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

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with “The Chosen” creator and showrunner Dallas Jenkins. Set in the house of Caiaphas, they discuss Dallas’ early failures and the transformative experiences that led him to partner with Angel Studios to bring forth the most important story ever told. They discuss proper sacrifice, intention, and offering, the role of the Herald in the modern day, and how to honor Jesus as both God and man. This episode was filmed on December 10th, 2024.  | Links | For Dallas Jenkins: Watch “The Chosen” https://www.thechosen.tv/en-us Dallas on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DallasJenkinsOfficial/ Dallas on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dallas.jenkins/?hl=en Angel Studios https://www.angel.com/home 

[♪ Music & Intro To The Music Of The Holy Spirit, by J.S. Bach & S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach.

The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. The Last Supper, by J.S. Bach. stage setting today that I don't know I've ever been in, although I've been in some unlikely places. This is the house of Caiaphas, the high priest during the time of Christ. It's the setting for part of The Chosen, one of the most successful series,

and I would say probably indisputably the most successful religiously-based series ever produced. I'm here today to talk with the creator, producer, director, and writer of that series, Dallas Jenkins, who's invited us down here to see the studio and to see the sets and to talk about how this most unlikely of all occurrences made its manifestation. So what did we talk about? Well, the emergence of The Chosen as a spectacular success occurred on the heels of a relatively cataclysmic failure. The precursor movie, so to speak, at least from a career perspective of Delos, was a failure.

It launched as a Hollywood production and spiraled downward almost immediately, and we talked about the desperation, the despair and hopelessness that accompanied that failure, and then the surprising and remarkable consequences that unfolded across time. And I don't want to spoil the story. You have to hear it in its details to really understand what transpired. But out of the ashes of that defeat, let's say, rose the radical success of the Chosen, very unlikely enterprise. And I was extremely curious about how that happened. I wanted to know how it happened personally.

What was the response to the, what was Delos' response to his failure? And how did the idea of the chosen make itself present? And what did that mean practically? And why did the audience respond? And how was it financed? And what was the marketing approach? And why did that work? And what does it mean for the culture, more broadly speaking?

And what has been the effect worldwide? and how are we to understand that? And we did what we could to investigate all those questions and to provide some, at least, provisional answers to them in the 90 minutes that we were fortunate to talk today. And so, if you're interested in that story, and it's an extremely interesting story about the attempt to film the most interesting story ever told, you might say, then join us for this podcast. Well, let's start by talking about where we are, because we're in this remarkable set, part of a remarkable series. And so, let's talk about the set first and then the series. We are in Caiaphas' house. I preached Caiaphas.

Now, it's in Texas, not Israel. We film in Texas. Texans believe Jesus lived here anyway, so that's why we film in Texas. This is where He would choose to live. Exactly. And when He comes back, He's coming to Texas first. But we built this set. This is a season five set. It's not been released to the world yet, so you're introducing Caiaphas' set to the world.

Chosen fans have not seen it yet, but this is the room in which not only Caiaphas and Judas make a deal, but ultimately where we'll see Jesus come for his quasi-trial, his Sanhedrin trial took place at Caiaphas' house under cover of night, away from the traditional place because they were trying to do it quickly. But with that uplifting light-hearted note, this is where we're filming this conversation is in Caiaphas' place. Right. And this is part of a large macro set consisting of a number of large buildings, each of which have sets built inside it. They're all soundproofed.

And when did you set all this up? Well, season one of The Chosen was crowdfunded, and at such a low budget, we were starting from scratch. So we were finding places to film and trying to make them look bigger. It was after season two that we realized we have to have our own place. We can't just keep chasing the kinds of places

around the country that some of which don't exist. We need our own home and we need to stay in one spot. And so that's when we started to build some of these places on here in Texas at a, on a property owned by the Salvation Army. There's no pun intended on that. It happens to just be the place that had hundreds of acres of open land and some already interesting infrastructure and so we built these sound stages. So right now we're in a sound stage

that contains Caiaphas' house. 50 yards away is a potential place where we would film the Garden of Gethsemane. There's another building that has Simon Peter's house, Pontius Pilate's house. We had a place where we've got the room for the Last Supper. And then we've got a back lot where we've got a first century Capernaum recreation. So it's all over the place, but within about half a mile of each other. Well, let's familiarize everybody watching and listening with the story of the chosen in the broadest possible sense. You just pointed out that it was crowdfunded to begin with. And so why don't you start at the beginning of the vision for the

series and the ambition for the series and just tell the story because lots of people who are engaged in this podcast won't know it. It was birthed from failure. So for coming up on 20 years leading up to 2017, I've been a filmmaker for that long. I've made several films with varying degrees of success, but all independent, outside of the studio system. That's what, when you hear the term indie film or independent film, it means not financed by the studios.

And so I had varying degrees of success, but I was very eager to make a film that was either financed or affirmed or endorsed by Hollywood. And I finally got a chance to do that in 2016. It released in 2017. So January 20th, 2017 turned out to be the lowest moment of my life, or at least my career, because the film that I had gotten a chance to make released in theaters around the country with several big Hollywood studios attached and working on it and it completely failed.

And that was which film? It was called The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. And the fact that you haven't heard of it is part of the reason why it didn't do very well. So what happens is on a Friday afternoon, a math equation takes place. The numbers come in from the East Coast and you can then decipher how a movie is going to do that day, how it's going to do that weekend, and most often how it's going to do for the life of it. And within a couple hours, I went from being a filmmaker who had a very bright future to a filmmaker with no future because the movie bombed.

The other stories that we were hoping to tell with these companies, the companies said, no, never mind. Apparently, we don't understand this audience, this approach, the kind of faith-based filmmaking. And so, out of that, I was home alone with my wife, Amanda, and we were crying and praying and confused because you hear all the time, God's not the author of failure. And so when you fail, you must assume that the calling that you thought you'd received to do this work must not have been a true calling. You know, anytime we feel called to something, it's hard to decipher sometimes whether it's a calling from God,

or a temptation, or just a desire, a fleshly desire. And sometimes it's a fleshly desire and it's okay. It's not, you know, when we choose what we're going to eat for dinner tonight, I don't wait for God to reveal it to me. I just have a desire for something and it's fine. But I had spent, you know, two years of my life developing this story and seeing so many moments throughout that where doors were opening and God clearly seemed to be present. And so then when it failed, I thought, I guess I was wrong. I guess God wasn't present and wasn't calling me to this. And so in the midst of my devastation, Amanda came to me and said, I feel very strongly

and clearly like God is putting it on my heart. Open the story, the feeding of the 5,000 in the Gospels. I don't know why, I just know that that's what we're supposed to do. So we open the Bible to the Feeding the Five Thousand, a story I've heard many times before. I've been a believer as long as I can remember. So what about that story was for us? Well, the thing that we noticed in that story was that Jesus had been preaching for several days, the disciples come to Him and they say, Master, the people are hungry.

We need to send them home to get food. And what I hadn't noticed before in the story was that Jesus didn't say, oh, good point. I hadn't realized that. We should get this taken care of. He already knew it. In fact, it was His fault they were hungry. He'd been talking for two days, two, three days.

And His response was, oh, no, three days, and his response was, oh no, we can't send them home, because they're so hungry, they'll faint along the way. So, we realized in that moment, just because you're at a place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God's not in it. And in fact, it may mean He is in it. Depending on your theology, He either allowed it or He caused it. But being brought to that place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God— You're being abandoned. Right.

It may be— Or even necessarily that you were wrong. Why did God tell the Israelites to camp out at the edge of the Red Sea? In advance of the Israelites being pursued by the Egyptians, he said, go to the edge of the Red Sea and camp out. He put them in this place where they had no place to go. When the Egyptians came and pursued them, they had no escape. And he put them there on purpose, and he says three times in a span of several verses,

so that I will get glory. It's a tricky problem, eh, because you don't want to be opaque to failure. I mean, it's a terrible problem. You don't want to be opaque to failure. And being persistent and being opaque to failure are often hard to distinguish. How do you know if you're assiduously pursuing your goals in the face of trouble and opposition, or stubbornly clinging to your tyrannical failures. Very hard thing to... That's part of that problem of separating the wheat from the chaff, or discriminating the spirits. And so, you had spent a lot of time in your career trying to get in a position where you were attractive

to the mainstream Hollywood studios, that had happened. It seemed as far as you were concerned that you were pursuing the right path, then you get devastating news and in relatively short order that at least part of what you had envisioned just wasn't going to happen. And you must've been wondering at that point too, and I'm curious about what you think about that now.

Do you have some sense of why the film, I mean, there's lots of reasons films don't succeed, many, like any product. First of all, the probability that any product is going to succeed, even if it's a good product is low. Everything has to be timed exactly right, including things you can't control. But so, what did you conclude at that moment,

along with your wife, that was the nature, let's say, of the failure? And then let's go back to the story of the feeding. Yeah, so that didn't happen until that night. So in the midst of the failure, you're wrestling with what caused it. And for me, as an analyzer, I analyze well, I solve problems, I wrestle with causes

and effects. It's one of the things that I'm fairly good at. And then I'm realizing maybe I'm not good at it. Maybe I'm not, maybe I'm not. So there's the calling. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's the calling. There's the spiritual direction that I believe God had given me. Now I'm questioning whether that's real. Real. Real. Yeah, well, that's the thing about… And then there's the surface. There's the practical. What mistakes did I make to bring me to this place?

