509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins

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 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hello, everybody.

• 0:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  I'm probably in the most unlikely 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 Caiphas, 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,

• 1:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 Dallas, was a failure. It launched as a Hollywood production and

• 2:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  spiraled downward almost immediately. And we talked about the desperation, the despair, and hopelessness that accompanied that failure. And then the...

• 2:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 Delis's 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?

• 3:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 3:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  We are in Caiphas's house. I priest Caiphas. 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.

• 4:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  This is where he would choose to live.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Exactly. And when he comes back, he's coming to Texas first. But we built this, this is a season five set, has not been released to the world yet. So you're, you're introducing Caiphas's set to the world. Chosen fans have not seen it yet, but this is the room in which not only Caiphas and Judas make a deal, but ultimately where we'll see Jesus come for his quasi-trial. His Sanhedrin trial took place at Caiphas's house undercover of night, away from the traditional place, because they were trying to do it quickly. But with that uplifting, lighthearted note, this is where we're filming this conversation.

• 4:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and this is part of a large number, 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?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  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...

• 5:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's hilarious.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 Caiphas's house.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Fifty 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. So, and then we've got a backlot where we've got a first-century Capernaum recreation. So it's all over the place, but within about, you know, half a mile of each other.

• 6:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, let's, let's familiarize everybody watching and listening with the...

• 6:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 who are engaged in this podcast won't know it.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  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, by the studios. And 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

• 7:26Speaker 03

  the country with several big Hollywood studios attached and working on it, and it completely failed.

• 7:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was which film?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  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 decide for 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.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  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 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 gonna 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,

• 9:02Speaker 03

  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 Five Thousand,' in the Gospels." I don't know why, I just know that that's what we're supposed to do. So, we opened the Bible to "The Feeding of 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?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  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 this 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, 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.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  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...

• 10:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  You're being abandoned.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or even necessarily that you were wrong.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  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."

• 11:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, right? 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

• 11:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  attractive to the mainstream Hollywood studios. That had happened.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 have 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.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  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, that's, so there's the calling.

• 13:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  There's the calling, there's the spiritual direction that I believe God had given me. Now I'm questioning whether that's

• 13:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Real.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Real.

• 13:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's the thing about

• 13:16Speaker 03

  And then there's the surface, there's the practical. What mistakes did I make to?

• 13:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  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?

• 13:38Speaker 03

  I'm gonna pretend that I know what you just said.

• 13:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, 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 mere strategic error to analysis of a fundamental characterological flaw. Now, and so there's actually some rules for this. 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.

• 14:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's sort of like the presumption of innocence in the legal realm.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? 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.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  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?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  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?

• 15:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  I need to learn how to drive a bus so that I can provide for my family.

• 15:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Right? So that's what I'm worried about.

• 15:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  So everything is destabilized, maybe, as far as you're concerned.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  So God brings us to the latter. 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.

• 16:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, but you don't have to draw that conclusion.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  That.

• 16:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  So in the story of Job, I mean, the decisions, 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.

• 16:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  His wife says to him, there's nothing left for you except to curse God and die.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that's her conclusion, given the dismal circumstances. He's, 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.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. So. So I'll get to that because what I did was in the moment, I'm, 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.

• 17:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  And this came to your wife's mind, this story.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's why you investigated it.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Yes, that's her contrad, she, she was not Job's wife. She did not say curse God and die.

• 17:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. So that's interesting. So, so one of the things that does happen to people in circumstances like this, and it's, 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. And 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 read 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.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, we'd call that an intuition, but it's a revelation too. That's another way of thinking about it.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you took that seriously and you read the story.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  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 with it, whether it's an intuition or a revelation, and here's why.

• 18:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, yeah, you know, you, 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.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  So that I will get glory.

• 19:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Three times in one chapter.

• 19:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  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? And we're thinking...

• 20:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's at least a possibility then?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. We think in 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 2,000 years ago. So that night, the numbers got worse. So now we're going, okay.

• 20:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  So much for that hypothesis.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  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 gonna go now to the, my brain is now back to how I normally am. And I'm gonna do what I normally do. I'm gonna get online. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna pull up Microsoft Word. And I'm gonna 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. I was wrong. I missed it. I'm on page 14 of my 15-page memo analyzing everything that went wrong.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Ping, pop, something pops up on my computer. It's 4 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." 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?

