Subscribe to the Podcast:

Christian investors are talking a lot about impact, but we’re often left with a tough question: how do you measure it?

Author and investor, Shundrawn Thomas has wrestled with this question in his career. Over the years, Shundrawn has run a trillion-dollar global fund and recently founded The Copia Group which offers a distinct approach to investing that marries the strategic investment of financial and relational capital with the holistic development of scalable business models.

In this episode, he opens up about how his firm makes and measures impact, the ways in which investing overlaps with pastoral work, and the Chicago food staple he likes best. If you like the content, give us a rating or share it with a friend and don’t forget to follow for new episodes every other week.

Episode Transcript

John Coleman: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is John Coleman and I am here with my partner in crime, Luke Roush. Luke, how are you doing today?

Luke Roush: I’m doing great and looking forward to this conversation very much.

John Coleman: Well, we’re both looking forward to this conversation because we have an amazing guest, Shundrawn Thomas is with us today. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Shundrawn for several years now. He has an amazing personal story. He grew up in Chicago, wonderful parents that he may talk about, whom I’ve gotten to hear about just an extraordinary guy who’s bought and run different businesses and ended up running Northern Trust Asset Management out of Chicago, one of the biggest asset managers in the world before, and more recently breaking off to start his own firm, an impact investing firm called Copia Investment Group. And so Shundrawn is going to talk to us about that. In addition, he’s published multiple books, one of which I have here today. Shundrawn I tried to find your latest book, Discover Joy in Work, which is excellent. Instead, I found the 2006 version of Ridiculous Faith, which has a very youthful Shundrawn Thomas on the cover. But Shundrawn, we’re so grateful to have you today and to really benefit from your wisdom.

Shundrawn Thomas: John, it’s a pleasure to be here with both you and Luke, and good to see you both again.

John Coleman: Awesome. As we dig into this, you know, a lot of the listeners at Faith Driven Investor are interested in this idea of impact investing and how that ties to faith. Just to set the table. When people say impact investing, what are they talking about in your mind? Or how do you think about impact investing?

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, so I’ll start with I mean, just more so in the context of our business and then maybe briefly zoom out. So when you think about it in the context of our business, the business of investment management, when people say impact investment, we’re talking about investing that involves making investments with the intention of generating a positive, albeit also a measurable societal benefit. Now that societal benefit, as you know, can be environmental or it can be social, but you’re intentionally looking to generate this societal benefit alongside obviously delivering financial returns for the business. Now, zooming out, the thing contextually that I like to say is I think this is really important. Every single business makes an impact. That impact can be net positive or it can be net negative, right? And so one of the things to appreciate is that, you know, when we’re in the work of doing business, when we’re operating in the context of things that impact people and society, we’re always causing an impact. And so the real question oftentimes is what’s the nature of the impact that we’re generating?

John Coleman: And Shundrawn, a question for you because you’ve worked in very diverse investment environments. We like to say all investing is impact investing. We totally agree with your thesis that every business, every investment makes an impact, whether positive or negative. How did you come to that belief in your journey within this broader asset management world? Is that something you kind of knew from the beginning? Did you have an evolution to come to that belief? Talk to us about your journey towards that.

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, so I think the journey is integrated, but it’s two parts, right? It’s how do I think about my role as a business leader being in the profession, which I have for most of my career of investing. So a business leader in the area of professional investing. Right. And one of the things I would say is it’s an evolution that’s occurred for me over time, John, and it’s how I think about approaching business and leading. I would say, broadly speaking, my philosophy has evolved to where I believe that if you are running an enterprise at its best, there is a triple bottom line that you want to deliver. First and foremost, you want to deliver profit. It’s very fine to say companies have a profit motive, so think of that as income. But second impact, when you think about the fact that when you’re running an enterprise, right. First of all, it’s made up of people. It’s not only the people in your organization, but it’s the partners, the vendors that you work with, the communities that you do business in. And now you have, by virtue of your vision and mission and opportunity to have a positive impact. And it happens by result of either your intentional action or inaction. Now, the third part of that, which it’s complementary, it’s not one the same is inclusion. And one of the things is we work in a multicultural society. We work with people who are created to be wonderfully different. And if we run our businesses in such a way that we value and we respect, we acknowledge and we integrate the value of those differences, we create greater value. And so what I would say is the wonderful thing is it allows us to not only become better at producing profit, it allows us to be better professionals at our craft, but ultimately better people. So I would say that philosophy of just generating in my mind that triple bottom line ultimately informed increasingly how I thought about investing and then ultimately a focus on impact investing.

John Coleman: Yeah, we see that a lot in our work. You know, even just the types of businesses, types of people, there is such a diversity of ways that people can have impact, can create flourishing environments that might look different for an investment manager and a fire truck company or something of that nature. I want to pivot to Copia, and I know Luke wants to jump in with that before we do. Just a quick note. You know, most people associate impact with ESG now. I think ESG become such an omnipresent term for values based investing, at least in the mainstream world. How do you think about the difference or similarities between impact investing and ESG?

Shundrawn Thomas: Right. So I’ll start with this context, John. As you know, I had the great privilege when I led our global asset management business at Northern Trust is really focusing on sustainable investing and socially responsible investing. And if you look, there’s a continuum now there related when you talk about sustainable investing or ESG, you talk about socially responsible investing, you talk about impact investing. But specifically, when you talk about ESG investing in impact, it is important to acknowledge that there are differences, right? Impact investing. As I alluded to earlier, it involves making investments with the specific intent of generating positive and measurable societal benefits alongside those financial returns. And while again, you hear it interchangeable with ESG, one of the reasons it’s notably different is just because the inception. So, like you would know this well, because I know you’re a student of this ESG at its core is really a framework. And actually, if you look at the history, it was really ushered in really in the public sector because they wanted to say, are we considering right the factors of environmental, social or governance concerns? And is that going into the investment decision making? But to be clear, at that inception, that framework was principally about impacting the investment strategy right at its inception, If you think about impact investing, the very intent of it was to integrate into an approach, something that was going to deliver a measurable outcome. So in its inception, impact investing is by definition affirmative. Whereas in many respects, first and foremost, ESG was a framework that was used for measurement and to think about how you incorporated into the risk management. And ultimately it became integrated into various investment strategies. So not bad or good, but those differences are relevant. The last difference I would note, which you would know well, is generally speaking, most of what we see in ESG strategies are applied in the public markets. And interestingly enough, you see more of a prevalence of impact investing in the private markets.

Luke Roush: I’d love to just unpack a bit more. One of the things we talk a lot about with our managers is focus and sort of know what you know and then kind of keep going deeper in spaces that you understand, where you understand kind of what the opportunities are, what the risks are. All that thinking about Copia group and just what you’ve defined is like, All right, this is what we really want to go deeper in love to have you comment on some of the impact metrics, both inputs as well as outputs that you guys are thinking about.

Shundrawn Thomas: I appreciate you asking that Luke. And we are certainly cut from a similar cloth. Like one of my basic rules for myself and personal investing is, look, I don’t invest in anything. I can’t, you know, understand at basic level. But what I would say is this there are a couple of elements to our value proposition are very simple. The first and foremost is we believe in focus. And so to your point on that, Luke, we’ve decided that we want to focus on the lower middle market. When we think about the lower middle market, we’re talking about established companies. Generally, the sweet spot is revenue base from 5 million to 100 million in revenue there. Variety of reasons why we like that. You probably well know that market is increasingly underserved. Banks have pulled away from providing capital there. Many private investors have moved to the higher end of the private markets. And what we find is these companies, we have a true partnering orientation and they very much look for the value add that we want to provide being more than just a financial sponsor. So that’s a part of the focus. The second we talk about is our focus on impact investing. But even there, we’ve decided to focus even more Luke, now. I’m a believer in both the ability to have a positive impact from an environmental and a social standpoint, but we decided we wanted to specifically focus on social impact. And as you well know, if you look at the breadth of impact investing strategies today, they are predominantly focused on the environmental side. So one with impact investing as we know it more formally. It’s one of the few places an investment. Management where the developed world outside of the U.S. is leading the U.S. in terms of dollars invested in focus and the like. And it’s been a prevalence on environmental. And I think, to be frank with you, Luke, I think people look at social sometimes as too hard to solve where it’s the opportunity and sometimes the biggest need. And then the last thing and this is a compliment. We do fundamentally believe in economic inclusion. So again, we think there’s a huge opportunity. If you think about, you know, a simple statistic, like if you look across, you know, private markets, for example, I believe that all told, the amount of capital that is allocated to women and ethnically diverse entrepreneurs falls somewhere below 4% in these cohorts, make up over 70% of the population. So that tells me from a very basic sense, there is a huge mismatch in terms of talent, in energy, in innovation relative to access to capital. So what we say is we want to unlock that so we don’t invest exclusively in firms that are led or owned by women in ethnically diverse people. But we do say we want to target 50% or more of our investments there, because, again, we think there’s a huge opportunity [….] and a huge need.

Luke Roush: And just maybe one follow up, As you first started to wade into that kind of core focus, what were the behaviors as a firm that you adopted and encouraged amongst your team to try to really enable that flow of opportunities coming across your desk? Like what did you do that really triggered that strategy?

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, well, Luke, I know you and John can appreciate this from the work that you all do. The first thing that we had to really instill in our culture, and I believe in this, we have to be truly intellectually curious, because what happens is there’s a predominant way in which people invest, Right? And what we’re looking to do is to be different and to be more innovative. Right? It’s no different than how we might think about our role as believers. It says where to be in the world, but not of the world. It talks about when we read scripture, You know, your ways are not my ways. And so literally, there’s a transformation of our thinking that happens when we become believers. And I’m not trying to overstate this, Luke. There has to be a transformation sometimes of your thinking when you’re trying to innovate or you’re trying to approach the marketplace in a new way. So that’s the first thing. The second thing that we drive in our culture is before we can try to compel anybody else of our vision or our value proposition, we first have to believe. And so what I tell people is we’re not just looking for intellectually bright people in our culture. We’re not just looking for people with deep expertise. We are fundamentally seeking to find people that believe in the vision and the mission and the value proposition that we think we’re uniquely called to. And that’s important because it’s a hallmark of the culture. The last thing that I would point out is the way that you reinforce those beliefs is how you organize around a value. And so everybody has maybe differing values, but we think it’s important in a firm to have certain shared values, and those build a load bearing walls. And I think if you look over time, if you really want to have a really, truly great enterprise, culture is only one of the only competitive advantages that you actually have. And so we focus a lot on that Luke.

John Coleman: Shundrawn, I want to dig into something. So you touched on a little bit. Knowing you, you’re a person of deep faith. I think you’re your family are people of faith, and you’re really well grounded in that. You’ve written Christian books. I believe you’re also one of the assistant pastors at your church. If if memory serves. Talk, if you don’t mind, about the way in which your faith has informed your approach to this theme of diversity in particular, and how Christians should think about this and why that’s important to Christians.

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah. So I love I’m a lover of words. I’m a student of many things and I love the word of God. And, you know, it truly does give us so much practical wisdom that influences if we allow it, every aspect of our lives. But I think including in especially many times how we approach our work. Right. And so, you know, one of the most fundamental and basic things that we know as followers of Christ, he doesn’t make it very complicated. He says, Follow me. Yeah. And that means that there is a blueprint. There is an example that he put forward. And so I’m very much a student of, you know, the life and times of Jesus Christ, right, the way in which he led. And I think it would be impossible for anybody to objectively look at the leadership of example of Christ and say anything short of that. He for sure was the most inclusive leader that you would ever see. Think about how he approached those not only in his immediate circle that were different from different backgrounds, from different ethnic or racial or however we want to characterize it. Right. And what’s always amazed me, if you really just with open eyes, look at it. Not only was he inclusive, he extended himself. He encouraged his followers not to just go with the status quo, to always think about the least of those. Right. And he had this amazing quality to see the unique value in every person. He unlike us in our fallen state, we see differences as ways to divide. But he saw things that were different as attributable value that could be brought into the whole to make the whole greater. And so to me, it’s just literally following that example. And I can tell you unequivocally, John, you know, when I joined our leadership team at Northern Trust, it happened to be the case. When I joined, we had 16 executives on the asset management leadership team. I was the only person of color and we had no women. I’m using that as one example. There are lots of characteristics of diversity. When I left, the team that I left was two thirds women in ethnically diverse. I can tell you without a hesitation that that wonderfully talented and diverse team that I work with over time that we got there on purpose, not an accident made me a better professional and a better person. So it’s not just something intellectually I know in my head. I know through my experience what the value of that is. I can also tell you, John, we had incredible success in the business in terms of increasing our innovation, our product development, our revenue growth. And so it tells me more than just something that’s a nice to do, that’s a philosophical good that there is real value in it.

John Coleman: Yeah, I mean, that’s such a good word. Shundrawn. And it is, you know, we’re watching just like everyone else. I feel like the Chosen right now and it helps bring to light you know this you get to picture actually the way that Jesus behaved in the people. I mean, it really is. It’s amazing just how open and inclusive he was of the least of these of the outcasts of those who had been pushed to the margins and how much he was ready to challenge existing power structures and things like that. And he did you know, he saw that in a way, we are all created with dignity. And it’s also practically just really reassuring to me that that example, to your point, can help us unify, not divide that in this understanding that each person has immense worth and dignity in God, that we’re all created equal and that we have an equal worth to God. If you truly believe that it’s impossible to devalue someone or to not want to appreciate them for who they are and when done well, obviously it hasn’t been done well at all points in history for Christians. But when done well, that’s such a and the way that Jesus did it, that’s such a liberating message.

Shundrawn Thomas: It is

Luke Roush: And maybe we go over to just how you think, talk about one KPI in terms of percent or more of capital put to work. Maybe just talk a little bit more on kind of intermediate KPIs right there, sort of this ultimate where does capital go? Yeah, as you think about deal flows, you think about team composition as you think about hiring and being able to source an appropriate candidate pool that maybe looks and thinks differently right, than the existing team. How do you think about what are the, you know, your current team and what do you have them focused on in terms of performance indicators for 2023 as the example?

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah. So let me split that in two categories. I’ll start with how do we think about it from the fund standpoint? So we have those five themes diversity, equity, inclusion, equal opportunities, health and wellness, workforce development and quality education. The way that we think about it is like if you look at something like workforce development. And so we’re very much focused on the ability of companies to not only create gainful opportunities for work, but investing in the growth and development of those professionals. And so whether we look at metrics like job creation and certain value added roles, we can look at actually in a company from the time we invest how people’s income grows or tracks over time, how we’re moving people into more sustainable jobs. So the same sustainability of their employee, all of these things we can see in terms of dollars spent, that’s a particular KPI in terms of direct to the investment of the development of employees and their skills. So just in the area of just workforce development, there’s this rich set of things that you can look at in terms of KPIs and you can measure them on an absolute basis for that particular enterprise. And you can also measure it across, say, similar enterprises. The thing that we do from this is very important. Luke, we seek to be practical. So we don’t expect that a single company touches every theme. We say, where is the place, given their unique mission or of calling? They are making a meaningful difference. And then what we do is, you know, some people are just I say we got lots of critics in the world. We’re not coming alongside as a critic. We’re saying it looks like you have a great opportunity here. It’s important to you. Let us help you do that even more. And that’s how we’re adding value now within the company. What we say is we have to hold ourselves to the same standards. And so in the same way that we’re going to be delivering impact investment reports as part of our report, we’ll talk about things that we’re doing at our company. So whether it’s everything from the diversity of our or to our leadership team, whether it’s the investment that we make in our employees. Like, if we’re going to expect this at companies we invest in, we have to hold ourselves accountable for it. And one of the basic ways you hold yourself accountable for Luke is you’re transparent. And so you let people know what you’re doing along those lines.

Luke Roush: That’s good. That’s good word. I think the transparency is a really that’s a word that’s come up like three times in the last week. And, you know, when you shine a light on things, you build trust and you build credibility and you just build. I think there’s a with whether it’s with your limited partners, whether it’s with portfolio companies, CEOs, whether it’s with teammates, creating more visibility helps to establish a foundation for trust. And so I think it’s an important point. Yeah.