Yeah, well, that's an unpacking of levels, right? I mean, there's actually some psychological rules for approaching a situation like that, because any failure brings up the specter of cataclysmic, characterological inadequacy. Right? I'm going to pretend that I know what you just said. Did I fail because I made a strategic error or did I fail because there's something fundamentally wrong with me at a very deep level? Okay, so one of the things that happens to people who are depressed, and it's actually

one of the hallmarks of depression, is that every time someone who has a proclivity towards depression faces an obstacle or fails, they immediately move from contemplation of a mirror strategic error to analysis of a fundamental characterological flaw. And so there's actually some rules for this is the rule is that if something happens to you that's negative, you should presume the least amount of error possible and then work

downward. It's sort of like the presumption of innocence in the legal realm. You don't want to take yourself apart any more than is necessary. It's also a good rule of thumb in arguments, let's say, or disputes with your partner, right? You want to start with your wife or your husband. You want to start with the assumption that the problem between you is a strategic and practical problem rather than an indication that the whole marriage should be thrown up in the air and you should leave. Right.

Okay, so now you see this major failure and you're trying to figure out, well, is this a strategic error? Did I do something? Is there something wrong fundamentally with my relationship with reality? So in the afternoon, Friday afternoon, it was the latter. I'm so consumed by that that I don't have room in my head or heart to start to wrestle yet with the practical, was it a mistake, a strategic error? Right now it's a, have the last 20 years of my life led to this? Right. I need to learn how to drive a bus so that I can provide for my family.

Right. So that's what I'm worried about. So everything is destabilized, maybe, as far as you're concerned. So God brings us to the ladder. He's saying, He's helping us wrestle with our calling, and His first message to us, or at least what we are wrestling with, is the macro level, the foundation, to your point. Was I wrong all along? So, in that moment, reading that story of the Feet of the 5,000 was very comforting,

because it's a, okay, this doesn't necessarily mean that God's abandoned me, to your point, or that I'm fundamentally flawed in my calling. Now, I don't know what's next, I don't know how— Right, but you don't have to draw that conclusion. That. So in the story of Job, Job makes a series of decisions in the aftermath of his cataclysmic failure, let's say, which is multi-dimensional, right? Because he loses his enterprise, he loses many of the members of his family, he

ends up ill and disfigured, his friends are basically accusing him of moral impropriety of the sort that would lead to that outcome. And Job's decision at that point is not to lose faith in the essential goodness of His being, even though He recognizes that He's flawed like every other person, or to lose faith in the benevolence of the divine, let's say. And so, He goes to the bottom. His wife says to Him, there's nothing left for you except to curse God and die. That's her conclusion, given the dismal circumstances.

But he doesn't do that. He maintains faith in himself, and he maintains faith in the benevolence of existence, even though he can't necessarily perceive it at that moment. Yeah. So, I'll get to that, because what I did was, in the moment, I'm struggling with faith in myself, for sure. Struggling with faith in my ability to hear God's voice and know what I'm supposed to be doing. And God brings in this reminder of a story that makes me feel a little bit better of foundation. And this came to your wife's mind, this story.

That's why you investigated it. Yes, that's her contra- she was not Job's wife. She did not say, God, I'm high. Right, right, right. That's interesting. So, one of the things that does happen to people in circumstances like this, and it's worth noting psychologically, is that if you are wrestling with a very complex problem, you can watch memories and images flit through your mind.

Yes. You can think of it, your imagination, what your imagination is trying to do is to sketch out the nature of the new landscape, and it might offer a hint in the form of a reference to something red or something encountered that you can then pursue, right? So, it'd be like your wife's imagination had gripped onto the notion that there was some possibility that there was a nugget of information embedded in that particular story that would be useful for this situation. Right. We'd call that an intuition, but it's a revelation too. That's another way of thinking about it. Okay, so you took that seriously and you read the story. Right. So in the midst of it, this is why you're who you are.

I wouldn't have put it this way, but we were also unknowingly wrestling, whether it's an intuition or a revelation, and here's why. Because our conclusion from the story that we were reading was, okay, right now we are at that point of hunger and desperation. The next step is the miracle. Jesus brought them to that place so that they were hungry and desperate, so that the only solution to their problem was a miracle, the thing that only He could do. Yeah, you mentioned the Exodus story. One of the, what would you say, God, if I remember correctly, God justifies His actions in hardening the heart of the Pharaoh,

because that increases the majesty of His eventual victory. So that I will get glory. Yes, exactly. Three times in one chapter. Yeah, right, right, right. So that's a very complicated thing to unpack, and I don't remember if we went into that in the Exodus Seminar in the Daily Wire series, but I suspect so. And so, what you're doing is you're laying out the narrative of those events to point out the,

what would you say, it's the magnification of what happens that's beneficial by the precursor of the tragic. And it is definitely the case that there's this dynamic in our life that what's good would not be as good as it is, unless it could be contrasted with suffering and misery, right? You need that expanse of experience for things to have their majesty. That's a good way of thinking about it, Tim. So in the moment, a bad thing has happened, but it's the precursor to something great. So what is it? We know that Jesus is about to do something extraordinary in the feeding of the 5,000, so what is God about to do with us? So that's at least a possibility then.

Yeah, maybe. We think that tonight the numbers might so dramatically shift in a miraculous way that God will get glory and that our movie will actually surprise and counteract the math equation that has taken place. And so we're thinking, don't be surprised if tonight the numbers magically, supernaturally, miraculously turn around. The math equation that Hollywood is used to is upended. And what is about to happen to us is what happened to the people who were hungry and desperate 2000 years ago. So that night, the numbers got worse. So now we're going, okay.

So much for that hypothesis. Yes. So we're back to square one. And now I go to the former, when you had the two options of, is it a practical mistake? Is it an error that was made? Or is it a foundational problem? 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 what I normally do.

I'm going to get online, I'm going to pull up Microsoft Word, and I'm going to do a 15-page memo analyzing all the errors and strategies that were mistaken to lead me to this point. So I'm writing it out. This is what I did wrong. To my credit, I'm taking blame. I'm not putting blame on anyone else what I did wrong. To my credit, I'm taking blame. I'm not putting blame on anyone else. I was wrong. I missed it.

I'm on page 14 of my 15-page memo analyzing everything that went wrong. Something pops up on my computer. It's four o'clock in the morning. Message pops up on Facebook Messenger from someone I've never met. We're friends on Facebook. We've talked maybe once a year. It doesn't say hi. It're friends on Facebook. We've talked maybe once a year. Doesn't say hi, doesn't say hello. Just ping, remember, your job is not to feed the 5,000. It's only to

provide the loaves and fish. So I pause for a moment. I wonder if genuinely, with my computer recording what Amanda and I talked about today, how does this person know to speak to this thing we've been wrestling with all day? Yeah, that's a weird coincidence. So my response… To say the least. Yeah. So I didn't say, hey, Alex, nice to hear from you. I just go, what are you doing up at four in the morning?

Because I'm trying to analyze. He says, oh, I'm in Romania. I'm on the other side of the world right now. I just heard about your movie and I wanted to say that. And I said, before I respond, can I ask you why you told me that? He said, oh, that wasn't me. God told me to tell you that. Okay, so tell me the message again.

Remember, your job is not to feed the 5,000, it's only to provide the loaves and fish. Okay, so what did you make of that? So, I first had to... My life changed in that moment because my question about whether or not God was present was clearly answered. He's telling... I found out later that Alex said he was walking home from the grocery store and he looked up my movie, saw it was a failure, he had enjoyed it, he had seen it himself, he was disappointed, and he felt just as clearly as my wife had felt God putting her into the story of the Feeding 5000, he felt God putting it on his heart.

Tell Dallas it's not his job to feed the 5000, it's only to provide the loaves and fish. And he said, no, I barely know Dallas. It's a very condescending thing to say to somebody who's clearly— Well, and a strange thing. It's like its meaning is opaque. Yes, yes. It's a very particular reference, right? Right, right. Contextless.

Yes. So he wrestles with that and doesn't want to do that and thinks ultimately, well, God won't let me off the mat. He keeps pressing this into me, so, okay, I'm going to share this with Dallas. It's four in the morning back there anyway, so he won't see it for a while anyway. And of course, he gets this immediate response and informs me that God had been pressing it on his heart to tell me that. So two things happen. Number one, it all hit me in that moment. I understood what he meant, and that's what you're asking.

So in the story of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus could have, assuming you believe the story and you believe all the stories of the miracles that he performed, he could have manifested loaves and fish from nothing. And he could have fed 5,000 people, and the loaves and fish could have just emerged in their laps. But he says, I need food. Someone bring me some food. Bring me something. And a boy brings five loaves and two fish. And Jesus takes those five loaves and two fish and he blesses them

and then multiplies them to the point where we can feed 5,000 people. And so why does he do that? Why does he involve us, or in the case of this story, the boy, in the process when he doesn't have to? So the principle of your job is to not be responsible to feed 5,000, to not think of the results. I'm a results guy. I'm a problem solver. I'm a—the numbers didn't match.

We didn't feed 5,000. It failed. And this gentleman is telling me, no, no, that's not your job to worry about. You didn't fail. I see. So you're looking at the wrong marker of success in relationship to your endeavor. So as long as you did the right thing all the way along, which is something you have to contend with, in relationship to your conscience, the outcome is not the measure.

