Aimee Minnich: I was 17 when my dad died. My inheritance was a baby blue plastic trash bin full of quarters. My dad seven years sobriety coin from AA and his prayers. My parents marriage had dissolved when I was seven and I lived with my mom after that. But my dad had done his best to share with us five kids the faith that he discovered on his journey to sobriety. By the grace of God, I went to college and law school on a full ride scholarship, and while I was in my first year of school, first year of law school, my mom and stepdad took their company public. It was a fast, wild ride from nothing to IPO. And since then I’ve sat through family meetings with wealth helpers to discuss the portfolio, and I’ve suffered through the painful estate planning meetings. I tell you this to say that I have seen and personally lived through both ends of the wealth spectrum and it’s given me a lot of opportunity to think about what it means to live a successful life. Is it being able to buy a Lamborghini or a yacht so that I can demonstrate to the world that I made it that I was a success? Is it being able to leave as much as possible to my family and pay as little as possible on estate taxes? You might be wondering what in the world this has to do with the conference for investors. You see, I’ve decided that the best way I can spend my working life is to help families like mine steward their resources, financial, spiritual and social to the best of their abilities and to the glory of God. For families with significant wealth, a lot of it looks like investing. It’s what compels the work that I do now at Impact Foundation, where we help families invest charitable capital in businesses that create jobs, share the gospel and contribute to human flourishing. So what’s the measure of success? I think we all want to get to the end of days and here. Well done, my beloved child. And we’re just doing our best to figure out what that means. We want to be excellent in the craft of investing, but I’m afraid sometimes I and other Faith Driven Investor used the wrong definition of excellence, just as the kingdom of this world misses what it means to live a successful life, so too it gives us an inadequate definition of what makes a successful investment portfolio. The world says, minimize the risk of losing your capital, maximize financial return and invest for the time horizon of your own life and maybe the life of your kids. But risk reward and time horizon have very different meanings in the kingdom of God. Jesus says if anybody wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross and follow me. It’s pretty risky on its face, but God’s omnipotent and good, his time horizon is eternal and we’re really just his money managers, which means the only meaningful risk we can encounter is to disobey his commands or ignore his invitations. So let’s ask then whether his word gives us any indication of how we should invest in scripture. We see at least four uses of capital commended. We’re familiar with the first three charity tithing and traditional investing for return. And to be clear, those are all worthy of our time, effort and money. But I want to focus on gleaning. It’s the most misunderstood and unaddressed but really important uses of capital. Remember how Ruth gathered around the edges of Boaz’ field in the Book of Ruth? Boaz was following the command from Leviticus 19 and 23 to allow for gleaning. The Theology Work Project explains gleaning is a process in which landowners have an obligation to provide the poor and marginalized access to the means of production, which in Leviticus was the land. And to work it themselves, unlike charity, does not depend on the generosity of landowners. Also, unlike charity, it was not given to the poor as a transfer payment. Through gleaning, the poor earned their living the same way as the landowners did by working the fields with their own neighbors. It was simply a command that everyone had a right to access the means of provision created by God. Our economies may not be agrarian anymore, but gleaning nevertheless is instructive for all of us because it has to do with provision rather than harvesting crops. I’ve observed sometimes it’s easier to practice gleaning within our own companies than it is to understand how to do it as investors. I think many of us are afraid to consider investment gleaning because it seems that accepting less than full market rate returns is the purview of the unsophisticated. If I lend money at eight percent and somebody else gets 15 percent. Doesn’t that make me the chump? Plus, people fear that it provides an excuse for lack of excellence from an entrepreneur. Those things certainly could be the causes of poor returns, but that’s not what gleaning entails. True gleaning involves excellence, access, work and sacrifice. In ancient times, a farmer there was leaving some of those fields and unharvested. It meant that he had to be even more efficient, more effective with the portions he was working in order to make enough to feed his own household and follow the command to allow room around the edges. A follower of God had to be the very best farmer around. Excellence is always a hallmark of gleaning. David Simms and John Halverson, at Talanton, are doing an amazing job as they back small and medium sized companies in Kenya and other parts of Africa. They’re demonstrating excellence in their company selection and management, even as they expect less than market rate returns. The next two parts of gleaning access and work, they go together gleaning access to the poor and marginalized for the poor and marginalized. And it’s not the same thing as a handout. Access to the means of production means work for wages. I wouldn’t ever, ever advocate eliminating charity, but I do fear that if we aren’t creating pathways to employment through our philanthropic capital, then we may be doing more harm than good. If you’ve been to Haiti, you’ve seen this firsthand. There are instances where aid given to the poor and marginalized can create access. Scholarships for education or career training are great examples. So as aid in the context of a natural disaster or mass displacement. But at some point we have to begin asking ourselves when does access and helping me find a job rather than another handout for Garfield Produce in Chicago, Access looks like employing former gang members from Chicago’s South Side to grow micro greens, which they sell to restaurants or they used to before covid. Their investors are expecting maybe to get their original loan back, but with no interest. That’s investment gleaning. Sacrifice is the last hallmark of gleaning, and it’s also the scariest until we actually do it. Gleaning means the difference between an eight percent return that creates 100 jobs or a 15 percent return that creates 50 jobs. What looks like sacrifice to others often feels like simple obedience to the person making the sacrifice. If the God of Heaven instructs us to do something, following in obedience is probably the safest bet when we get to the pearly gates. I don’t think he’s going to ask us whether we got a 15 percent IRR or beat our benchmarks. But I am confident that what we do for the least of these, the ways in which we take care of his children who are poor and marginalized will be remembered. So next time you’re looking at an eight percent return that creates a hundred jobs, how might you respond?

