40:32.480 said to you was that your criteria for success was inappropriate. It's very targeted, especially

00:40:39.120 for that moment. So, it's not only the coincidence of the overlapping theme, it's that the message that

00:40:44.580 you received was dead relevant to the problem you were trying to solve and in a revolutionary way.

00:40:49.260 Yes. Right. So, now you have a different hallmark for success. And one of the proofs that that message

00:40:57.580 struck home and was accurate was that instead of being in desperation as a consequence of the collapse of

00:41:04.320 your vision, you said that perversely even you felt free, right? That's very unlikely, right? That's a

00:41:10.800 very unlikely outcome. The most unlikely outcome is you're shattered, at least for a good while.

00:41:15.300 Right.

00:41:15.620 And so, and that would also indicate that you were laboring under a burden of success definition that

00:41:24.180 was actually not good for you at all.

00:41:27.060 I was, I was a performer. I was performance-based.

00:41:30.620 Right, right. That's a puppet. That's like a Pinocchio puppet, right? Performing for the stage.

00:41:34.760 Yes.

00:41:35.300 Yeah.

00:41:35.820 And my strings—

00:41:36.360 That's being an actor.

00:41:37.580 Yeah, yeah.

00:41:38.220 So, you could say, well, your strings were cut. No. My actually strings became stronger. It was the

00:41:46.280 audience was removed from the equation. Am I still willing to be a boy on a string? Am I still willing

00:41:52.220 to be in service to God? Am I still willing to bend the knee and commit to a life of more of him,

00:41:58.920 less of me? I am in service to him, even if there's not an audience while I'm dancing.

00:42:02.280 Yeah, but that's voluntary.

00:42:03.980 Yeah.

00:42:04.180 That's the difference between that and being a puppet dancing on strings, right?

00:42:08.220 Well, for sure.

00:42:08.560 It can be—voluntary submission isn't dancing to the Piper's tune. It's a different game.

00:42:14.040 Fair.

00:42:14.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:15.340 But I, in that moment, said, okay, okay, God. I crumple up the 15 pages. I give up even—so

00:42:24.080 that's the past, but I also crumple up the future. I don't know what my future is, and

00:42:28.780 I'm okay with that for the first time in my life. It may mean I don't ever make—

00:42:32.480 Why were you okay?

00:42:33.760 Because I understood who God was and what he—and it was so clear he was present that I was like,

00:42:40.280 whatever those five loaves and fish are, I'm okay. As long as you—

00:42:45.440 I'm willing to go along with it.

00:42:46.480 Yes, and so if that means driving a bus for—just that I'm supporting my family, that's okay,

00:42:52.180 because what's more important is that I'm in your will and that I'm not basing my success

00:42:57.900 or failure or my mood, my—who I am as a husband and father on how well—

00:43:04.700 Your identity.

00:43:05.260 Yeah, better. Yeah, thank you. My identity in how people see me. My identity in the Bible

00:43:12.320 talks about the fear of man.

00:43:13.740 Yeah, right.

00:43:14.280 I had a fear of man more that I didn't maybe know. I wouldn't have maybe admitted that about

00:43:19.580 myself, but clearly I knew in that moment the fear of man was more than my fear of God.

00:43:23.080 Right. Well, that would be a temptation, obviously, if you're going to be a filmmaker, because

00:43:28.220 one of the things you want to have happen is that you want people to watch your film. So

00:43:32.260 the—so that's a positive in a way, because you want to make something—

00:43:36.540 I'm in a performative—I'm in a performative field.

00:43:38.820 Right. But the problem is, is when you're basing your self-worth on your status as a performer,

00:43:46.920 right, then it becomes about you.

00:43:48.800 Yes.

00:43:49.080 And that does make you a puppet.

00:43:50.820 And so one of the things we know as psychologists is that there's no difference between being

00:43:56.160 self-conscious and being miserable. Those are so closely linked, you can't separate them

00:44:01.820 statistically. And, you know, if you're on stage and you start worrying about how the audience is

00:44:07.300 reacting to you, you get self-conscious and you stumble over your words, you're embarrassed,

00:44:12.220 you—people can tell you're self-conscious, you get awkward.

00:44:15.740 Yeah. And you say things like, oh, sorry, I'm rambling.

00:44:18.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. You start apologizing, right, which is a really bad thing

00:44:22.220 to do on stage. It's like, well, if you have to apologize for being on stage, maybe you shouldn't

00:44:26.640 be on stage.

00:44:26.740 Yeah, now the audience is above you on the—

00:44:28.740 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:44:29.440 They're ahead of you.

00:44:30.420 Continually. Continually. And it's worse, it's the whim of the audience that's above you.

00:44:35.160 Yeah, that's—okay, so that's cool. So, okay, so you have this—

00:44:37.900 So you've got a guy who is narcissistic in a field that demands a bit of narcissism in order

00:44:43.460 to succeed. In one moment, being—having all that taken away from him.

00:44:49.020 And the perverse consequence of that is that you feel free instead of demolished.

00:44:53.320 A hundred percent.

00:44:53.920 Yeah, right. So that's pretty funny. All right.

00:44:55.940 Okay, okay. So then—so, okay, so let's continue. What happens?

00:44:59.080 So, for the next few months, I'm like, well, I—what's my future? Now, I happen to be—we won't

00:45:05.780 get into this—but I happen to be working at a church in Illinois at this time. So I had made

00:45:09.920 certain movies I'd—but they had hired me to come make movies within the context of this

00:45:14.460 large church in Illinois. And so, one of the things that I had done previously was for Good

00:45:21.720 Friday services or for Christmas services at this huge church of 12,000 people, which had huge Good

00:45:26.800 Friday services, eight of them over the course of two days for 2,000 people per service. My task was

00:45:32.340 to make these short films or vignettes about Jesus. And so, going back as far as, you know, 2012,

00:45:39.920 I was doing these little—like, it's where I met Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus and the Chosen,

00:45:45.340 is was—I was doing a short film about the crucifixion from the perspective of the two

00:45:49.200 thieves on the cross. And so, this notion of telling the stories that I've heard hundreds

00:45:53.900 of times but from different perspectives had already proven itself over the last five years

00:45:58.340 to be an extraordinary tool in unlocking people's emotional connection to the story.

00:46:03.800 Why? What did you see when you were making those films? What sort of impact was that having?

00:46:07.440 So, for example, instead of being just what most Bible projects are, like, I assume you've

00:46:15.740 seen—like, have you seen the Jesus of Nazareth miniseries? Have you seen any of these kind

00:46:20.520 of Jesus movies?

00:46:21.520 No, no. The Chosen is the one that I've watched.

00:46:24.020 Oh, well, good. But the genre of biblical filmmaking, particularly Jesus filmmaking, tends to be

00:46:30.780 verse by verse. It's a reenactment of the verses that you're reading. It's not a story,

00:46:35.740 per se, that you're telling that follows traditional three-act structure, other than

00:46:40.000 the fact that a lot of Jesus stories do. But it's—and then Jesus did this, and then Jesus

00:46:44.160 did that, and then he encountered a blind man.

00:46:46.140 Right. So, is it fair to say that that's the subordination of the movie to the text?

00:46:50.400 Yes. Which makes for sometimes an enjoyable recreation of what you already believe,

00:46:56.040 but certainly not a good movie.

00:46:57.920 Yeah, yeah. And that's a crucial thing. It's a crucial thing. You know, I have a very large

00:47:02.740 collection of Russian propaganda art, like 400 pieces, a lot. And I've studied propaganda

00:47:08.840 a lot. And propaganda is the subversion of art to a—it's like a subversion of art to

00:47:15.740 an outcome. It's kind of like what we're talking about with regards to your criteria

00:47:18.780 for success. You already know what the target is. The thing about telling a story is a story

00:47:25.200 is a quest.

00:47:26.400 Yes.

00:47:26.740 You don't know what the outcome is. Now, you might say, I want to make this story in a

00:47:30.340 way that serves the highest possible purpose. That's pretty—that gives you a lot of degrees

00:47:34.860 of freedom.

00:47:35.340 Right.

00:47:35.740 But the story isn't genuine. The story isn't genuine like a conversation isn't genuine if

00:47:42.700 you know what the outcome is going to be. Like our conversation here, I don't know where

00:47:45.700 it's going to go, right? I want to let it go where it's going to go. The religious films

00:47:52.840 can be propagandistic, just like political films.

00:47:55.340 Can be. Oh, they almost always are.

00:47:56.460 Yeah, I know. And then they fail. They're not interesting. And I don't—I think not

00:48:00.300 only do they not serve their religious purpose, then I think they harm it.

00:48:03.460 100%.

00:48:03.820 Because it looks like it's the hijacking of the quest in art to push forward a message

00:48:11.560 that's predetermined. It's not an exploration. There's not even any faith in it, right?

00:48:15.740 Because there's no risk in a way.

00:48:18.660 Right.

00:48:18.800 Yeah, so it doesn't work. And, you know, part of the reason I think that one of the

00:48:23.840 things I've learned about atheists, because I've learned a lot about atheists discussing

00:48:28.240 religious issues with atheists—

00:48:30.400 Have you ever been one? Do you think that there's been a time in your life where you

00:48:34.320 would have said, I don't believe there's a God? Or have you always been agnostic on the

00:48:39.600 verge of back and forth, you know, wrestling?

00:48:41.340 I think I was never an atheist because I was never confident enough in my own doubt to

00:48:47.220 proclaim it as a virtue, in a way, you know. I knew it at minimum. I knew that I didn't

00:48:53.560 know what the hell was going on. There's another thing that mitigated against that, too, is that

00:48:57.660 I've believed in evil since I was very young.