Correct. So, in that moment, when I'm literally analyzing what I did wrong, coming off of a day of wrestling with the story of defeating the 5,000, this gentleman, randomly out of the blue, tells me, it's not that. It's not that you failed, per se. It's not that you, we could argue about, did I make the best five loaves and two fish? Was the recipe a good recipe? So back to Job.

So you see, this is exactly the issue that's dealt with in Job, because part of the subtext of Job is the problem with assessment of a situation, what would you say, using anything but proper intent as the measure. And the reason for that is fairly straightforward. Sometimes things that are radically successful fail in the measurable moment. I'll give you an example. So, for example, Nietzsche's book, Beyond Good and Evil, I think it sold 200 copies in his lifetime. Right. Yeah, so it was a cataclysmic failure, but it was maybe the most impactful book of philosophy

in the last 150 years. He didn't know. Right. And then there's the contrary situation where you succeed beyond your wildest dreams in the moment, but it's hollow and you've sold your soul for it, and everything that comes flooding towards you, which looks like success, is actually the means for your destruction. Right?

So, and Job does wrestle with this. He says that, he says in effect to himself and to his friends and to God, that he's in no position to judge what's happened to him, in part because he doesn't have the omniscient view necessary to take all things into account, right? And so, he's unwilling to condemn himself or God for that matter because of this momentary failure, cataclysmic though it is, because everything has not yet been revealed. Now, that's complicated because it still leaves us in an uncomfortable situation, which is, well, if you can't use the result as the marker for success or failure, what do you use as a marker?

So, now you went over your conduct, you got this message and you presumed, I'm leaping ahead a bit, my suspicion is that you presumed that perhaps this hadn't been a failure. How did you make the judgment? Well, how did that change your judgment of the situation? It took a year and I think it's still taking place today as you and I talk about this show that, spoiler alert, has become one of the most successful shows in the world and I have gotten some of those things that I used to pursue. But it's different now, so we'll put a pin in that, we'll come back to this moment.

I don't know yet. I'm going, okay, so he's right. So you set the stage so this could be successful, and so you did your part. That's the message. The message is you did your part, but the, did I do a good job? Was the fish and loaves the best? I don't know yet. I don't know what the reason is for this because if the feeding, if the result, the miracle isn't a good result for the resurrection of Gavin Stone, the name of the movie, if it's still failing, if it's never of Gavin Stone, the name of the movie. If it's still failing, if it's never going to succeed, then what is the, I eat my loaves and fish.

He's just saying to me in that moment, don't worry about it. Be okay, because I'm wrestling with what's, so what's the next step? And I don't know. And God's economy of time is different from humanity's economy of time, so I'm wanting the answer now. He's saying, you don'm wanting the answer now. Yeah, yeah. He's saying you don't have that answer now. Just know, just stop thinking about the result.

Think more about the five loaves and two fish. And so for me, as someone who over 40 years of my life had always measured myself by the results, was seeking a particular result, affirmation was my drug of choice. Legitimacy was my drug of choice. It was my voice, my vice. Narcissism was my struggle. In this moment, I think that the feeding of the 5,000 refers to many things. It refers to financial success. It refers to Hollywood legitimacy. It refers to what people think of me, the audience. The audience rejected what I was bringing to them, right? So did Hollywood, so did anything that I was seeking.

So okay, well, that's nice to hear, but in that moment, I realized from now on, and I became a different person that night, that morning, 4 o'clock in the morning. Okay. God, as long as I am in your will, as long as I am providing five loaves and two fish that you deem acceptable, the transaction's over. No longer will I seek the feeding. I'm not going to be the boy who provides the five loaves and two fish, sees it multiplied, goes home to his parents and says, look, mom and dad, I fed 5,000 people today. That would be ludicrous. So I'm not only not responsible for the failure, I mean, in a manner of speaking, of course I'm sure,

of course I made some mistakes, of course the movie wasn't good enough to achieve its correct box-off. That's exactly what Job says. Yes. So, but, now my focus is going to be on just the transaction, for lack of a better term, between myself and God. OK, OK. So, one of the things that I've been talking to audiences about as I travel around the world and lecture is a theory of, what would you say, the relationship between truth and adventure. So, here's a way of conceptualizing faith in the truth. Whatever happens if you tell the truth is the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter how it looks to you.

Right, so this is, because, see, you've got to make a decision both ways. You can say, I'm going to judge the validity and utility of my utterance based on the result that I can see. Now the problem with that is you can't see everything. And that brings up those other problems we described. It could be a cataclysmic failure in the moment, but a long-term success or a cataclysmic success in the moment, a long-term failure. If you use the results as the measure, those errors exist. Okay, the alternative is to flip that and say, no, because of my ignorance in relationship to the adjudication of outcomes,

I'm going to concentrate on the process, and I'm going to make the assumption, and that becomes a standard of faith, that whatever happens if I say what I believe to be true is the best outcome, regardless of how it looks to me. And so, that's analogous to the, what would you say, conclusion you drew about even, you might say, a cognitive error that made you susceptible to taking yourself apart in the aftermath of the collapse of your movie, right? Now, you still have a problem, which would be, you know, are you just rationalizing? You know, you failed by any reasonable standard of failure.

Now you're saying, well, I did everything right, and I'm not gonna take the failure to heart. Well, I'm not saying I did everything right. Okay, fair enough, You didn't say that. I'm saying that's not how I'm going to measure ultimate success here. So what's interesting is I would conclude, and I think I concluded it in that moment, and I certainly conclude it now. In fact, hundreds of millions of people around the world believe

the conclusion I'm about to tell you, which is the resurrection of Gavin Stone, that movie was in a sense almost sacrificed at the altar of my own. The measurement of the success wasn't Gavin Stone's financial results, because those never went, those never improved. It maintained its failure. So then what's the success? Yeah. its failure. So then what's the success? Well, it's not necessarily that Nietzsche's book ended up, even though it only sold 200 copies, ended up still having impact. The resurrection of

Gavin Stone, that movie is not, in 50 years, people aren't going to say, even though it only did 2.3 million dollars, it inspired millions of people. That movie is the, again, I don't know if I have a better term for it, kind of sacrifice, because the story that God is telling in this moment is, at the risk of sounding arrogant, my story. It's ultimately, again, skipping ahead for a moment, the chosen became the thing that was the outcome. Well, you said something, okay, now you said something that I thought was crucial, and I'm hoping I can reproduce it. And I'm sure I don't have this exactly right, but you said something like you determined

at that moment that the outcome wasn't the proper measure, and then you described how using the outcome as the measure could be contaminated by your own self-interest, your pride, your desire to be attractive to people, to be accepted in Hollywood, all of that. So there's a pride element to that. You said instead that you were going to adjudicate the moral acceptability of your actions by what? By determining whether they were an accurate, a genuine reflection of your relationship with God?

Yes. Okay, what does that mean exactly to you? Like, take that apart, because it's analogous to this notion of the truth will set you free as a definition, right? So you said you're switching the criteria that you're using. Okay, how did you come up with the new criteria and how do you know that you're genuinely applying those criteria in a way that isn't contaminated, let's say, by pride and self-interest? I actually wrote about it on Facebook a few days later. I did this long post where I just said, okay, I'm not going to pretend that I can convince

you to go see this movie now. I've surrendered it. Here's what's happened. It failed. Period. End of sentence. Now what? Why do I feel, I actually use the word free, why do I feel more freedom right now than at any other time in my life? The truth will set you free. What does that freedom come from? And that was the experience you had. Oh, absolutely. So, in that moment, I went from, how do I wrestle with this? How do I understand? What went wrong? Was it me? Was it God? Was it Satan? Was it my friends? Was it the studio? What brought

me to this place? It didn't matter anymore. In my life right now, for the first time in decades, I was perfectly willing to never make another film or TV show if that's what God wanted. Now, I didn't know if that was what God wanted. I didn't know what the future held. How did that, how do you think that transformation God wanted. I didn't know what the future held. How did that, how do you think that transformation came about? I mean, it's linked to this message that you had received and the timeliness of that. And the delivery of the message, the fact that the message was, could you call this a coincidence? Could you call it just random?

It's quite a coincidence. It's such an extraordinary coincidence. Similar, I've heard your story. You talk about your wife, what God put on her heart, how she knew. Yeah, right. You know, and you go, I can't… Yes, it's quite a coincidence. It's such a coincidence that I must… You're kind of screwed both ways when a coincidence like that shows up.

Yes. Because you either don't believe it or you believe it. It's like both are absurd in a way. The secularist or the humanist or the atheist would say, Dallas, it is a coincidence. These things happen all the time. I don't even know how you would calculate the odds of a coincidence like that. I can't. And so I must accept God is clearly in this, He is clearly communicating to me what must

I draw from this. Well, I've attended business seminars, every filmmaker will tell you to have a plan, five-year plan. Where are you going to be at in five years? And Phil Vischer, who's the creator of Veggie Tales, which was 25 years ago, huge, and then he had a similar crisis of faith. He lost it all. He was left barren and found that God was trying to just get his attention. God was saying to him, I don't care what you do for me, I care that you're doing it with me. I want

you, I don't care about what you're giving me. That was his ultimate message, I'll let him speak for himself. But one of the things he said to me was, where you're at in five years is none of your business. So that, for me, was an extraordinary thought, because I'm someone... That's a weird one too, because I do believe that it's useful for people to flesh out a vision. Yes. Right? But you have to do that in a kind of a detached way. You have to understand that that's a first-pass approximation, and it's necessary, but you don't want to fall in love with it. You don't want to be wedded to it. You don't want to worship it as a final end, let's say.