Jimmy Song: So Esau had what we would call in between high time preference, right, like he was very impatient, didn’t have much prudence. Jacob had low time preference. He was willing to wait. He was patient. He was prudent. He was wise. And that’s what I wanted to point out about Bitcoin is there’s an ethic of being willing to wait because Bitcoin is very volatile. It does sort of like turn your stomach. There’s a lot of emotional disturbance in the price going up and down that you kind of have to go through that a lot of people simply can’t take. So for a lot of people, they would rather live for tomorrow and be more like Esau, who cares about my estate? That’s like 30 years from now. I’d rather have the suit now rather than being like Jacob. OK, I’ll forgo the suit now, but that means that I get this huge treasure later on. And to me, that’s at the heart of what both Bitcoin is about and what Christianity is about. Our God promises us treasures in heaven for doing the things that aren’t necessarily rewarded in this life. And that’s for me, what the ultimate in low time preference behavior looks like.

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone. You found us once again at the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Money, money is a fact of everyday life. We earn it, we spend it, we save it. Sometimes we give it away. We’re tempted to worship it and to trust it, to provide for our needs. And while much has been written about the power, the danger and the stewardship of money, little has been said about what money actually is and whether or not money itself is moral. Today’s guest is here to change that. Jimi Song is a Bitcoin advocate, a developer and an author who has been contributing to open source Bitcoin projects since 2013. On today’s episode, he explores the ways in which the current monetary system is broken, what can be done to fix it, and how the ongoing transition to sound money may be the source of hope for a broken world. We can’t wait to hear what you think of this, but let’s go mine this subject right now.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’ve got a really special episode. I say that at the beginning of every one of these look and at some point in time that’s going to ring hollow, but it’s not going to ring hollow today because today is actually super cool. We have our first ever Asian cowboy on the podcast. We’ve never had that before. We never had anybody who was wearing a cowboy hat to a podcast interview. And we may even be able to do a video clip of this in the promo reel. But Jimmy’s song is a really special guest because he’s going to take us through an asset class, Luke, that we actually participated in a little bit, but we don’t know very much about, right?

Luke Roush: That’s right. And it’s a hot asset class, right? It’s garnered a lot of notoriety and a lot of interest in the last few months. So never had an episode on Bitcoin been more appropriate.

Henry Kaestner: I agree. We’ve got Jimmy Song on the podcast today. Jimmy, welcome.

Jimmy Song: Thank you for having me. It’s very exciting for me to be on this podcast. I’ve done a lot of Bitcoin podcast. I haven’t done that many Christian ones. So I am super excited to talk about my faith and how Bitcoin relates to our faith.

Henry Kaestner: So it’s great having a is a real treat before we get going. One of the things that we like to do with every one of our guests is to understand who they are and where they come from and just share with us a bit, you know, who are you? Where do you come from? Where did faith enter into your journey? And then, yes, absolutely. We can tell about all things talking about the money system. We going to talk about greed and corruption and government and crypto and it being a force for good, all those different things. But who are you? Where you come from?