John Coleman: Can I ask you, Shundrawn, on, you know, a key topic here, obviously is in certain types of impact investing. There’s a belief that it’s going to be concessionary or there’s a stated fact that it’s going to be concessionary. A lot of the impact you’re talking about is going to be delivering both financial return as well as social impact. How do you see the interplay of those two things and are they mutually reinforcing or are you approaching them as a tradeoff?.

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, so for us, so I want to be clear on this one. I think that we need a range of different types of impact investing. I think you can have impact investing that is done more specifically, I would say, in the philanthropic space or by social enterprises, and that takes on a certain character. I think there are organizations that I think are wonderful organizations like, you know, lists that works to get capital to underserved communities. And I would say some of what they do, by its very definition, is concessionary. And we absolutely have a need or a role for that, particularly when you have a partnership between public and private enterprise, in my opinion. And then there’s an example of the work that we do. Our premise is that you can also invest in a way that drives impact that is not concessionary. Now, when I say that is not to say that I think there’s anything wrong with concessionary investments, it’s just that I’m saying that’s not what we’re doing in this context. And I think you need that as well, because you’re going to have instances where people will say, Look, from the perspective of my fiduciary responsibility, I need to have as a basis that I am delivering investments that are going to have competitive market returns. And as a starting point, we won’t say that there’s anything inherently bad with that. Right. But I think there are folks like us, certainly. I think I look at the work that you all do, John, where we can say you can do that and still drive impact. You can do that and still have values based leadership. You can do that and still have impact for the kingdom. So the premise that these things are by definition antithetical, That is the premise. I think that we also have to be able to attack.

John Coleman: Shundrawn that is such a good articulation as we dive even deeper into this kind of measurement in the way that you look at impact, you look at financial return in that spectrum. One of the things I know that you all have done is partnered with Sustainalytics on ways objectively measure as you think about that partnership. Just help us understand that and how that reinforces the work that you’re doing.

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, I appreciate you asking that question. So Sustainalytics, which is now owned by Morningstar. So Morningstar Sustainalytics is a global leader in sustainable research, and so they work with many types of enterprises to focus on this area of measurement. So there were two important reasons there, others that we really wanted to partner with. Sustainalytics. First of all, when you’re trying to innovate, you want to work with people who can bring value, add and perspective that is complementary and different to yours, to the table to drive the best. So when we were working on this proprietary framework, we said, Listen, who could we partner with to really help drive innovation in this area? The second thing I think it ties to something that Luke and I were discussing earlier. I think there is value to having someone your partner with that brings an independent lens to what you’re doing. So there are three things that Sustainalytics does as it pertains to our framework. First of all, they provide a wholly independent assessment of our framework so that you actually as an investor can know that this is a genuine and a well inform impact investment framework. The second thing that they’ll be doing as part of the framework, John, is they’ll provide an independent assessment of each individual deal that we do. And the third thing that they will do is they will work with us on both the pulling together of the reporting of those KPIs or metrics they look was referring to, and then packaging that in the impact report. And so I think that creates not only a partner, but I think something that’s really important, a sense of accountability to what we’re doing and what we’re committed to.

Luke Roush: So that’s actually fascinating. I’ve got a whole bunch of other questions around Sustainalytics that we can maybe follow up on another time, because it sounds like a really powerful tool that is relevant in the midst of a fair amount of criticism sometimes around, you know, particularly public company funds that are being greenwash, so to speak, rather than real commitment to environmental stewardship. This idea of inviting other partners in to kind of help to create visibility and accountability. I think it makes a ton of sense. Thank you for your comments on that. One thing I want to talk about, just switching gears before we go to the Lightning Round is how your role as a pastor in your church is equipping you to take action on a different mission field, which is really more tied to your day to day work as an investor? Love to have you just talk about the Venn diagram between those two parts of how God equipped you.

Shundrawn Thomas: So, you know, it’s interesting, you know, over time, you know, as I grew in my level of responsibility in the workplace and I went into, you know, senior and then executive management. I mean, nobody gives you the memo beforehand about how much time that you will spend on the people side and how fast. So you need to be in that. Now, one of the things sometimes you don’t see it where sometimes God is preparing you in certain ways that you under appreciate. I’ve always served in the church, got involved as a teaching pastor, and then as ultimately associate pastor. And you deal with life on life issues with people. And the starting point to do anything that you do as a pastor has to be that you care intimately and deeply about the people. And that’s important because if we’re really honest in the workplace, that is not generally the starting point. The starting point is the self-interest of the organization or the profit motive and those things. And so I find that that experience as a pastor helps reorient me to what is the most important thing many times, which is the nature of that relationship. Because a lot of what you’re doing when you’re trying to do things in a professional setting is only going to come by the effort, the innovation, the hard work, the commitment, the belief of people. And so you have to appreciate then a big part of your job is actually to sow into the people. A big part of your job is to help them flourish. And so if your professional life is not different than your personal life, if you just have one life, if what you do whenever you interact with people is have a focus that says I actually want them to flourish, I think it’s incredible in terms of enhancing your effectiveness as a leader.

John Coleman: Amen. Fantastic. I mean, I can’t echo that enough Shundrawn. And that’s what we see in the best business leaders that we’re fortunate to partner with is just this real love of and belief in people. Right. Which I do think is founded in faith. Everybody’s created by the same creator. Everybody’s got talent. I’ve got a friend who says talent is universal, opportunity is not right. And in workplaces that create that I think are important. Now, I am an occasional writer. It would be absolute professional malpractice of me if I didn’t let you talk about a book. Shundrawn, I know you’ve written many books. I would love to hear about your journey as a writer, although I’m probably nerding out more over that than anything else. But your latest book, I believe, is Discover Joy in Work. Talk to us about Discover Joy in Work. How can we discover joy in work? And why is that topic important to you?

Shundrawn Thomas: So, you know, it frankly ties a lot to lose questions. So one is both about personal experience and it’s about my experience and leading people. So two things very quickly. One, I found that I, over time got to work with these incredibly talented people. And when you got to build real relationship with them, I was literally shocked at how many people were so deeply unhappy in their jobs. And I’m not exaggerating the fact that I’m [….] state truly the majority of people. The second thing that really put a light on this is for me personally, I went through a period where I was just struggling with a deep despondency from the outside looking in. It was at a period of time where I was seeing this incredible quote unquote success professionally. And so between being someone who had a sense, for lack of better terms, look at the past of people in the workplace. In dealing with my own experience, I really had to step back and think about, like the experience of work. And what I realized is, again, there is a joy I believe that God wants us to experience at work. I mean, if we have more time. I talk about the very opening passages of the Bible and we find a God not at rest, but at work. And if you were to describe his attitude towards his work, I would say, how could you describe in any way but joyful? And so how do we experience that same thing? I think it’s three things that are simple, not necessarily easy. All of them involve changing our perspective. The first is changing our perspective to the workplace. I think many of us have the wrong perspective about the workplace, and by that I mean the people that we work with in the environment we work in. The second thing is about work ethic, and that comes down to realizing that there external motivators that principally drive us from work. But if you’re external motivators, money, recognition and respect, I call it three R’s. It’s remuneration, you know, respect. In recognition. If your desire for those is greater than your internal motivation, you have imbalances, not the right work ethic. So you have to change your perspective on work ethic. The last thing is really important. We’ve kind of been talking around this. I call it work life. I say it simply this way, John, we focus so much on our careers, but the reality is your work life has to fit in the context of your overall life. There’s a purpose for which we are called. That’s bigger than any job, any role, any paycheck we have. And when we can see that we don’t have a occupation, we have a vocation, we have a life’s calling.

John Coleman: Well, I’ll give a brief testimony to discover Joy in Work, which everyone on this podcast should buy. I’m pretty sure we can’t pitch securities on this podcast, but I think we can pitch books. You know, I did my own transition a couple of years ago when I joined Sovereigns and was writing a book called The HPR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose. And that was part of me switching to the type of firm I was in. And I actually got to interview Shundrawn for that book, and that turned me on to his writing. And one of the books I read through my own transition was Discover Joy in work in the frameworks that you laid out I thought were so thoughtful about crafting a life that was really aligned with your work and about the way in which you could orient yourself towards work. And that was super informative for me as I began my journey at Sovereigns. Luke still thinks my work ethic is a little bit not what it should be, but it’s improved at the very least. And I thought the book was just fantastic. So I do hope people will pick it up. It’s an important topic. Luke Maybe I’ll pitch it over to you.

Luke Roush: Yeah, I’d love to. Transition is recognizing that we’re short on time. One of my favorite parts of this podcast is we affectionately call the Lightning Round. And so I’m going to lead off and then we kind of go back ping pong, back and forth. Some of the questions are serious, some of them are less so. But the idea is that we just get kind of 30-60 seconds responses. And so we’re grateful for you playing the game with us. I’m going to start off Chicago native Shundrawn and we’re very, very curious about which is better. The Italian B sandwich or deep dish pizza?

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, well, I love them both. I have to go deep dish pizza. I have to go with deep dish pizza.

Luke Roush: Yeah.

John Coleman: All right. Shundrawn I’m pivot here a little bit. Chicago is known for its great sports teams that are maybe have a spotty performance track record, let’s say, other than the Chicago Bulls of the Chicago sports teams right now between the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bulls, the Bears, who are you most optimistic about winning a title over the next couple of years?

Shundrawn Thomas: Oh, my gosh. This is a tough one because I am a die hard and miserable Chicago sports fan. I think all of our major teams are really bad straits right now. So let me just tell you where my heart is because I’m a Cubs fan. Even though I grew up on the South Side, I am a Blackhawks and a Bulls fan, I’m going to go Bears, not because I think we’re anywhere close to sniffing a Super Bowl. It’s just that I’m such a Bears fan and hope springs eternal.

John Coleman: I love the optimism.

Luke Roush: Lot of history, Buddy Rich history there, coming back to discovering joy at work. I think a lot of people here discovering joy at work and they think about an operating company, But you’re an investor, so how would you encourage investors to better discover joy in their work?

Shundrawn Thomas: I think that’s a great question because I think one of the basic things I would encourage investors, one of the things that we can do is we can get so focused on the intellectual asset of the discipline of investing. We are all head and no heart. So my basic encouragement to investors is bring your heart alongside your head. There is nothing that is going to depreciate your ability as a great investor. If you also look for the things that you are passionate about and are meaningful for you. And I think taken together that will bring a level of joy in your work that maybe some have an experience here heretofore, because we all need that connection between your head and heart.

John Coleman: Shundrawn I think your dad is a pastor and not just a pastor, but perhaps your pastor.

Shundrawn Thomas: Yes.

John Coleman: What is the best piece of pastoral advice you’ve gotten about your career?

Shundrawn Thomas: Oh my gosh. You know, my father and my mother who founded our church, they’ve given so much great advice over the years. But I would say the piece of advice he gave me that it’s been so beneficial to me at work and at home is that he says, Look, son, you know, wherever you are, be there. And if you don’t pay attention, the depth of that can just get by you. But I think that what happens for so many of us, we live so much of our lives distracted. And some of the most important moments that we have are the engagement that we have with people. And I’ll tell to myself, you can look back over time and you can say, you know, I was there, but I wasn’t really there. I wasn’t locked in. I wasn’t focused on that. And I missed that special moment. And so I always hear his voice echoing in my mind, and it gives me a different level of engagement and focus, particularly with people. Wherever you are, be there.

Luke Roush: So I want to actually go outside of your work and outside of the church, maybe just another ministry or nonprofit that you’re personally excited about. You find joy through your engagement with them.

Shundrawn Thomas: Yeah, so I appreciate that question. Now, we’re very involved with a number of different nonprofits, and my wife and I are very charitably inclined. I would say one that is top of mind that’s doing some interesting work, particularly it impacts communities here in Chicago, but I think it’s an example for the nation. So I joined the board of Rush University Medical Center, and the thing that pulled me over the top because we’re very intentional about where we spend our time, is they do this innovative and groundbreaking work on health equity. I mean, it is truly an example for these. I mean, they focus on communities in particular on the west side of the city. These happen to be communities that are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, but predominantly African-American. A lot of these communities, when you see what happened over time, you have a lot of industry moving out of the city and so forth and so on. But your reality is what was left is communities where they are, among other things, not only banking and financial deserts, but health deserts. So providing expert health care, creating access. But then the last thing is they went even further. They start thinking about ways to engage the economic vitality of these communities. So they said, as a hospital, we’re not only giving care to people, but we are a business. So we can do business with and engage people in the community is such an innovative way to think about health equity in the fact they’re doing it out in the community. And so we’ve come alongside that. We give a lot to those particular initiatives and we serve in that capacity.

John Coleman: That is awesome Shundrawn. So one thing we love to know end on for every episode, given it’s the Faith Driven Investor podcast, is for our guests to just teach us one thing that they’re learning through Scripture right now that’s impacting your life. I know this is important to you, but what would you share with our audience about what you’re learning from Scripture right now?

Shundrawn Thomas: So it is going to be very timely and topical because one of the privileges I have of serving in our church is I said as an associate pastor, I serve as teaching pastor, a teaching pastor. And so what I always say whenever I have the privilege to teach, to deliver the homily or the sermon, it’s always impart things that God is working with me on, revealing to me, and I feel like there’s an importation you have to share. And so one of the things I’ve been focused on most recently, and I’m actually teaching a series of the church on it’s a three part series is focusing on the practical wisdom and the power of the Word of God. I think it’s so easy in times like this, you know, people’s hearts in some ways are failing them. Their confidence in political and governmental and business systems is shaken. We look at all the things going on in the world. And so where do we go to answers. But we have this incredible source, the word of God. And what I encourage in this service, in this series is understanding one, The word of God is active, right? It is continually working. It’s effective. It does exactly what it is intended to do. It’s time tested, it’s enduring. Right. And so there’s a source of this deep practical wisdom that we have that we can trust. And I think for me, that is such an encouragement, like all the things that are going around, to just refocus on that truth. And so that’s what’s been top of mind for me.

John Coleman: Shundrawn awesome look. We are grateful for you taking the time on the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’re grateful for the witness that you are in the financial services world and your faith and how that’s reflecting on others and also for the great work that you’re doing in the community right now. And, and I think Luke and I would both agree that we’ve loved the conversation and we’re very hopeful about the work that you’re set out to do now and really appreciative that you’re sharing your story with the world. Thanks so much for joining us.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

Each month, we bring in experts to give an overview of the market’s current state. 

On this episode, we have frequent contributors Bob Doll and David Spika take us through their 2022 reflections and predictions for 2023. Bob is the Chief Investment Officer at Crossmark Global and David has the same role at GuideStone Investments. Both men bring incredible insight to the conversation.

Throughout the conversation, the two also chat about how Christian investors can think through layoffs, the potential recession, and ESG investing. David even makes a Super Bowl prediction. 

Check out the episode and don’t forget to rate and follow the show on whatever platform you use to listen.

Episode Transcript

John Coleman: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is John Coleman and this is our monthly Mark’s On the Market podcast, where we talk to experts in the industry who are also people of great faith about what they’re seeing in markets and highlight some of the best Christian minds in faith driven investing. Today is a real treat because we certainly have some of the greatest Christian minds in Faith Driven Investing in Bob Dole and David Spika. Bob is the Chief investment officer of Cross Mark Global Investments. David is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Guide Stone Capital Management. Both have extraordinary careers in the industry. They have a record of success and we are so grateful to have them on today. So welcome, Bob and David.

Bob Dole: Thank you John.

David Spika: Thank you. Happy to be here.

John Coleman: Well, we want to dive right in. You know, we’re entering the month of February here. Before we look at this month and 2023, talk to us about your big takeaways from the market in 2022. And Bob, maybe you could kick us off.

Bob Dole: Sure first word that comes to mind is, wow, I mean, what a year it was in so many ways, mostly on the negative side. You know, when you do these ten silly predictions every year and we actually did say stocks and bonds would both be down in 2022, but never thought it would be by the magnitude. It’s the first time in 50 years that stocks and bonds were both down three quarters in a row.

John Coleman: Wow.