Now, it's also interesting that this message you got, it's so pointed in relationship to how your attitude changed because you said, this is the other part of this that's too coincidental in a way, because what your friend from, the message delivered from Romania said to you was that your criteria for success was inappropriate. It's very targeted, especially for that moment. So it's not only the coincidence of the overlapping theme, it's that the message that you received was dead relevant to the problem you were trying to solve and in a revolutionary way. Right.

So now you have a different hallmark for success. And one of the proofs that that message struck home and was accurate was that instead of being in desperation as a consequence of the collapse of your vision, you said that perversely even you felt free, right? That's very unlikely, right? That's a very unlikely outcome. The most unlikely outcome is you're shattered, at least for a good while.

And that would also indicate that you were laboring under a burden of success definition that was actually not good for you at all. I was a performer. I was performance-based. Right, right. That's a puppet. I was performance-based. Right, right. That's a puppet. That's like a Pinocchio puppet, right? Performing for the stage.

Yes. Yeah. That's being an actor. Yeah, yeah. So you could say, well, your strings were cut. No. My actually strings became stronger. The audience was removed from the equation.

Am I still willing to be a boy on a string? Am I still willing to be in service to God? Am I still willing to bend the knee and commit to a life of more of Him, less of me? I am in service to Him, even if there's not an audience while I'm dancing. Yeah, but that's voluntary. That's the difference between that being a puppet dancing on strings, right? Voluntary submission isn't dancing to the Piper's tune. It's a different game. Fair. But I, in that moment, said, okay, okay, God.

I crumple up the 15 pages. I give up even, so that's the past, but I also crumple up the future. I don't know what my future is, and I'm okay with that for the first time in my life. It may mean I don't ever make it into... Why were you okay? Because I understood who God was and what He... And it was so clear He was present that I was like, whatever those five loaves and fish are, I'm okay.

As long as you... I'm willing to go along with it. Yes, and so if that means driving a bus just just that I'm supporting my family, that's okay, because what's more important is that I'm in your will and that I'm not basing my success or failure or my mood, who I am as a husband and father on how well… Your identity. Yeah, better. Thank you.

My identity in how people see me, my identity, and the Bible talks about the fear of man. Yeah, thank you. My identity in how people see me, my identity in the Bible talks about the fear of man. Yeah, right. I had a fear of man more that I didn't maybe know. I wouldn't have maybe admitted that about myself, but clearly I knew in that moment the fear of man was more than my fear of God. Right. Well, that would be a temptation, obviously, if you're going to be a filmmaker, because one of the things you want to have happen is that you want people to watch your film. So that's a positive in a way,

because you want to make something that's appealing in a worthwhile. I'm in a performative field. Right, but the problem is, is when you're basing your self-worth on your status as a performer, right, then it becomes about you. And that does make you a puppet.

And so one of the things I know as psychologists performer, right? That it becomes about you. Yes. And that does make you a puppet. Yes. So one of the things I know as psychologists is that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable. Those are so closely linked, you can't separate them statistically. And you know, if you're on stage and you start worrying about how the audience is reacting to you, you get self-conscious and you stumble over your words, you're embarrassed, people can tell you're self-conscious, you get awkward. And you say things like, oh, sorry, I'm rambling. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

You start apologizing, right, which is a really bad thing to do on stage. It's like, well, if you have to apologize for being on stage, maybe you shouldn't be on stage. Yeah, now the audience is above you on that. Yeah, exactly. They're ahead of you. Continually, continually. And it's worse, it's the whim of now the audience is above you on that. Yeah, exactly. They're ahead of you. Continually, continually. It's worse, it's the whim of the audience that's above you.

Yeah, that's okay. So that's cool. So you've got a guy who is narcissistic in a field that demands a bit of narcissism in order to succeed in one moment having all that taken away from him. And the perverse consequence of that is that you feel free instead of demolished. 100%. Yeah, right. So that's pretty funny.

All right. Okay, okay. So then, okay, so let's continue. What happens? So, for the next few months, I'm like, well, what's my future? Now I happen to be, we won't get into this, but I happen to be working at a church in Illinois at this time. So I had made certain movies, but they had hired me to come make movies within the context of this large church

in Illinois. And so one of the things that I had done previously was for Good Friday services or for Christmas services at this huge church of 12,000 people, which had huge Good Friday services, eight of them over the course of two days for 2,000 people per service. My task was to make these short films or vignettes about Jesus. And so, going back as far as, you know, 2012, I was doing these little, like it's where I met Jonathan Rumi who plays Jesus and the Chosen, is I was doing a short film about the crucifixion from the perspective of the two thieves on the cross. And so, this notion of telling the stories that I've heard hundreds of times, but from different perspectives, had already proven itself over the last five years to be an extraordinary tool in unlocking people's emotional connection to the story.

Why? What did you see when you were making those films? What sort of impact was that having? So, for example, instead of being just what most Bible projects are, like, I assume you've seen – have you seen the Jesus of Nazareth miniseries? Have you seen any of these kind of Jesus movies? No, no, the Chosen is the one that I've watched. Oh, well, good. But the genre of biblical filmmaking, particularly Jesus filmmaking, tends to be verse by verse.

It's a reenactment of the verses that you're reading. It's not a story per se that you're telling that follows traditional three-act structure other than the fact that a lot of Jesus stories do. And then Jesus did this, and then Jesus did that, and then He encountered a blind man. Right. So is it fair to say that that's the subordination of the movie to the text? Yes. Right, so is it fair to say that that's the subordination of the movie to the text? Yes, which makes for sometimes an enjoyable recreation of what you already believe, but certainly not a good movie. Yeah, yeah, and that's a crucial thing. It's a crucial thing, you know.

I have a very large collection of Russian propaganda art, like 400 pieces, a lot. And I've studied propaganda a lot. And propaganda is the subversion of art to a... It's like a subversion of art to an outcome. It's kind of like what we're talking about with regards to your criteria for success. You already know what the target is. The thing about telling a story is a story is a quest. You don't know what the outcome is. Now, you might say, I want to make this story in a way that serves the highest possible purpose. That's pretty, that gives you a lot of degrees of freedom. But the story isn't genuine.

The story isn't genuine like a conversation isn't genuine if you know what the outcome is going to be. Like our conversation here, I don't know where it's going to go, right? I want to let it go where it's going to go. The religious films can be propagandistic, just like political films. Oh, they almost always are. Yeah, I know. And then they fail. They're not interesting. And I think not only do they not serve their religious purpose, then I think they harm it.

Because it looks like it's the hijacking of the quest in art to push forward a message that's predetermined. It's not an exploration. There's not even any faith in it, right? Because there's no risk in a way. Yeah, so it doesn't work. And part of the reason I think that one of the things I've learned about atheists, because I've learned a lot about atheists discussing religious issues with atheists. Have you ever been one? Do you think that there's been a time in your life where you would have said, I don't believe there's a God? Or have you always been agnostic on the verge of back and forth, you know, wrestling?

I think I was never an atheist because I was never confident enough in my own doubt to proclaim it as a virtue, in a way. I knew it at minimum, I knew that I didn't know what the hell was going on. There's another thing that mitigated against that too, is that I've believed in evil since I was very young. Which is helpful. Well, maybe not when you're age. If you believe in evil, you believe in good because it's the opposite of evil. And so now, amorphous though that may be.

Okay, so now, propaganda. You learned that you were telling stories, and you were doing that by showing these stories from a new light. Okay, so how did you come across that as an idea? Well, ironically enough, I was listening to a sermon from a pastor in Louisville, his name is Kyle Eitelman, and he did a sermon on the crucifixion. And the story of the crucifixion and Jesus' relationship with the two thieves on the cross takes just a few verses. Right. So, in just a few verses, a man goes from mocking Jesus and seeing those mocking Jesus and joining in on the mockery and within just a few verses says, I want to be with you, I believe in you.

Right, right, right. And a lot of transformation packed into a very short period of time. As a storyteller, it's pretty bad storytelling. There's no journey. We just know he was mocking him a few verses later. He believed in Him. There's no three-act structure. I guess there's the first and the third act. There's the before and the after, but there's no middle. And so, what would lead Him? This pastor was saying, what might have He heard from Jesus that could have caused Him

to break. And so this pastor opined, not claiming fact, but he opined, what if it was he was broken by Jesus' comment, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. Some of this, he's being mocked, he's being mocked. Well, that would be a thing to be broken by if you actually saw it happen. Right. So you're mocking him, you're mocking him, you're joining in the mockery, and he's just completely, not only is he not phased and broken by it, he's actually praying for the forgiveness of the people who are doing it.

And he means it. And he means it. Right, right. So that's what his opinion was and I thought that was very compelling and I thought I want to make a short film where we unpack the backstory, the before. And that's a word we use all the time on the show. So there's a lot in that story that needs unpacking too. It's like there's lots of things in principle that you could have taken inspiration from. Why do you think that hit you, what he was doing? Why do you think that captured your, because that's a calling, right?