00:49:00.100 Which is helpful.

00:49:01.760 Well, if you believe in evil, you believe in good, because it's the opposite of evil.

00:49:08.040 And so, now, amorphous though that may be. Okay, so now, propaganda.

00:49:16.320 Yes.

00:49:16.560 You learned that you were telling stories, and you were doing that by showing these stories

00:49:21.420 from a new light. Okay, so how did you come across that as an idea?

00:49:25.480 Well, ironically enough, I was listening to a sermon from a pastor in Louisville, his name

00:49:30.080 is Kyle Eidelman, and he was preaching—he did a sermon on the crucifixion. And the story

00:49:37.580 of the crucifixion and Jesus' relationship with the two thieves on the cross takes just

00:49:42.280 a few verses.

00:49:43.120 Right.

00:49:43.500 So, in just a few verses, a man goes from mocking Jesus and seeing those mocking Jesus

00:49:50.380 and joining in on the mockery, and within just a few verses, says, I want to be with

00:49:56.160 you. I believe in you, you know.

00:49:57.940 Right, right, right.

00:49:59.300 And a lot of transformation packed into a very short period of time.

00:50:02.500 As a storyteller, it's pretty bad storytelling. There's no journey. We just know he was mocking

00:50:08.000 him a few verses later. He believed in him. You know, there's no three-act structure. I

00:50:15.160 mean, I guess there's the first and the third act. There's the before and the after, but

00:50:19.140 there's no middle. And so, what would lead him? This pastor was saying, what might have

00:50:25.840 heard from Jesus that could have caused him to break, right? And so, this pastor opined,

00:50:33.000 not claiming fact, but he opined, what if it was he was broken by Jesus' comment, forgive

00:50:39.600 them, Father, for they know not what they do. You know, some of this, he's being mocked.

00:50:43.340 He's being mocked.

00:50:43.580 Well, that would be a thing to be broken by if you actually saw it happen.

00:50:46.560 Right. So, you're mocking him. You're mocking him. You're joining in the mockery, and he's

00:50:49.880 just completely, not only is he not phased and broken by it, he's actually praying for

00:50:55.480 the forgiveness of the people who are doing it.

00:50:57.580 And he means it.

00:50:58.400 And he means it.

00:50:59.060 Right, right.

00:51:00.100 So, that's what his opinion was, and I thought that was very compelling, and I thought, I

00:51:03.380 want to make a short film where we unpack the backstory, the before. And that's a word

00:51:08.480 we use all the time on the show.

00:51:09.540 Okay, so there's a lot in that story that needs unpacking, too. It's like, there's lots

00:51:14.580 of things in principle that you could have taken inspiration from. Why do you think that

00:51:19.240 hit you, what he was doing? Why do you think that captured your—because that's a calling,

00:51:23.600 right? That's the manifestation of a calling, and it has a big effect, as it turns out.

00:51:27.640 Right, right.

00:51:27.840 So, something is being born there. Something triggers, what, a commitment or an interest.

00:51:33.920 What happens exactly when you see him—

00:51:35.840 It's a very quick and easy answer. I'm a storyteller. So, you know, just for example,

00:51:40.680 I watch your gospel series on Daily Wire, and I'm seeing extraordinary intellectuals wrestle

00:51:48.740 with and discuss and debate, and I'm watching it. And of course, it speaks to me because

00:51:52.340 I love the gospels, and I've been a believer as long as I can remember, and I've been tasked

00:51:56.580 and stewarded with—again, fast-forwarded for a second—with portraying the gospel story

00:52:01.820 to the world through the medium of television in this way that has seemingly transcended cultures

00:52:07.340 and boundaries. And so, I'm interested in it from that perspective. But I listen to some

00:52:11.260 of you talk, and I go, yeah, that's fascinating, but my job and my calling and my interest and my

00:52:17.940 skill set is to tell it as a story. And because I'm a storyteller, I'm attracted to the emotional

00:52:24.600 as much or more than the intellectual. And so, I've known these stories all my life,

00:52:29.300 but ever since I was a kid, when I was a little kid, I would hear Sunday school stories.

00:52:33.280 And I'm going, what would it have been like to sit around with Jesus at a campfire?

00:52:36.280 What was it like to be a sibling of Jesus and to argue with him, and then his parents

00:52:40.720 come involved, and they always side with Jesus because he's never wrong, you know?

00:52:44.840 What would it have been like to go to school with the perfect son of God? I was always intrigued

00:52:48.980 by those, and the reaction you just had where you chuckled. I'm like, that was me. I'm going—and

00:52:52.720 I would say that. I'd go, can you imagine what it would have been like to be Jesus's brother?

00:52:55.680 And to go, Mom, Jesus, do this again. And his mom says, well, you need to make the adjustment.

00:53:01.180 He's like, you're always on—Jesus can do no wrong. He's the perfect child. Mom's like, well,

00:53:05.560 yes, he is, actually. That's very funny.

00:53:07.200 So those kinds of things, I was eight years old and was wrestling with that, right? So I've always—

00:53:11.780 Right. Well, and there are people who are natural storytellers, but that's a real gift, and it's—

00:53:16.640 Well, my father is an author of over 200 books. He's one of the most prolific authors of all time.

00:53:22.180 Right. So you came by it honestly.

00:53:23.600 Yes. And so I'm a storyteller in the classroom. I was a storyteller when I wasn't supposed to be.

00:53:28.160 I've always been a storyteller. So when a pastor is unpacking three to four verses

00:53:33.160 with an intellectual conclusion, the part that speaks most to me is the story part of it.

00:53:39.780 What might have been the backstory? I'm like, well, I'm on the case.

00:53:42.180 You see with Christ's parables frequently, like an amalgam of those two approaches, you know,

00:53:47.400 because he'll tell a story, and then the disciples, for example, will say, well, you know,

00:53:52.620 thank you, but we don't really get it. And then he'll lay out the explanation.

00:53:56.360 I've certainly found in my lectures that the most effective way of driving a point home

00:54:01.340 is to tell a story and to provide an explanation, right? The story is brought—this is—it's like

00:54:07.340 the playoff intellectually between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who are aiming in very similar

00:54:12.700 directions. Dostoevsky's stories cover a much broader territory than Nietzsche's thinking,

00:54:19.840 but they're less explicit, right? They're less propositional. So there's a loss there because

00:54:27.220 it's not as defined. Nietzsche is more defined and more specific, but there's a loss because

00:54:33.100 the expanse that Dostoevsky covers is brought—I'll give you an example. So in the Brothers Karamazov,

00:54:40.940 the hero is a novitiate named Eliosha, and he's contrasted—Eliosha is a very good person,

00:54:50.040 but he's not an intellectual, and his arguments aren't as tightly formulated and pointed as they

00:54:55.720 might be. He's often at a loss for words. His brother Ivan is hyper-charismatic and unbelievably

00:55:01.960 pointed in his propositional reasoning. And if he goes head-to-head with Eliosha, he can win the

00:55:09.020 argument. But he loses the battle because as the story unfolds, you see that the goodness of Eliosha

00:55:15.640 triumphs over the Luciferian rationality of Ivan. Ivan wins all the battles, you might say, but loses the

00:55:23.420 war. And Dostoevsky could portray that because he used a story. Like, Nietzsche, as a philosopher,

00:55:29.440 would have to make the philosophical case for Eliosha. That isn't what happens in Dostoevsky.

00:55:34.400 Dostoevsky shows what happens as Eliosha's life unfolds. He does the same thing in his book,

00:55:39.700 The Idiot, which is about a prince who's an analog of Christ, who is a holy fool and who people have

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00:56:43.380 Pity for? But he's a very good person, and you see that unfold in the story.

00:56:49.340 Right. Dostoevsky's showing how a life well-lived triumphs over an argument well-formulated. That's

00:56:56.760 a good way of thinking about it. Correct. And I know just enough, I'm a good enough

00:57:01.960 arguer, well, I'm a good enough formulating arguments to be dangerous. But at my heart,

00:57:06.700 I always find that the way into the persuasion, if you want to look at it from that way, is

00:57:11.440 storytelling. And it always seems to... Persuasion or communication?

00:57:15.680 Both. Yeah, okay. So if I say to you right now, so this morning I wake up and I get out

00:57:21.480 of bed, the simple fact of me saying that, you're going, well, then what happened? Right.

00:57:26.320 Even though you know that it's probably, most likely, banal, it's not very few significant

00:57:34.100 things happen when you just get out of bed, but you're intrigued, right? That's all I know.

00:57:38.880 What happens next?

00:57:39.180 I don't know that I can intellectualize why, I just know that it works. And I know that

00:57:42.440 when I set out to make that short film about the two thieves, we showed their backstory,

00:57:47.760 we showed how they met, we showed, again, all through not fact, but through what we call

00:57:52.140 plausibility. What was plausible? What would have been the cultural context, the historical

00:57:56.640 context? So my co-writer, Tyler Thompson, at the time had never written a screenplay in

00:58:00.980 his life, but we were working at the same place. And he's brilliant at connecting the Old

00:58:06.240 Testament to the New. He's brilliant with historical context and cultural context. And so we worked

00:58:09.920 together to fashion a plausible backstory for the two thieves. Jesus doesn't show up until

00:58:14.120 the last five minutes of the short film. So we spend 20 minutes establishing the things

00:58:19.760 that led these two thieves to be on the cross. And they finally get on the cross and we get

00:58:23.740 to the crucifixion moment when Jesus is there. And the audience, of course, in a church is

00:58:27.300 going, all right, now we're here, we get it. This is the crucifixion story we've heard so

00:58:31.620 many times, but we're seeing all these comments from Jesus that are in scripture. We're seeing

00:58:35.640 them now through the lens of the two thieves on the cross, this backstory that we've

00:58:38.800 been following. And so what happened, to your question, is the audience I saw and experienced

00:58:45.440 and they told me there was a significant aha moment.