Bob Dole: I think that’s a superlative. I’m also struck by the amount by which value outperformed growth and the environment that transpired. You would expect that, but the magnitude was amazing. The final thing I would say off top of my head is how well international stocks did versus U.S. stocks. All those problems internationally and of course, international markets, most of them went down, but they went down less than the US.

David Spika: Yeah, I don’t want to trump you, Bob, but I had seen that we saw stocks and bonds both down more than 10% for the first time since the seventies in the 1870s.

John Coleman: Whoa.

David Spika: Yes, indeed. I don’t know what bonds we were trading in the 1870s, but something was being traded. So it’s been a long, long time. The thing that struck me about last year, though, was how ill prepared we all were for what occurred. If you go back and look at what the market expected for Fed rate hikes in December of 2021, I think we thought the Fed was going to raise 25 basis points two or three times. We ended up going up 450 basis points. Nobody is prepared for that. Nobody was prepared for 9% inflation and that caught everyone off guard. And I think what it taught us is that we can’t get too confident in our expectations and our predictions. We have to be willing to pivot and to humble ourselves and say, I was wrong because things often turn out differently than we expect.

Bob Dole: Well-said.

John Coleman: Well, and speaking of pivoting, we have flipped the calendar year, Bob. It was a crazy year in markets in 2022. It’s shaping up to be an interesting year in markets this year and in the business community. One of the trends that we’re seeing really prominently right now is layoffs among technology companies, including many companies that have never broached this before. Firms like Amazon, Google and Meta have had large layoffs, succeeding all those announced at Twitter previously in the Go Private there. And a host of other tech firms have made similar moves. David, I want to start with you. What does this tell you about tech companies in the U.S. And do you see these layoff announcements, apart from the human implications which will come to you as a positive or negative for the future of those companies?

David Spika: I think what we need to recognize is that what’s happening in the economy, whether it be in tech companies or financial service companies, is we’re seeing the job market start to weaken. Now, there’s two things that have created the situation we had over hiring during the pandemic, particularly the financial services sector. And we’re also going into a weaker economic environment. Labor has got to weaken and that’s what has to happen. The Fed can’t engineer a better supply chain, but they can engineer weaker spending. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with these layoffs.

John Coleman: Bob, do you have any thoughts on the layoffs that are happening?

Bob Dole: You know, first of all, I agree with David. What I add to it is, look, these companies are facing top line growth is slowing and inevitably they’re concerned about profits and profit margins. And where is the economy going? How long will this weakness last? And so they have to trim their costs. And for a lot of tech companies, the biggest costs, labor. And so we’re seeing these announcements probably more to come. I guess what I would add is tech companies don’t have a lot of people compared to a lot of other industries. So the reason the job market, so far has remained strong as the big employers, retail, restaurants, they’re still looking for employees. They can’t find them at the wage rates. And so we see these tech layoffs and they are big and they’re important. But relative, the size of the labor force still not affected things all that much.

John Coleman: Yeah, we’ve been talking in our firm a little bit about the movement in technology potentially being structural in that they had become extremely overstaffed, potentially. I think Twitter was the canary in the coal mine there. There were a lot of folks who weren’t performing functions that were critical to the operations of the business. And a reckoning was going to happen at some point. And David, you know, to your point about this being really a cut primarily of the over hiring from the pandemic, I think a lot of these layoffs that have been announced, even though they’re quite broad, are actually just returning to something like 2021 or 2020 staffing levels. You know, this hasn’t cut deeply. And from my point of view, it is, again, will come to the human implications. But just from a leadership of the company point of view, it’s encouraging them to see them emphasizing discipline as part of their management toolkit. Now, where they haven’t had to do that quite as much in the past.

David Spika: And John, on that point I saw recently where BlackRock, even though they’re laying people off, has stated that they want to keep employment levels flat this year. So they may be replacing higher wage workers with lower wage workers as a way to manage their costs. Bob’s right, 70% of their costs are labor, so that may be part of what’s going on as well.

John Coleman: Let me zero in on one topic here and maybe, Bob, you could lead us off. When we talk about layoffs. Obviously, there’s a financial component to that within companies, but there’s a human component. We may be heading into something like a recession. It may not be as deep as some people think, but it may. As Christian investors and business leaders. How do we think about layoffs and how do we think about treatment of employees in times like a recession when these reductions become necessary?

Bob Dole: Yeah, great question. I think we start with the observation that, look, business cycles are part of life and you get expansionary phases where you hire, hopefully not over hire or perhaps they do this, we just comment it and then you get the other side of it and you’ve got to trim your costs. And labor is one place that it goes. I love employers that have variable part of the compensation, so they may end up laying off fewer workers and spreading the difficult news across the workforce more so we pay attention. That sort of thing, of course, is how do you handle as a company the policy of a layoffs, You know, how do you treat your workers? Is there a period of time where you hold them over? Is there a method by which under certain circumstances you can come back? What is the safety net that might be put in place? Are we treating this people as human beings rather than just numbers? And that’s, in my view, part of the values based investing. How do companies approach the layoffs that can often be necessary?

David Spika: Now, something else to note is that we have a responsibility to God and to our clients to deliver the best products and services we can. So if you go back to the old Jack Welch model, what did he do every year he got rid of the D players. Now, that sounds very callous, but in an environment like this where the job market is so strong, this is an opportunity to help some of the folks that really aren’t a good fit in your firm, find a better opportunity someplace else. And the good news for them is there’s 4 million excess jobs today. Bob pointed this out and we’re three and a half percent unemployment. It’s not like when we go much higher than four and a half or 5%, My gosh, that’d be a big move. So this is not like what we saw in oh eight where you’ve got 10% unemployment. But at the end of the day, as Bob said, this is an important part of the cycle. Recessions are necessary to prune the economy of excesses. And it’s just unfortunate. But yes, how you treat people when you go through this process is indicative of whether or not you’re following the Lord.

John Coleman: And I want to pivot back to this idea of inflation and recession in a moment, which you guys are starting to talk to you. One thing I add, Bob, that I just saw today, to reaffirm this idea that you can use variable compensation reductions or comp reductions instead of layoffs, was Intel actually took that approach today where they announced 5 to 25% compensation cuts across the board, depending on seniority, which presumably helps them manage this downturn that they’re in specifically in the economy’s in without having to enact such dramatic layoffs. And that can certainly be a tool that companies utilize. I want to pick up now on this idea of recession and inflation. We talked about six months ago. At the time, inflation was running very hot and there were very few signs that we were in a recession. Now inflation is cooling and there are more signs of a potential recession or that we might be in a recession. What is your read on inflation and recession right now? What do you think is ahead for the Federal Reserve? And David, perhaps we could start with you.

David Spika: The Fed met today. We heard from Chairman Powell. He was very clear that they still have a 2% target for core inflation. We’re a long way from 2% on core inflation. Given that and given how strong the job market is, the Fed has to continue to tighten financial conditions. And one of the problems they have today is that the market is not helping them. So stocks are up eight or 9% since November and the ten year Treasury is down 72 basis points in the same period of time. That’s loosening financial conditions. The markets rallying today on the Fed’s remarks, I guess presumable because they only raised 25 basis points. Bottom line is the Fed has work to do. Chairman Powell was very clear on that. His reputation, his legacy is on the line. And the only way we can get inflation under control is by reducing consumer spending. And the only way we can reduce consumer spending on a sustainable basis is by bringing employment levels down, increasing the unemployment rate. It’s just how things work. And historically, inflation has only been tamed through recession. So we fully expect a recession at some point, maybe in the second half of this year going into next year.

Bob Dole: So I 1,000% agree with David. So let me just say a few things to emphasize that maybe a couple of different ways. I want to emphasize David’s first point. The Fed’s target is 2%. We are a long way from 2%. So if the Fed insists on 2%, I do not see, as David said, how we avoid a recession. It may be a mild one for a bunch of reasons, but avoiding a recession is really difficult now. The other path the Fed could choose is to say at some point, you know, maybe two’s not the right number, maybe three. Okay. And if we get to a three handle, say three and three quarters, they might say, oh, let’s round it down to three. And if they do that, we could have the proverbial soft landing, but their credibility will be shot. And David’s right. You don’t bring inflation down without cooling the economy, especially the labor market, which shows lots of signs of being pretty strong. So kind of the slide I’m envisioning I put together in December was 50% chance of a mild recession, 30% chance of a soft landing, 20% chance of a more average or more difficult recession. I don’t see how we avoid it. We could debate when it’s going to start, but the markets acting like, okay, maybe inflation is not a problem because we’re bringing it down. Maybe the Fed’s almost done. Maybe the economy’s okay, let me go out and buy high beta stocks. It may not have a whole lot of quality, and I’m not sure how long that can last if in fact, we are going to have a recession.

David Spika: So let me add one more thing to that. Great points, Bob. I agree completely. You might need to get two guys that argue with each other. John, Bob and I are on the same page.

This is way too friendly. Yes,.

This isn’t very entertaining is it? So maybe we’ll talk football or something later. But we have seen by virtue of Fed policy, the largest decline in the money supply as measured by M2 ever. There is no way that doesn’t have a meaningful impact on the economy, regardless of what the Fed sees as their ultimate goal. There is no way you drain that much money out of the system without it having a meaningful impact in the economy.

Bob Dole: At the risk of beating a dead horse. I want to add to that. Yes, the money supply is shrinking. The leading economic indicators have rolled over significantly. We have the most inverted yield curve in 40 years. The PMI is are almost all below 50 here and around many places around the world. And remember, the Fed raised rates, as David said earlier, at the fastest pace in U.S. history except for Paul Volcker. And we know monetary policy operates with long and unpredictable legs. So I think what the Fed did in 2022, we’re going to feel the effects of it in 2023. So it will probably both be wrong and the economy will sail forward. But I don’t see how we avoid a significant slowdown, if not a recession.

Bob Dole: When they both are wrong. But we can still be friends. Bob, how about that?

Bob Dole: I hear you. I hear you.

John Coleman: Well, let’s see if we can spark a little debate with the next one. I wanted to turn to this topic of ESG, and Bob, maybe we can start with you. You know, ESG has been this prominent trend in investment management for some time now. It’s close to a third of the assets in the world claim to be ESG in some way. And 2022 mark, one of the first years of sustained pushback against that, notably against BlackRock, which has become kind of the figurehead for the movement in many ways. And there were effectively two sets of pushback on that that were. Prominent one was for many state based institutions, saying, look, actually all that should matter is fiduciary duty. We should not take into account things that we think are unrelated to performance. And then a second set of pushback was just around the values inherent in ESG, saying that those were inherently progressive values or they were values that people disagreed with. People are of different opinions now on what the future of that holds. What is your view on ESG and how Christian should think about ESG or more broadly based values investing in their portfolio?

Bob Dole: So I think what we’re discovering is we don’t know what ESG is. It’s different for almost every investor and every money manager. And that’s why, among other reasons, we at cross mark, we never talk about ESG because we don’t know what it is. We talk about values based investing, which in our view is a subset of ESG, not a broader concept. And the standard we bring is what is God said? You know, we could talk all day about what we think and how we would like the world to look. We try to say, you know, God in his word gives us some black and he gives us some white and it gives us a lot of gray. And that’s why it gave us minds to think through and try to figure those areas out. So I think the ESG moniker is appropriately undergoing scrutiny, confusion. And look, it will take different forms. There is no ESG standard. That’s part of the problem. And so I think the debate is going to continue to rage. And a lot of people will say, let me figure out what my values are and let’s see if we can manage money that way and get rid of this broad ESG moniker. I know there’s some ESG factors that we think are great for values based investing and others where we want to actually reverse the sign. So it’s a very confusing subject, but one that we’re all trying to wrestle to the ground.

David Spika: Yeah, ESG has become a dirty word because of the association with the climate change agenda. And as Bob said, we at guide stone don’t practice ESG. We don’t want to get caught up in ESG. What we do is faith based investing. We want to invest in a way that has a positive impact on the kingdom. Only 15% of evangelical Christian investors invest in faith based investments. We want that to grow. We think that a tremendous opportunity to introduce Christians to faith based investing. We know about tithing, but they don’t really understand the opportunity or really the obligation they have to invest in a way that honors the Lord. And so there’s a big educational process that firms like cross mark and guide stone are in the process of doing and creating and going out and teaching folks about faith based investing about biblical values investing and how it’s different than ESG. And I think that’s on us to make sure Christians understand they have that opportunity.

John Coleman: Yeah, and we think the same. I think I would agree 100% with both of you. You know, the Bible actually consistently has a lot of commands about how we live our financial lives. It’s obvious that God cares about how we steward capital in the Bible and in church history. ESG is a particular set of values. Like you said, Bob, some of which are aligned with biblical values or Christian values, some of which are not. Right. And I think what’s incumbent upon us now is for us collectively to develop a more nuanced set of views about what Christian values look like manifested in a portfolio. And David, then to your point, to encourage people who are Christians to take into account their values when they’re allocating capital as much of the world already has through ESG investing, but Christians have kind of lagged behind. I think.

David Spika: Amen.

Bob Dole: As David said, it’s an educational process. I think we would all agree. Most Christians think about how they earn their money. You know, they’re not going to rob a bank every other week to put food on the table. And at the back end, how they spend their money and where they give their money, they give that thought to from the faith. But this in between that and that’s investment part. Boy, a lot of people, they’re not even aware of that possibility. So it’s a fun education process.

John Coleman: So I’m going to pivot us now from a very fine and catchy topic like ESG to a very nerdy topic like bond markets. And David, I figure you might be able to kick us off here. You know, you guys mentioned at the beginning, 1870 was an interesting statistic that I didn’t know, but bond markets absolutely got hammered last year. And for the first time in a long time on the other side, fixed income, even money markets are starting to yield again, Right, Because the Fed rates are going up. Even I now see CCD advertised, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid, probably be prominent. What is your outlook for fixed income right now and how do you think about that in an investor portfolio in 2023?

David Spika: Well, John, thank you for giving me an opportunity to explore my nerdy side. I don’t get to do that as often as I would like. But I will tell you this at guide stone we’re big fans of Bonds. Today. We have seen for the first time ever back to back negative total return years for the Barclays Act. Never seen that before. Bonds consistently produced positive returns. Today you can get four and a half percent or more in short term, high quality bonds. Think about it. Most investors, what do they want to earn? A particular retirement? 6% or so. Wow. If I get four and a half percent in the safest part of the market, that’s a great opportunity. The thing that happened last year that scared a lot of people off was the rate volatility. As the Fed was raising rates, rates were going crazy. The MOVE index, unlike the VIX, was going crazy and that had a big impact on bond prices. And I think people got scared off a little bit. But we’re near the end, close to the end, obviously, of the rate hike cycle. You’re already seeing the longer end come down for rates. That’s positive for bond investors. So you buy these bonds at some point, you get an opportunity to go further out on the yield curve, benefit from current yields that are the highest we’ve seen in 15, 20 years and benefit from the capital appreciation that will occur as rates fall when we get into weaker economic times. So we’re big fans today and think investors really need to be taking a hard look at the bond market.

Bob Dole: So, John, as you know, I’m an equity investor, so I start with the phrase bonds are boring but boring is but boring is a good thing.

John Coleman: You’re breaking David’s heart over there. I see him tearing up just a little bit.

Bob Dole: I have to disagree with him once.

David Spika: I’ve been called a lot worse, Bob, Trust me than boring.

Bob Dole: So to continue with David’s history, he’ll look back. The last hundred years I focused on the ten year Treasury. 20% of the years you lost money in a ten year Treasury, only 3% of the time Did you lose money two years in a row. Three years in a row. We went back 250 years and there are no three year rates. So I think we can take it to the bank, maybe a little strong, but close to it. That will make a couple of bucks in fixed income this year. So how do we feel about fixed income? Have some. Unlike a year ago when one and a half percent ten year treasuries, it was a place to stay away from 3.5 a whole lot more interesting. And as David said, shorter maturities, you can get four approaching five. So we want to have some. And now the question in bond portfolios having length and duration from the shortest that we ever had to more neutral, now we’re playing the credit game with fear and trepidation, but that’s part of how we’re trying to add a buffer to above the benchmarks.