That's the manifestation of a calling and it has a big effect as it turns out. So something is being born there, something triggers a commitment or an interest. What happens exactly when you see Him? It's a very quick and easy answer. I'm a storyteller. So, you know, just for example, I watch your gospel series on Daily Wire and I'm seeing extraordinary intellectuals wrestle with and discuss and debate. And I'm watching it, and of course it speaks to me because I love the Gospels and I've been a believer as long as I can remember, and I've been tasked and stewarded with, again, fast forwarded for a second, with portraying the Gospel story to the world through the

medium of television in this way that has seemingly transcended cultures and boundaries. And so, I'm interested in it from that perspective, but I listen to some of you talk and I go, yeah, that's fascinating, but my job and my calling and my interest and my skill set is to tell it as a story. And because I'm a storyteller, I'm attracted to the emotional as much or more than the intellectual. And so, I've known these stories all my life, but ever since I was a kid, when I was a little kid, I would hear Sunday school stories. And I'm going,

what would it have been like to sit around with Jesus at a campfire? What was it like to be a sibling of Jesus and to argue with Him and then His parents come involved and they always side with Jesus because He's never wrong? What would it have been like to go to school with the perfect Son of God? I was always intrigued by those and the reaction you just had where you chuckled. I'm like, that was me. I'm going, and I would say that. I'd go, can you imagine what it'd been like to be Jesus' brother?

And he'd go, mom, Jesus did this again. And his mom says, wow, you need to make the adjustment. He's like, you're always honest. Jesus can do no wrong. He's the perfect child. Mom's like, well, yes, he is actually. That's very funny. So those kinds of things,

I was eight years old and was wrestling with that, right? So I've always, I'm just- Right, well, and there are people who are natural storytellers, but that's a real gift, and it's- Well, my father is an author of over 200 books. He's one of the most prolific authors of all time. Right, so you came by it honestly. Yes.

And so I'm a storyteller in the classroom. I was a storyteller when I wasn't supposed to be. I've always been a storyteller when I wasn't supposed to be. I've always been a storyteller. So when a pastor is unpacking three to four verses with an intellectual conclusion, the part that speaks most to me is the story part of it. What might have been the backstory? I'm like, well, I'm on the case. You see with Christ's parables frequently, like an amalgam of those two approaches, you know, because He'll tell a story and then the disciples, for example,

will say, well, you know, thank you, but we don't really get it. And then He'll lay out the explanation. I've certainly found in my lectures that the most effective way of driving a point home is to tell a story and to provide an explanation, right? The story is brought, it's like the playoff intellectually between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who are aiming in very similar directions. Dostoevsky's stories cover a much broader territory than Nietzsche's thinking, but they're

less explicit, right? They're less propositional. So there's a loss there because it's not as defined. Nietzsche is more defined and more specific, but there's a loss because the expanse that Dostoevsky covers is brought up. I'll give you an example. So, in the Brothers Karamazov, the hero is a novitiate named Eliosha, and he's contrasted. Eliosha is a very good person, but he's not an intellectual, and

his arguments aren't as tightly formulated and pointed as they might be. He's often at a loss for words. His brother, Ivan, is hyper-charismatic and unbelievably pointed in his propositional reasoning. And if he goes head-to-head with Eliosha, he can win the argument. But he loses the battle, because as the story unfolds, you see that the goodness of Aleusia triumphs over the Luciferian rationality of Ivan. Ivan wins all the battles, you might say, but loses the war.

And Dostoevsky could portray that because he used a story. Like Nietzsche as a philosopher would have to make the philosophical case for Eliosha. That isn't what happens in Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky shows what happens as Eliosha's life unfolds. He does the same thing in his book, The Idiot, which is about a prince who's an analog of Christ, who is a holy fool and who people have some pity for. But he's a very good person, and you see that unfold in the story. Dostoevsky is showing how a life well-lived is triumphs over an argument well-formulated.

That's a good way of thinking about it. Correct. And I know just enough, I'm a good enough arguer, well, I'm good enough formulating arguments to be dangerous. But at my heart, I always find that the way into the persuasion, if you want to look at it from that way, is storytelling. And it always seems to... Persuasion or communication? Both. Yeah, okay.

So if I say to you right now, so this morning I wake up and I get out of bed, the simple fact of me saying that, you're going, well, then what happened? Right. get out of bed. The simple fact of me saying that, you're going, well, then what happened? Even though you know that it's probably, most likely, banal, it's not very few significant things happen when you just get out of bed, but you're intrigued, right? That's all I know. I don't know that I can intellectualize why, I just know that it works. And I know that when I set out to make that short film about the two thieves, we showed their backstory, we showed how they met, we showed, again, all through not fact, but through what we call plausibility. Right.

What is plausible, what would have been in the cultural context, the historical context. So my co-writer, Tyler Thompson, at the time had never written a screenplay in his life, but we were working at the same place and he's brilliant at connecting the Old Testament to the New, he's brilliant with historical context and cultural context, and so we worked together to fashion a plausible backstory for the two thieves. Jesus doesn't show up until the last five minutes of the short film. So we spend 20 minutes establishing the things that led these two thieves to be on the cross, and they finally get on the cross, and we get to the crucifixion moment when Jesus is there. And the audience, of course, in a church is going, all right, now

we're here, we get it. This is the crucifixion story we've heard so many times, but we're seeing all these comments from Jesus that are in Scripture, we're seeing them now through the lens of the two thieves on the cross, this backstory that we've been following. And so what happened, to your question, is the audience I saw and experienced, and they told me there was a significant aha moment. Right, right. That's a revelatory moment. I had never, yes, I had never considered this.

It makes more sense to me now. Now when I read the… Things go together. Yes, now when I read these four verses, I actually can not only understand it perhaps a little better, but I also can see myself in the thief on the cross. And that's the problem with most biblical storytelling, is that it's through the eyes of Jesus. Jesus actually doesn't make for a good protagonist in a drama, because he doesn't necessarily, outside of that moment in Scripture where it says he grew in wisdom and stature. But once his ministry starts, he doesn't make for a great protagonist, because he doesn't necessarily learn,

he doesn't necessarily go from bad to good or anything like that. And so when we see all these miracles that he's performing in these life change that he's causing, we don't know anything about the people that he's causing it for. That's a clunky way of saying it, but we don't know how can we unpack the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years and touches the hem of this garment? Well, so what you're doing, it's analogous, I would say, to, let's say, what the Renaissance artists in particular did when they were painting images from the Bible, right?

They're taking textual reference and they're fleshing them out. Now it's a static image, although a great Renaissance painting is packed with, insanely packed with, insanely packed, insanely packed with information. But you have the advantage of being able to do that in three dimensions, right? Cause you can add that temporal element. So you can, you can use your imagination.

See, this is, it's interesting, eh? Cause this is analogous to what the great psychoanalytic thinkers did in relationship to dream analysis. Yeah. So, so a client would tell them a dream fragment and they would ask the client to let their imaginations range to flesh out the territory that was associated with the dream images. So that would be the first step. And then the second step would be for the analyst himself to participate in that.

So if I was doing dream analysis with a client or merely listening for that matter, I'd watch like your wife was watching when she got that message about the loaves and the fishes. I'd watch to see if an image or an idea flashed into my mind. And one of the things I was doing as a therapist is you tell me something and something would be triggered in my mind. So, it's associated. Now, we're similar in some ways. So, if I have an association to what you're saying, it's possible that it's also fleshing out the broader meaning.

Now, you're taking these biblical stories that are fragments of a narrative, obviously, because the thieves had a life, and you're letting your imagination flesh them out, right? And amplifying them. Ignatius talked about that. St. Ignatius, when he says, we were to read the Bible with a holy, a sacred imagination. Right, right, right. The text isn't meant... Protestants are uncomfortable with this. I'm an evangelical Protestant. I'm not a Catholic, so I'm raised to be a little more protective

to the fidelity of the text, the text, the text. That's why there aren't too many things like the chosen, because typically it's, well, we don't want to expand and your imagination can run wild into a dangerous area. It can, it can. There's no doubt about that. But that's also, the thing about the text is the Bible is insanely hyperlinked. And so, like crazily hyperlinked, it's really the world's first hyperlinked text. And so, it's not like there's a linear voyage through the text, because each verse refers

to like five other verses or 50, and each of them refer to 50. And so, there's a lot of imaginative pathways through the text that are valid textual interpretations. Now, the Protestants who are skeptical are right that you can deviate heretically and that that's a problem. An evangelical would say, well, yes, it's hyperlinked, but stay there. Don't bring your own humanity into the imagination of it. Stick to the text. Yes, this verse is set up by a verse written thousands of years ago, and that's

beautiful and that's perfect because God wrote this book. So, that's okay. But when you start to bring your own analysis to it, now we're treading on thin ice, and that's for the realm of pastors to provide commentary, not for Dallas Jenkins to tell his own story. Just because something has dangers doesn't mean it isn't useful. And just because it's useful doesn't mean it doesn't have dangers. I mean, you can wander into heretical or hallucinogenic or psychopathic territory by deviating too far away from the text. So you look at a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ from Martin Scorsese's Exploration of Things, and most Christians were horrified to imply, I mean, Scorsese was exploring Jesus'

humanity and it went too far, right? And so they're like, we can't have them. Well, that was Nicco's Chizansicus work, right? Sure, but— And he got excommunicated. Right, but then it's put in the hands of a struggling Catholic who has made movies that most Christians would never even dare to see. But of course, if you look closely, you can see a spiritual beauty in Taxi Driver and in Raging Bull and some of these things.

Right, right. But it's a little too... Risqué, you might say. Risqué, a vulgar, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I became comfortable with that as an evangelical and my church was comfortable with it. Why? I became comfortable with that as an evangelical and my church was comfortable with it, not only comfortable with it. Why?