Jimmy Song: Sure. I was born in South Korea and I immigrated to the United States back in nineteen eighty five as an eight year old. So my dad was transferred to an office in New York because at the time he worked for a textile manufacturer and back in the eighties that was where a lot of clothing was made in Korea. But of course the designers were in New York and they wanted to see what materials factory could make and so on. So he was the representative for that company. He worked in the Empire State Building. I still remember going to his office, you know, on the sixty sixth floor next to the diamond exchange and everything. Anyway, we immigrated in nineteen eighty five and one of the things that happened when we came was my parents just kind of missed Korea and though they weren’t religious at the time, they decided to go to church as a way to meet other Korean people. And we started attending church maybe a month after we came to the US and part of that was me growing in faith and learning about God. I went to a summer overnight Christian camp called Word of Life in upstate New York. That was where I was saved. And it’s been a journey since then. Also, around that time I got into computers, I didn’t really even know what they were, but I had like this natural affinity towards them. And I begged my dad to get me one. He got me one from Toys R US as a fourth grader. It was a Commodore sixteen, not the sixty four that everyone knows was a sixteen, which only had like three games. So I learned a lot of programing on that thing, mostly because I wanted to play with this machine and I’ve been programing ever since. So I’ve been a programmer all my life and I went to a startup right out of college. I’ve been doing startups for a long time, pretty much since I graduated college, which was back in ninety eight. And I learned about Bitcoin back in 2011 when I was reading tech news site that said Bitcoin has reached parity with the dollar and I couldn’t even pass that sentence. I was like, what does that mean? How do you get parity with the dollar? And then I found out that it was a digital currency and so on. And yeah, I’ve been doing stuff in the Bitcoin space, contributing to open source projects, writing various books, speaking at conferences, teaching people I’m also a Bitcoin fellow at a venture capital firm and things like that. So. Yeah, it’s been quite a journey, and I’m excited about this podcast because it is sort of talking about two things that got integrated into my life and it’s something that only God can do.

Luke Roush: Jimmy, some of our listeners don’t have a ton of exposure to Bitcoin, maybe they haven’t actually spent the time that you have to really understand the currency and kind of how it works. But pretend we know nothing about Bitcoin, would you mind just kind of walking us through kind of a crash course for dummies, myself included, on how Bitcoin functions and what our listeners might want to know or pay attention to as we’re watching this universe unfold before our eyes?

Jimmy Song: Sure. The easiest way I can describe Bitcoin is as digital gold, and it’s digital, I think, which most people understand. But it’s also like gold in the sense that it requires no permission to go and gather it. So gold has always been like that. If you own some land, you can go dig in your backyard or whatever to go search for gold. That is everyone’s right to do. You don’t need permission from anybody. So in that way, Bitcoin is what we call decentralized. There’s no central authority that determines whether or not you are allowed to create that or find that particular commodity. This is unlike the US dollar, for example, which is centrally controlled. If I tried to produce a one hundred dollar bill and managed to make it look very realistic, I would get arrested by the Secret Service because the production of US dollars is controlled by, well, at least the physical notes by the Treasury, but really most of it by the Federal Reserve. So a lot of things are centralized, including concert tickets, coupons for online stores or whatever. What’s unique about Bitcoin is that it’s digital and decentralized and this usually blows people’s minds. And honestly, most of us in the computer science field didn’t think that that was actually possible until Satoshi Nakamoto showed that it could in 2008. And that was a big breakthrough in Bitcoin was the fact that it was both decentralized and digital. That is, it had no central authority, but it was also digital. When most people think of digital things, they think like MP3 files or Web pages or e-books or something like that, something that can essentially be infinitely copied with perfect fidelity. But with Bitcoin, you have something that’s decentralized, not infinitely copyable because there’s a ledger and this is what’s called the block chain. And that block chain holds essentially every transaction that’s ever been done on Bitcoin. It’s not very different than, say, the ledger at your bank, which for them has the record of every single transaction that’s ever been done by their customers of that bank, except that block chain is completely distributed. Everyone that runs the software can check exactly that. The ledger balances, for example, that no one’s overspending that noone’s overdrafting, that the rules of the ledger are being kept up and not violated and so on. And that’s essentially what it is. We also call it digital gold because of this process called mining with gold. I’m told that you need to scour something like 40 tons of dirt and rock before you find about one ounce of gold. So there’s a lot of dirt and rock that you have to process. You use chemicals on before you find that one ounce of gold. Bitcoin also has that same process for bringing new Bitcoin into existence, except instead of dirt and rock, what you have lots and lots of numbers. So you process as many numbers as possible and you’ll find that sort of one ounce of gold, if you will. And much like gold, that process of finding that gold is much more difficult than verifying that ounce of gold is genuine. The chemical test is much cheaper than actually digging up an ounce of gold in the ground. Similarly with Bitcoin, the process of finding a number that satisfies a particular property is very, very difficult. You just have to brute force lots and lots of numbers, the equivalent of 40 tons of dirt and rock. But when you find it, it is very easy to verify. In fact, your cell phone can go verify that it’s been done, whereas the actual process of finding it requires many, many thousands of thousands of machines.