John Coleman: That’s great. Well, Bob, maybe they get back on firm footing with your territory. One of the biggest hits last year was to growth stocks. You mentioned high beta stocks earlier. We saw this in private markets and growth equity and venture as well. You know, 2022 was just brutal for growth equity for growth stocks in markets, at least partially because they had gone up so aggressively over the prior 15 years and even in the last 12 to 24 months. What is your outlook for growth stocks this year and how do you think about venturing growth, equity or even public growth equity in a portfolio?

Bob Dole: So first, to extend your observation last year, to oversimplify it, but not by much long duration, things were the worst place to be. When interest rates go up, the last thing you want to own is a long duration bond. When interest rates go up, the last thing you want to own is a long duration stocks, and those stocks got absolutely pummeled. Doesn’t mean they’re bad companies, a lot of good companies. But their stocks just got crunched because the discount rate went up as as interest rates went up. So fast forward to today and then back to my observation, how much value beat growth last year. So we want some of both in our portfolio. You put a gun to my head. I think value will be growth again this year for a whole bunch of reasons. But in the portfolios I manage, I want some value. I want it to be higher quality, predictable value given the economic landscape that Dave and I just posited for this year. But I want some girls too. I just don’t want to pay ridiculous prices, so maybe growth more at a price to get some balance in my portfolio.

John Coleman: David, this is your chance to get a little revenge for that boring comment. What do you think?

David Spika: Yeah, I’m still thinking about that one, so I’m going to be a little bit off the Bob train. We like growth and let me tell you why. Growth stocks, as Bob very articulately described, do better in a stable to falling interest rate environment because they’re longer duration assets. We believe we’re going to have a stable to falling interest rate environment this year. Secondly, investors pay up for growth when growth becomes scarce. And we believe that the economy is going to slow down earnings. Growth has already started to slow down. Growth will become scarce, so investors will pay out for growth. And finally, for long term investors, which I hope we all are for buying equities growth companies is where you get innovation, right. And you talked about venture capital and you talked about private equity. Obviously, you’ve got to be a long term investor because you can’t even get your capital for ten or 15 years out of those. But that’s where the innovation comes in. So to have a portion of your portfolio in those types of companies is really going to benefit you longer term and give you the opportunity, invest in really exciting parts of the economy, whether it’s AI and machine learning or whatever the case may be, that you can only access through growth stocks.

John Coleman: Yeah, it’s only a matter of time before we’re just using chatGPT, I think, for this podcast. So there is a lot of excitement.

David Spika: You could get rid off Bob and I and AI is going to be making up better stuff and we have.

John Coleman: Right, they might keep you, but my job is definitely in jeopardy here. You know, Bob, maybe pivot back to you and let you start. You do these ten predictions every year that are fascinating. I’m not going to ask you for quite that many, but to almost round us out today before we come to some lessons you’re getting through scripture right now. I wanted to get each of you just to give me your three best predictions for 2023. Bob, what do you think?

Bob Dole: Because you prepped as I looked through my ten and I singled out three. If singled out means three, I don’t know. But it is. Inflation falls substantially this year but does not get down to the Fed target. So good news but not good enough news. Two earnings falls short of expectations. We talked about earnings recession earlier. You know the number for the 2023 S&P 500 peaked at over $250 a few months ago, is now in the two twenties. I’m going to get down to $200 and three. The average equity manager beats the index this year, while last year, after eight years where more than 50% of managers lagged the benchmark. I think this will be the second year in a row, and there are a whole lot of reasons when interest rates are stable, when they’ve gone up, when interest rates are more market set rather than artificially set fundamental research matters. And so that’s the third one.

David Spika: Well, John, let me give you my three. I’m going to say the Fed takes the Fed funds rate to at least 5%, Stay it to the end of the year, and that pushes the economy into recession. Secondly, I think bonds beat stocks this year. And thirdly, I’m taking the chiefs over the Eagles in the Super Bowl. Sorry, Bob.

John Coleman: There we go, we got Mahomes guy here.

David Spika: Hey, Patrick. Mahomes is my guy. Okay.

John Coleman: So I’m worried about that. I’m worried about the ankle.

John Coleman: David, He looked okay, but that ankle’s making me nervous a little bit that I’d have to pick the Chiefs as well. Bob, you’re a little surrounded at the moment

David Spika: I’m outnumbered. We’ll talk. We’ll talk two Mondays from now, guys.

David Spika: Yes, we will.

John Coleman: Well, hey, this is the Faith Driven Investor podcast and the Faith Part of that’s really important. Y’all have touched on that a bit. But we do like to just in the podcast asking each of our participants about what they’re learning from Scripture right now that they think might be relevant to others. And David, if I could start with you, just be curious. Anything in your personal devotional life that you’re learning right now that you want to share with others?

David Spika: I love this question, John. Thanks for asking. In our small group, we’ve been studying the life of David, and one of the things that really stands out about David is even though he was anointed by God to be the king of Israel, he didn’t try and force it. He didn’t try and overtake Saul. He had chances to go and take over and to kill Saul and become king. But he didn’t because God wasn’t ready for him to do that. So he showed patience, he showed humility, He showed obedience to God, and he waited until God was ready to put him in the throne. And I think that’s a great lesson for us to learn in this business, particularly in an environment like this. Let’s don’t try and get ahead of things. Let’s make sure that we’re doing what honors the Lord every day, practice that humility, practice that patience and truly honor him and do what’s in the best interest of our clients.

John Coleman: Bob, what about you? What are you learning right now?

Bob Dole: Yeah, mine’s a simple one. God is sovereign. I mean, we know that factually, and I would say experientially, I’m just grabbing a hold of that and apply it. Some of the things we’ve talked about the economy, layoffs, people are going to lose their job and that’s not fun. But, you know, God knew that was going to happen because he’s sovereign over all things, all people at all times. And so I take comfort in that on the good days in the not so good days, that we can look to him as the God who wants the best for each of us. And if we accept his sovereignty in recognizing he has our best in mind, the days get a whole lot easier to live.

John Coleman: Amen. Amen to both of you on that one. And certainly, Bob, that sense of trust and. Sense that there is someone who cares about us and that we can take a very, very long term perspective with regards to our salvation. And also how all these things are going to work out is quite comforting in times like this. This is Bob Dole, CEO of Cross Smart Global Investments. David, Speaker, President and CEO of Guide Stone Capital Management. Gentlemen, as always, incredible insights. We’re really grateful to you for sharing them and they’ve been a great benefit to us today on the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Thank you very much.

David Spika: Thank you, John. Enjoyed it.

Bob Dole: The privilege.

subscribe to the podcast

Andy Crouch and the entire team at Praxis never disappoint, and today’s episode is no exception. At this year’s Faith Driven Investor Conference, Andy shared what a redemptive model for investing could look like, especially in uncertain times.

It goes without saying that 2020 has upended everyone’s expectations and many people’s financial security. So, what would happen if we viewed investing as an opportunity for redemption rather than selfish reward? Listen in to find out…

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Welcome back everyone, to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. The Praxis team has been so faithful about the way they think through and process Christian entrepreneurship and investing. We’re always glad to put a spotlight on their work. And today’s episode with Andy Crouch is no exception at the faith driven investor conference. He shared a redemptive framework for investing. And that’s what we’d like to invite you to listen to today. Here’s Andy now.

Andy Crouch: I’ve been thinking about the extraordinary success in our lifetimes of Islamic finance, which is based on actually one very simple, powerful and radical rule, which is that in Islam, interest is forbidden, which means that debt, as it’s practiced in Western capitalist economies, isn’t really practical. And a two point two trillion dollar industry has grown up to kind of work around this prohibition on interest and finance ventures and personal needs in the Islamic world. And of course, this has me thinking if Christian investors, the faith driven investors, were as influential and focused on what we’re aiming for as Islamic investors, how many trillions of dollars would be redirected and how would the world financial system be potentially quite reshaped? Now, this is a tricky question because there is a problem, I think, from a Christian point of view, with the Muslim approach to this, which is it’s based on a law, it’s based on a rule, and lives based on law and rules become easily become legalistic. And legalism is when you define a kind of a boundary that you’re not allowed to cross. But then everyone spends a lot of time right at the edge of the boundary looking for loopholes around the boundary and the reality of Islamic finance, in spite of the genuine good intentions of those who practice it sometimes is that it is often about just getting around this prohibition on interest through creative structuring of things that look like equity, but really function a lot more like debt with interest. And there’s actually a much deeper issue than just this legalism issue, which is that when you actually look at the structure of the economies that are controlled by people with power in the Muslim world, especially those of the Arab Gulf states, unfortunately, these are very oppressive places for many, many of their members, especially the actual labor of those economies. So usually immigrant labor who build the cities on the soccer stadiums, but really under conditions that are very close to indentured servitude or forced labor. These are not just economies. They don’t charge interest, but they’re not necessarily pieces of justice. And of course, this was exactly Jesus critique of the legalists of his time, the Pharisees, who had lots of very laws, but he said, you strain out these tiny little things. You screen for these particular things that you’ve neglected. The waiter matters of the law. So we are not out to create a Christian financing. That’s just a kind of legalism. And several everyone have to look for something that is deeper, more based on the orientation of the heart, and ultimately might be more transformative than any legalistic system will be. And our community Praxis has been thinking about this under the heading of what we call redemptive investing. And there are three themes that keep emerging as we talk with people who are doing really transformational investing out of their Christian faith here. They are redemptive. The message as we’re starting to see a practice prioritizes people, prioritizes people over money or deals or transactions, redemptive investing seeks out and takes on meaningful risk. It’s risk seeking in a in a certain meaningful way. And redemption investing takes responsibility for the nonfinancial outcomes to some extent of investments, not just looking at financial return, but all the other effects that our investing has on the systems around the companies and ventures we invest in. So to illustrate this, I thought we’d look for a moment and think about Jesus’s strangest and least legalistic parable, because this is a parable about someone who does everything wrong. He is, in fact an investment manager, but he’s a dishonest one. He breaks every rule of investing. And yet, Jesus says this story actually teaches us something essential about how to live truly righteous lives, not just superficially righteous lives with what Jesus calls dishonest wealth. So it’s found in Luke 16, and you may remember how it starts. There’s a man who as someone managing money for him and he learns that this man is squandering his property. Jesus says so he summons the man who says, What are you doing? Give me an account. Give me an audit and then you’re fired. The manager says to himself, and this is Jesus’s way of putting it. This is quite remarkable. What will I do now that my master is taking my position over me? I am not strong enough to dig and I’m ashamed to beg. And he says, I know what I will do. So that when I no longer have my position, people will welcome me into their homes. So he summons his masters debtors. One by one he asks the first one, How much do you owe my master? The guy says, I owe one hundred containers of wheat. He says, Okay, take it. Sit down and make it 50. Then he signs the next. The guy says, I owe you one hundred containers of olive oil.

Says, Okay, make it 80. And then Jesus says something quite unsettling and strange. He says the master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, because the children of this age, Jesus says, are more shrewd in their dealings with one another than are the children of light. So you two should make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into eternal homes. So how do we see the three principles I listed very quickly there and the choices of this dishonest steward? Well, first he prioritizes people, he prioritizes people. He knows that his access to the money that he’s been a steward of and his position are very temporary. But those people will still be around. And if he can develop relationship, friendship with them, they’ll welcome him into their homes long after the money is gone. Transactions are temporary. Money is temporary, but people and relationships can last a long time. In fact, this guy is just looking for a place to stay after he loses his job. But every person we interact with is someone who if we really were to be Christ for them, if they were to see Christ in us. And if they were to trust in Christ, they would actually be our brother or sister eternally. Money is very temporary. Our access to whatever’s been entrusted to us is so temporary. Every single person we meet is potentially our eternal friend.

Second thing that this guy does. He takes meaningful risks with the money entrusted to him. Now he had a low risk option. His master has asked just for an audit and he should turn in as clean and audit as he can tell the whole truth. Hope to get away with at least not a negative recommendation, maybe just a no comment. When someone calls for a reference, but instead, this guy who Abdulnasser has seemingly been totally thoughtless and lazy, suddenly has a very clear reason to take risks with the owner’s money. How do we think about risk? I think we have a complex relationship with risk as we ourselves manage money and as we manage other people’s money, because every single Christian is called to take incredible risk in order to join God’s adventure. God’s call on their life for the sake of justice and the repair of the world. And there are some risks that are not meaningful. Inflation risks, currency risks, concentration risk, sector risk. These are not particularly meaningful risks. And we’re right to prudently hedge them and and limit them in appropriate ways. But the point of having resources is to deploy them in meaningful ways, and that’s always going to mean risk. And it’s so tempting when you have resources to make the point. Safety and preservation, rather than setting ourselves up for the maximum risk we could take. For God’s call in our lives. And then the third thing he does is he. He has a non-financial outcome in mind for the money. He’s not great on the financial side as M. ends up with a 20, 50 percent haircut on the debt. But there is something this Masterda, this manager does, right.

He sees there’s something good available that isn’t just about money that the proper use of money can obtain. And I think this has a parallel to us, too, because we cannot look at our investments only in terms of what they return financially. These are this is ultimately God’s money. And all all resources are gods as we know. So what is God after? God’s interests are ultimately not financial. God is not going to be auditing our lives for our IRR. What is God seeking? He’s told us. I’ve told you people what I desire of you. To do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. So any money that we are entrusted with needs to be invested in ways that do justice. Instead of furthering exploitation, they create environments of mercy, rather environments of legalism and punishment. And that encourage humility rather than feeding human pride, because that’s the accounting God is going to ask for for our whole lives, including how he’s stewarded, whatever was entrusted to us. So the crazy thing is the owner commends him. He recommends him. He’s going to get a positive reference. That seems like why why in the world? I think there are two things going on here. One is it said that he was squandering the owners money before. He wasn’t doing anything with it. He’s wasting it. He wasn’t paying attention. And now he starts paying attention. I think the Masters just impressed the final. He started actually being shrewd in what he was doing with it. But there might be something deeper going on here. It could be that not just the manager, but the owner actually benefits from these acts of voluntary debt write downs. How would you feel about a creditor whose servant came and voluntarily had you write down your debt? I mean, you’d be grateful to the servant for sure, but you might well feel grateful to the owner as well. And it may be that this wealthy man’s relationship with his neighbors and the whole economy that he’s part of is going to change for the better because of what this servant does. He’s going to be known as a generous, merciful man. And maybe in the end, that matters more to this particular master than the hundred percent return of principal. Now, the dishonest manager was not a faith driven investor. Jesus tells us that his motivation was fear. He was a fear driven investor. And yet he prioritized relationship over transaction. He took meaningful risks. And he seeks non-financial outcomes that may not just benefit him, but benefit his master in the bigger picture. If a fear driven investor does that. What’s it, faith driven investors Bedi? Imagine if Christian finance was defined by loving people, taking meaningful risk and pursuing real justice and repair in the world with money as the instrument of those ends.

We would end up with a lot of friends who would welcome us, perhaps even the eternal dwellings and the master we serve, who is not in the money business, but in the redemption business, we’ve got so much glory and we’ll get to welcome so many more people into his house because of the way we steward what was his all along.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

Brett Johnson founded The Institute for Innovation, Integration & Impact, Inc. in 1996. His writings complement the work of this Silicon Valley think tank. Brett’s most recent book, Kingdom Economics, is an invitation to the faith driven investor who loves the nations and the planet too much to leave their money stuck where it grows but does not change the world for good.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Brett Johnson: And this is the fascinating part about Faith Driven Investor. It’s a combination of capital and faith, whereas in the world system, it’s capital without faith. The world system is crafted carefully so that you don’t have to depend upon God. And one day, you know, I realized one of the reasons I’m asking God for a million dollars or ten million is that: I don’t want to pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ That’s really why I’m praying for. But then I realized if God gave me $10 million, he’d give me a $20 million problem if I’m a kingdom person. That’s what God does. He gives kingdom people providence for breakfast.

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Brett Johnson founded the Institute for Innovation, Integration and Impact Inc. in 1996. His writings complement the work of this Silicon Valley think tank. Brett’s upcoming book, Kingdom Economics, is an invitation to the growing Faith Driven Investor community who love the nations and the planet too much to leave their money stuck where it grows. But it doesn’t change the world for good. We’re excited to talk to Brett about his new book and to learn from his four decades of experience, helping organizations discover a purpose that is greater than just the bottom line. Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor podcast with Brett Johnson.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with my partner, Luke Roush from Nashville, Tennessee. Luke, how are you?