Why would they be comfortable with it? Well, because it felt so plausible and yet it was rooted in a fidelity to Scripture, meaning it wasn't made by someone who doubts it. You know, you look at the movie Noah from Darren Aronofsky where many Christians were offended by that because he was exploring the story of Noah as an environmentalist manifesto of sorts, and Ridley Scott doing the Exodus story about Moses, and he's clearly not a believer. And so that was clear. So that's where the textual interpretation gets subverted to the psyche of the interpreter,

the danger that the Protestants are warning against. Correct. But when it's in the hands of someone like myself who is a believer and who has been raised and trained in fidelity to Scripture and loves it. So, my artistic imagination has some boundaries to it that I'm happy to… See, this is what Jonathan Pagio has done on the iconography side, right? Yes.

He was trained as a modern artist, but he adopted an attitude of respect and fidelity to the tradition, and that bounded His artistic imagination, right? But it provided it with structure, and it also, it's interesting because that means that His artistic vision is now in sync with this broader tradition, which is what you're striving to do by your own testimony or admission here. You're approaching the text insofar as you can manage it with respect and honor. And then what you'd hope, and I do think this is how it works, to the degree that your intent is pure, so to speak, in relationship to those, your imagination will fall into line.

That's how imagination works, because it's a goal-directed process. So your goal, and maybe that's part of what happened in that transformation too, is right, because you said you switched from outcome as evaluative standard to something like relationship or covenant as standard. That should mean that your imagination is much more reliable. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so maybe that accounts for why...

Jonathan's iconography is intended to point people to the thing. Yeah, not to him, for example. Not to him or to the icon itself. An icon is not an object of worship. If it was, it would be an idol, and we're warned against idolatry. But iconography points people to the thing. So I know my place in this story, which is I'm not replacing the Bible, I'm not God, Jonathan Rumi who plays Jesus is not Jesus, and the show isn't scripture. Are you a prophet?

Oh, I'm not going to answer. Well, I'm curious about this, because I kind of mean it technically, because the imagination properly harnessed is prophetic. It can see around corners. And you've adopted a given aim, and we've fleshed out what that aim is, and you are expanding upon and exploring the text. So now … I would say I'm a herald.

Exactly. Okay, how would you distinguish that? A herald is calling you to look at the thing and he's gathering you, right? When we went to Israel in 2017 with Rabbi Jason Sobel, who's the Messianic Jewish Rabbi who's one of our consultants, and so I went to Israel. And I'll get to that in a bit because there was a profound spiritual moment that happened there too. But one of the things that happened on that trip was we went to the Sea of Galilee and saw, while we're talking about what took place in the Sea of Galilee and investigating it,

there happened to be a man on a boat who was fishing with his net. And it was extraordinary. It was an old-fashioned boat. It was not a motorboat. And he's gathering. And there's a parable that Jesus gives in the Gospels about the parable of the nets where he says a fisherman's job is to gather the fish and they separate the good from the rotten and they toss it around back in. So it will be at the end of the age. Right.

You gather the fish and the angel will separate the evil from the righteous. I'm calling you to be a fisher of men." He says that to Simon Peter. From now on, I will make you fishers of men. You are to gather as many as possible, all kinds. I will sort them out later. So we had a profound moment, one of the profound moments, not the ultimate one, but one of them was me going, I think that's what I am, I'm a gatherer. I gather fish into the net and I let God work out what the result of that is. I'm not trying to convert you in my show, although that has happened to be a very common occurrence, or I'm not hoping...

No, that's one of the reasons that your show can be watched, as far as I'm concerned, because there isn't that element of compulsion and force and propagandistic intent that, by the way, does drive so much atheist resistance. Like, a lot of atheists are not merely rationalist, materialist determinists, let's say, who are skeptical. That's sort of their intellectual facade. A very large number of them were hurt by religious people using force to drive home their beliefs. Right? Not helpful. And, you know, I'm always leery of religiously themed entertainment because

it's got that propagandistic element of subversion and even though hypothetically it's for a good cause. It just, it makes me revolt, let's say. The Chosen didn't do that. I enjoyed watching it, partly because it succeeds on the basis of its ability to tell a story, which is that, and it's weird that that should be the first thing, right? But it has to be.

I don't think anything can take primacy over the story. I don't, doesn't look like it to me. That's where the feeding of the 5,000 story, again, rears its, I wouldn't say ugly head, rears its beautiful head, because when I'm writing, I'm not thinking about trying to quote unquote convert or even feed 5,000 people. I'm trying to tell a great story. Right, right. I'm trying to honor God and tell as close as I can the truth of the character and intentions of Jesus in the Gospels. And so, that's my job in these, and when I first

started doing it with my co-writer. Are you guarding your, okay, so this is a very tricky question, I suppose. I mean, there's a danger. Now all your other questions have been completely, they've just been… Nothing, I know. Yeah, 2 plus 2 equals 4. Well, one of the dangers too is that you get concerned about your... Okay, as I've become more successful, let's say as a public communicator or podcaster,

the temptation to protect my reputation in relationship to my selection of guests increases. Should I really talk to that person? If I get worried about my reputation, then I'm going to fail because the wrong thing is driving me forward. All I've been doing using this podcast for is to talk to people who I want to hear from so I can learn something. That's it. If I get concerned, okay, for you as a Christian, if you get concerned about your reputation as a Christian, you're going to get dull quick. Oh, I tell people that all the time. They'll say,

why do you do this show? And when I'm sitting with my laptop in my living room, if I'm thinking about this scene will cause YouTube videos to come up like they have over several years about me. You can look on YouTube right now and find plenty of videos talking about my heresy and my... that I'm leading people to hell because I'm not just, you know, whatever. Or you can find videos that are saying that I'm the greatest storyteller ever and that this show has changed their life. If I start to seek to pursue the ladder and avoid the former, then I'm not making a good story. Well, you can see this is what's happened to Hollywood in relationship to the woke ideology. It's like, as soon as pleasing the woke ideologues becomes the goal, then the stories are like

instantly contemptible. Oh, 100%. They're just worse than dull. And the people who participate in them are empty. And it just dies. It just, as we've seen, it just dies. So my comfort with telling those stories in the way that I am could have only come from that moment at 4 o'clock in the morning where I gave up.

So the Feeding the 5,000 that I felt responsible for not only refers to financial success, it refers to spiritual achievement, right, mission. I can't feel like my mission is to convert more people or gather more fish, or when I gather them, I'm responsible for putting the righteous in this boat and the evil into the... That's God's job, right? So, I'm a gatherer, I'm a herald, so that's to your question. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. So, my comfort with telling those stories could have only happened after that moment

that happened at 4 o'clock in the morning. And so, what happened after we've had several short films and vignettes over the years that had that, resulted in that aha moment. It was clear that we were onto something. It was clear that telling stories from a different lens allowed people to unpack it differently. So, for example, I filmed a vignette around the crucifixion where Peter is wrestling with how is this possible that the Messiah could have died. If he's the Messiah, why would he die? That must have missed it, right? And so he's flashing back to when Jesus called him Peter and called him the Rock and said, you now have the keys to the kingdom of heaven, yada yada. So he's

flashing back to that moment. Well, I went to that moment and I started it with two disciples arm wrestling and they're just having fun around the fire. This goes back to my eight-year-old self. What would it have been like to sit around the fire with Jesus with the twelve disciples and they're just friends. What are they doing? And so, they're arm wrestling. And I have one of the disciples have a surprise victory over the other. The other one had been undefeated, and Andrew defeats Thaddeus.

And they go, oh my goodness, look what happened. He won! And John says, I can't believe Andrew beat Thaddeus. And Jesus says, even I didn't see that coming. Right? Jesus making a joke about his own divinity. And I remember leading up to that. My wife, Amanda, had even said, I don't see that coming. Right? Jesus making a joke about His own divinity. And I remember leading up to that. My wife, Amanda, had even said,

I don't know if this is, you know, sometimes people are uncomfortable with so much humanity of Jesus, right? I'm assuming that's what you want. That's a good joke. Right. That's what I thought. It's a good joke, yeah. So, I remember, I'll never forget it. I'm watching, I'm waiting, that joke comes and the audience laughs hard, but I'm a fairly

good audience gauger and I could tell it was not only just a laughter of humor, it was a laughter of relief. Sure. Sure. The air was let out of the balloon, maybe it was, and I've had people coming up to me going, oh my goodness, seeing Jesus have fun, seeing Jesus laugh with his friends was a revelatory moment for them. It unlocked, it made everything else make more sense, it brought it more... Brought some play into it.

Of course, but then by that case, then it opens you to the next part, which is when he calls Peter Rock, the serious stuff. Your soil is tilled because you're laughing, because you're charmed, because – and this clearly must have been how Jesus was, because why else would children have found Him so attractive? Why else would thousands of people follow Him around just to hear Him speak? So, it was not an offensive thing, it was a life-giving thing, and so we learned that that worked, right? So, that was the training ground for what happened. That's important. So, a few months, fast forward to a few months after my failure, after my moment at four in the morning, and I take the script that we had written a year and a half earlier about

the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds, and put it on the shelf because of my Hollywood movie, right? Well, I'm thinking, I'm willing to drive a bus, I'm willing to get a normal job, whatever it takes, but, you know, let's pull this off. And I'm still working at this church, I've still got the security of that job. I say to them, you want to do another short film, let's film it for Christmas Eve. And they loved it, right? So I'm on my friend's farm in Illinois, 20 minutes from my house. I'm filming this short film called The Shepherd, and it's about what the shepherds would have

been experiencing that morning and what it would have been like to be a shepherd and what it would have been like to be in the marketplace that day in Bethlehem, selling your sheep for slaughter. And then that night, while you're out in the field, you're visited by a host of angels and choosing you as shepherds, the lowliest of the low in society. So we're going to unpack that. We see it in Scripture briefly, but Scripture doesn't say the shepherds who happen to be lowly and happen to be poor, and you have to unpack that. We see it in Scripture briefly, but Scripture doesn't say the shepherds who happen to be lowly and happen to be poor. And you have to unpack that somehow.