• 22:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's a weird coincidence, to say the least.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I didn't say, "Hey, Alex, nice to hear from you." I just go, "What are you doing up at 4:00 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."

• 22:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so tell me the message again.

• 22:48Speaker 03

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

• 22:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what did you make of that?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  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 feeding 5,000, he felt God putting it on his heart. Tell Dallas, it's not his job to feed the 5,000. 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..."

• 23:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and a strange thing. It's like its meaning is opaque.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's a very particular reference, right?

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 23:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Contextless.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  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 happened. Number one, it all hit me in that moment. Like, I understood what he meant, and that's what you're asking. So, in the story, "The Feeding of the Five Thousand," Jesus could have, assuming you believe this story and you believe all the stories of the miracles that he performed, he could have manifested loaves and fish from nothing.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  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..."

• 25:14Speaker 03

  "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."

• 25:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm, 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

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 25:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  in relationship to your conscience, the outcome is not the measure.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Correct. So in that moment, when I'm literally analyzing what I did wrong.

• 25:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  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... You... Now, we could argue about, did I make the best five loaves and two fish? Was the recipe a good recipe?

• 26:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, 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?

• 26:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  What would you say? Using anything but proper intent as the measure.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, and the reason for that is fairly straightforward, is sometimes things that are radically successful fail in the measurable moment. I'll, 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.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, 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, so, and, 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

• 27:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, 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,

• 28:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  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. Like, how did you make the judgment? Well, how did that change your judgment of the situation?

• 28:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  I don't know yet. I'm going, okay, so he's re-

• 28:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you set the stage so this could be successful. And so you did your part. That's the message.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  The message is you did your part.

• 28:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  But the, 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, if the feeding, if the result, the miracle, isn't a good result for the resurrection of Gavin Stone, the name of the movie.

• 29:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  If it's, if it's, if it's still failing, if it's never going to succeed, then what is the, I gave 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 in God's economy of time is different from humanity's economy of time. So I'm wanting the answer now.

• 29:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  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?

• 30:19Speaker 03

  So did Hollywood. So did-

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Anything that I'm 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, four 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.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  Of course, the movie wasn't good enough to achieve its correct box office.

• 31:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's exactly what Job says.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Yes. So, but now my focus is going to be on just the transaction, for lack of a better term, between myself and God.

• 31:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay. So one of the things that I've been talking to audiences about as I travel around the world in lectures 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 could say, "I'm going to judge the validity and utility of my utterance based on the result that I can see."

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 32:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, the problem with that is you can't see everything.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, 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 this, 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.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so... That's analogous to the, 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.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 going to take the failure to heart."

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not saying I did everything right.

• 33:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, okay, fair enough. You didn't say that.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  It maintained its failure. So then what's the success?

• 33:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  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,

• 34:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  it inspired millions of people. That movie is, is, is the, is the, again, I don't know if I have a better term for it, kind of sacrifice.

• 34:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Because the story that God is telling in this moment is, 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.

• 34:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, what, with God?

• 35:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, what does that mean exactly to you? Like, take that apart, because that's, 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, how did you come up with the new criteria? And how do you know that you're genuinely applying those criteria, you know, in a way that isn't contaminated, let's say, by pride and self-interest?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  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 used 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?

• 36:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was the experience you had?

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. So in that moment, I went from, how do I wrestle with this? How do I understand? How do I, what went wrong? Was it me? Was it God? Was it Satan? Was it my friends? Was it the studio? What, 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 was God wanted. I didn't know what the future held.

• 36:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, but-

• 36:42Speaker 03

  And the delivery of the message, the fact that the message was, you, you, could you call this a coincidence? Could you call it just random? It's such a, such an extraordinary coincidence. Similar, I've heard your story, you talk about your wife, what God put on her heart, how she knew when-

• 36:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  You know, and you go, I-

• 36:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, it's quite a coincidence.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  It's such a coincidence that I must.

• 37:02Jordan B. Peterson?

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

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because you either don't believe it, or you believe it. It's like, both are absurd, in a way.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  The secularist, or the humanist, or the atheist would say, Dallas, it is a coincidence. These things happen all the time.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  I can't.

• 37:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  I don't even know how you would calculate the odds of a coincidence like that, right?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  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 went to, 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, and had a, 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. He was, 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.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  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...