00:58:48.300 Right, right.

00:58:49.860 That's a revelatory moment.

00:58:51.340 I had never, yes, I had never considered this. It makes more sense to me now.

00:58:56.160 Right, right, right. Things go together.

00:58:57.960 Yes, now when I read these four verses, I actually can not only understand it perhaps a little

00:59:02.980 better, but I also can see myself in the thief on the cross. And that's the problem with most

00:59:07.520 biblical storytelling is that it's through the eyes of Jesus. Jesus actually doesn't make

00:59:11.840 for a good protagonist in a drama because he doesn't necessarily, outside of that moment

00:59:16.540 in scripture where it says he grew in wisdom and stature. But once his ministry starts,

00:59:20.800 he doesn't make for a great protagonist because he doesn't necessarily learn. He doesn't necessarily

00:59:24.500 go from bad to good or anything like that. And so when we see all these miracles that he's

00:59:30.820 performing in these life change that he's causing, we don't know anything about the

00:59:36.140 people that he's causing it for. That's a clunky way of saying it, but we don't, how can

00:59:43.520 we unpack the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years and touches the hem of his garment?

00:59:47.740 Well, so what you're doing, it's analogous, I would say, to, let's say, what the Renaissance

00:59:52.680 artists in particular did when they were painting images from the Bible, right? They're taking

00:59:56.920 textual reference and they're fleshing them out. Now it's a static image, although a great

01:00:02.240 Renaissance painting is packed with, insanely packed, insanely packed with information.

01:00:07.780 But you have the advantage of being able to do that in three dimensions, right? Because you can

01:00:11.580 have that temporal element so you can use your imagination. See, this is, it's interesting,

01:00:17.860 eh? Because this is analogous to what the great psychoanalytic thinkers did in relationship

01:00:23.360 to dream analysis. Yes. So, a client would tell them a dream fragment and they would ask the

01:00:31.780 client to let their imaginations range to flesh out the territory that was associated with the dream

01:00:39.620 images. So, that would be the first step. And then the second step would be for the analyst himself

01:00:44.100 to participate in that. So, if I was doing dream analysis with a client or merely listening for that

01:00:49.360 matter, I'd watch like your wife was watching when she got that message about the loaves and the

01:00:59.020 fishes. I'd watch to see if an image or an idea flashed into my mind. And one of the things I was

01:01:04.300 doing as a therapist is you'd tell me something and something would be triggered in my mind. So,

01:01:09.360 it's associated. Now, we're similar in some way. So, if I have an association to what you're saying,

01:01:14.780 it's possible that it's also fleshing out the broader meaning. Now, you're taking these biblical

01:01:20.780 stories that are fragments of a narrative, obviously, because the thieves had a life,

01:01:25.680 and you're letting your imagination flesh them out, right? Yes. And amplifying them.

01:01:30.520 Ignatius talked about that. He said, St. Ignatius, when he says, we're to read the Bible with a holy,

01:01:35.660 a sacred imagination. Right, right, right.

01:01:37.440 The text isn't meant, Protestants are uncomfortable with this. I'm an evangelical Protestant.

01:01:41.440 And I'm not a Catholic. So, I'm raised to be a little more protective to the fidelity of the

01:01:48.980 text, the text, the text. That's why there aren't too many things like the chosen, because typically

01:01:53.180 it's, well, we don't want to expand, and your imagination can run wild into a dangerous area.

01:01:57.900 It can, it can. There's no doubt about that. But that's also, the thing about the text is the Bible

01:02:03.980 is insanely hyperlinked. And so, like, crazily hyperlinked. It's really the world's first hyperlinked

01:02:09.400 text. And so, it's not like there's a linear voyage through the text, because each verse refers to,

01:02:16.020 like, five other verses, or 50, and each of them refer to 50. And so, there's a lot of

01:02:20.680 imaginative pathways through the text that are valid textual interpretations.

01:02:25.600 Right.

01:02:25.720 Now, the Protestants who are skeptical are right that you can deviate, and heretically,

01:02:30.740 and that that's a problem.

01:02:31.720 An evangelical would say, well, yes, it's hyperlinked, but stay there. Don't bring your

01:02:37.580 own humanity into the imagination of it. Stick to the text. Yes, this verse is set up by a verse

01:02:44.900 written thousands of years ago, and that's beautiful, and that's perfect, because God

01:02:48.760 wrote this book. So, that's okay. But when you start to bring your own analysis to it, now

01:02:53.640 we're treading on thin ice, and that's for the realm of pastors to provide commentary, not

01:02:58.480 for Dallas Jenkins to tell his own story.

01:03:01.000 Yeah.

01:03:02.580 Just because something has dangers doesn't mean it isn't useful, and just because it's

01:03:06.740 useful doesn't mean it doesn't have dangers. I mean, you can wander into heretical or

01:03:11.200 hallucinogenic or psychopathic territory by deviating too far away from the text.

01:03:17.920 So, you look at a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ from Martin Scorsese's exploration

01:03:21.920 of things, and Christians, most Christians were horrified to imply, I mean, Scorsese was exploring

01:03:30.360 Jesus as humanity, and it went too far, right? And so, they're like, we can't have him.

01:03:34.600 Well, that was Nikos Kazantzakis' work, right? Sure.

01:03:37.180 And he got excommunicated for it, right?

01:03:39.340 But then it's put in the hands of a struggling Catholic who has made movies that most Christians

01:03:46.900 would never even dare to see. But of course, if you look closely, you can see Spiritual Beauty

01:03:52.300 in Taxi Driver and in Raging Bull and some of those things.

01:03:54.440 Right, right.

01:03:54.580 And it's a little too—

01:03:56.720 Risqué, you might say.

01:03:57.600 Risqué, vulgar, right?

01:03:58.820 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:59.480 So, I became comfortable with that as an evangelical, and my church was comfortable with it.

01:04:05.640 Not only comfortable—

01:04:06.360 Why? Why were they comfortable with it?

01:04:07.000 Well, because it felt so plausible, and yet it was rooted in a fidelity to Scripture,

01:04:12.680 meaning it wasn't made by someone who doubts it.

01:04:15.460 You know, you look at the movie Noah from Darren Aronofsky, where many Christians were offended

01:04:19.780 by that because he was exploring the story of Noah as an environmentalist manifesto of sorts,

01:04:26.920 and Ridley Scott doing the Exodus story about Moses, and he's clearly not a believer.

01:04:32.740 Right.

01:04:33.040 And so, that was clear.

01:04:33.560 So, that's where the textual interpretation gets subverted to the psyche of the interpreter,

01:04:37.720 the danger that the Protestants are warning against.

01:04:40.100 Correct. But when it's in the hands of someone like myself who is a believer and who has been

01:04:44.260 raised and trained in fidelity to Scripture and loves it. So, my artistic imagination,

01:04:49.780 has some boundaries to it that I'm happy to.

01:04:52.740 See, this is what Jonathan Pagiot has done on the iconography side, right?

01:04:56.420 Yes.

01:04:56.560 He was trained as a modern artist, but he adopted an attitude of respect and fidelity to the tradition,

01:05:03.400 and that bounded his artistic imagination.

01:05:06.440 Yes.

01:05:06.840 Right?

01:05:07.340 Right.

01:05:07.500 But it provided it with structure, and it also—it's interesting because that means that his artistic vision

01:05:14.120 is now in sync with this broader tradition, which is what you're striving to do by your own testimony

01:05:20.580 or admission here. You're approaching the text insofar as you can manage it with respect and honor.

01:05:27.320 Yes.

01:05:27.600 And then what you'd hope—and I do think this is how it works—to the degree that your intent

01:05:32.720 is pure, so to speak, in relationship to those, your imagination will fall into line.

01:05:39.360 Right? That's how imagination works, because it's a goal-directed process.

01:05:43.060 Yeah.

01:05:43.400 So, your goal—and maybe that's part of what happened in that transformation, too, is, right,

01:05:48.200 because you said you switched from outcome as evaluative standard to something like relationship

01:05:55.340 or covenant as standard.

01:05:57.640 Right.

01:05:57.800 That should mean that your imagination is much more reliable.

01:06:01.480 Yes.

01:06:02.040 Yeah, yeah. Okay.

01:06:02.840 And so, because Jonathan's iconography is intended to point people to the thing.

01:06:09.760 Yeah, not to him, for example.

01:06:10.940 Not to him or to the icon itself.

01:06:12.860 Right.

01:06:13.000 An icon is not an object of worship.

01:06:14.940 Then, if it was, it would be an idol.

01:06:17.600 Yes.

01:06:18.100 And we're warned against idolatry.

01:06:19.540 But iconography points people to the thing.

01:06:21.500 So, I know my place in this story, which is I'm not replacing the Bible.

01:06:30.480 I'm not God.

01:06:31.320 Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus, is not Jesus.

01:06:34.280 And the show isn't Scripture.

01:06:36.800 Are you a prophet?

01:06:38.640 Oh, I'm not going to—

01:06:39.740 Well, I'm curious about this, eh?

01:06:42.680 Because I kind of mean it technically, because the imagination properly harnessed is prophetic.

01:06:51.220 It can see around corners.

01:06:52.580 And, you know, you've adopted a given aim, and we've fleshed out what that aim is,

01:06:58.520 and you are expanding upon and exploring the text.