Luke Roush: I am doing great. Great day to be alive.

Henry Kaestner: So our guest is very close to you. Up in Chattanooga and so on. The odd man out being out here on the West Coast. But I’ll tell you the different guests that we’ve had over the last couple of months. I can’t think of anybody that I’m more excited about sharing with our audience than Bret Johnson. Bret has been in this space of Faith Driven Investor and for a very long time, much longer than Luke and I have probably had longer than Luke and I have combined and has a great international and emerging markets perspective, great ministry and practice towards developing leaders, which he’ll talk to us about. And then just a great framework for us to think about the ancient truths that come from scripture, how we think about investing and the instructions from other religions and other faith traditions. And hopefully you’ll walk away from our time together here today, being better equipped to be a great steward of all the capital that God has entrusted us. So, Brett, thank you very much for being on the program.

Brett Johnson: I’m very excited to be with you. Thank you so much, Henry. Luke, good to see you.

Henry Kaestner: So, so many different places to go with you. And maybe we’ll even get into a little bit later. But lest I forget, you have this incredible podcast where you break down exodus and talk about what that means about faith in the marketplace. And you think, gosh, you could probably take the gospel, you probably take acts, you definitely take Nehemiah, but exodus. But somehow you just made that thing sing.

Brett Johnson: Yeah, that was fascinating during the pandemic. I think there were a lot of people thinking through What do I really want to do and how do I restart? You know, there was this great reset, and I think it was an opportunity for people to reset their foundations. And God is no stranger to restarts and there’s a whole national restart. And it’s a fascinating story. How God did that? So I just pulled out 50 principles of restarting something. And I think this is apropos in our careers nowadays in our working lives, we’ll have to restart numerous times, so we have to go back to scripture and say what the principles about restart. Otherwise, we get blindsided.

Henry Kaestner: I thought it was very, very good. We’re going to have the link in the show notes. Maybe we’ll mention again at the end, but what we like to do with every one of our guests before we get started into the meat of your current work, your current ministry, the things that you feel that God is teaching you. Give us an autobiographical sketch. Most of us know what a Tennessee accent sounds like. It doesn’t sound like yours, like

Brett Johnson: your quarry where you come from. I’m from the south, but the south of Africa, that’s right. And I grew up there, grew up in a family, actually that was somewhat by vocational. So my dad was a business guy. But I remember as a teenager, I asked my mom, what would dad do if he had no money? And she said, plant more churches, and that’s what they did. They planted churches and did business, and only much later in life did he become as it were a vocational pastor. And so I grew up in that environment. And for me, there were three things happening together. One was business. I worked at Pricewaterhouse, a chartered accountant, which is like a cousin of a CPA and worked with them for 10 years at the same time. I had been through the Sunday School Youth Group and ended up running a church. And so when I was running the church, I kept my ears open. When was God going to tell me to quit Pricewaterhouse so that I could do the church? And he never did. So now I had two jobs. And then what happened was I got connected with youth with a mission in Africa, and I found out that they were looking for guitar players, evangelists, etc. and what they really needed. Was it finance, marketing, business analysts and I had those people in my church seriously under deployed. So we had business, local church and missions. I had three jobs and I had to figure out how to integrate them. And so that’s how I got going. And that was in from about 1981, a little while ago. And then in 1986, we came to San Francisco for one year, a couple of kids and some suitcases, $300 in my pocket. And as the plane landed, God said, This is going to be your home for quite a while. So we started asking why? And through a series of things, God said, I want you to start a new kind of organization that integrates business, local church missions, all of that stuff into a new type of organization. So that’s how we got going.

Henry Kaestner: And so you end up down here in the South Bay, by the way, $300 would get you two tacos and a coke right about now.

Brett Johnson: That’s right. I was very much at that, said A. Credit card. And I remember Pricewaterhouse sent me to New York on a trip, man. I could pull out $300 a day out of the ATM. The hotel was $330 a night. I remember pretty quickly I had to establish credit and get a credit card in the US, even though I preached against debt for years. Yeah.

Henry Kaestner: So speaking of debt, you have a book that’s come out called Kingdom Economics. This give us your best elevator pitch to queue up this topic for us.

Brett Johnson: Sure. Yeah, I would say that heaven has an economy and we don’t know a whole lot about it, but we see indications in scripture that this trade in the heavenly somehow and there’s a lot in physical trade about that. And our job is to figure out how to bring heaven’s economy to Earth. And that sounds a little bit fuzzy. But we do see clear enough principles in scripture about biblical practices and principles. Tons of them actually in scripture. And so the goal of king economics is to look at the world of economics, finance, investing capital through the lens of scripture. And I would say, even with the faith driven investor, it’s not to become Christians or people who are driven by their faith to make investments for good purpose, but to actually figure out how do we beat people who do investing based on these heavenly principles or these kingdom or eternal principles of finance? Obviously, with the good results that we expect. So I would say, you know, there’s an economy in heaven and there’s an economy on Earth, and the underlying assumptions of what we call just business as usual are fundamentally different in many respects. There is some good overlap, but there are some things that are completely different.

Luke Roush: So Bret, as you think about kind of that work in your book, to what extent do those principles really speak into our relationship with money and how we shepherd money or our relationships with the environment that we work and the people that are our customers, our vendors, our partners, our employees? Does it really go into both sides of that? Or is it really more focused on the economics of it all?

Brett Johnson: Good question, Luca. I think right now we’re living in an era where financial capital has become somewhat commoditized. There’s a lot of it around and we’re recognizing when I say we, I’m not just talking about people of faith. I mean, you can go to the World Economic Forum or universities around the world, and they’re understanding capital is bigger than just financial capital, of course. And this is way beyond the triple bottom line, and there are many other facets. So there’s human capital, relational capital, social, environmental, et cetera. And there’s a big piece of it, which is spiritual capital, which we have to understand. And if we’re going to be engaged as people in faith in the warfare, if you like that is business. We have to have spiritual capital, so you can’t just look at it. In fact, many years ago when we. Started working with business people around the world, we’ve done maybe five years to work with hundreds of companies. And I found out there was an issue still around capital and this was about 2008 and Christians running good businesses getting a good purpose for their business still had a problem with greed. And Mammon means greed deified. So you’ve got to get to the heart of the issue. So I thought, what do we do about it? And we decided to do a Kingdom Economics forum in Johannesburg. We decided to put some truth together, which has now ended up in the Kingdom Economics book and the repurposing capital book that we could put a stick of dynamite up the giant’s nose if you like and blow the lid off this thing because we could get great business practices, great products that would bless people, we could be intentional. We could have pastors in every business, we could have prayer meetings, we could do all that kind of stuff. But unless you get to the issue of what is capital, whose money is it? What’s it for? What’s our relationship with money unless you get to the heart of that thing? We’ll never win the game.

Henry Kaestner: So if I haven’t made it clear so far on the podcast, I can’t think of a book that I recommend more heavenly than Kingdom Economics. If there’s one right behind it, be repurposing capital. You write something in Kingdom Economics that I think is really profound. I’d love for you to expand on it. You write a new future where kingdom economics becomes reality is premised on a great awakening among God’s people and an influx of people into the Kingdom of God. So that feels kind of heady and it’s kind of out there, and I think it’s a theological truth. But unpack that for us. What does it look like for us to experience this divine reality? And what does it look like for us to invite more people into the movement? I say this, of course, because Faith Driven Investor as a ministry is about inviting people into this movement as a way to help them experience the life that is truly life. But that’s something you’ve seen unpacked in scripture to riff on that a bit, please.

Brett Johnson: Yeah. And I’m very excited about the Faith Driven Investor community and the movement and the young generation, if you like of people, that’s growing up with a new and freer idea about capital and having to play. So I think that that’s fantastic. And when I talk about that awakening, I’m not talking about getting to a tipping point of fifty one percent Christians in a nation and so forth. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m actually talking about the fact that unless we get to a spiritual awakening that goes in tandem with fully integrated with the deployment of capital, kingdom business, et cetera, we will do no better than the Sustainable Development Goals with a bit of prayer and Christian sprinkling on it. That’s not what we’re after. So reformation is essential, not just salvation. You know, if it was just about salvation, as you would know, Africa would be the best continent on the planet. I mean, there are so many Christians you can’t swing a cat and miss a Christian. So it’s not just about getting people saved, but it’s getting Sunday into Monday. And actually, I don’t think the devil cares what Christians do on a Sunday if you can have the other days of the week. So what this awakening? It gets to the heart of the matter. Unless you get to the heart of a business leader, the heart of somebody who’s an investor will end up doing good things but with the wrong tools. So I remember a Christian guy, he’d sold one of his companies in the Bay Area for a billion dollars back in 2000 or so, so it was a decent sized deal and he was not doing venture capital and so forth. He came to me, said, Brett, I’ve got this great idea. I want you to head up a company for us and what are we going to do? Is What if the supply chains of big businesses and if we find out that there’s any shenanigans in the supply chain, then what we’ll do is we’ll basically guilt them into hiring us to clean up their supply chain. And I said to him, No, I won’t do it this, why not? I said, Well, you’re trying to get rid of slavery in supply chains, but the spirit behind what you’re doing is exactly the same. And so we can’t tackle the problems in the world with the spirit of the world. You know, when scripture talks about Babylon or Egypt, it’s the spiritual principle driving economic systems that are independent of a dependance upon God. So we need an awakening. Otherwise, we don’t get to the heart of the matter. And once you get to the heart of the matter, then all sorts of creativity breaks loose in terms of how you invest, how you build a business where you go to the lengths you’ll go to. So this is a big issue at the heart.

Luke Roush: So, you know that that’s fascinating, and so the idea that sort of God’s ways are not the ways the world, the ways of the world are not God’s ways, an inappropriate analogy. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Right? There’s something that’s more biblical than that that you could probably enlighten us with. But you know, I’d love just to kind of unpack that a little bit more because I think that there are a great many believers who are trying to do what God has called them to do in the marketplace, in their vocation. And yet some of the tactics that get used are basically the same tactics from the world kind of re-applied with some sort of gospel lipstick on it. Like, how would you challenge us, right? Henry and I and all of our listeners to like, reimagine what it looks like to bring sort of a set of gospel tools to those problems?

Brett Johnson: OK, great. I think I’d like to get to talk a bit about success because you’ve got to define the end game. I mean, why are we in things with God? Not for our own benefit? God didn’t put us on the planet to be blessed, to be happy, to live in Los Gatos, where the weather is fine and so forth. No, he put us on the planet to make a difference. To accomplish his agenda, he populated the Earth so that he had workers to accomplish his purpose. And we’ve adopted some evangelical notion that God was lonely. And so he made us so that he had his land. God could have got a puppy or a few more angels, and I know he created us to work with him in collaboration with him. So how do we define success? Well, it’s when God’s job gets done, not when the ROI is X or the return on capital or even the stewardship of capital is such and such a metric. So we have to define the end game. If we don’t define the end game well enough, somebody else will define it like the World Economic Forum or somebody you know, by 2030, you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. No, no, no. We have to define the game. People from every turn tribe and nation living like God, looking like God, a flourishing living to their full potential, working like God and so on. So I think that we have to define the endgame. Then I would say, look, we have to understand that this three big economic systems in scripture as I see it. One is, let’s call it Egypt or Babylon, and the other is the promised land. And in between you have the desert. Now, Egypt is quite interesting, but Deuteronomy Chapter 11 says, Look, the land that you’re entering is not like the land you’ve come from where you watered your vegetable garden by foot. But the land that you’re going to is a land that I look after and it gets its rain from heaven. If you obey me, I’ll send autumn and spring rains. If you don’t, you’re toast. That’s what God says. So let’s unpack that a little bit. In Egypt, there was a predictable water supply. It’s still there today. All you have to do, take your bucket, go down, get it. Water your vegetables and you’re done. No dependance on God. Just a little bit of effort and you get your paycheck every month. Now, the desert is a bit different because you’re dependent daily for water, for manna, for quail on God. And, you know, every single day. And we call this living by faith. And we’ve made this the epitome, the ultimate of a Christian experience. I used to work at IBM. I used to work at Google. Now I’m living by faith, and we make that the ultimate destination. It was meant to be a temporary gap to get some Egypt out of our thinking and then get us into the Promised Land. And the weird thing about the Promised Land is that everybody had capital. Everybody had a piece of land. Every tribe had an allocation. Every family had a means of income production, and they had to exercise faith. And this is the fascinating part about Faith Driven Investor ERG. It’s a combination of capital and faith, whereas in the world system, it’s capital without faith. The world system is crafted carefully so that you don’t have to depend upon God. And one day I realized one of the reasons I’m asking God for a million dollars or ten million is that I don’t want to pray. Give us this day our daily bread. That’s really why I’m praying for it. But then I realized if God gave me $10 million, he’d give me a $20 million problem. If I’m a kingdom person, that’s what God does. He gives Kingdom people problems for breakfast. So being in the Promised Land, he says, OK, you’ve got a means of production and you have to exercise faith because if you don’t do things the way I want you to do it, there will be no rain and the place is going to be a desert. So it’s a strange combination of capital and faith. And we’ve separated capital in faith, but in the promised land, they fully integrated the ones not a substitute for the other. They’re just fully integrated.

Henry Kaestner: He gives Kingdom problems to people for breakfast. The. His faithful for breakfast, that’s amazing, that’s a very good that snip, it’s going to show up somewhere. That was really good. So you’re talking about a countercultural way to think about economics. Are you thinking about a counter-cultural way to think about money countercultural way even within the Christian circles about living by faith? What are some of the other countercultural things that you see Christ’s followers falling into and it could be in one of these two places? Number one, we’re told, of course, not to be conformed by the pattern of the world or the worries of the world and deceitfulness of riches. So how do we avoid falling into those traps? But then also, what are some of the traps that you see that doesn’t come from the Bible, but their Christian culture would have an investor buy into? That’s not biblical? And you alluded to that about the time in the desert, but expand on that concept, please.

Brett Johnson: Sure. We touched a little on success, and I would say the other thing is what’s normal when we go to money? We often think if I’ve got money, it’s an indicator of God blessing me. Or if you’re in another country such as India, if I don’t have money, it’s an indication that I’m spiritual when both of those are extremes. So in the West, we strive for comfort and a problem comes along and we expect God to take it away. And that’s what we pray for. And other parts of the world, they figure this is normal. In fact, in judges, it says in chapter three, verse two, it says in brackets there were some tribes left over that didn’t get conquered and it says in brackets and he left them only to teach warfare to a generation that hadn’t known war. As parents, we want our kids to be more comfortable than we are. Go to a good college, have a good dorm room, a good experience and so forth. And God says you’ve got to expose them to battle. So when people become believers, we should rip up their passports, give them a kingdom passport and a military uniform. We should let them know this is a war zone. You know, historically, there’s a battle between good and evil, and we going to deploy our business capital a time out talents one way or the other. And so culturally, we’ve got used to being comfortable. What makes me comfortable versus what gets the job done, no matter what it does to my comfort level? That’s a big factor. And so we’ve almost become acclimatized to if I’m being blessed by God, I won’t have problems and God is thinking, Well, is there anything, anywhere in the world that’s out of whack with the way I want it to be? And how can a deploy Luke or Henry to go and fix that problem?

Luke Roush: So, Brett, one of the things you talk about in Promised Land is around guard owning the key resources, just unpack a bit more. The key resources. What does that mean for us and how do we respond to that?