• 38:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's a weird one, too. Because, like, I do believe that it's useful for people to flesh out a vision.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  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...

• 38:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, eh, 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.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  And to the person.

• 39:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  And in a revolutionary way.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, and that would also indicate that you were laboring under a burden of

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  success definition that was actually not good for you at all.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I was, I was a performer.

• 39:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. That's a puppet, that's like a Pinocchio puppet, right? Performing for the stage.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  And my strings.

• 40:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's being an actor.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, so you could say, well, your strings were cut. No, my actually strings became stronger. It was the audience was removed from the, 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, 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.

• 40:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, but that's voluntary.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's the difference between that being a puppet dancing on strings, right? It can be voluntary submission isn't dancing to the piper's tune. It's a different game.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Fair.

• 40:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  But I, in that moment, said, okay, okay, God.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  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

• 40:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why were you okay?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  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're

• 41:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  I'm willing to go along with it.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yes, and so if that means we're driving a bus for 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, my who I am as a husband and father on how well

• 41:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Your identity.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, my better, thank you. My identity in how people see me. My identity, and the Bible talks about the fear of man.

• 41:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 films. So that's a positive in a way, because you want to make something

• 42:00Speaker 03

  I'm in a performative field.

• 42:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that does make you a puppet. And so one of the things we 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. You, people can tell you're self-conscious. You get awkward.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you say things like, oh, sorry, I'm rambling.

• 42:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, now the audience is above you.

• 42:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  They're ahead of you.

• 42:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Continually, continually. And it's worse, it's the whim of the audience that's above you. Yeah, that's, okay, so that's cool.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  So, okay, so you have this 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.

• 43:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the perverse consequence of that is that you feel free instead of demolished.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 43:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right. So that's pretty funny. All right. Okay, okay. So then, okay, so let's continue. What else?

• 43:23Speaker 03

  So, uh, for the next few months, I'm like, well, I, I, uh, what's my future? Now, I happen to be, we, 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 I'd, but, but, but they had hired me to come make movies within the context of this, uh, this large church in Illinois. And so, um, 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,

• 44:06Speaker 03

  like it's where I met Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, is was, 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.

• 44:27Jordan B. Peterson?

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

• 44:31Speaker 03

  So for example, um, instead of being just what most Bible projects are, like, I assume you've seen, it's like, have you seen the Jesus of Nazareth mini-series? Have you seen any of these kind of Jesus movies?

• 44:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, no, The Chosen is the one that I've watched.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Oh, well, good. Um, 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, uh, other than the fact that a lot of Jesus stories do. But it's, and then Jesus did this, and then Jesus did that, and then he encountered a blind man.

• 45:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So is it fair to say that that's the subordination of the movie to the text?

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Yes, and which makes for sometimes an enjoyable recreation of what you already believe, but certainly not a good movie.

• 45:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's a crucial thing. It's a crucial thing, you know, um, 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...

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's like a subversion of art to an outcome. It's kinda 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's a quest.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  You don't know what the outcome is. Now, you might say, "I wanna 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's gonna be. Like, our conversation here. I don't know where it's gonna go, right? I wanna, I wanna let it go where it's gonna go.

• 46:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  The... Religious films can be propagandistic, just like political films.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Can be, oh, they almost always are.

• 46:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I know, and then they fail. They're not interesting. And I don't, I think not only do they not serve the religious purpose, then I think they harm it.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  100%.

• 46:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because it looks like it's, it's, 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, there's no risk, in a way.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, so it doesn't work. And, you know, 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.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Have you ever been one? Do you think that there's been a time in your life where you, where you would've said, "I, I don't believe there's a God," or have you always been agnostic on the verge of back and for, you know, wrestling?

• 47:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think I was never an atheist because I was never confident enough in my own doubt to proclaim it as a virtue.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  In a way, you know? I, I, I knew it at mi- 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.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Which is helpful.

• 47:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well...

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Well, maybe not when you're age.

• 47:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  If you believe in evil, you believe in good.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because it's the opposite of evil. And so, now, amorphous, though that may be. Okay, so now...

• 47:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Propaganda.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, how did you come across that as an idea?

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Well, ironically enough, I was listening to a sermon from a pastor in Louisville. His name is Kyle Idelman. And he was preaching, he did a sermon on the crucifixion. And the story of the crucifixion and Jesus's relationship with the two thieves on the cross takes just a few verses.