01:07:03.480 So, now—

01:07:04.100 I would say I'm a herald.

01:07:06.380 Okay, how would you distinguish that?

01:07:07.900 The herald is calling you to look at the thing, and he's gathering you, right?

01:07:13.420 Yeah, okay.

01:07:14.000 When we went to—I went to Israel in 2017 with Rabbi Jason Sobel, who's the Messianic Jewish

01:07:19.680 rabbi, who's one of our consultants.

01:07:21.220 And so, I went to Israel, and I'll get to that in a bit, because there was a profound

01:07:26.140 spiritual moment that happened there, too.

01:07:29.280 But one of the things that happened on that trip was we went to the Sea of Galilee and saw—

01:07:34.060 while we're talking about what took place in the Sea of Galilee and investigating it,

01:07:37.600 there happened to be a man on a boat who was fishing with his net.

01:07:41.420 And it was extraordinary, and it was an old-fashioned boat.

01:07:43.780 It was not, you know, a motorboat, you know.

01:07:47.120 And he's gathering, and there's a parable that Jesus gives in the Gospels about the parable

01:07:52.820 of the nets, where he says a fisherman's job is to gather the fish, and they separate

01:07:57.300 the good from the rotten, and they toss the rotten back in, so it will be at the end of

01:08:01.140 the age.

01:08:01.720 Right, right.

01:08:02.220 You gather the fish, and the angels will separate the evil from the righteous.

01:08:05.300 I'm calling you to be a fisher of men.

01:08:06.980 And he says that to Simon Peter.

01:08:10.080 From now on, I will make you fishers of men, and you are to gather as many as possible,

01:08:16.400 all kinds.

01:08:17.840 I will sort them out later.

01:08:20.480 So I—we had a profound—one of the profound moments, not the ultimate one, but one of them

01:08:25.000 was me going, I think that's what I am.

01:08:26.400 I'm a gatherer.

01:08:27.320 I gather fish into the net, and I let God work out what the result of that is.

01:08:32.020 I'm not trying to convert you in my show, although that has happened to be a very common

01:08:38.380 occurrence, or I'm not hoping—

01:08:40.680 No, that's one of the reasons that your show can be watched, as far as I'm concerned,

01:08:44.160 because there isn't that element of compulsion and force and propagandistic intent—

01:08:50.120 Correct.

01:08:50.360 That, by the way, does drive so much atheist resistance.

01:08:53.760 Like, a lot of atheists are not merely rationalist, materialist, determinists, let's say, who are

01:08:59.340 skeptical.

01:09:00.220 That's sort of their intellectual facade.

01:09:03.200 A very large number of them were hurt by religious people using force to drive home

01:09:08.760 their beliefs.

01:09:09.560 Right.

01:09:10.020 Not helpful.

01:09:10.640 And, you know, I'm always leery of religiously-themed entertainment, because it's got that propagandistic

01:09:19.140 element of subversion.

01:09:20.580 And even though, hypothetically, it's for a good cause, it just—it makes me revolt, let's

01:09:27.120 say.

01:09:27.520 Right.

01:09:27.840 The Chosen didn't do that.

01:09:29.160 I enjoyed watching it, partly because it succeeds on the basis of its ability to tell a story.

01:09:35.660 Sure.

01:09:35.900 Which is that—and it's weird that that should be the first thing, right?

01:09:39.300 But it has to be, I think—

01:09:40.160 It has to be.

01:09:40.640 I don't think anything can take primacy over the story.

01:09:44.520 I don't—it doesn't look like it to me.

01:09:46.400 That's where the feeding of the 5,000 story, again, rears its—I wouldn't say ugly head,

01:09:52.320 rears its beautiful head, because when I'm writing, I'm not thinking about trying to,

01:09:57.120 quote-unquote, convert or even feed 5,000 people.

01:10:00.420 I'm trying to tell a great story.

01:10:01.880 Right, right.

01:10:02.380 I'm trying to honor God and tell as close as I can the truth of the character and intentions

01:10:07.380 of Jesus in the Gospels.

01:10:08.600 And so, that's my job in these—and when I first started doing it with my co-writer—

01:10:14.080 Are you guarding your—okay, so this is a very tricky question, I suppose.

01:10:19.000 I mean—

01:10:19.340 Yeah, all your other questions have been completely—they've just been—

01:10:22.340 Nothing.

01:10:23.120 Yeah, 2 plus 2 equals 4.

01:10:24.220 Well, one of the dangers, too, is that you get concerned about your—okay, as I've become

01:10:30.240 more successful, let's say, as a public communicator, a podcaster, the temptation to

01:10:36.460 protect my reputation in relationship to my selection of guests increases.

01:10:41.200 Should I really talk to that person?

01:10:42.860 Right.

01:10:43.180 Right.

01:10:43.340 If I get worried about my reputation, then I'm going to fail, because the wrong thing

01:10:50.380 is driving me forward.

01:10:53.200 All I've been using this podcast for is to talk to people who I want to hear from so

01:10:58.920 I can learn something.

01:10:59.760 That's it.

01:11:00.500 If I get—okay.

01:11:01.940 For you, as a Christian, if you get concerned about your reputation as a Christian, you're

01:11:06.780 going to get dull quick.

01:11:08.600 Right.

01:11:08.940 I tell people that all the time.

01:11:10.380 They'll say, why do you do this show?

01:11:12.760 And when I'm sitting in my laptop, with my laptop in my living room, if I'm thinking

01:11:18.340 about this scene will cause—

01:11:20.840 Yeah, right.

01:11:21.520 —YouTube videos to come up like they have over the last several years about me, you can

01:11:25.300 look on YouTube right now and find plenty of videos talking about my heresy and my—that

01:11:30.640 I'm leading people to hell because I'm not just—you know, whatever.

01:11:33.240 Or you can find videos that are saying that I'm the greatest storyteller ever and that

01:11:37.240 this show has changed their life.

01:11:38.380 If I start to seek to pursue the latter and avoid the former, then I'm—

01:11:45.020 Yeah, then you're done.

01:11:45.640 —I'm not making a good story.

01:11:46.880 Well, you can see this is what's happened to Hollywood in relationship to the woke ideology.

01:11:51.300 Right.

01:11:51.540 It's like, as soon as pleasing the woke ideologues becomes the goal, then the stories are like

01:11:57.500 instantly contemptible.

01:11:59.900 Oh, 100%.

01:12:00.620 They're just—they're worse than dull.

01:12:02.920 Right.

01:12:03.080 And the people who participate in them are empty.

01:12:06.140 And it just dies.

01:12:07.780 It just—as we've seen.

01:12:09.240 Right.

01:12:09.480 It just dies.

01:12:10.400 So my comfort with telling those stories in the way that I am could have only come from

01:12:17.300 that moment at 4 o'clock in the morning where I gave up.

01:12:20.860 So the feeding the 5,000 that I felt responsible for not only refers to financial success, it

01:12:25.520 refers to spiritual achievement, right?

01:12:29.460 Mission.

01:12:30.340 I can't feel like my mission is to convert more people—

01:12:33.520 Yeah, right.

01:12:33.560 Well, you don't know what your mission is.

01:12:34.880 —or gather more fish.

01:12:36.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:36.540 Or when I gather them, I'm responsible for putting the righteous in this boat and the

01:12:42.440 evil into the—that's God's job, right?

01:12:44.760 So I'm a gatherer.

01:12:45.760 I'm a herald.

01:12:46.500 So that's to your question.

01:12:47.700 Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

01:12:48.740 So my comfort with telling those stories could have only happened after that moment that

01:12:53.580 happened at 4 o'clock in the morning.

01:12:54.900 And so what happened after we've had several short films and vignettes over the years that

01:13:00.520 had had that—resulted in that aha moment, it was clear that we were onto something.

01:13:04.960 It was clear that telling stories from a different lens allowed people to unpack it differently.

01:13:10.120 So, for example, I filmed a vignette around the crucifixion where Peter is wrestling with

01:13:16.300 how is this possible that the Messiah could have died?

01:13:19.380 If he's the Messiah, why would he die?

01:13:20.800 That must have missed it, right?

01:13:22.380 And so he's flashing—

01:13:23.120 Bad outcome.

01:13:23.600 Right, so he's flashing back to when Jesus—he's flashing back to when Jesus called him Peter

01:13:29.640 and called him the rock and said, you now have the keys to the kingdom of heaven, yada, yada.

01:13:33.280 So he's flashing back to that moment.

01:13:34.380 Well, I went to that moment, and I started it with two disciples arm wrestling, and they're

01:13:40.160 just having fun around the fire.

01:13:41.380 This goes back to my eight-year-old self.

01:13:43.020 What would it have been like to sit around the fire with Jesus with the 12 disciples,

01:13:45.800 and they're just friends.

01:13:46.740 What are they doing?

01:13:47.260 And so they're arm wrestling, and I have one of the disciples have a surprise victory over

01:13:52.100 the other.

01:13:52.420 The other one had been undefeated, and Andrew defeats Thaddeus, and they go, oh my goodness,

01:13:56.560 look what happened, he won.

01:13:57.960 And John says, I can't believe Andrew beat Thaddeus.

01:14:00.780 And Jesus says, even I didn't see that coming, right?

01:14:03.620 Jesus making a joke about his own divinity.

01:14:06.200 And I remember leading up to that, my wife Amanda had even said, I don't know, I don't

01:14:10.600 know if this is—you know, sometimes people are uncomfortable with so much humanity of Jesus,

01:14:15.820 right?

01:14:16.000 I'm assuming—

01:14:16.740 That's a good joke.