Luke Roush: Yeah, that’s fascinating. And a whole bunch of other questions you go off in terms of who the miners are, where they live, how they mined. But now I want to go over actually to an argument that you make in your book that it could be really interesting to our listeners, maybe resonant given the environment that we’re currently living in. It’s around the moral argument for Bitcoin versus currencies that can be printed more readily. Could you just kind of articulate that view on the merits of Bitcoin relative to fiat currency?

Jimmy Song: Sure. The thing about the current monetary system, which is central bank backed fiat money, it is extremely corrupt for the lack of a better word. There’s a lot of theft in it. There is what we would call huge moral hazard within the fiat money system. And this is because there exists a money printer. Unfortunately, not that many people know how money works. I’ll just briefly describe it. When the government has a budget of 4 trillion and their tax revenue is three trillion, you have a one trillion dollar deficit. So where do they get that money in the past before central bank back fiat money? What? The government had to do was to go borrow that money from people that actually had it. So King John, for instance, wanted to borrow a ton of money to fund the war that he wanted to do as a part of England. The merchants that lent to him charge them two hundred fourteen percent interest because they were pretty sure that they wouldn’t get the money back. So at least after six months, they’d get some of it back and interest and then go from there. So that’s how money used to be nowadays. That one trillion dollar gap, it sold US Treasuries. There are other central banks that buy it. There are people in the public that buy it. They’re hedge funds and various pension funds that will buy it. But there’s usually some left over. So say they sell five hundred billion to various parties, but they have five hundred billion left. What happens? Well, the central bank is called the lender of last resort. For that reason, they will buy up the other five hundred billion dollars through money that they created then. Er so it’s essentially monetary expansion through debt insurance and that’s how the monetary system currently works. And it’s not just at the government level, it’s also at the corporate level and it’s also at the consumer level. So if you think about corporate bonds and whatever bond buyers know, you can get tremendous leverage. You can actually just get the spread. There’s questions about, OK, who’s buying these like one and a half percent bonds. Right. Like that pay like nothing. Well, it’s because you can go get loans for one hundred percent of that amount. It just becomes sort of like a money generating machine. And even if you’re getting paid like 20 basis points, if you’re getting loans at five basis points to 15 basis point spread is all profit and you can leverage the heck out of it. So you borrow a billion and you get 15 basis points on a billion dollars. That’s still a significant amount of money. So that’s how the current system works. It’s based on that. It’s based on money printing. It’s based on monetary expansion that can be sort of like game by the people that are in control. And that means that there is a huge moral hazard or the people that are printing the money because they can use it to benefit themselves and their friends and their family at the expense of everybody else. Every time you expand the money supply, you are essentially stealing from everyone that has saved in that currency. So if you have money saved in the dollar and the dollar expands and supply, then your dollar has a little less purchasing power. And you could kind of see that in the asset inflation bubble that we’re in with stocks and even bonds and real estate and maybe even gold to some degree. But every time the money expands, you are stealing from everybody else that’s holding the dollar. And this isn’t just people in the United States. A lot of those people are in third world countries. They use the dollar as their store of value because their own currency is even worse than the dollar. So in essence, every time money is being expanded through debt creation, we are essentially stealing from everybody else that has money stored in that fiat currency. So from a biblical perspective, it is immoral and it is doing something that God detests.