• 48:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  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."

• 48:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. A lot of transformation packed into a very short period of time.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  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. You know, there's no, there's no three act structure. There, I guess there's the first and the third act. There's the before and the after, but there's no middle. And, and, and so what would lead him? What would, what this pastor was saying? What might have he heard from Jesus? That could have caused him to break? Right? And so this pastor opined, not claiming fact, but he opined, what if it was? He was broken by Jesus's comment, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." You know, some of this, he's being mocked, he's being mocked.

• 49:07Jordan B. Peterson?

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

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Right. So you're, 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.

• 49:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  And he means it.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  And he means it.

• 49:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 49:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 49:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  What, a commitment or an interest? What happens exactly when you see him?

• 49:59Speaker 03

  It's a very, 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, 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'm, I love the gospels and I've been a believer as long as I can remember. And I'm, 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, I'm interested in it from that perspective, but I listen to some of you talk and I go, yeah, that's fascinating, but I, my job and my calling and my interest and

• 50:41Speaker 03

  my skillset is to, is to tell it as a, as a story. And I'm, 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, and they always side with Jesus because he's never wrong, you know? What would it have been like to go to school with, with the perfect son of God? All those, 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 would have been like to be Jesus's brother? And to go, Mom, Jesus did this again. And, and, and Jesus, his mom says, well, you need to, you need to make the adjustment.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  He's like, you're always, Jesus can do no wrong. He's the perfect child. Mom's like, well, yes, he is actually.

• 51:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's very funny.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  So those kinds of things, I was, I was eight years old and was wrestling with that. Right? So I've always, I'm just-

• 51:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and there are people, there are people who are natural storytellers. I mean, that's a real gift and it's-

• 51:40Speaker 03

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

• 51:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you came by it honestly?

• 51:47Speaker 03

  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. So when, 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."

• 52:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  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... This is... It's like the playoff intellectually between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who are aiming in very similar directions. Dostoevsky... Dostoevsky's stories cover a much broader territory than Nietzsche's thinking, but they're... But they're... But they're less explicit, right? They're less propositional.

• 52:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that there's a... 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 broad. I'll give you an example. So in The Brothers Karamazov, the hero is a novitiate named Alyosha. And he's contrasted, Alyosha 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 Alyosha, he can win the argument.

• 53:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  But he loses the battle, because as the story unfolds, you see that the goodness of Alyosha 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 Alyosha. That isn't what happens in Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky shows what happens as Alyosha'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 wholly fool and who people have some...

• 54:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Pity for, but he's a, 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.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Correct, and I, I know just enough, I'm a good enough arguer, well, I'm a 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 that always seems to-

• 54:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Persuasion or communication?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Both.

• 54:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  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?

• 54:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Even though you know that it's probably, in, in, most likely, banal, it's, it's, not, very few significant things happen when you just get out of bed, but, but you're intrigued, right?

• 55:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  What happens next?

• 55:08Speaker 03

  I don't know that I can intellectualize why, I just know that it works and I know that, 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.

• 55:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Is it 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, 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, alright, now we're, 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

• 56:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 56:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  A, I had never-

• 56:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a revelatory moment.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  I had never, yes, I had never considered this. It makes more sense to me now.

• 56:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. Things go together.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  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, and these life change that he's causing, we don't know anything about the people that he's causing it for.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  That's a clunky way of saying it, but we don't, how can we unpack the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years and touches the hem of his garment?

• 57:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, insanely packed with information. But you have the advantage of being able to do that in three dimensions, right? Because you can add that temporal element, so you can use your imagination. See, this is, it's interesting, eh, because this is analogous to what the great psychoanalytic thinkers did in relationship to dream analysis.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, a client would tell them a dream fragment, and they would ask the client to let their imaginations range-

• 58:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 fish and the lows 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'd 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.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  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?

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  And amplifying them.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Ignatius talked about that. He said, Saint Ignatius, when he says, "We were to read the Bible with a holy, a sacred imagination."

• 59:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  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 and 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.

• 59:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, the Protestants who are skeptical are right that you can deviate heretically, and that that's a problem.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  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."