01:14:17.580 Right.

01:14:17.980 That's what I thought.

01:14:18.600 It's a good joke, yeah.

01:14:19.680 So I remember, I'll never forget it.

01:14:23.160 I'm watching, I'm waiting, that joke comes, and the audience laughs hard, but I can—I'm

01:14:28.900 a fairly good audience gauger, and I could tell it was not only just a laughter of humor,

01:14:33.700 it was a laughter of relief.

01:14:34.720 Sure.

01:14:35.640 They, the, the, the, I don't know, the air was let out of the balloon, maybe it was,

01:14:40.480 and I've had people coming up to me going, oh my goodness, seeing Jesus have fun, seeing

01:14:44.960 Jesus laugh with his friends was a, was a revelatory moment for them.

01:14:49.760 It unlocked, it made everything else make more sense, it brought it more, more—

01:14:54.440 Brought some play into it.

01:14:55.480 Of course, but then by that case, then it opens you to the, to the next part, which is

01:15:00.140 when he calls Peter Rock, the serious stuff.

01:15:01.700 If your, your, your soil is tilled because you've, you're laughing, because you're charmed,

01:15:06.480 because, and this clearly must have been how Jesus was, because why else would children

01:15:11.020 have found him so attractive?

01:15:12.760 Why else would thousands of people followed him around just to hear him speak?

01:15:15.760 So it was not an offensive thing, it was a life-giving thing, and so we, we, we learned

01:15:21.240 that that worked, right?

01:15:22.780 So that was the training ground for what happened.

01:15:24.920 That's important.

01:15:25.580 So a few months, fast forward to a few months after my failure, after my moment at four in

01:15:31.240 the morning, and I take the script that we had written a year and a half earlier about

01:15:35.060 the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds, put it on the shelf because

01:15:39.160 of my Hollywood movie, right?

01:15:42.340 Well, I'm thinking, I'm willing to drive a bus, I'm willing to get a normal job of whatever

01:15:45.940 it takes, but, but, you know, let's pull this off, and I'm still working at this church,

01:15:49.940 I've still got the security of that job.

01:15:51.740 I say to them, you want to do another short film?

01:15:53.440 Let's film it for Christmas Eve.

01:15:54.820 And they loved it, right?

01:15:55.720 So I'm on my friend's farm in Illinois, 20 minutes from my house, I'm filming this short

01:16:02.260 film called The Shepherd, and it's about what the shepherds would have been experiencing

01:16:05.380 that morning, and, and, and what it would have been like to be a shepherd, and what it would

01:16:08.760 have been like to be in the marketplace that day in Bethlehem, selling your sheep for slaughter.

01:16:12.800 And, and then that night, while you're out in the field, you're visited by a host of

01:16:17.480 angels and choosing you as shepherds, the lowliest of the low in society.

01:16:21.240 So we're going to unpack that, we see it in scripture briefly, but it doesn't, scripture

01:16:25.120 doesn't say the shepherds who happen to be lowly and happen to be poor, and you have

01:16:29.060 to unpack that somehow, you have to get that from somewhere beside.

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01:17:54.300 Scripture.

01:17:55.400 So that's what we're doing.

01:17:56.340 And that short film, while I was making it, again, it felt like a big step down from a

01:18:02.000 Hollywood opportunity.

01:18:03.000 Again, I'm on my friend's farm in Illinois.

01:18:04.920 Good story, though.

01:18:06.040 Yeah.

01:18:06.600 Right.

01:18:07.280 So I'm making this little thing, and I'm like, why is it that this feels so small,

01:18:12.440 and yet I'm more comfortable than I've ever been?

01:18:14.460 Why am I—

01:18:14.760 Right.

01:18:15.020 That's a good question.

01:18:16.060 Yes.

01:18:16.660 So I went home to my wife, and I'm like—

01:18:18.300 It's not so small then, is it?

01:18:19.840 Right.

01:18:20.160 Right.

01:18:20.480 It's like, maybe my criteria for what constitutes small has been wrong.

01:18:24.640 Right.

01:18:25.120 And that's where I go, loaves and fish.

01:18:27.520 Loaves and fish.

01:18:28.340 Right.

01:18:28.560 I'm just focused on the five and two.

01:18:30.580 And this is my five and two right now.

01:18:32.600 It didn't even feel like five and two.

01:18:33.680 It feels like one and a half, and it's small, but it's life-giving, and I'm good at it.

01:18:38.520 I can tell I'm better at this than I am anything else.

01:18:42.000 Biblical storytelling seems to be easier for me.

01:18:45.680 I don't struggle with it as much.

01:18:46.960 Right.

01:18:47.340 I'm on set.

01:18:48.200 I'm more comfortable.

01:18:48.960 So it's a door that opens if you knock on it.

01:18:51.260 Yes.

01:18:51.500 Yes.

01:18:51.860 Yes.

01:18:52.140 So I'm telling the story, and I love it, and I'm feeling like it's good.

01:18:56.420 And while I'm doing that, I'm binge-watching The Wire on HBO, which is a show that's been

01:19:03.560 around for years, and it's vulgar, but I'm binge-watching it, and I'm appreciating the

01:19:08.820 storytelling, and how the show covers multiple—it covers the cops, it covers the city hall,

01:19:14.540 it covers the people on the streets.

01:19:15.760 It's a crime show, but it covers multiple angles.

01:19:18.020 And I'm like, that's never been done before in a Jesus story.

01:19:20.580 When we—you know, in a Jesus movie or miniseries, that's all there's ever been,

01:19:23.460 is movies and miniseries, which are limited by their time.

01:19:26.360 And because of their limited time, they don't explore much more than, and then Jesus did

01:19:31.140 this, and then this verse, verse by verse, miracle to miracle, that's what these are.

01:19:35.320 And I'm like, what if we had a multi-season show where you have the time to develop the

01:19:38.640 backstories and develop this context like I did in 20 minutes in the birth story?

01:19:43.320 That's where I had the idea.

01:19:44.180 Oh, yeah.

01:19:44.680 Cool.

01:19:45.100 But no one's lining up around the block to do a show about Jesus, and certainly not with

01:19:48.700 someone like myself who's failed, and coming off of a career failure.

01:19:52.140 But I'm like, boy, whoever does this, I think, is going to be really smart, because

01:19:55.040 I think it's going to really impact people like these short stories seem to do.

01:19:59.140 Very, very long story short, the short film got in the hands of a streaming platform at

01:20:04.480 the time.

01:20:04.840 It was called VidAngel.

01:20:05.900 They loved it.

01:20:06.860 VidAngel at the time.

01:20:07.720 They're now Angel Studios.

01:20:08.480 Oh, yes.

01:20:08.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:10.240 And they loved the short film and loved my idea for a show.

01:20:13.780 And they said, we want to do this.

01:20:15.540 We want to support you.

01:20:16.500 And I said, great.

01:20:17.100 And I was very excited.

01:20:18.280 And they said, we should raise it.

01:20:19.340 Why?

01:20:19.500 Why did they like it?

01:20:20.360 And they watched that short film and burst into almost uncontrollable tears.

01:20:26.040 Oh, that's good.

01:20:26.960 That's good.

01:20:27.500 You hit a chord.

01:20:28.740 There was something almost transcendent about what happened with that short film, that

01:20:32.620 little thing I did on my friend's farm 20 minutes from my house.

01:20:35.920 People, so when they said, we're going to put it on social media, and that will be the

01:20:40.380 tool to raise crowdfunding.

01:20:42.040 Right.

01:20:42.460 So that was their idea, the crowdfunding idea.

01:20:44.500 I thought it was a ridiculous idea.

01:20:46.720 Uh-huh.

01:20:47.300 But loaves and fish.

01:20:50.000 Right?

01:20:50.500 Right.

01:20:50.820 That's for sure.

01:20:51.820 A year ago, I would have said, no, that won't work.

01:20:53.960 Therefore, we must do a different plan.

01:20:56.820 It required some outside-of-the-box thinkers who don't, you know, who aren't conventional

01:21:01.980 to come up with the idea.

01:21:03.320 And it required a broken, surrendered, humbled man to accept the idea.

01:21:05.380 Yeah, well, that's so interesting, too, too, eh?

01:21:07.560 Because that's another indication where you're a priori, tyrannical presumptions about what

01:21:13.520 the right path must be.

01:21:15.700 Yes.

01:21:16.000 Which is a weird thing to think you know about when you're trying to do something impossible,

01:21:19.600 say, like tell a gospel story to a horde of people.

01:21:22.600 It's like, I know how to do that.

01:21:23.880 It's like, probably no.

01:21:25.360 Yes.

01:21:25.580 And so, these people offer you this unconventional opportunity, and partly because you now know

01:21:33.220 that you don't know what the hell you're doing, and all that prideful presumption has

01:21:36.280 disappeared, you're willing to take a shot at it, a crack at it.

01:21:39.780 Yeah, that's very cool.

01:21:40.720 My job is to provide this short film, and then to humbly request people, if you love

01:21:45.980 this, you can contribute to season one of this multi-season Bible show.

01:21:51.280 Right, that's an invitation.

01:21:52.600 It's an invitation.

01:21:53.160 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:53.660 And for whatever reason, 16,000 people around the world contributed $10 million based on

01:21:59.960 this little 20-minute short film.

01:22:00.880 And talk about a market test.

01:22:02.600 Talk about a market test, but also talk about my wife a year later, once when we hit that

01:22:09.640 $10 million mark and shattered the all-time crowdfunding record for media projects, and

01:22:14.460 now it comes into understanding what we were being communicated a year earlier from God,

01:22:21.480 which is, see, surrender, five loaves and two fish.