You have to get that from somewhere beside Scripture. So, that's what we're doing. And that short film, while I was making it, again, it felt like a big step down from a Hollywood opportunity. Again, I'm on my friend's farm in Illinois. Good story though. Yeah. Right.

So, I'm making this little thing and I'm like, why is it that if this feels so small and yet I'm more comfortable than I've ever been? Why am I? Right. That's a good question. Yes. So I went home to my wife and I'm like, not so small then, is it? Right. Right. It's like, maybe my criteria for what constitutes small has been wrong. Right. And that's where I go, love's in fish. Love's in fish. Right. I'm just focused on the five and two, and this is my five and two right now. Didn't even feel like five and two, it feels like one and a half, it's small, but it's life-giving and I'm good at it. I could tell I'm better at this than I am anything else.

Biblical storytelling seems to be easier for me. I don't struggle with it as much. I'm on set, I'm more comfortable. So it's a door that opens if you knock on it. Yes. Yes. So I'm telling the story and I love it and I'm feeling like it's good. And while I'm doing that, I'm also binge watching The Wire on HBO, which is a show that's been around for years and it's vulgar, but I'm binge-watching it and I'm appreciating the storytelling. And how this show covers multiple, it covers the cops, it covers the city hall, it covers

the people on the streets. It's a crime show, but it covers multiple angles. And I'm like, that's never been done before in a Jesus story. When we, you know, in a Jesus movie or mini-series, that's all there's ever been is movies and mini-series, which are limited by their time. And because of their limited in time, they don't explore much more than, and then Jesus did this, and then this verse, verse by verse, miracle to miracle. That's what these are. And I'm like, what if we had a multi-season show where you have the time to develop the backstories and develop this context like

I did in 20 minutes in the birth story? That's where I had the idea. Oh yeah, cool. But no one's lining up around the block to do a show about Jesus and certainly not with someone like myself who's failed and coming off of her career failure. But I'm like, boy, whoever does this, I think is going to be really smart because I think it's going to really impact people like these short stories seem to do. Very, very long story short, the short film got in the hands of a streaming platform at the time.

It was called VidAngel. They loved it. VidAngel at the time. They're now Angel Studios. Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they loved the short film and loved my idea for a show. And they said, we wanna do this, we wanna support you. And I said, great. And I got very excited.

And then they said we should raise them. Why? Why did they like it? They watched that short film and burst into almost uncontrollable tears. Oh, that's good, that's good. There's something. You hit a chord. There was something almost transcendent about what happened with that short film. That little thing I did Oh, that's good, that's good. There's something... You hit a chord. There was something almost transcendent

about what happened with that short film, that little thing I did on my friend's farm, 20 minutes from my house. People, so when they said, we're gonna put it on social media, and that will be the tool to raise crowdfunding. Right, so that was their idea, the crowdfunding idea. I thought it was a ridiculous idea.

Aha. But, Loaves and Fish. Right? Right, that's for sure. A year ago, I would have Aha. But, loaves and fish. Right? Right, that's for sure. A year ago I would have said, no, that won't work. Therefore we must do a different plan. It required some outside of the box thinkers who aren't conventional to come up with the idea and it required a broken, surrendered, humble man to accept the idea.

Because that's another indication where you're a priori tyrannical presumptions about what the right path must be, which is a weird thing to think you know about when you're trying to do something impossible, say, like tell a gospel story to a horde of people. It's like, I know how to do that. It's like, probably no. And so, these people offer you this unconventional opportunity, and partly because you now know that you don't know what the hell you're doing, and all that prideful presumption has disappeared. You're willing to take a shot at it, a crack at it. Yeah, that's very cool. My job is to provide this short film, and then to humbly request people, if you love this,

you can contribute to season one of this multi-season Bible show. Right, that's an invitation. It's an invitation. Yeah, yeah. And for whatever reason, 16,000 people around the world contributed $10 million based on this little 20-minute short. Right, and talk about a market test.

Talk about a market test. Yeah, yeah. But also talk about my wife a year later, once when we hit that $10 million mark and shattered the all-time crowdfunding record for media projects, and now it comes into understanding what we were being communicated a year earlier from God, which is, see, surrender. Five loaves and two fish. Right. Well, that even drives the point home even even more because, you know, what you just

laid out, it's so interesting because the story that you told in the last part of our discussion, the second half, parallels the first half almost perfectly in that you noted that like the message to you is that you are supposed to concentrate on what you had to offer and not to pay attention to the outcome. OK, then you notice that your proper offering... See, God tells Cain that if he offered what was best, he would be accepted. And so his message to Cain is, you're failing because you're not offering what's best.

So that begs the question, well, how do you know what's best? Well, you said, you said, look, I was willing to follow my intuition with regards to storytelling. I was following a path that I had known about since I was very young, this storytelling path. I was willing to use my imagination. I was willing to humble myself to not do the Hollywood thing, but just to continue telling the story. Then I noticed that I was very good at this and that people responded very positively to it and that I was calm and interested while I was doing it, which is probably a good indication that one of their standards would you use for evaluating what the best you had to offer

would be. And so that's so cool because it's not what you thought, but it is what you experienced. Then you show the results of your film to add, what were they called? At the time, VidAngel, now they're called the Angels. Then it was the Angels Studios, and they provide you with an unorthodox opportunity. And then the genuine fruits of what you had offered

come to make themselves manifest. That's so cool. It's so cool that those things are paralleled with that message that you got from Romania. Right, right. Okay, so you raise- Right, but at no point during the process, am I ever skipping steps.

I'm still at the loaves and fish step, loaves and fish step. So, oh, we raised $10 million. Well, that's amazing, that's cool. The old me would have felt pretty darn good about myself and said, well, this should lead to then the next thing. Yeah, which would be the Hollywood film, let's say. Yes, no, no, no. Okay, now I'm tasked with making season one.

Okay, so now by then you're wise enough to not stop doing what you're actually good at in favor of this other vision that you had that would be... 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. 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 church. But I don't think it would have been possible.

No, no, I should say that again. I know it wouldn't have been possible, and I don't think God would have been possible. No, no, I should say that again. 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. It's as much about my own brokenness as it was about, oh, you finally figured it out. You finally figured out what you're good at. Now you're ready to succeed. It's, no, you finally figured out the surrender necessary to even be good at what you do. The show right now is better than what I'm doing. Probably kudos to you for at least, what would you say?

That's humility. You at least had the willingness to pay attention to what the failure might have been indicating without losing faith. Yes. Faith. Yeah, right. So that's good. I've made a couple of good decisions.

I'll give myself credit. I've made good five loaves and two fish. I'm not going to be falsely modest about that. 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. I take responsibility for making really good five loaves and two fish. I 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.

God never lets me get ahead of myself or feel comfortable with, well, now I've finally arrived. 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. Right. Well, you have a whole new distribution. Oh, of course. Like this is a whole new ecosystem for filmmaking and distribution. Right, so a whole other episode could be,

could talk about the business assumptions that were wrong over and over and over again before it got, you know, how many times we had to start all over to figure things out. But long story short, it was clear that when people did watch it, there was a transcendent response of some kind. 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. Number one, it's to take Jesus down from stained glass windows and to take the disciples down

from stained glass windows into the formality of religion that sometimes can distance ourselves from Jesus, from a pure relationship with God. Sometimes, you know, we say that, we evangelicals sometimes say religion is about man's attempts to reach God. True relationship with true Christianity is about God's attempts to reach man. It depends on how, when you see the painting of Jesus, of God and the Father and Adam pointing at each other, who's reaching for who, right? Well, Adam is sort of going like this.

Yeah. Evangelicals look at it like God's reaching for Adam and he's accepting it, right? He's receiving it. 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, and then even when we sometimes watch movies, he still feels like a stained glass window. He's very formal and distant and pious and not funny or not interesting or not charismatic. 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. Of course, we still see him perform miracles and claim authority in the show. 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, and then it turns out, ultimately the miracle comes down to a favor for his friends because his mom asked him to. Did you find that that diminished his divinity or did you find that it enhanced it? Or I'm just curious for someone like yourself, because for most people who watched it, it was revelatory. 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 and I

was curious about that. Well, and how many people were telling you? Like, you probably had viewers and listeners going, you watched The Chosen. Well, there was buzz everywhere. 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. When is Jordan Peterson, like, do you believe? Have you met the last several years as almost like a gateway drug into Christianity, but still hoping. When is Jordan Peterson, like, do you believe? Have you met the need?

How many people have asked you? How many Christians have you met have gone, so do you believe Jesus rose from the dead? No, they ask me something worse. The question usually is, do you believe in Christ exactly the same way I claim to? It's like … Yeah, people are competing for Dr. Jordan Peterson to bring them into their fold the correct way to look at it. Yeah, well, and that's, you know, I mean, that's fine, I suppose, but it's...

There's something very sweet about it, too. Well, yes, that's what I mean by being fine. It's just, it's... Well, it's something like, you know, look to your own salvation. That's my fundamental attitude towards that. 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.