• 1:00:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  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

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  territory with, by deviating too far away from the next intent.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  So you look at a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ, from Martin Scorsese's exploration of things, and Christians, most Christians were horrified to imply, I mean, Scorsese was exploring Jesus as humanity, and it went too far, right? And so they're like, we can't have him.

• 1:01:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that was Nikos Kazansikis' work, right?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:01:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And he got excommunicated.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Right, right. But then it's put in the hands of a struggling Catholic.

• 1:01:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  It's a little too, too...

• 1:01:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Risque, you might say.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Risque, vulgar, right?

• 1:01:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  So, so, I became comfortable with that, as an evangelical, my church was comfortable with it, not only comfortable...

• 1:01:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  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 Noah, the story of Noah, as an environmentalist manifesto of sorts. And Ridley Scott doing Exodus story about Moses, and he's clearly not a believer.

• 1:02:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  And so that was clear.

• 1:02:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's where the textual interpretation gets subverted to the psyche of the interpreter.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  The danger that the Protestants are warning against.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  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...

• 1:02:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  See, this is what Jonathan Pagé has done on the iconography side, right? 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.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right?

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then, what you'd hope, and I think, 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.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  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

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  as standard.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:03:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  That should mean that your imagination is much more reliable.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

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

• 1:03:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, not to him, for example.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Not to him, or to the icon itself.

• 1:03:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  The icon is not an object of worship. Then, if then, if it was, it would be an idol.

• 1:03:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  And we're warned against idolatry. So, but iconography points people to the thing. So, I know my place in this in this in this story, which is I'm I'm not replacing the Bible, I'm not God, Jonathan who plays, Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus, is not Jesus. And the show isn't scripture.

• 1:04:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are you a prophet?

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm not gonna...

• 1:04:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I'm curious about, I'm curious about this, eh, because I kind of mean it technically, because the imagination properly harnessed is prophetic, it can see around corners, and, you know, 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...

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  I would say I'm a herald.

• 1:04:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, how would you distinguish that?

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  A herald is calling you to look at the thing and he's gathering you, right?

• 1:04:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay, I see.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  When we went to, I 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 at 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 and it was an old fashioned boat. It was not, you know, a motorboat, you know? 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

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  and they toss the rotten back in, so it will be at the end of the age."

• 1:05:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:31Speaker 03

  "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.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  "From now on, I will make you fishes of men. And you are to gather as many as possible, all kinds. I will sort them out later."

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  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...

• 1:06:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  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-

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:06:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  -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.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  The Chosen didn't do that. I enjoyed watching it. Partly because it succeeds on the basis of its ability to tell a story.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:07:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which is that, and it's weird that that should be the first thing, right? But it has to be.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  It has to be.

• 1:07:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  I don't think anything can take primacy over the story. I don't, it doesn't look like it to me.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  That's where the Feeding 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.

• 1:07:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:07:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are you guarding your, okay, so, this is a very tricky question, I suppose. I mean...

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  Now, all your other questions have been completely, they've just been...

• 1:07:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Nothing, I know.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, 2 plus 2 equals 4.

• 1:07:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, a podcaster, the temptation to protect my reputation in relationship to my selection of guests increases. Should I really talk to that person?

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:08:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? If I get worried about my reputation, then I'm gonna fail. Because the wrong thing is driving me forward. All I've been using this podcast for is to talk to people who's, who I wanna hear from. So I can learn something. That's it. If I get, okay, for you, as a Christian, if you get concerned about your reputation as a Christian, you're gonna get dull, quick.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Oh, I tell people that all the time. They'll say,

• 1:08:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  "Why do you, why do you do this show?" And when you, when I'm sitting on, in my laptop, with my laptop in my living room, if I'm thinking about... This scene will cause

• 1:08:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  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 latter and avoid the former,

• 1:09:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep, then you're done.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Then I'm not making a good story.

• 1:09:15Jordan B. Peterson?

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

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's like, as soon as pleasing the woke ideologues becomes the goal, then the stories are like instantly contemptible.

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:09:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  They're just, they're worse than dull. And the people who participate in them are empty. And it just dies. It just, as we've seen.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  It just dies.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:10:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  So my comfort with telling those stories could have only happened after that moment that happened in 4 o'clock in the morning. And so what happened after we've had several short films and vignettes over the years that had had that resulted in that aha moment. It was clear that we were on to 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-

• 1:10:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Bad outcome.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Right. So he's flashing back to when Jesus, 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 and the 12 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.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  My wife, Amanda, had even said, I don't know. I don't know if this is, you know, sometimes people are uncomfortable with so much humanity of Jesus. Right? I'm assuming.