Henry Kaestner: Hold on saying this is the almighty dollar. If this is the greenback, you’re saying that there’s something just wrong with the system and then maybe you’d even suggest that because we are all transacting in dollars that we may even, by extension, be morally complicit in this.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, yeah. I mean, every time we take out a mortgage, for example, I mean, think about this. You take out a mortgage for, say, a quarter million dollars, two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and you get three percent, 30 years or something like that when most people think with that mortgage is OK, some that is on the other side of that trade that’s lending out two hundred fifty thousand dollars for three percent for 30 years. And that’s simply not true. If you were an investor, you would never take back 30 years, three percent with some credit risk. And so, like, nobody would do that. The only reason that happens is because they print that money into existence. And that mortgage in turn is actually insured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So really, there’s no risk for the bank at all. And the government’s the one that takes the risk and they print the money for your benefit. So we’re all complicit in this. And I’m speaking as a person that has a mortgage, so I’m complicit in this as well, and that we are expanding the money supply. Clearly, the borrower is benefiting because they’re getting access to a lot of money at once. The bank is benefiting. They’re getting paid interest. So who’s it actually hurting? Well, it’s hurting everyone else that’s holding the dollar, including people in Nigeria that are holding dollars because the Niros inflating very quickly. So how do you even for them, I mean, we’re stealing from everybody through this monetary expansion. And the US is the most guilty of all because we got first access to that dollar, whereas people in Nigeria, for example, get last access as a result of what’s called the Cantillon effect. They get screwed more than everybody else being convicted.

Luke Roush: And my guess is that many of our listeners are also being convicted based on that last 60 second report, which is good. I think it goes over a lot of people’s heads and just kind of passed us. But we don’t. Realize that we’re living in it, so I appreciate you shedding light on that, one of the things that Indonesia, where I used to live is known for is having the most expensive coffee in the world, which is Kopi Luwak coffee and I won’t go into all the details of it. But my understanding is that you may be an expert on some of the most expensive beef jerky in the world. And switching gears, I got to ask the man we need to hear the beef jerky story, most expensive beef jerky ever produced in the world. Jimmy Fallon on the show today.

Jimmy Song: Yeah. So 2013, there were a lot of different companies that were allowing came in and bitcoin. And this is sort of the mistake that I made. I want to support this company that’s now taking Bitcoin. And it was online and I decided to order some beef jerky from that company. At the time, Bitcoin was about four hundred dollars. So I bought one hundred dollars worth of beef jerky and I was like, OK, it’s a quarter bitcoin. It’s not that much. I’ll buy it. They shipped it to me. It was delicious. I don’t think it was like twelve thousand dollars delicious though because currently Bitcoin is up forty eight thousand. And this is kind of what happens with a lot of store of value assets is that I’ve known people that worked at Dell or something early on and they had stock options. They decided to sell them for a couch and it turns out that the stock kept going up or whatever, and that couch is now ten thousand dollars or something instead of eight hundred or something like that. So you know this. I regret spending Bitcoin on that beef jerky. Yeah, there was also a sewing machine I got from my wife, which costs like a tenth of a bitcoin that’s now like five thousand bucks. So, yeah, some regrets.

Henry Kaestner: So when you’re referring to store value, you’re referring to beef jerky as a store value. So tell us you’ve written a book on this. Tell us about the book.

Jimmy Song: Thank God for Bitcoin. Yeah, it’s all about the moral case for money. And it comes from a Christian perspective. I got to write this during covid as a result of Bible study that we started doing on Zoom. So basically I had gone to this conference that Russell Cohen put together. He’s the left tackle for the Carolina Panthers and he also wrote the foreword for our book. And his brother in law, George was one of my coauthors, is a Christian, and we started talking about it and we decided, OK, you know what, let’s do a Bible study of just some verses in the Bible that talk about money and oh, my goodness, there are so many verses in the Bible that talk about money. So we started doing that. And as we finished, he expressed some interest in learning more about the economic aspect of it. And I come from the Austrian school and I’ve read a lot of stuff on it. And we decided to open it up to some more people. And we had about ten different Bitcoin ers that have known through conferences and so on that I knew were Christian. And we got together. We studied two books, The Ethics of Money Production by Guido Huelsmann and Honest Money by Garry North. And both of them treat the monetary system from an ethical perspective. And we ended up doing studies of both books. And at the end we were dissatisfied because both of them ended with, hey, we need to go back on the gold standard and we need to get a political action committee together and convince enough people so that the dollar can go back to being backed by gold. And, you know, I mean, we’re reading this and thinking, OK, this is completely unrealistic and this is never going to happen. But we have this thing called Bitcoin where each individual can opt out. We need to write a book to lay that out. And that’s how the book started. We wanted to make the moral case for Bitcoin and we wanted to do it from a Christian perspective. So there’s a lot of verses in there. We definitely take the Christian world view in this book, and the hope is to give that moral perspective, because for a lot of Christians, I think what they think of when they think of Bitcoin is OK. It’s like the money used by drug dealers and traders that just gambled their money or something like that. And for us, it’s very much not. It’s a more moral money. And that’s the argument that we wanted to make in the book, and that’s what it covers.