01:22:26.480 Right.

01:22:26.820 Well, that drives the point home even more, because what you just laid out, it's so interesting,

01:22:33.400 because the story that you told in the last part of our discussion, the second half parallels

01:22:38.940 the first half almost perfectly, in that you noted that, like, the message to you was that

01:22:44.760 you were supposed to concentrate on what you had to offer, and not to pay attention to the

01:22:49.640 outcome.

01:22:50.240 Okay, then you noticed that your proper offering, see, God tells Cain that if he offered what

01:22:58.020 was best, he would be accepted.

01:23:00.560 And so his message to Cain is, you're failing because you're not offering what's best.

01:23:07.700 So that begs the question, well, how do you know what's best?

01:23:10.200 Well, you said, you said, look, I was willing to follow my intuition with regards to storytelling.

01:23:16.620 I was following a path that I had known about since I was very young, this storytelling path.

01:23:22.540 I was willing to use my imagination.

01:23:24.460 I was willing to humble myself to not do the Hollywood thing, but just to continue telling

01:23:28.980 the story.

01:23:29.600 Then I noticed that I was very good at this, and that people responded very positively to

01:23:34.620 it, and that I was calm and interested while I was doing it, which is probably a good indication

01:23:38.840 that, like, those, what other standards would you use for evaluating what the best you had

01:23:44.240 to offer would be?

01:23:45.520 And so that's so cool, because it's not what you thought, but it is what you experienced.

01:23:50.740 Right.

01:23:50.960 Right, so now you, then you show the results of your film to add, what were they called?

01:23:56.340 At the time, VidAngel, now they're called VidAngel.

01:23:57.960 VidAngel, and then it was Angel Studios, and they provide you with an unorthodox opportunity,

01:24:02.300 and then the genuine fruits of what you had offered come to make themselves manifest.

01:24:09.000 Right.

01:24:09.300 That's so cool.

01:24:10.080 It's so cool that those things are paralleled with that message that you got from Romania.

01:24:15.020 Right, right.

01:24:15.760 Okay, so you raise-

01:24:16.900 Right, but at no point during the process am I ever skipping steps.

01:24:21.340 I'm still at the Loaves and Fish step, Loaves and Fish step.

01:24:23.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:24.260 So, oh, we raised $10 million.

01:24:26.160 Well, that's amazing.

01:24:27.300 That's cool.

01:24:28.240 The old me would have felt pretty darn good about myself and said, well, this should lead to then the next thing.

01:24:33.240 Yeah.

01:24:33.560 No.

01:24:33.800 Which would be the Hollywood film, let's say.

01:24:35.160 Yes, no, no, no.

01:24:35.940 Okay, now I'm tasked with making season one.

01:24:38.480 Do we know that-

01:24:38.720 Okay, so now by then you're wise enough to not stop doing what you're actually good at-

01:24:43.720 Yes.

01:24:43.920 In favor of this other vision that you had that would be-

01:24:46.620 It's not surprising you had it because you want to be a filmmaker and there's the Hollywood model, but that obviously isn't the kind of filmmaker that you are.

01:24:55.620 Right.

01:24:55.800 Right, and it turns out that the kind of filmmaker you are takes a very different pathway, but that there's tremendous opportunity there, which is exactly what happened with the girls.

01:25:04.740 Sure, but I don't think it would have been possible.

01:25:06.860 Well, no, no, I should say that again.

01:25:08.300 I know it wouldn't have been possible, and I don't think God would have given it to me had I not had the surrender.

01:25:13.360 Yeah, right.

01:25:13.500 It was as much about my own brokenness as it was about, oh, you finally figured it out.

01:25:18.560 You finally figured out what you're good at.

01:25:20.040 Now you're ready to succeed.

01:25:21.920 It's no, you finally figured out the surrender necessary to even be good at what you do.

01:25:27.260 The show right now is better than what I'm doing.

01:25:28.700 Probably kudos to you for at least, what would you say?

01:25:33.200 Okay, that's humility.

01:25:34.640 You at least had the willingness to pay attention to what the failure might have been indicating without losing faith.

01:25:44.540 Yeah, right, so that's good.

01:25:46.700 I've made a couple of good decisions.

01:25:48.400 I'll give myself credit.

01:25:49.360 I've made good five loaves and two fish.

01:25:51.380 I'm not going to be falsely modest about that.

01:25:53.140 But the feeding of the 5,000 not only is not something I don't think about while I'm doing it, I also don't take responsibility for it when it happens.

01:25:59.860 It's—I take responsibility for making really good five loaves and two fish.

01:26:03.340 Yeah.

01:26:03.760 Figured out the recipe, and I catch good fish, and God uses them, and they're impacting people so that we get to that place where now I have the means to do season one, yet still not knowing if there's going to be a season two.

01:26:15.200 Yeah.

01:26:15.580 God never lets me get ahead of myself or feel comfortable with, well, now I've finally arrived.

01:26:20.280 So we make season one, and it takes some time to resonate because it's on a new app, and it's hard to find.

01:26:27.400 Right, well, you have a whole new distribution.

01:26:28.700 Like, this is a whole new ecosystem for filmmaking and distribution.

01:26:33.840 Right.

01:26:34.100 So a whole other episode could be—could talk about the business assumptions that were wrong over and over and over again before God—you know, how many times we had to start all over to figure things out.

01:26:45.600 But long story short, it was clear that when people did watch it, there was a transcendent response of some kind.

01:26:52.100 I mean, it was clear that the emotion of it, the humanity of it—I consider my job to be twofold as a storyteller and as a herald.

01:27:00.740 Number one, it's to take Jesus down from stained glass windows and to take the disciples down from stained glass windows and to the formality of religion that sometimes can distance ourselves from Jesus, from a pure relationship with God.

01:27:15.380 But sometimes, you know, we say that—we evangelicals sometimes say religion is about man's attempts to reach God.

01:27:24.080 True relationship with true Christianity is about God's attempts to reach man.

01:27:28.200 It depends on how—when you see the painting of Jesus—of God and the Father and Adam pointing at each other.

01:27:34.400 Who's reaching for who, right?

01:27:36.680 Well, Adam is sort of going like this.

01:27:38.300 Yeah.

01:27:38.680 Well, we—evangelicals look at it like God's reaching for Adam and he's accepting it, right?

01:27:43.100 He's receiving it.

01:27:44.160 And so, my job is to remove the religiosity of how we oftentimes see God and we see him in paintings or stained glass windows.

01:27:52.880 And then even when we sometimes watch movies, he still feels like a stained glass window.

01:27:56.280 He's very formal and distant and pious and not funny or not interesting or not charismatic.

01:28:01.660 And so, my show is designed to bring Jesus down from the stained glass window or from the statue and remind you that he's a human being in addition to his divinity.

01:28:10.580 Of course, we still see him perform miracles and flame authority in the show.

01:28:14.000 But I'm curious for you as someone who is so intellectual, when you saw Jesus, for example, in the Chosen brushing his teeth in a stream or winking at a friend or laughing at the wedding at Cana when, you know, before he does the miracle, he's dancing with his friends.

01:28:29.320 And then it turns out, ultimately, the miracle comes down to a favor for his friends because his mom asked him to.

01:28:35.280 Did you find that that diminished his divinity or did you find that it enhanced it?

01:28:40.760 Or I'm just curious for someone like yourself, because for most people who watched it, it was revelatory.

01:28:45.800 Well, the first thing I would say, my first response to The Chosen, which I started watching in part out of curiosity and in part because it had become a cultural phenomenon.

01:28:55.500 And I was curious about that.

01:28:57.160 Well, and how many people were telling you?

01:28:58.840 Like, you probably had viewers and listeners going, yeah, watch The Chosen.

01:29:01.120 Well, there was buzz everywhere, right?

01:29:02.660 Because Christians all over the world have looked at you for the last several years as almost like a gateway drug into Christianity, but still hoping.

01:29:09.560 When is Jordan Peterson, like, do you believe?

01:29:11.860 Have you met the need?

01:29:12.500 Right, right, I know.

01:29:13.340 How many people have asked you?

01:29:14.360 How many Christians have you met have gone, so do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?

01:29:16.880 No, they ask me something worse.

01:29:18.740 The question usually is, do you believe in Christ exactly the same way I claim to?

01:29:24.760 It's like—

01:29:25.600 Yeah, people are competing for Dr. Jordan Peterson to bring them into their fold, the correct way to—

01:29:30.260 Yeah, well, and that's, you know, I mean, that's fine, I suppose, but it's—

01:29:35.180 There's something very sweet about it, too.

01:29:37.260 Well, yes, that's what I mean by it being fine.

01:29:40.140 It's just—it's, well, it's something like, you know, look to your own salvation.

01:29:46.860 That's my fundamental attitude towards that.

01:29:49.320 With regards to The Chosen, I mean, the first—I was watching it with my wife, and she had undergone quite a profound religious transformation not too long before we started watching The Chosen.

01:30:00.960 And so—

01:30:01.300 What about your daughter?

01:30:02.200 Because Michaela had a similar—she just decided to surrender and give her life to Jesus, and then—

01:30:07.580 Yeah, well, she had a very powerful experience that preceded that.

01:30:11.040 And so, yeah, yeah, but I watched The Chosen with Tammy, and so I was watching her watch it and seeing her response.

01:30:19.740 The first response I had was relief.

01:30:22.340 The relief was, oh, I can watch this, because I'm very sensitive to propagandistic intent.

01:30:27.720 I don't like it at all.

01:30:29.140 Yeah.