• 1:11:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a good joke.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Right. That's what I thought.

• 1:11:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's a good joke.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  So I remember, I'll never forget it. I'm watching, I'm waiting. That joke comes and the audience laughs hard. But I can, I'm a fairly good audience gager. And I could tell it was not only just a laughter of humor, it was a laughter of relief.

• 1:12:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sure.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  They, the, I don't know, 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, more.

• 1:12:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Brought some play into it.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Of course. But then by that case, then it opens you to the, to the next part, which is when he calls Peter Rock, the serious stuff. Your soil is tilled because you've, 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, we learned that that worked, right? So that was the training ground for what happened. 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. I put it on the shelf because of my Hollywood movie, right?

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  Well, I'm thinking, I'm willing to drive a bus, I'm willing to get a normal job, whatever it takes, but, 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, 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, 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 gonna unpack that. We see it in Scripture briefly, but Scripture doesn't say the shepherds,

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  who happened to be lowly and happened to be poor, and you have to unpack that somehow. You have to get that from somewhere besides 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.

• 1:14:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Good story, though.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So I'm making this little thing, and I'm like, "Why is it that this feels so small and yet I'm more comfortable than I've ever been? Why am I..."

• 1:14:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that's a good question.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Yes. So I went home to my wife and I'm like...

• 1:14:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's not so small then, is it?

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, it's like, maybe my criteria for what constitutes small has been wrong.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  Right, and that's where I go, loves and fish, loves and fish.

• 1:14:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  I'm just focused on the five and two. And this is my five and two right now. It didn't even feel like five and two, it feels like one and a half, it's small. But it's, 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.

• 1:14:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  I'm on set, I'm more comfortable.

• 1:14:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it's a door that opens if you knock on it, to say.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, so I'm telling the story and I'm, I love it and I'm feeling like it's good. And while I'm doing that... I'm also, I'm 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 the 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.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:15:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh yeah, cool.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  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 a career failure, but I'm like, boy, whoever does this, I think is going to be really smart. Cause I think it's gonna, gonna 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.

• 1:16:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Called?

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  VidAngel at the time. They're now Angel Studios.

• 1:16:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh yes, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  And they, they loved the short film and loved my idea for a show. And they said, we want to do this. We want to support you. And I said, great. And I got, was very excited. And then they said, we should raise.

• 1:16:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why? Why did they like it?

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  They watched that short film and burst into almost uncontrollable tears.

• 1:16:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, that's good. That's good.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  There's something.

• 1:16:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  You hit a chord.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  There was something almost transcendent about, 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 going to put it on social media and that will be the tool to raise crowdfunding.

• 1:16:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So that was their idea? The crowdfunding idea?

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Yes. I thought it was a ridiculous idea.

• 1:16:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  But loaves and fish.

• 1:16:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that's for sure.

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  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, humbled man to accept the idea.

• 1:17:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's so interesting, too, eh? Because that's another indication where your 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."

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, crack at it.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  My job is to provide this short film, and then to humbly request people, "If you love this, you can contribute to Season 1 of this multi-season Bible show."

• 1:17:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that's an invitation.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  It's an invitation. And for whatever reason, 16,000 people around the world contributed $10 million based on this little 20-minute short.

• 1:18:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And talk about a market test.

• 1:18:08Speaker 03

  Talk about a market test, 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.

• 1:18:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, well, that drives the point home 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 was that you were supposed to concentrate on what you had to offer, and not to pay attention to the outcome. Okay, then you noticed 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?

• 1:19:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 like those, what are 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. Right. So now you, then you show the results of your film to

• 1:20:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  add, what were they called?

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  At the time, VidAngel, now they're called.

• 1:20:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  VidAngel, and then it was Angel Studios. And they provide you with an unorthodox opportunity and then the genuine fruits of what you had offered come to make themselves manifest. Right. 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 raised.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:20:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  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 then said, well, this should lead to then the next thing.

• 1:20:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, which would be the Hollywood film.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  Yes, no, no, no. Okay, now I'm tasked with making season one.