Brett Johnson: This is a dual thing, and you’ll see a bit of this in the book of Acts when you remember the the real estate guys and nice and safari, right? Not that I have anything against real estate people, but there’s an interesting concept over there because and it’s the same thing mirrored in the Old Testament between A.A. and Safire. Everything was guns, but between an alliance of fire and the apostles. Everything was this, Peter says, Hey, the land was yours before you sold it, the money was yours. After you sold it between us and you. It’s yours between you and God. It’s all God’s. So when they went into the Promised Land, they said, Okay, this area over here is for the Benjamins. This area is for this tribe, that tribe between the different tribes. There were clear boundaries and within that property rights, ownership of property, etc. But between the people and God, God says the land is mine. The gold and silver is mine. In fact, it is the people of mine. What’s the implication? Well, you can’t enslave each other. You’ve got to treat the aliens and the widows. Well, you’ve got to have justice, you’ve got to have equity. So there’s the strange paradox, if you like between us and God, it’s all God’s between you and me. There’s property rights, there’s rewards responsibility. And so.

Henry Kaestner: As you talk in kingdom economics, you suggest that other faith traditions have wrestled with these problems and have a framework through which they think about the allocation of capital. What about the way that Jewish people or Muslims and how they’ve processed some of these ancient truths about money? How can they be either an encouragement to us as Christians are maybe a wake up call? How might they be a warning? What’s different?

Brett Johnson: That’s interesting, Henry. When you think about the major eras of capital and just to simplify it, you know, I’ve broken that out in one of my books, but there was an era where Christians abdicated the world of capital. It happened after about 324 A.D., the Council of Nicea. They put a distance between the church and the Jews and Christians got out of the world of capital. There had been quite actively involved. I mean, they were actively working, banking, trading, financing and it became their band interest, a sort of a religious view that Jews never got out of capital. In fact, the banks, as you know, come out of the merchants of Venice, that situation, they brought the bench out. You know, the story, how that evolved. But Christians got out of the world of capital for about a thousand years, and during that time, Islam started up. Now I think that in many respects, the Jews and the Muslims have a more integrated view of capital and Christians. Do we have the secular, sacred dichotomy that says some things are spiritual and some things aren’t? The Jews don’t have that view. They’re much more integrated in their view of things. And the Muslims are more deliberate about the use of capital. I will invest in your business. It’s not alone like a Christian bank where we say, Well, if the collateral is bigger than the loan, that’s fine. It’s an investment. I’m a partner with you in the business. Therefore, I have an incentive to grow you as an individual. Otherwise, I lose my capital and they use capital to disciple people. I remember back 40 years ago, forty five years ago, a friend of mine said, who’d started why? When a youth with a mission in Africa that the biggest problem in Africa was leadership. Some years later, I was sitting down with a couple of people that, you know, in Cape Town, and I asked them, What’s the biggest problem you see in Africa? Because they’d been doing prayer gatherings around Africa? And they responded, The Muslims are buying up the place now. The Muslims are thinking multi-billion dollars to impact the continent. The Chinese are in their wake. And Christians are like 10000 for an orphanage or, you know, maybe 100000 in a good Christian business that’s doing a bit of fintech in Kenya or Cape Town because it’s cheaper than doing it in Silicon Valley. And we think we’ve done it a whole deal, and we have to think bigger in this regard. And I think that the Muslims and the Jews have done a better job in that regard.

Henry Kaestner: As president, it makes me think of the speaker we had at the first Faith Driven Investor conference, Kenny Kuruvilla, who talked about maybe the fact you mention the merchant of Venice. He talks about Columbus being from Genoa and presumably trying to raise venture capital among the Italian city states and going to offer and then going to Portugal and not getting any. And and that’s why they speak Spanish in Ecuador and Peru and Bolivia. They should be speaking Genovese, right, or Italian or something like that. And the extent of that thinking is what language is going to be spoken in the marketplace in Africa, a place where you have more entrants into the job market than Indian and China, are they going to be speaking secular or are they going to be speaking Christian? Are they going to be speaking Arabic or Chinese? Or are they going to be speaking the language of redemptive products and services and loving your neighbor and being thoughtful? And I think that your admonition there is kind of hits me like when I hear about people just like in their giving is like, really, it ends up being like tipping, right? Christians are giving like three or four percent. It’s not giving. It’s tipping. When you say, guys, you know, go ahead and write a check for $10000 for an orphanage. Are we really in Arab? Would you suggest, other than looking at some of these other faith traditions? How is it that you’ve been able to get to a place where you feel about being all in on investments and seeing that this is something that is not just a kind of a side thing, but how do you reconcile that with a listener? That’s listeners right now is like, Wait a second, I want to send my kids to college. I want to have a retirement. If I go all in on a place like Africa, like it sounds like this podcast is encourage me to do. I got currency devaluations. I get all these different things. How do you break through that? What’s the wrong thinking there or is that the wrong thing?

Brett Johnson: Well, I think the thinking is, you know, what is God up to? The question is, you know, many years ago, I think it was Ed Silver, so or one of those guys used to ask people it might have been one of the other guys used to ask who once got in their business and all the Christians would raise their hands. And he said it’s the wrong question, the question is, who wants to get their business into God’s business? Same thing with your portfolio, with your assets. It’s very easy to get God in your business. You have a problem. Everybody wants God in their business. That’s when we want God in our best. Same with our finances, with our investments, and we’ve got to see the bigger purpose. I’ll tell you a story I said in Redwood City. Sitting with a lady, she was a money manager. She’d invested in the South American country, and no sooner had she get the money in the country than they froze the bank account. So now she was upset and she would say to me, Brant, please pray that there unfreeze the bank accounts. After she’d asked me this so many times, I’m sitting at breakfast with her. I started laughing. She said, What are you laughing about? I said, to get a napkin and I said, You went into that country because you wanted to do a capital deal. Get your capital in, get a return for your clients. Get out. But God wanted to impact the nation. So he sent you a problem, and the problem forced you to understand what’s going on in the nation. She found out it was corruption. A politician didn’t like the bank managers, so froze the money. So she starts praying. She goes down with intersperses. She’s meeting with local pastors. What’s going on? She funds out the societal problems about education and health care and corruption and everything. She even goes to the president and says to him, This is what’s going on. If you don’t sort this thing out by such and such a date, I’m doing a press release to all of these media outlets exposing this thing, which she did. I said you went in to do a capital deal, but God wanted to change the nation. So now you’re involved in government, in business, in church, in media, in family and so forth. So I said to some guys recently they wanted me to do something in some country. I said, You want to go in and out and sell a product. God wants to impact the nation. You can decide upfront. God will give you a problem that gets you squeezed out like a good fragrance into that whole nation. So my view is start with what God wants to do in the nation. That’s the big picture or in your city. It could be. Chattanooga could be San Jose, California, or it could be, you know, Namibia or some other country like this. You pick the country and you say, What is God doing there? You could also pick an industry if you like and say, Okay, what does God want to do in the world of, you know, food security or energy or whatever it might be, whatever your giant is, pick then and then work backwards into your investments and then look at the metrics. I think that resets things. Otherwise, we bring old school thinking that God doesn’t care about, you know, am I beating the index? Am I doing this? Am I? I mean, it’s just really we’ve got the wrong metrics on the thing. We have to look at God’s endgame and understand that. And then how do we fit into that picture? So then, you know, go ahead, Rick.

Luke Roush: Now I was just going to say to the discernment process of trying to understand sort of what is God doing in this nation? And then how might I participate in God’s story? Not sort of my own story and inviting God into what I want to do in discernment process for a believer to kind of understand what that looks like, what would be sort of three pieces of advice you would give to someone who is trying to understand sort of where is God at work and how might I be called to participate?

Brett Johnson: I would say God is interested in all of the nations, of course, and it might be through relationships or other ways that you end up there. That’s great. Once you get in there and look for their assets because God is just and he gives every country the assets that they need for the blessing of that nation. Our Western mindset says I’m going to bring in my American thinking or my European processes or my laws, my Roman Dutch laws or whatever to fix your country. A biblical approach says there’s something about the glory of God in this nation, and there are assets that God has probably put in that nation. Now, what are the assets so that they can start thinking possibilities? And then, yes, in the Kingdom of God, we can bring in some additional IP, some thinking, some financial capital, some other things relationships to add to those, but assume that they have assets because God is just find out the health of the assets. I think a lack of stewardship of assets for under stewardship of assets is one of the big giants in the world. You go to India. I mean, the place hasn’t been painted since the British left, you know, and you go to other countries and the railroads are messed up and so forth. So failure to steward assets is a problem. So you can bring the concepts of asset stewardship. I remember I went to Egypt, got a bunch of people together in the Wadi did. And I’m asking them, what assets do you have? And they look at me with a blank. Then they say sand sun. But the question got them thinking, and a guy came to me a few days later and he said, I’ve got a farm out in the desert. I did a calculation. I think I could put in enough solar to power half of Europe. But he just never thought about it before. But if you start with the assets, it’s respectful. It’s a good thing to do. Then I would say look at the health of the sectors of society. Look at the giants, the problems, the things that God cares about and then say, Who’s already tackling those? Let’s invest in the mezzanine type financing growth, financing into people who are already doing something and can be taken to the next level. For example, I went to Madagascar, found a guy that had bought a piece of land and built a mill to make bread, flour, gluten free bread flour out of some local ingredients bread, plant and cassava, and a bakery for $30000. I mean, all of that for $30000. Well, you can replicate that out again and again and again wherever they have those ingredients. So it’s not some speculative thing. So let’s say find out who’s doing good stuff, invest in them and be in it for the long haul. I remember going to Bali and met a guy who went there when there were no churches in Bali. Then he had about 47 churches around the world and he told me, Bret, the Kingdom of God is trench warfare. You don’t go into Indonesia, have a rally, declare that Indonesia is transformed and leave again. So this concept of patient capital so that there is a bill I would say is a key.

Luke Roush: You know, one thing that came to mind in some of your early comments about God’s Kingdom come in kind of here on Earth. This idea of restoration and Wright has written a lot about that was surprised by hope. And it was just kind of reminiscent with some of your talk track there. So anything else that has been influential with your thinking around what does it look like for a new having a new Earth to sort of come to where we are versus sort of, hey, it’s all going to burn in the end anyway? So who cares? Right? It’s because it’s not just about salvation, as you said earlier. Any other thoughts on that?

Brett Johnson: Yeah, I think you know in the book Transforming Society, which I know we don’t want to get into too many books, but what I see actually is three responses which we could talk about to this question. The question is, do we still have a mandate? I mean, I have godly Christian people who actually do investing who say, No, you can’t do all of this stuff. And their view is that over spiritualized, the whole thing, they say, we’re just going to get people saved. If we can get a whole bunch of people say, that’s great. Don’t mess with the economy, don’t mess with politics. We’re not called to do all of those things. The Kingdom of God is above all of that separate from all that. So it’s not invoked. So let’s say there’s three responses, even with the, you know, in the repurposing capital, which changes three responses. One is interventionism, which we’re seeing heavily in western countries. The other is isolationism. We’re going to have a Christian bank. We’re going to take our guns and our seeds and head to the hills of Tennessee, whatever we are. I think somebody just moved to Nashville. That’s probably not on your mind. And or it’s evangelism. Well, if we can just get enough people saved. So I think those are the three. Maybe we should talk about those three big responses to the fact that the economies of the world are in a problem. And I think the world understands the economies are fragile. And then what’s our response? And I think for me, the danger look is that we we just throw in some Christian principles into investing our finances, stewardship, whatever we call it, but we don’t actually fundamentally believe that we can change the systems. So we haven’t talked much about. There are people who want to invest to bring hope, flourishing and so forth. And there are others who are saying, No, we actually have to change the systems and the systems can be changed. Now I see two groups of people over there. One like that says we could change the banking regulations. We could change the way the Fed operates. We could change the underlying policies and procedures. And another group that says, you know, we have to go back to the gold standard or, you know, bitcoin is the new gold and so forth and they looking for a replacement type of system. But I don’t know that there’s a deep belief that we could actually see God’s economy become the dominant economy, and it’s a little bit like revival. There was a book called Like a Mighty Wind Miltary. There was an Indonesian revival back in the day. East Timor. You should read about it. The guy by the name of miltary, he’s still alive. He wrote a second book called The Gentle Breeze of Jesus. He said Unless you had your eyes open, you wouldn’t see the revival, basically. And I think this is where we are in the world of capital and finance. It’s almost like the opportunity is at our fingertips right now and we have to have our eyes. And to see it and to believe that God’s economy can become the dominant economy,

Henry Kaestner: that was very good, that’s very helpful. And they’re just so much more for us to do in future episodes. I’m grateful for the time that you spent with us. I want to go on to something that we asked each one of our guests before we sign off, which is what are you hearing recently from Guy threw his word. And I know that you’re in tune with that. You’ve written a lot of books on that. We talked before about, have you even unpacked exodus for somebody who’s in the marketplace? But what are you hearing? And maybe it’s not today, but maybe it is. But recently that might be an encouragement for all of us.

Brett Johnson: Yeah, Henry, thank you for the question. What’s been exciting this year is just doing a read through the Bible in one year, which I’ve enjoyed doing and just got a little bit to go. And I’m sorry that it’s going to end in a way, but I’ll have a bit more time for journaling again. But what I see when you look at the broad sweep of history all at once, how all of these books of the Bible connect and when you look at it, there’s often times when it looks like God’s not involved. The world is in a mess. Politics is going one way health care. Another way the economy is going another way. The gap between the haves and the have nots. And the question is, where is God in all of this? And God is brooding watching over all of this? His fingerprints are all over history. And I believe that we’re at a crucial time in history right now. And as Christians, people of faith, we need to be alert to it so that we see what’s going on in the big game as it were. So I’m very, very encouraged that we’re at a time in history where we could make more of a difference than we’ve ever made before. If we’re awake, if we’re alert and I really think we’re living out some of the things that we see predicted through the people like Daniel and Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation and so forth. And I’m not saying gloom and doom, I’m saying opportunity, and it’s an opportunity to be grasped. So the fingerprints of God on things that are happening today, it’s like. There’s a bigger game that’s being played and we can get wrapped up in politics, in economics, etc. that God is sovereign and he’s working and he’s wooing us to partner with him in the big things he’s doing in the world.

Henry Kaestner: OK, that’s very encouraging to look on. Big takeaway for me here is and I’ve heard this repeatedly through what Bret has shared. I hadn’t expected to hear this, but it’s just pay attention, be awake, understand the winds of what God is doing. Look for the problems or the opportunities that he serves you up for breakfast and understand that we were built for such time as this, and that there are some ancient truths that help us to think about how to deploy capital, how to think about assets in the different countries and cultures and countries that we invest in. And I’m just I’m grateful. I’m grateful. This was a great time

Luke Roush: is really high, high quality Britain. The other takeaway that I have is that as believers, we need to be very careful about applying secular solutions to problems that God’s call us to solve. Let’s just not rinse, repeat the solutions from the world. And that’s part of what I, you know, I think we see all around us, particularly in the last two or three years that has created some divisions and even some confusion around the witness that we have in broader society because of how we’ve at times as believers body, the church tried to use conventional solutions to resolve differences or other things so that that also is going to come up for several weeks in my mind.

Henry Kaestner: Great. Thank you. Very, very grateful for your partnership, your leadership in getting out there. We’re going to put the links to the books in the show notes link to the Exodus podcast, and we’re just grateful for you.

Brett Johnson: Thank you so much. It’s been a privilege to chat with you, and I love the work that you’re doing.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

Filmmaker Jon Erwin has worked his way from operating cameras at sporting events to producing a major motion picture about a sports legend. His move from the sidelines to the studios has been earned through hard work and perseverance. It has also come by way of Jon’s strong desire to draw people to the hope and the truth of the Gospel. On the Faith Driven Investor Podcast, Jon shares about the early days of his career. He also talks about the making of “American Underdog,” how it came to the big screen, and why he believes in the power of strong stories that positively influence culture.