01:30:29.280 Even a bit of it is a turnoff for me, and I thought, no, this is—it kind of reminded me a bit of The Master and Margarita.

01:30:37.580 Do you know that book?

01:30:38.540 I don't.

01:30:38.900 Oh, you need to know The Master and Margarita.

01:30:41.680 It's an absolute, staggering masterpiece of Russian literature.

01:30:46.500 It's a story written in the 1930s by a man named Bulgakov.

01:30:50.920 Satan comes to Earth in the Soviet Union, and he can do whatever he wants because no one believes he exists.

01:30:56.220 Sure.

01:30:56.420 And then there's a backstory.

01:30:58.520 This is why it would be so relevant to you.

01:31:01.560 Bulgakov tells the story of Christ and his experience with his disciples in a manner that's analogous to what you're doing.

01:31:08.820 And it's a brilliant book.

01:31:10.480 It's like Dostoevsky-level brilliant.

01:31:12.520 Well, then that probably eliminates me as a reader, but I'll try.

01:31:15.600 Oh, I think you'd find it.

01:31:17.160 It's a fascinating, multi-level book.

01:31:20.280 And I also really like Nikos Kazantzakis' work.

01:31:23.900 He did Zorba the Greek, for example, which is a book most people know about.

01:31:27.080 But he wrote a variety of stories that have a very—well, is it The Temptation of Christ?

01:31:34.340 Is that the name of the book?

01:31:35.580 I can't remember at the moment.

01:31:37.420 He did a variety of—

01:31:39.160 I wish I could help you.

01:31:40.800 He produced a variety of stories that are similar to what you're doing with The Chosen.

01:31:46.780 Sure.

01:31:47.220 So I was—and then I thought, well, do I find this interesting independently of my religious convictions or lack thereof?

01:31:56.460 And the answer to that was yes, I really enjoyed it, which was really what I was hoping for.

01:32:01.700 You asked me a more specific question.

01:32:03.560 What did you think of the things like Jesus brushing his teeth in a stream, which seem normal, but to an average Christian, they've never thought of it before.

01:32:12.040 Well, part of the insistence, the Christian insistence since time immemorial was that Christ was fully God and fully human.

01:32:18.780 Yes.

01:32:19.340 So the human part needs to be—

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01:33:32.260 Demonstrated with a commitment that's equal to the divine part.

01:33:36.320 And I thought, I couldn't see how that could have been handled better than the manner in which it was handled in your series.

01:33:45.080 And I found myself more than pleased to continue watching.

01:33:49.360 I'm going to put that on our poster.

01:33:50.940 Well, it's a hard...

01:33:52.100 Dr. Jordan Peterson, more than pleased to continue watching.

01:33:54.820 Yeah, well, like I said, it was a relief because you avoided all of the cliched temptations of the easily parodied evangelical tradition.

01:34:09.380 Yes.

01:34:09.860 Right?

01:34:10.240 That's a hard thing to pull off.

01:34:12.000 And I also thought this was something else.

01:34:14.580 It's beautiful.

01:34:15.740 That's seriously important.

01:34:19.300 The cinematography is top right.

01:34:20.940 The acting is top right.

01:34:21.960 Like the quality of the production is extreme because you can use it as an excuse.

01:34:26.560 You know, you see another part of the problem with propagandistic religious entertainment is that it's often low quality.

01:34:34.180 And you're supposed to pretend that doesn't matter.

01:34:36.360 You think it doesn't have to be good.

01:34:37.800 Well, it's about God.

01:34:38.840 So like how high quality does it really have to be?

01:34:41.020 Right.

01:34:41.260 It's like of the highest possible quality.

01:34:43.640 And independent of the religious message.

01:34:45.640 And I thought the acting was great.

01:34:48.220 And I wanted to know what was going to happen next.

01:34:50.460 It was a real cliffhanger.

01:34:51.960 And so I really enjoyed it.

01:34:54.060 And I'm looking forward to the continuing seasons.

01:34:57.740 I'm curious.

01:34:58.900 You know, it's not atypical for a series to wane as it progresses.

01:35:04.080 Not always.

01:35:04.900 But that can happen.

01:35:06.260 I mean, it exhausts itself.

01:35:08.060 Or people get tempted by the success of the series to warp it in one, you know.

01:35:14.480 Or even the similarity of the previous three seasons.

01:35:17.460 As an artist, we have to break out.

01:35:19.040 We have to do something different.

01:35:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:35:20.480 We have to go left now instead of right.

01:35:21.940 Or you can get stuck repeating what you already did.

01:35:24.480 So how are you feeling about the new season that's forthcoming?

01:35:28.440 Well, everyone who's seen it so far, this is season five, we're currently finishing it.

01:35:32.860 And those who've seen it and read the scripts and the actors who, like while we were filming it, we're all saying, oh, this is our best season yet.

01:35:38.640 Oh, oh, that's good.

01:35:40.340 Yeah.

01:35:40.820 And it's, and you might think, well, they're just biased.

01:35:44.600 There's recency bias.

01:35:45.840 No, they say-

01:35:46.920 No, they could get exhausted.

01:35:47.880 Because they go into each season when they get the scripts, the actors and the crew going, oh, please be good.

01:35:52.660 Right, right.

01:35:53.320 And expecting it to do what you just said, which is to start to wane.

01:35:56.360 Yeah.

01:35:56.580 And I would argue that we've become, we've gotten better as storytellers and as filmmakers.

01:36:01.960 Now, to be fair, we're blessed by the story getting, I mean, season five is Holy Week.

01:36:08.040 It's the most impactful and important week in the history of humanity.

01:36:10.980 Right, right, right.

01:36:11.540 There's a big mouthful to chew.

01:36:13.160 And you see Jesus show sides of himself he's never shown, which is turning over the tables of the temple and yelling and then willingly giving himself up.

01:36:21.400 And you see the betrayer emerge, Judas breaks bad during Holy Week, right?

01:36:27.520 Yeah.

01:36:28.320 A million people both-

01:36:29.900 Conspiring with Caiaphas.

01:36:31.380 Yes, where we are now.

01:36:33.300 And, of course, in Holy Week is, in history, it was over a million people all gathered in one city, most of, as many friends of Jesus as enemies.

01:36:42.800 Believers and people who wanted him killed.

01:36:45.020 And they're all now in one powder can.

01:36:46.460 Right, right, right.

01:36:47.020 So that makes-

01:36:48.180 A hot town, a hot time in the old town tonight.

01:36:50.620 So I can't take too much credit for the unique excitement of season five.

01:36:55.720 It's not necessarily that I'm a better storyteller, although I think I am, but it's also that the text is giving me so much to work with.

01:37:02.640 But I think another thing that sometimes causes people to- shows to wane is what you said earlier, which is they get enraptured by the success.

01:37:10.400 And so I always am brought back to that moment back at 4 o'clock in the morning.

01:37:14.700 And I surrendered and recognized my own humanity and my own sinfulness and my own narcissism and my own need for surrender and my giving of-

01:37:22.800 Yeah.

01:37:23.040 And God strike my soul if I go back to who I was the day before.

01:37:26.960 Right, no kidding.

01:37:27.800 Yeah, yeah, because you know, it's a very bad thing to be bad, but it's a very, it's a much worse thing to return to being bad after you've recognized that that was insufficient.

01:37:39.660 That's a much worse, that's that parable about the servant who doesn't know what he's doing being whipped with few blows.

01:37:48.800 Oh, yes, yes.

01:37:49.800 And the servant who knows what he's doing being, well, condemned to hell fundamentally.

01:37:54.640 Right.

01:37:54.980 Right, right, because it's one thing to be bad unconsciously and it's another thing to have learned and then return, you know, to your-

01:38:03.580 And you just brought up what I think is a potentially strong, I don't know if I want to call it a conclusion to our conversation about the specifics of the show,

01:38:11.320 but to an understanding of what I think makes the show work, which is that Jesus knows our hearts.

01:38:19.400 He wants a relation-

01:38:20.480 He wants a relationship with you specifically.

01:38:26.040 So whether he's healing you, calling you to follow him, or rebuking you, it's not based on a paint-by-numbers one-size-fits-all.

01:38:33.280 He knows what's in your heart.

01:38:34.420 He knew what I needed to become the creator of the chosen.

01:38:38.380 It wasn't the same thing as someone else needed, right?

01:38:40.600 He spoke to me directly and my wife Amanda is here uniquely to make sure that I don't go back to who I was, you know, the day before that moment.

01:38:50.360 And so when Jesus calls us differently, I mean, the message of salvation is the same, but the calling is specific.

01:38:56.660 And that's what you see in the show, is that when you see Jesus in the show, we've probably, by season five, have shown, I don't know, a dozen more and more miracles, or more than that, callings, rebukes, all of that.

01:39:12.060 But each time, it's specific to the heart of the person he's talking to, and we do that cinematographically, too.

01:39:16.820 We shrink the moment so that it feels personal.

01:39:19.760 And what everyone says to me when they recognize me in public, nine times out of ten, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this, will say to me, thank you for the show, and they'll start to cry.

01:39:28.780 And you experience this, too.

01:39:30.020 How many people, when they meet you, start to cry?

01:39:32.120 Not because you're a celebrity, but because something's changed.

01:39:36.220 Something's changed.

01:39:36.920 Yeah.

01:39:37.040 I've experienced that in my life.

01:39:38.200 You know, we'll talk about this off camera, but some of the people in our lives who you've changed, just from something you've said or written, and so people will come up to me, and they'll start to cry.

01:39:46.140 But nine times out of ten, when they say something about the show, it's always, it feels personal.

01:39:51.120 Yeah, right.