• 1:20:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  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're 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. This opportunity there, which is exactly what happened with the

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Sure, but I don't think it would have been possible. Well, 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.

• 1:21:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  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 did.

• 1:21:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Probably kudos to you for at least, what would you say? That's humility. You at least had the willingness to pay attention

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:21:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  To what the failure might have been indicating without losing faith.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:21:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right. So that's good.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so 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.

• 1:22:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:22:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:22:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Well, you have a whole new distribution. Like this is a whole new ecosystem

• 1:22:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  For filmmaking and distribution.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  Right. So a whole nother episode could be, could talk about the business

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  assumptions that were wrong over and over and over again before God, you know, we, 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, 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 and to 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.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  A 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, who's reaching for who?

• 1:23:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:23:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, Adam is sort of going like this.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, we, 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, it still feels like a stained glass window. He's very formal and distant and pious and, 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

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:24:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the first thing, 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.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  Well, and how many people were telling you? Like, you probably had viewers and listeners going, you watched The Chosen.

• 1:25:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, there was buzz everywhere.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Well, because Christians all over the world have looked at you for the last several years as, as almost like a gateway drug into Christianity, but still hoping, when is, when is Jordan Peterson, like, do you believe? Have you met the need?

• 1:25:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, I know.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  How many people have asked you? How many Christians of you met have gone, so do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?

• 1:25:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, they asked me something worse. They, the question usually is, do you believe in Christ exactly the same way I claim to? It's like...

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, people are competing for Dr. Jordan Peterson.

• 1:25:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  To bring them into their full, the correct way.

• 1:25:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, and that's, you know, I mean, that, that's fine, I suppose, but it's, it's a...

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  There's something very sweet about it, too.

• 1:25:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, yes. 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...

• 1:25:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  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...

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  What about your daughter? Because Michaela had a similar... She just decided to surrender and give her life to Jesus and then...

• 1:26:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, she had a very powerful experience that preceded that. 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? 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 Bogakov.

• 1:26:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  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. Bogakov 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.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  Well, that probably eliminates me as a reader, but I'll try.

• 1:27:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, I think you'd find it... It's a fascinating, multi-level book. And I also really like Nikos Kazansikas's work. He did "Zorba the Greek," for example, which is a book most people know about. But he wrote a variety of stories that have a very... Well, is it "The Temptation"? "The Temptation of Christ"? Is that the name of the book? I can't remember at the moment. He did a variety of...

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  I wish I could help you.

• 1:27:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  He produced a variety of stories that are similar to what you're doing with "The Chosen."

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:27:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:28:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Part of the insistence, the Christian insistence since time immemorial, was that Christ was fully God and fully human.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:28:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  I'm gonna put that on our poster.

• 1:28:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's a hard-

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  Dr. Jordan Peterson, "More than pleased to continue watching."

• 1:28:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, like I said, it was a relief. Because it, you avoided all of the cliched temptations of the easily parodied evangelical tradition.

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:29:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? That's a hard thing to pull off. And I also thought, this was something else. It's beautiful. That's seriously important. The cinematography is top rate, the acting is top rate. Like, the quality of the production is extreme. Because you can use it as an excuse. You know, 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.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  You think it doesn't have to be good.

• 1:29:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's about God. So like, how high quality does it really have to be?

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's like, 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-

• 1:30:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  People get tempted by the success of the series to warp it in one, you know...

• 1:30:11Speaker 03

  Or even the similarity of the previous three seasons. As an artist, we have to break out, we have to do something different.

• 1:30:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  We have to go left now instead of right.

• 1:30:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or you can get stuck repeating what you already did. So how are you feeling about the new season that's forthcoming?

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  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, were all saying, "Oh, this is our best season yet."

• 1:30:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, that's good.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's, and you might think, "Well, they're just biased, there's recency bias." No, they...

• 1:30:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, they could get exhausted.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  Because they go into each season, when they get the scripts, the actors and the crew going, "Oh, please be good."

• 1:30:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  Expecting it to do what you just said, which is to start to wane.

• 1:30:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:31:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. There's a big mouthful to chew.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  And you see Jesus show sides of himself he's never shown, which is turning over the tables of the temple and yelling and then...

• 1:31:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  Willingly giving himself up, and you see the betrayer emerge. Judas breaks bad during Holy Week, right?

• 1:31:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  A million people both...