Episode Transcript

Richard Cunningham: Jon, we are so grateful you’re here. I’m actually going to start reason for having me because it’s so impressive. And then we’ll have you fill in some of the gaps, though. All right. Here’s some of the Jon Erwin story. Jon Erwin began his career as a teenager working for ESPN as a camera operator in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. In 2002, he founded a production company with his brother, Andrew, the brother were directing videos and producing concerts and television programs for platinum recording artists such as Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Casting Crowns, Switchfoot, Skillet and others. They received 11 GLAAD Award nominations and three wins for Music Video of the Year. In 2010, Jon and Andrew began exclusively developing dramatic feature films. The features of all opened in the top 10 box office on opening weekend, and they received the coveted A-plus CinemaScore twice. Some of those titles are October Baby, Moms Night Out and Woodlawn. Additionally, the list also includes the surprise hit ‘I can only imagine’ which became the number one independent film of twenty eighteen, earning over eighty three million at the box office. In 2019, Jon and Andrew launched the Kingdom Story Company alongside their partners Kevin Downs and Tony Young, and the production company just released the new feature film American Underdog. Based on True, an inspiring story of Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Kurt Warner and his wife, Brenda. So if you don’t have plans this weekend, you’re going to watch American underdog. There’s a lot of your Bible Belt, man. Let’s start with the basics. Who are you? Fill it in. Then what has God done in your life to bring you here today?

Jon Erwin: Well, I mean, my name name’s Jon. I appreciate you guys having me. You know, I think I’m a living testament that God can use anyone. And we all have unique gifts. I had to do what’s done in the bios. I had to do kindergarten twice because I was an ADHD disturbance to the class. It was more everyone else’s grades than it was mine, but it was like I was that much of a disruption. And you know, you can’t grow up further away from L.A. or from Hollywood than Birmingham, Alabama. So I just think, you know, as the Bible says, God uses the weaklings of the world to confound the wise. And he’s given us all gifts and there’s nothing more fun and fulfilling vocationally than when you can really find, you know, there’s a lot of things that we can do. There’s only a few that that we can uniquely do, and I think even fewer that we’re sort of called to do. And if you live in your calling and your unique ability and you do it for God’s glory and for reasons beyond yourself, vocationally life does not get more fulfilling than that. So I’m one of those lucky people that gets to, I say, the coolest job in the world. And, you know, we say that, you know, we work for the fans. Everything we do is is about the people sitting in the seats and the experience they’re having with the movies. And I’m very grateful to have the job I have, you know, and to tell stories for a living. And so we say we’re storytellers serving the greatest storyteller of all time. And you know, it’s interesting. God is really, really on the move in Hollywood in ways that are really cool to be a small part of.

Katherine Trout: Thanks for sharing that, Jon. I know one question I’m sure you get a lot is how did you get to where you are today and where you just see the hands of a in that? And he started you in a surprising place on the sidelines, operating guys.

Jon Erwin: Yeah, yeah. I can’t recommend this story, but I can tell you what happened. It’s I mean, first of all, desperation is a powerful motivator. And so sometimes it’s like when your only option is to figure it out, you keep going. I’ve heard it said success is long obedience in the same direction. And, you know, the Bible echoes that that, you know, in due season will reap. If we don’t lose heart, we don’t quit. Which was really the theme of the Kurt Warner movie American Underdog, which we wanted to do that film. But for me, I started working at a cable station when I was 12. My dad helped show there and he was a radio show. And then when I was 15, I had apprenticed for a cameraman from my church. You know, I think you get big opportunities when you do small things, well, you know? And so I had just carried around Australia and helped them out, and I was super curious, you know, as a kid and try to maintain that. I think if there is a nitroglycerin to success at any level, I’ve found it’s sort of the the two most valuable elements, I think would be just a level of resilience and a level of curiosity, like if you just watch those people that has a high pain tolerance and won’t quit. But you also love to learn and love to stay curious. Eventually, you’ll figure it out. And so when I was 15, that cameraman was on a University of Alabama football game. I should say roll tide and somebody got sick randomly a cameraman about three hours before the kick off. I lived an hour away, and so this guy, my mentor Mike, called me and said, Get over here right now. Don’t tell anybody how old you are. Just don’t say anything. You know, lies a strong word, but you know, basically just neglect to inform anyone of the actual truth. And so I went over there and I had the time of my life. I just, you know, 15 year old homeschooled southern Baptist, you know, in the reddest of the states. And all of a sudden it was like joining the circus and I had just a blast and did the game. They pay me $300. We’d have any money. So I had never seen that much money at one time and accruing agent called me the next week and just said, I guess they looked at the list and said, Are you a freelance camera operator in Birmingham? Because it’s right in the middle of the assessee? So there’s lots of televised games. I didn’t know if that was three different jobs or a single job, you know? So I literally just said, yes, that’s what I do that that’s that’s me. And I did a game on Auburn and then just started doing games every week. My brother quickly followed my dad with money. He did not have helped me buy a camera when I was 16 and help me get a loan, which you should be 16 for $10000 for editing equipment. And we just were off to the races and my brother and I, we started making stuff and I like this. There’s a Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers that talks about the 10000 hour rule. And, you know, basically that anybody that’s really successful has been 10000 hours refining their craft. And that was sort of what it was for me. And we were just we had the good fortune of charging people a little bit of money, like a $500 wedding. We videotaped orthopedic trauma surgeries. You know, we did birthday parties. I mean, anything that you could possibly do just to make stuff and just to refine our craft. And that’s how the whole thing sort of began.

Richard Cunningham: I cannot tell you how much I love that story. That is a wild 15 year old sideline of Alabama football game. We have one of the co-hosts of the faith driven podcast William Norvell would be just jumping out of a seat to hear that story. He is a diehard Crimson Tide family. All right, so incredibly humble beginnings. So cool to hear about how your dad also gets involved and kind of help with this passion, this calling. Now it’s 2002. You’ve got this incredible experience, the camera. You’re talking about 10000 hours and you and your brother just mastering this craft. You guys decide to go out on your own producing music videos, working alongside a lot of these Christian artists. What was that like? Yeah, I like the fact that

Jon Erwin: sometimes you have to have in life, you know, the courage to leap. You know, my kids go to the school, behold. And you know, they say that in the Bible, it’s based on the version of what God says. Behold, I’m doing something new. You know, can you see it? And for me, when there’s nothing really left to learn, that’s where vocationally I’ve got to move somewhere. And so I love working for ESPN. It was a great sort of 10 years of my life, but in my early 20s, we were trying to start really get our production company off the ground. And sometimes you can’t serve two masters, as the Bible says. And so, like Cortez, had to burn his ships, you know, to motivate his men. And I just remember calling all of the crewing agents and say, this has been a wonderful season of life and I have this dream. At the time, it was to direct music videos and commercials and really going to go for it. And I think I just need to chase it fully, and if I fail, I’m going to call you and beg for a job. But I’m going to I’m going to try and, you know, I have never regretted those type decisions. You know, looking back where I have regretted hesitating, you know, and maybe being afraid of what God could do. And there’s been, you know, three or four of them in my life. And so jump to music videos and commercials and did a ton of music, a lot of Christian music videos, some country music videos. And really, that was great fun. I mean, that was really where we found our sort of visual style and voice, and we did some fun videos at the time. The label would submit a song and you would have to typically write a six eight page treatment with a bunch of nonsense and adjectives like amazing and nuanced, and the band’s going to look beautiful. And it’s, you know, all these words that I don’t even know. They mean, you know, just to try to get the video awarded. But we had gotten popular and we’d won via the year a few times. And I remember we did a video. It was a we did a video for Skillet, this Christian band and literally the whole treatment was the band is singing at night. Things start to blow up. Then it starts to rain. Then it rains and things blow up. Then everything blows up the end, you know, and that was just the type of things that were just great fun to just do stunts and explosions and car chases. And, you know, each music video was like this little mini movie. So again, it was a way for us to refine our craft. And then sometimes the questions can be the most powerful agents of change. And I went to direct second unit on a faith based film called Courageous that Sony was doing in this real Cinderella story. A church out of Georgia was making movies. And as luck would have it or whatever George Washington called the Divine Hand, you know Sony was trying to get into Faith-Based films after The Passion of the Christ. And so they acquired these films from this church, Sherwood and started releasing them, and the first one to ten million a football film called Face the Giants. The second one called Fireproof, did like 30, and it was this big sort of thing. And so they wanted to do a film called Courageous, but they were making their films primarily with church volunteers. So it’s an incredible story. And so I went into direct because it was a police drama and there were car chases and action sequences and foot chases. You never want to combine car chases with church volunteers. It’s like that’s where people can die. And so it

Richard Cunningham: was really massive red flag, right?

Jon Erwin: Yeah, yeah. So I had directed all these music videos like the skill at one. And so it was my job to come in with a smaller group of professionals and some people and go do those action sequences in that film. So nobody died. And you know, it’s a Southern Baptist church in Georgia. And so, you know, exaltation is a big thing. And I remember Alex, the director of that film, got right up in my face right away and basically said, You know, we don’t quite understand you like, what’s your purpose and the purpose of your work? And what is the question everyone should ask themselves like? It’s a great book. Simon Sinek wrote it called Start with Why and that great leaders and organizations don’t begin with what they they begin with why. And they sort of emanate from the wire, you know? And so when you join great companies like Apple, I still I love Southwest Airlines and I just fly. I still stay on that airline just because I love the spirit of the airline and I love the way of it. And so it’s a great question, but this question I can answer. And so I for a long time, while doing those sequences on that film, I thought about that question like, why do I do what I do? It all just happened. My career plan was like. Indiana Jones, where like, I don’t know, making this up as I go, like from age 15, it it all just sort of manifested and I had gotten opportunities that people that dream of being a filmmaker from like birth and then go to film school don’t ever get. I mean, it was unbelievable some of the breaks that I got and some of the sort of the providence involved. And so I really that was my moment where a career became a calling and I realized I could fuze this thing that I had sort of practice for a while with my faith and that, you know, we’re this rare generation of Christians, and I think this is why Faith Driven Investor is so important that could actually accomplish the great commission in our lifetime. You know, when Jesus says take the gospel to the whole world, I mean, he said, it’s a people that know this content we’re on would exist for like 400 years. And so we’re this first because of technology generation that can really get it done. They can get the gospel all around the world. And I think the way we would have to do it is really to to harness some of the mechanisms. I love it where Paul says of David and actually serve the purposes of God in his generation, like the gospel never changes. The true truth never changes. But the way you get it to people really does. And so I love that phrase in his generation. You got to sort of own your time in mass media is just a great way to tell stories, a great way to communicate. So I think that that was the turning point where a career became a calling. Functionally, we went from a service company where, you know, sort of like Han Solo. So I got this ship. You need to go somewhere. You pay me and I’m out. I’m done as a service company to an intellectual property company where we were actually developing. You know, that was the business of it all. And that was another huge jump, completely different business. And, you know, like the line where Mike Tyson said every boxer has a plan until he gets in the ring, gets punched in the face. So beginning to sort of raise money for our own films and whatnot. It was, you know, we just you have to just get in and figure it out. But it was definitely we embodied that line for sure.

Katherine Trout: In Twenty Eighteen, that’s when you produced the film. I can only imagine which has quickly become a household name and not just Christian films, but films in general. We’d love to hear you share a little bit more about specifically for financing that movie. What was the process like? What ActionScript had you actually taken to get that up and running?

Jon Erwin: Well, from a financial perspective, it was very interesting project. We had raised money. Every filmmaker should. There’s two classes of money that you have to pull together to release a feature film in theaters. Now, as we do this podcast, we’re at a moment of disruption. It’s so fascinating. I could I could talk you off about a very similar COVID is is reshaping the movie industry in a very similar way that Napster reshaped the music industry. It’s that sort of level of disruption is permanent behavioral change. It’s like ten years of change in 18 months, and it’s just so fascinating to be in this moment of rapid and rapid change. But typically, there’s two classes of money. There’s the equity that it takes to make a movie, and then there’s what’s called pay, which is printed advertising, which is the advertising budget. And what’s interesting is I actually think that failure is actually the great teacher. There’s a great book from I think he runs the largest hedge fund in the world radio. It’s called principles, and he talks about just the power of a process he calls looping, which is basically just learning incrementally from your failures. And so we had made films that all open in the top 10. All of them had made money. Nothing had broken out, made a ton of money. And then we got to this film called Woodlawn that we did before. I can only imagine. And they say a filmmaker finds their story and tells it over and over again. Woodlawn is where we found the power true stories. And you know, tens of thousands of young people got saved because that movie I remember watching 800 teenagers go forward at a screening of that movie, and it just I feel like a movie doesn’t do the work. The movie just sets the stage. It’s like, we call it setting a volleyball that other people spike. It’s called emotional instigation. And no wonder Jesus told emotional stories, you know, and then explain them. But we spent more on that movie than we ever had before, and then we raised some of the money, but not all of it to market it. And that was the first time we didn’t recover the entire investment. We recovered about two thirds of the investment. And film is definitely a high risk, high reward. It belongs in your alternative portfolio. And if you’re a filmmaker out there, one of the big moral things to do is just never take money people need. When you make money, you make a lot of money, but it’s a volatile game. And so you just have to structure it right. And I think being honest about that upfront is actually a better way to raise money. But it just wrecked me. I couldn’t I couldn’t sleep at night and I couldn’t stop. I just I am hyper competitive, and so I have this thing. I say, either I win or we play again, like, I’m OK losing, but just please, let’s just go again. And so we did a five month postmortem on that movie. And really, you know, what’s interesting is that I’m in an industry where there is a category of people, literally. Called critics like it’s their job to criticize, and you have to separate your identity from the work and understand that’s OK. But what’s interesting is we never really solicit criticism from people that really care about us and want us to succeed. And it’s one of the funny things about business at every level is like because so much of it is just solving problems. And I think we don’t ever take the time to say, I wonder what I can learn. And I think a lot of times it’s actually worse in faith based film because we sort of back up the finish line to the results achieved. And then what I say is we sort of throw the God card in the sense that we say, well, we got the gospel out. So and we sort of don’t ever admit to not accomplishing our goals, and we certainly did with that movie. And it was the first movie that had this sort of burst of evangelical sort of use, but it didn’t. We didn’t accomplish our financial goals, and so we just confronted that head on. And one of the best things ever on a piece of paper was, you know, Woodlawn failed, and it’s my fault, and let’s figure it out. And so that led to this sort of study and so much came out of that process of learning. And that led to the way we were able to spot the value of I can only imagine when no one else saw it because of the data and because of what we had learned about theatrical, moviegoing and brands and it being sort of a branded driven event business. And so many people know and love that song. And so we saw value where other people didn’t see value. And that’s, I think entrepreneurism in general. You have to be looking at the same thing everyone else is and see what no one else sees, and it enables to do that. And then a very innovative financial model came out of that that no one said would work in the status quo of our industry. And basically, it was that these two categories of money, you have this equity category of money and then you have advertising put on top of that, this pay, which is debt, it’s last in first out that in the way most people, if you know anybody that ever lost money in a feature film, they’ll typically what happens is if the film implodes and doesn’t get made well or when it gets released, all of that money that it took to release it sits on top of the equity in your equity. Investors end up buried at the bottom of this totem pole of inequality. And then also, you don’t have leverage to negotiate your deals. Like in my business, I’ve found and I think in any business, the two most important words are control and leverage. And so you have to build cases of leverage. And when you only have the movie but you don’t have any money or plan to get your product to a consumer, you don’t have a business plan and so that you get into this acquisitions world. In the studio system, these are a publicly traded, diversified companies that can just bleed you out and wait till you’re broke. And so the fees were way too high with wood line and distribution fees and a lot of the fees on top of that. And so what we did is we just said, why can’t we? We did two things. We said, Why can’t we just take this sort of, you know, vertical inequality thing and just turn it over and raise money into a blended vehicle where if you invest in it, 40 percent of your money is deployed. Equity 60 percent is deployed to advertising all your money making money. But it becomes this thing that nobody thought could be achieved, which it was a dollar one return to the first investor and which was not the status quo. And so we actually went out raising money based off informing people of why they would lose money in film deals or had or knew somebody that had. And so it was this sort of whistleblower pitch. And then what we were trying to do about it, and it’s funny that honesty is what raised the money. We raised it quicker than we had ever raised money before, and it created this scenario. The other thing we did is I remember sitting my pastor at the time when I lived in Birmingham was Chris Hodges, which I still love him, and he’s one of the smartest guys in the church. And I was sitting in church. And I think a lot of business people have this sort of attitude towards nonprofits or towards the church that the business practices aren’t. But the Church of the Highlands, which is his church based off just a few very shrewd principles, is one of the most well-run organizations I’ve ever seen and debt free like a hundred and fifty million dollars in cash and assets. And it’s incredible. And his basic principle is this principle of margin. He basically does an annualized budget that’s 90 percent of the previous year’s spending, even though they typically grow 20 percent year over year. So that leaves this 30 percent margin that they just put away in the bank. So they never do, you know, financial drives. Basically, he plans forward based off where he’s been in terms of budgeting, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember that service. I’m like, you know, he’s right, and we were so aggressive in where we thought we could grow that we forgot about margin. And so I can only imagine was built based off that principle with this blended vehicle to break even financially break even right at Woodlands box office of 15 million. Well, we did that in two days, and so everything between 15 million and 86 was margin, and so everyone did really, really well, and it led to the Lionsgate deal that we’re still in. Joined today, and so I just think that the enduring sort of things to consider are, you know, really take the time to learn from your failures. You know, I love to win, but I’ve found I don’t learn near as much when I when I actually learn a lot more, when I so just learned to micro fail and learn and apply quickly and just ask, you know, just have this curiosity to ask people what they thought, you know, you could do better or what went wrong. And then there are some principles that I love. A friend of mine, Craig Rochelle, is a pastor. He said, When you get around, great people don’t learn what they do. Your pride in their business, but learn how they think. And sometimes these simple principles of how to think can be pretty life changing in business. And so that’s how we raise the money for that movie. And then it led to the landscape you.