Henry Kaestner: So it’s very interesting. I want to get more into the rifts that you’ve had with friends in Bible studies about faith as it comes through. And I just you got one of the most entertaining Twitter feeds of all time. And the other day you talk about Esau and Jacob and their take on Bitcoin. Selling Bitcoin: Esau’s soup, buying Bitcoin: jacob Father’s estate. Please explain.

Jimmy Song: Yeah. So Esau had what we would call in Bitcoin high time preference. Right. Like, he was very impatient, didn’t have much prudence. Jacob had low time preference. He was willing to wait. He was patient. He was prudent. He was wise. And that’s what I wanted to point out about Bitcoin is there’s an ethic of being willing to wait because Bitcoin is very volatile. It does sort of like turn your stomach. There’s a lot of emotional disturbance in the price going up and down that you kind of have to go through that a lot of people simply can’t take. So for a lot of people, they would rather live for tomorrow and be more like Esau. Who? Cares about my estate, that’s like 30 years from now. I’d rather have the suit now rather than being like Jacob, OK, I’ll forgo the suit now, but that means that I get this huge treasure later on. And to me, that’s at the heart of what both Bitcoin is about and what Christianity is about. Our God promises us treasures in heaven for doing the things that aren’t necessarily rewarded in this life. And that’s for me, what the ultimate in low time preference behavior looks like.

Henry Kaestner: So I want to do a slight pivot here because I’m thinking through this. I’m going beyond the moral implications of the monetary supply and I’m going to be thinking about that for a long time. I know our listeners are, too, but one of the things that has stuck with me is when you talked about the Nigerians being the last people kind of in the stream, so to speak, what is Bitcoin mean? And maybe I’m reading too much into your comment or just this general thought, but what is Bitcoin mean for people in places like Zimbabwe where they’ve got to take wheelbarrows of cash just to buy food? You know, is their role here for Bitcoin and poverty alleviation? Can that happen or or do those governments shut it down? Because that’s their last stranglehold on the people. Just riff about what that means a little bit in developing economies.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and it’s been a tremendous in developing economies. In fact, one of my coauthors is Jordan Bush, and he actually inspired that Esau tweet. He is a missionary in Uruguay and his congregation is actually largely Venezuelan and they love Bitcoin. They think it’s something that is very important to them and in part because they can actually send money back home. A lot of these regimes, when they get in power, what they do is they impose strict capital controls and so on to make it very difficult to do anything monetary because they are spending their own money in hyperinflation. That the previous book that I wrote is the little Bitcoin book. And one of my coauthors there is Alex Gladstein, who’s the chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, and he’s really interested in Bitcoin, in large part because a lot of human rights activists in these countries, the first thing that happens to them, once the government finds out that they’re doing something against the government’s interests, is they get their bank accounts seized, they get financial, they get their financial access sort of cut off. And Bitcoin for them is a life saver. So there’s that aspect to it. But there’s also that other aspect that you are talking about, which is, you know, being able to store value. So one anecdote that I like to share is that one hundred dollar bill, a crisp one in a lot of third world countries, will trade at a premium to a wrinkled one. And you might be wondering, why would that be? Why is the crisp one trading at a premium to a wrinkled one? Well, the crisp one is more valuable because they’re given as gifts at weddings and so on. So when you’re presenting a gift to the bride and groom or something like that, you want a nice crisp bill. So the wrinkled one trades at a discount because these people are using these as stores of value. This is you’re starting off your new life. Here’s some money and that’s how they store it. So for a lot of those people in Third World countries, the US dollar and so on is a lifeline to being able to store their wealth. And if we’re thinking about like what’s happened to the US dollar in the last year, then two money supply, for example, has expanded by thirty five percent or something crazy. For a lot of people in Third World countries, it’s even worse. So they have their own currencies, which through legal tender laws and monetary injustice of all kinds, they’re forced to use. But it’s inflating at such a high rate that they need something else. They want to store value in something else. And if you go to like the black market in Venezuela, for example, you know, no one takes bolivars or if they do, they have a quick way of getting rid of it because no one wants to hold on to them, because an hour from now, it’s going to be worth less than what it is right now. So that whole process is very detrimental to their living and it makes all sorts of economic calculation crazy. It generally devalues labor and so on. So Bitcoin definitely has a role. The country where Bitcoin is most popular besides the United States is Nigeria right now. And it’s because the Naira is expanding fairly quickly. They have a pretty technical population. One of my coauthors from the previous book runs an exchange there, and he’s trying to comply with the central bank of Nigeria’s mandates and so on. But yeah, it’s a life saver for a lot of them because they can actually store value instead of having it just sort of like frittered away. And a lot of the injustice that we see in the world is actually monetary injustice. And honestly, a lot of that is because of the dollar hegemony that is over the entire world. And this is something that I think as Americans, much more so than, quote on quote, social justice or whatever that we have to think about as a nation. There’s a monetary imperialism that is over the entire globe. The US can more or less unilaterally enforce sanctions on Iran because of the dollar, all international transactions. These are settled in the dollar and so on, so. You know, that level of control, that level of ability to affect people in Third World countries, this is something that we need to really face up to as a nation because we’ve been abusing it for the last 70 years or so since Bretton Woods.