• 1:31:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Conspiring with Caiphas.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  Yes, where we are now. And of course, in Holy Week is, in history, it was over a million people all gathered in one city, most of, as many friends of Jesus as enemies. Believers and people who wanted him killed, and they're all in one powder can.

• 1:31:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  So that makes...

• 1:31:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  A hot town, a hot time in the Old Town tonight.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  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, shows to wane 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...

• 1:32:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  And God strike my soul if I... If I go back to who I was the day before.

• 1:32:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, no kidding. 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. And the servant who knows what he's doing, being, well, condemned to hell fundamentally. Right, right, because it's one thing to be bad unconsciously, and it's another thing to have learned and then return, you know, to your, to your.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  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, to an understanding of what I think makes the show work, which is that Jesus knows our hearts. He wants a relation. He, 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, to, to become the creator of the chosen. It wasn't the same thing as someone else needed, right? He spoke to me directly, and, and, and my wife Amanda is here uniquely to make sure

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  that I don't go back to who I was, you know, the, the day before that moment. And so when Jesus, Jesus calls us differently, I mean, the message of salvation is the same, but the, the calling is specific. And that's what you see in the show, is that when you see Jesus in the show, his, we've, we've probably by season five have shown, I don't know, a dozen more, more miracles, or 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.

• 1:34:27Speaker 03

  How many people, when they meet you, start to cry? Not because you're a celebrity, but because...

• 1:34:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Something's changed.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  Something's changed.

• 1:34:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  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, when they say something about the show, it's always, it feels personal.

• 1:34:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  It doesn't feel like I'm walking in and I love St. Peter's Basilica.

• 1:34:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, a great storyteller makes the archetypal personal. That's what a storyteller does.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  And that's what I mean when I say I'm taking him down from the stained glass window. So I visit St. Peter's Basilica in Italy and it's one of the most, probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:35:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, it's just beyond belief.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  It's jaw dropping.

• 1:35:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  It can be to the wrong person or in the wrong place. It can be distancing.

• 1:35:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:35:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  I have to admire it.

• 1:35:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  I don't have a relationship with it. And, and I certainly don't have a relationship personally with him. And so what, when my job is and what I'm experiencing myself and what you see in the show is, is, is, is again, what I talked about earlier, Jesus reaching for you.

• 1:35:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  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? You're never, it's, 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, 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's been bleeding for 12 years, or he's healing the, the man who's been blind for so long, or he's, or he's saving Simon Peter from, from, uh, from, 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, and calls him to something greater,

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  uh, which is, which is a fisher of men, not a fisher of, of fish. And All that is happening on a personal level and it's causing people to respond emotionally.

• 1:36:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  I guess that's partly why, 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...

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  It's the inevitable result of the need.

• 1:36:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, right?

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  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's 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?", right? All these, it's watching, I think people feel more connected to you than ever, because they're seeing not only these brilliant lectures that you've given and these books that you've written,

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:38:30Speaker 03

  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 and 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

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  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, not only for that person." And so that's what The Chosen is doing for many people, is if you can see Jesus through the eyes of those who actually met Him, perhaps you can be changed and impacted in the same way they were. 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. Thirty to forty percent of our audience is nonbelievers. We've been able to track that now.

• 1:39:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's good.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:40:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  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

• 1:40:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  of narrative that's reflected in part, let's say, in the evidence for something approximating a religious revival that's taking place in not only North America, but in Europe, in the West more broadly. So we'll investigate that.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  And then let me give you one other note.

• 1:41:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  The next show that I'm planning to do after The Chosen currently is The Moses Story, three seasons of Moses.

• 1:41:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:41:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  And I'm going, actually, we need to pause for a moment, take you back to the Exodus and to Moses, because Moses was the, I mean, Jesus is the new Moses.

• 1:41:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  Moses turned the water to blood.

• 1:41:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it's a prequel.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so we're gonna, we're gonna, because we reference Moses a lot in the show.

• 1:41:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:41:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  And so.

• 1:41:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  You're doing them in the opposite order that we did them in at The Daily Wire.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  Correct. But I'm also recognizing their cohesiveness.

• 1:42:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:42:05Speaker 03

  So if you wanted to touch on that, I'm willing to do that as well.

• 1:42:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 Caiofis's 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 and who haven't seen The Chosen.

• 1:42:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.