And so, she- What about your daughter? Because Michaela had a similar, she just decided to surrender and give her life to Jesus, and then- Yeah, well, she had a very powerful experience that preceded this. And so, yeah, yeah, but I watched The Chosen with Tammy. And so, I was watching her watch it and seeing her response.

The first response I had was relief. The relief was, oh, I can watch this because I'm very sensitive to propagandistic intent. I don't like it at all. Even a bit of it is a turn off for me. And I thought, no, this is, it kind of reminded me a bit of The Master and Margarita. Do you know that book? No. Oh, you need to know The Master and Margarita.

It's an absolute staggering masterpiece of Russian literature. It's a story written in the 1930s by a man named Bulgakov. Satan comes to earth in the Soviet Union and he can do whatever he wants because no one believes he exists. And then there's a backstory, this is why it would be so relevant to you. Bulgakov tells the story of Christ

and his experience with his disciples in a manner that's analogous to what you're doing. And it's a brilliant book. It's like Dostoevsky-level brilliant. Well, then that probably eliminates me as a reader, but I'll try. Oh, I think you'd find it. It's a fascinating, multi-level book. And I also really like Nikos Kazantzakis' work. He did Zorba the Greek, for example, the book most people know about, but he wrote a variety of stories that have a very, well, is it The Temptation of Christ? Is that the name of the book?

I can't remember at the moment. He did a variety of... I wish I could help you. He produced a variety of stories that are similar to what you're doing with the Chosen. Sure. So, I was, and then I thought, well, do I find this interesting, independently of my religious convictions or lack thereof? And the answer to that was yes, I really enjoyed it, which was really what I was hoping for. You asked me a more specific question.

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? Well, part of the insistence, the Christian insistence since time immemorial, was that Christ was fully God and fully human. So the human part needs to be demonstrated with a commitment that's equal to the divine part. 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.

And I found myself more than pleased to continue watching. I'm going to put that on our poster. Well, it's a hard… Dr. Jordan Peterson, more than pleased to continue watching. Yeah, well, it was a relief because you avoided all of the clichéd temptations of the easily-parodied evangelical tradition. That's a hard thing to pull off. And I also thought this was something else.

It's beautiful. That's seriously important. Cinematography is top rate, the acting is top rate. The quality of the production is extreme. Because you can use it as an excuse. You see another part of the problem with propagandistic religious entertainment is that it's often low quality and you're supposed to pretend that doesn't matter. You think it doesn't have to be good.

It's about God. So how high quality does it really supposed to pretend that doesn't matter. You think it doesn't have to be good. It's about God. So, like, how high quality does it really have to be? Right. Of the highest possible quality. And independent of the religious message. And I thought the acting was great and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. It was a real cliffhanger. And so, I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the continuing seasons. I'm curious, you know, it's not atypical for a series to wane as it progresses.

Not always, but that can happen. I mean, it exhausts itself or people get tempted by the success of the series to warp it in one, you know... Or even the similarity of the previous three seasons. As an artist, we have to break out, we have to do something different. We have to go left now instead of right. Or you can get stuck repeating what you already did. So how are you feeling about the new season that's forthcoming? Well, everyone who's seen it so far, this is season five, we're currently finishing it.

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. Oh, oh, that's good. Yeah, and it's, and you might think, well, they're just biased, there's recency bias. No, they said- No, they could get exhausted. Because they go into each season,

when they get the scripts, the actors and the crew going, oh, please be good. Right, right. Expecting it to do what you just said, which is to start to wane. Yep. And I would argue that we've become, we've gotten better as storytellers and as filmmakers. Now, to be fair, we're blessed by the story getting, I mean, season five is Holy Week.

It's the most impactful and important week in the history of humanity. Right, right, right. There's a big mouthful to chew. And you see Jesus show signs of Himself He's never shown, which is turning over the tables of the temple and yelling and then willingly giving Himself up. And you see the betrayer emerge. Judas breaks bad during Holy Week, right? A million people both— Conspiring with Caiaphas. Yes, where we are now. And of course, in Holy Week, in history, it was over a million people all gathered in one city, most of, as many friends of Jesus as enemies, were believers and people who wanted him killed,

and they're all in one powder can. Right, right, right. So that makes— Hot town, hot time in the old town tonight. So I can't take too much credit for the unique excitement of season five. 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. But I think another thing that sometimes causes people to show

to Wayne is what you said earlier, which is they get enraptured by the success. And so I always am brought back to that moment, back at four o'clock in the morning. 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 all... and God strike my soul if I go back to who I was the day before. Right, no kidding.

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. 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. Oh yes. And the servant who knows what he's doing being, well, condemned to hell fundamentally. Right. Right, right, because it's one thing to be bad unconsciously and it's another thing to have learned and then return to your...

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, but to an understanding of what I think makes the show work, which is that Jesus knows our hearts. He wants a relationship with you specifically. 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. He knows what's in your heart. He knew what I needed to become the creator of the chosen.

It wasn't the same thing as someone else knew, right? 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. And so, when Jesus calls us differently, I mean, the message of salvation is the same, but the calling is specific. 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 or more miracles, more than that, callings, rebukes, all of that. But each time it's specific to the heart of the person he's talking to.

And we do that cinematographically, too. We shrink the moment so that it feels personal. And what everyone says to me when they recognize me in public, nine times out of 10, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this, will say to me, thank you for the show, and they'll start to cry. And you experience this too. How many people when they meet you start to cry? Not because you're a celebrity, but because something's changed.

I've experienced that in my life. Well, 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. But nine times out of 10 when they say something about the show, it's always, it feels personal. It doesn't feel like I'm walking in and I love St. Peter's Basilica. Great storyteller makes the archetypal personal. That's what a storyteller does. And that's what I mean when I say I'm taking him down from the stained glass window.

So I've visited 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. It's just beyond belief. It's jaw-dropping. It can be to the wrong person or in the wrong place. It can be distancing. 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? I can't access Him. I have to be quiet as I walk through it. I have to admire it. I don't have a relationship with it. And I certainly don't have a relationship personally with Him. And so, when 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. 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. It has to be perfect, perfect, perfect. Jesus comes in and says, you know what? It's never fully going to get there. It's never going to be perfect enough, so I'll do it for you. I will be that perfection. I will be that sacrifice.

I will be the perfect sacrifice that Cain couldn't come up with. And so, in doing that, it makes it personal and human. And so, when Jesus is healing the woman who has 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. And Jesus comes in and calls him to something greater, which is a fisher of men, not a fisher of fish. And all that is happening on a personal level, and it's causing people to respond emotionally.

I guess that's partly why it seemed to me that you handled the miracles so well. It's not that you downplay them, it's that you, it's a weird thing because you make them in some ways a matter of logical course. It's a weird thing to do with a miracle, but… It's the inevitable result of the need. Yeah, and the situation. Yeah, exactly. 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 circumstances. So, my belief is that as we've seen you, Jordan Peterson, over the last several years, come to grips with the suffering you experienced, the physical suffering you experienced that we, you know, when you kind of disappeared for a year and those of us who were fans are going, 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. And you talk about a dream that you've had, I mean, all the things that we've seen and people asking you questions, do you believe Jesus actually walked out of the tomb?

All these people. 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. And that makes me go, oh, now I want to hear even more. 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. 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. 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. And now I can see some of these mysterious things through a foundation that's secure and solid and 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. 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. Sometimes our own religion can get in the way of a relationship, a personal relationship with Jesus. So I don't sit here writing going, how am I going to accomplish this? 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. But I think that's what's happening. That's when people meet me and they start to cry and they thank me.

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. And so that's what this chosen is doing for many people is if you can see Jesus with the eyes of those who actually met him, perhaps you can be changed and impacted in the same way they were. 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. 30 to 40% of our audience is non-believers. We've been able to track that now. That's good. 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. 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. That's God's job. I'm gathering. That is an excellent place to stop, and a good time to stop as well. 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 a, what, an index, an indicator of the time that we're in, 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, 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, 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. So we'll investigate that. And then let me give you one other note. The next show that I'm planning to do after The Chosen currently is the Moses story, three seasons of Moses. 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. And I'm going, actually, we need to pause for a moment, take you back to the Exodus

and to Moses, because Jesus is the new Moses. Moses turned the water to blood. So it's a prequel. Yeah, and so we're going to, because we reference Moses a lot in the show. Yeah. In fact, season five, which is coming soon, is the celebration of Passover. And so while I'm filming the Last Supper, what are they doing at the Last Supper? Well, they're remembering and honoring their heritage of the Exodus.

And so it's very fascinating. 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. Yeah. And so, I don't think it's... You're doing them in the opposite order that we did them in at The Daily Wire. Correct, but I'm also recognizing their cohesiveness. Right, right.

So if you wanted to touch on that, I'm willing to do that as well. Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a fine idea. We'll do that as well. So join us on The Daily Wire side for the continuation of the story. Yeah, great talking to you, and it's so fun to be here in Caiaphas' house. How preposterous having this conversation, and I'm very much looking forward to the new season. And for those of you who are watching and listening, who haven't seen The Chosen, watch an episode or two and see what you think.

I really enjoyed it and so did my wife and I would say we're very picky about such things, especially if they have intent, you know, and there was a marked absence of painful intent in The Chosen. It's very gripping and very well done and dramatically satisfying. You were pleased to continue watching. And I was pleased to continue watching. Yes, exactly. So thank you, sir. Thank you to all of you for your time and attention today

as well, and to The Daily Wire for making this possible.