01:39:51.680 It doesn't feel like I'm walking in, and I love St. Peter's Basilica.

01:39:54.120 Well, a great storyteller makes the archetypal personal.

01:39:58.020 That's what a storyteller does.

01:39:59.360 And that's what I mean when I say I'm taking him down from the stained glass window.

01:40:02.400 So I visit St. Peter's Basilica in Italy, and it's one of the most, probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.

01:40:07.660 It's just beyond belief.

01:40:08.740 It's jaw-dropping.

01:40:10.020 It can be to the wrong person or in the wrong place.

01:40:13.520 It can be distancing.

01:40:14.880 It can make you go, is this the only way to reach God, is to create this level of beauty, and he's up there on the ceiling, or he's in that painting and that structure.

01:40:22.200 I can't access him.

01:40:23.260 I have to be quiet as I walk through it.

01:40:24.600 Right, right.

01:40:25.080 I have to admire it.

01:40:25.960 I don't have a relationship with it.

01:40:27.820 And I certainly don't have a relationship personally with him.

01:40:30.420 And so what my job is and what I'm experiencing myself and what you see in the show is, again, what I talked about earlier, Jesus reaching for you.

01:40:41.420 You might be reaching for him and think that you have to do this perfect thing, and that's oftentimes what happens in the Old Testament.

01:40:46.560 It has to be perfect, perfect, perfect.

01:40:48.200 Jesus comes in and says, you know what?

01:40:49.760 You're never—it's never fully going to get there.

01:40:52.160 It's never going to be perfect enough, so I'll do it for you.

01:40:54.400 I will be that perfection.

01:40:56.380 I will be that sacrifice.

01:40:58.000 I will be the perfect sacrifice that pain couldn't come up with.

01:41:02.900 And so in doing that, it makes it personal and human.

01:41:06.240 And so when Jesus is healing the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years, or he's healing the man who's been blind for so long, or he's saving Simon Peter, who is a believer but who is focused on accomplishment and trying to catch as many fish as he can so that he can pay his taxes.

01:41:21.360 And Jesus comes in and calls him to something greater, which is a fisher of men, not a fisher of fish.

01:41:29.300 And all that is happening on a personal level, and it's causing people to respond emotionally.

01:41:33.720 I guess that's partly why it seemed to me that you handled the miracles so well.

01:41:38.540 It's not that you downplay them.

01:41:40.340 It's that you—it's a weird thing because you make them in some ways a matter of logical course.

01:41:47.240 It's a weird thing to do with a miracle, but—

01:41:50.040 It's the inevitable result of the need.

01:41:53.480 Yeah, and the situation.

01:41:55.160 Yeah, exactly.

01:41:56.060 Right.

01:41:56.160 It's—it's that—well, that's a strange thing to make the miracle appear to be, of course, the thing that would happen under those—under those circumstances.

01:42:05.280 Right, right.

01:42:05.680 So my belief is that, as we've seen you over—you, Jordan Peterson, over the last several years come to grips with the suffering you experience, the physical suffering you experience, that we—you know, when you kind of disappeared for a year.

01:42:19.860 And those of us who were fans are going, well, how is he doing? And you came back out of that and described it and talked about it, and your relationship with your wife and your daughter and all of the stories that we keep seeing on podcasts.

01:42:30.680 And you talk about a dream that you've had. I mean, all the things that we've seen, and people asking you questions.

01:42:36.600 Do you believe Jesus actually walked out of the tomb? Right?

01:42:39.040 All these—it's watching—I think people feel more connected to you than ever because they're seeing not only these brilliant lectures that you've given and these books that you've written, but now I'm seeing you cry because you're describing a dream that you've had.

01:42:53.980 And that makes me go, oh, now I want to hear even more.

01:42:59.060 And now some of the stuff that you're saying intellectually and broadly actually makes even more sense, and I'm even more connected to it, and I believe that's who God is.

01:43:06.820 You know, I don't have the intellectual capability to do even some of the things you're doing in your gospel series for Daily Wire, but I know that God created and Jesus rose.

01:43:18.440 And those two things are enough for me—they're not everything, but it's enough for me to go, if I know that and I believe that truly, then that makes everything else make sense.

01:43:28.420 And now I can see some of these mysterious things through a foundation that's secure and solid in that I still do believe, even if I don't understand this story, I do believe God created, and I do believe Jesus rose from the dead.

01:43:39.600 And so my job as a storyteller and as a herald is to make that palatable to the masses as much as possible so that they're not resistant to or denied the opportunity to explore because of things like propaganda or church hurt or even their own religion.

01:43:55.080 Sometimes our own religion can get in the way of a relationship, a personal relationship with Jesus.

01:44:00.280 So I don't sit here writing going, how am I going to accomplish this?

01:44:02.680 And I want to make sure that I'm sitting here just trying to tell a great story as much as well as I can and honor God in the text.

01:44:08.360 But I think that's what's happening.

01:44:09.940 That's when people meet me and they start to cry and they thank me.

01:44:12.420 They're saying, I saw Jesus wink, or I saw Jesus look her in the eye, or I saw Jesus come down to his level as opposed to staying here, and it broke me because I realized it's for me too, just not only for that person.

01:44:23.740 And so that's what The Chosen is doing for many people is if you can see Jesus through the eyes of those who actually met him, perhaps you can be changed and impacted in the same way they were.

01:44:31.420 Or, as is also in the case for many people who watch the show, they love the historical drama, it's a good show, they appreciate it.

01:44:39.100 30 to 40% of our audience is non-believers.

01:44:42.440 We've been able to track that now, right?

01:44:44.480 That's good.

01:44:45.220 And we're hearing from people who go, I don't believe he was the son of God, but I love this show, and I'm intrigued, and I'm following along, and I find myself wanting to be a better person, or I'm finding myself wanting to, whatever it is.

01:44:56.280 And so perhaps they don't ever bend the knee to the son of God that I believe he is, but I'm not trying to get you to do that when you watch the show.

01:45:08.220 That's God's job.

01:45:09.360 I'm gathering.

01:45:10.560 That is an excellent place to stop, and a good time to stop as well.

01:45:15.680 So I think what we'll probably do on the Daily Wire side, for everybody who's watching and listening, because we have another half an hour there, I think we'll talk more about the chosen as a cultural phenomenon and as an indicator of the time that we're in.

01:45:33.440 Because everyone knows that the tectonic plates are moving at the deepest of all possible levels, and we see that manifested in the culture war and in the strange political times that we're in.

01:45:44.220 But also in the, what would you say, in the sense that there is a transformation in the landscape of narrative that's reflected in part, let's say, in the evidence for something approximating a religious revival that's taking place in not only North America, but in Europe, in the West more broadly.

01:46:04.840 So we'll investigate that.

01:46:06.820 And then let me give you one other note.

01:46:08.280 Yeah.

01:46:08.440 The next show that I'm planning to do after The Chosen currently is The Moses Story, three seasons of Moses.

01:46:14.580 Oh, oh, oh, oh.

01:46:15.760 And some fans are saying, oh, we wish you would go into the book of Acts next, because that's a continuation of the story.

01:46:21.520 Right.

01:46:22.120 And I'm going, actually, we need to pause for a moment, take you back to the Exodus and to Moses, because Moses was the, I mean, Jesus is the new Moses.

01:46:31.240 Right.

01:46:31.660 Moses turned the water to blood.

01:46:33.620 So it's a prequel.

01:46:34.600 Yeah, and so we're going to, because we reference Moses a lot in the show.

01:46:38.560 Yeah.

01:46:38.780 In fact, season five, which is coming soon, is the celebration of Passover.

01:46:43.000 And so while I'm filming The Last Supper, what are they doing at The Last Supper?

01:46:46.280 Well, they're remembering and honoring their heritage of the Exodus.

01:46:49.400 And so it's very fascinating.

01:46:50.920 So I don't know if there was a part of you that wanted to, you know, you've got two shows, Exodus and The Gospels.

01:46:59.040 Yeah.

01:46:59.360 And so I don't think it's—

01:47:00.820 You're doing them in the opposite order that we did them in at The Daily Wire.

01:47:04.500 Correct.

01:47:05.060 But I'm also recognizing their cohesiveness.

01:47:07.540 Right, right.

01:47:08.020 So if you wanted to touch on that, I'm willing to do that as well.

01:47:11.440 Yeah, yeah.

01:47:11.900 That sounds like a fine idea.

01:47:13.240 We'll do that as well.

01:47:14.400 So join us on The Daily Wire side for the continuation of the story.

01:47:19.040 Yeah.

01:47:19.360 Great talking to you.

01:47:20.280 And it's so fun to be here in Caiaphas' house.

01:47:23.700 How preposterous.

01:47:25.240 Right.

01:47:25.580 Having this conversation.

01:47:27.080 And I'm very much looking forward to the new season.

01:47:30.620 And for those of you who are watching and listening and who haven't seen The Chosen, watch an episode or two and see what you think.

01:47:40.280 I really enjoyed it.

01:47:41.480 And so did my wife.

01:47:42.540 And I would say we're very picky about such things, especially if they have intent, you know.

01:47:48.100 And there was a marked absence of painful intent in The Chosen.

01:47:52.600 And it's very gripping and very well done and dramatically satisfying.

01:47:56.420 And you were pleased to continue watching.

01:47:57.420 And I was pleased to continue watching.

01:47:59.340 Yes, exactly.

01:48:00.300 So thank you, sir.

01:48:01.400 Thank you to all of you for your time and attention today as well.

01:48:05.100 And to The Daily Wire for making this possible.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 23, 2024

509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told ｜ Dallas Jenkins

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