Richard Cunningham: I just we got to stop and point out real quick. Just some of the quotes you’ve pulled in that you’ve got a book of acts to Mike Tyson is just,

Jon Erwin: I you know, I’ll tell you this if you ever want to give me a birthday gift I collect, I love quotes, I just collect quotes and I have like your notepad on my phone. Is this ever running list? I love a good quote, and it is no

Richard Cunningham: secret you’re a storyteller because it is just amazed where you’re pulling from. All right, so I can only imagine massive success. You talk about the margin that happened between eighty six and fifteen and just love your humility in the way you all approach that and just kind of thinking through, like, how can we strategize on the failure we had prior so powerful? So the Lord gives you this amazing windfall and this audience right now we’re talking to is Faith Driven Investor, as many of you are credited who have probably had a similar situation. An amazing windfall and an opportunity now to steward some success they’ve been given. We’d love to hear about you and Andrew’s kind of mindset. Once that took place post, I can only imagine and say, Hey, how can we use this position of influence capital and how almost maybe our pick of the litter of what we want to do next?

Jon Erwin: Yeah, a really interesting thing happened. Normally in our, you know, entertainment is driven by a power law in terms of economics. And there’s some, you know, biotech is like that. And you know, basically it means that it’s a winner. Take all game and I love it for this reason. It’s a hyper competitive industry. And once you succeed, you know, it’s an industry where most things fail. There’s this natural inclination to sort of want to guard what you’ve learned and guard your brain and be like back away and sort of, you know, because it’s just so competitive. But I began to think, OK, if the real goal is to really substantively reclaim the imagination of a generation with the gospel, I give the gospel to our generation, our time. You know, that is something to be a part of that’s bigger than any one initiative. And what I had learned is these things that these anomaly events in faith film that really tipped like I can only imagine or what’s happening now. The great friend Dallas Jenkins and his show that shows and if you hadn’t seen it, it’s amazing. What a Kellyway that is. You should have him on your show. But you know that or even, you know, Phil’s company, the idea that the VeggieTales or even maximale movie The Passion of the Christ, it’s like there were these anomaly moments or Divine Franklin’s films, the Kendrick’s films, but nothing coalesced in the sense that there was no sort of snowball effect. There was no combined effort, and I began thinking about that. And just, you know, normally when a filmmaker succeeds, it becomes all about you. And it’s like, What? What do I want to do next? And I just began to think of this question, really that I felt God spit. Some have it in my life where our son, who’s eight now and he’s great, but he had sort of these health things we couldn’t understand up having to have immediate sort of open heart surgery when he was three and I was in the middle we imposed on, I can only imagine and I was actually directing a documentary called Steve McQueen American Icon, and I was immediately sidelined. You know, as they say, the show must go on, and that documentary was slated for the actual release in September. And it was not finished and people were buying tickets to it. And all this happened in June, and I had to recruit and empower another filmmaker, which was not my style. Prior to that, really, you know, I created things myself or with my brother and that filmmaker Ben Smallbone, he did so well. I remember sitting in that premiere thinking he didn’t do as good as me. He actually did better, and he took the ideas deeper and I was actually more fulfilled, having helped equip and empower him than I was doing the work myself. And that’s the moment that it sort of clicked. I’m like, Oh my goodness, we could scale like we could scale our processes, you know, you could always scale a system, you know? And so I’m like, This is, I think there’s a scalable system here, and I think that we could actually incubate and empower other filmmakers. And so I began to look at models like where these singular events, these anomalies, like a movie like Star Wars, actually birthed a company like Lucasfilm or Toy Story, birthed Pixar. And we began to think, what if this was bigger than our name? Because up to that point, it was called Irwin Brothers, and we just kept coming to this name Kingdom. And that led to Kingdom Story Company, which the idea just became this orbiting question. What can we do together that none of us can do alone? And it’s a very powerful thing. There’s a documentary series that I can’t recommend, but it’s great, but it’s called especially for an entrepreneur. It’s called the defiant ones, which is this guy, Jimmy Levine, who did this company called Interscope and Dr. Dre. And they’re sort of Jimmy’s company. Interscope and RJ sort of rise through hip hop, and they do beats together and sell to Apple. It’s really entrepreneurism story. And one of the things that Jimmy Iovine says to Will.i.am and that has become my my season of life that I’m in now that I’m really enjoying, which is, he said to Will.i.am. He said, You’re talented enough. If you can just keep your seat at the table, you’ll be successful. He said, or become the table. And he walked away and will.i.am was like, What does that even mean? And then it really clicked for him. If you can become the place where the right people can gather. That is a very powerful thing. And so what I realized is because I sort of love the business and love the creativity, and I see the art in the business and the business in the art that I could be uniquely useful at serving the visions of other creatives and really seeing them shine. And that’s really what this season of life that I’m in now is I’m loving that more and more, and it is unbelievable when you get a conspiracy of friends together in a common ideal and objective what can be accomplished and God’s just moving all over Hollywood. I remember when we did the Lionsgate deal was very good deal, and they dumped a ton of money into our films, our brand. But I was with felt the CEO and I came out and one of the heads of the other divisions was like looking around and he’s like, Hey, get over here. And I’m like, what? He said, literally, like, he told me his name. He said, I’m a Christian

Richard Cunningham: and there’s a few of us. And I’m so glad you’re here.

Jon Erwin: I kind to go, you know, and I’m like, I think this is you can come out about it. Like, I came through the front door. They’re paying us to be here. And it’s just. But there’s a lot of Christians in the industry at all levels that God has placed, and there’s just a lot going on. And I’m I’m really happy to be a small part of it, and it’s fun to just pull those people together that have never really worked together before. We’ve been what we call competitive allies. You know, but now we’re getting to work together, and it’s just an exciting time and exciting thing to be a part of.

Katherine Trout: Wow, that’s such a powerful story. And it reflects what the body of Christ is really designed to look like is to be collaborative and to be as one rather than competing against the other. So especially in a place like Hollywood, where it feels really isolating to be a Christian there, having that community is so inspiring, Jon. I also wanted to ask you, of course, about your new movie that’s in theaters now. American underdog? Yes, St. Louis native myself. OK, art has been always has held a special place in my heart. I believe that was my first ever football jersey was Kurt Warner.

Jon Erwin: That’s amazing.

Katherine Trout: Very exciting.

Richard Cunningham: I did not know this over here. It hit the big screen.

Katherine Trout: So tell us a little bit about what made you decide to tell the story of Kurt.

Jon Erwin: Well, I mean, as a filmmaker, I think you have to realize that you’re the first viewer, you know? And so I think, you know, it has to be a story that moves me, that I can’t stop thinking about that. I then feel like, OK, this is our story to tell, and there has to be a cause behind the movie that I believe in giving time to. So like I remember with, I can only imagine. I remember asking him because we’re documentary filmmakers first. So we do these sort of interviews. And I remember asking Bart, you know, if I were to literally put a gun to your head and say, Is Jesus real? What would you say? And he said, yes, and I said, And how would you know? I’m just always curious to answer that question, he said. Because of the change I saw my dad, he said, I I watch this monster transform into the man I wanted to become and into my best friend. And you know, his faith is the only way to explain that. And so we all know the song I can only imagine is a song about heaven. Come to find out it’s a son singing for his father, and I thought it was a very powerful thing. And so the idea and I remember, you know, it’s cool. There’s actually been over 400000 of these type responses, but there was a woman watching. I can only imagine there’s another woman in her and her son leaving, and this woman didn’t get obviously couldn’t and said, Are you guys Christians? And they said, Yeah. And she said, I’m not. But whatever happened to Dennis Quaid in this movie, I need to happen to me. I need someone to explain it to me. And they they witness to it right there. And so that’s sort of why we do what we do. What I love about Kurt Warner is I love the idea of I wanted to make a film. And I think anything I did, especially in the times in which we live. Famous story, well known story, one of the great underdog sports stories. But to me, it was about the audience and making a film so that people could see it and say, You know what, if he can accomplish his calling in life and his dream, you know, maybe I can, too. And if they can stay together and love each other, maybe we can, too. And it’s just it. It’s just such a thing. You could not be further away from your dream than Kurt Warner was from his, and yet, you know, we all you bought his jersey, you know, and I think that that’s the amazing thing and it’s just so much of life and success and fulfilling a calling is just never, ever, ever giving up. And you just never know. Funny with I can only imagine my dad when he bought me a camera, a 16, he actually said, Hey, dream ball, dream. Big dream, the impossible. And then he says, if you give 20 years of your life to something, you’ll be successful. And it was almost 20 years exactly to the success of I can only imagine. And I think that there’s something to that. I think a lot of people give up at your 19 or you’re 17, which is where all the work is, you know, and they just don’t endure long enough. And you just never know when that breakthrough moment in life is right around the corner. And so I loved the story for that reason, and I also loved the idea that Kurt Warner became a champion off the field and then brought it onto the field. He had the arm of a champion. He had the talent of a champion but didn’t have the heart of a champion. He found that in his relationship with Brenda and her son and her kids and their son specifically, who’s disabled? You know, I understand that part of the story well, and it was actually him really her faith rubbing off on him and him falling in love with her and her kids and embracing a world that was bigger than he was finding his faith, becoming a Christian, becoming a father and all those things that he learned off the field. And it’s it creates as much of a love story as it is a sports story. And they really won together the entitled son of Vince Gill, and we got and seeing as love changes everything. And it really is true for this story. They really won together, but I loved all that he learned. He found his character off the field, and that’s what allowed him to become a champion on the field. And I just love that part of the story. And I just want to make a story that reinvigorates the dreams of the audience. You know, we’ve all had a really tough year and a half, and our dreams have never felt further away. So I wanted to tell a story about someone that was as far from his dream as you could ever be. And yet he still endured and accomplished it. And, you know, willing to give it a platform for Kurt and Brenda to talk about their life and their faith and their love story. And so that was sort of why we did the film, and I don’t know if this is like everyone’s going to come out, but it’s still in theaters and lovely to see it. And then I think it’s Super Bowl weekend is when it’s coming to pulmonary edema.

Richard Cunningham: Awesome. So fitting come and come to home Super Bowl week and I love that.

Jon Erwin: Yeah. Yeah, yes. Good timing.

Richard Cunningham: Love this. So practical. How can investors invest in a portfolio of faith based films most effectively would love to hear you just riff on that for a second, Jon?

Jon Erwin: Oh man, let me get back to you because it’s a, you know, we’re we’re dreaming about that right now. You know, I was very fortunate in God’s providence to get in business with the movie studio Lionsgate after I can only imagine because our next film came out, it was funny. I can only imagine that huge run, never one a minute film of 2018, but we were never number one at the box office. We just sort of like, we’re a little Honda Accord that got behind the tractor trailer semi-truck that was Black Panther, and we just glided behind it. But you know, the film we did after that, I still believe, actually is no. The only time we’ve been number one number one movie the night it opened on Friday, the one in America. But that was March 9th, 2020, and so not the best we can to release a film that, you know. And so everything was shut down and we had to go digital. And what’s interesting and you know, I think the thing for those raising money is just always believe fully in everything that you put in front of investors. And you know, what’s funny about that? And there’s a ton of opportunity in the disruption. But COVID has ended up reshaping behavior in an incredibly fundamental way that I think while it makes one form of getting a movie to people, which is a theatrical movie business much more difficult not only for faith films, reward films and, you know, musicals and Pixar and a lot of the box office. Because during COVID, you know, basically it was the streaming wars. And so for new streaming services were launched. Everybody sort of upgrade their technology very similar to in the music business when the album was pulled apart and you could buy your favorite song for 99 cents. That just reshaped an industry, the revenue still there. It’s in different places. So I would say as disruptive as that is to the economics of the moviegoing business in general and the studio business and everybody, it’s also opened up some incredible opportunities elsewhere in the home. And so that’s what we’re really researching right now and really building is I think that there’s enormous opportunity and I think there’s an extent that we have to no one go where people want the content. And also and I realize this is a very political answer, and I’m sorry. The point is we’re building a strategy that really believe in that. I’d love to get back to you on. But I think that when you look at the streaming wars and this mergers and acquisitions bloodbath, that is the entertainment business, the end of that is. Basically, everywhere you consume, content is going to be owned in these sort of super conglomerates, ultimately owned by one of the four tech giants. And I just don’t see that sort of Silicon Valley mindset and political worldview sort of allowing overt Christianity in that sort of downstream. So at least my home, I’m probably not the best for controlling my home, but the way I feel is screens have sort of overrun my home. And if I look at the future, I could see three or four years a situation where it would be very difficult to get content on those screens. If we don’t act now, we don’t act in a very big way. And so I think that that’s what I’m really diving into, and I love the moment that we’re in the moment in time in our industry because it’s that mass disruption that just accelerates change that we’ll be talking about for a very long time. And I think if you’re willing to let go of old ways of thinking and see where the value is, there’s enormous value, but you have to sort of embrace change and embrace change very quickly. So I would say that the current model for what has worked up to this point, that was very difficult for an independent film where all your eggs in one basket. The question is right. You have to sort of diversify risk and, you know, go with a whole portfolio mindset. And then I think there’s just a lot of work to do on the economics of how these things, you know, we make money, not off people consuming entertainment. We make money off how they consume entertainment. And so when the how changes abruptly and quickly, it just takes time. And it’s these enormous opportunities open up and then other things sort of change rapidly what we’re seeing now. You know, just over the last two months, especially after Spielberg’s movie, that people’s expectations of where they want the content and where they would most enjoy the content are permanently changed. It’s got nothing to do with safety. It’s now have it loops that have been built, and I could talk your ear off on those just fascinating. So I think that there is an answer to the question, but it’s in sort of re-engineering the value chain of where the content is. And I think I wish I could say we’re close to being able to say what I really do believe is next and where there is a lot of value for films. But it’s going to look all different. The theatrical window will survive, but it’ll only be for specific things, and there’s a lot of things that were theatrical prior to the pandemic or not. So that’s my vague political answer. We’ve got it. We’ve got to build a different engine to the car.

Richard Cunningham: Jon, thank you again. Let me ask you this. But again, we are grateful. Thank you for the way you have used the story of Jon Andrew Irwin and the many, many gifts you’ve given them to Steward and the positions you’ve given them steward. And finally got it. It is all about your son and may we make much of his name? And thank you for the way people like Jon are doing that in the ever changing kind of spiritual warfare landscape of media. And so we just ask that you would be with Jon and the many endeavors that are in front of him be with all those that are on this call today. Thank you so much for the privilege together. We love you, King Jesus Amen Amen.

Jon Erwin: Appreciate you guys. I wish I could stay. There’s so many questions in the chat that I wish I could answer, but maybe next time, but come

Richard Cunningham: back any time we’ll take you, we’ll take you any time. Thank you, everybody.

Katherine Trout: Thanks, Jon.