Luke Roush: So the concept of monetary imperialism is a powerful word, picture that I’ve never thought through that before. But this is really, I think, brought that to light for me and will be impactful for others, too. I’ve got one more question and then a closing question. But one more question is, we all have friends who have waded into Bitcoin more recently trying to make a quick buck. What counsel would you give the folks who are seeing this more sort of short term trading opportunity rather than a long term?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, I know a lot of people that have been like that, and those people have existed since 2010. So there were people that got into Bitcoin at a dollar and sold at eight dollars and said, you know what, I made eight times my money. I am out. And they have never come back since. So my counsel to those people would be understand what Bitcoin is. It could be a trade thing, a plaything, a gambling thing. In which case, I think as a Christian, you should really look into whether or not that is something that is corrupting your soul or not otherwise. Once you’ve learned what that really is, whether it is this incorruptible unsensible store of value that we argue in the book, then you’ll understand like just how much it means to have that store of value available so that we can build a better civilization instead of one that’s leaking all over the place with the current fiat monetary system that we’re in. So for those people, learn what it is before you keep going with this sort of like speculation. A lot of people do come in for no go up, as we say, in our space. But a lot of people end up staying because they learn what it is and read books like mine or say things the Bitcoin standard or many others and learn, OK, all right. This really is a better money. And it is in many ways incorruptible by human beings because it’s run by computer code. And as a result, they become convinced, OK, this really is superior to the current monetary system. And I want to opt out of the current monetary system into this thing. And that’s what brings a lot of people in. So, you know, learning about that is not easy. I’ve seen people take many years before they got into it or understood it or realized this implications. And like we’ve been talking about, the implications are enormous and they are global. And it is no small thing to be changing out money. It seems to be one of the base layers of civilization. If you change that out, you affect absolutely everything above it, including governments, including trade, including companies, including our lifestyles, including our how we view debt and things like that. And all of those things will need to be changed as we transition more to a Bitcoin standard. In my opinion, that’s inevitable because fiat currencies are just sort of temporary by nature. I think a study of all fiat currencies that have ever existed, like the average life span, is like twenty three years. The US dollar is about 50 years old in fiat terms. And so it’s fairly old, but we’ll see where it goes. But that’s what I would implore your listeners to go and understand.

Luke Roush: Most impactful episode for me and I think for all of us. But let’s just close out with the way we always close out. So I’d love to hear, Jimmy, how God is speaking to you and teaching you. Now, what have you found in his words that has stuck out to you recently?

Jimmy Song: Yeah. So the verse that I’ll go to is in the book as well, but it’s Ephesians 4:28. He who steals my steal no longer, but rather he must labor performing with his own hands. What is good so that he will have something to share with one who has need. And I love that verse first of all, because it says don’t steal. And I think at least in the fiat economy, I think we’re all guilty of that, whether we know it or not. And stopping from that and working with our own hands, creating something that is good. So he will have something to share with one who has need. That to me sometimes is interpreted as go and make money so you can give alms to the poor. For me it means go make something with your hands so that you can contribute something to civilization, to someone else in the market that can get value from whatever it is that you create. And the verse is really about money and the role of money, which from a spiritual sense is a signal to you, to each individual to know how it is that you can provide most value to other people. And when the money is not corrupt, it’s the purest sort of signal for what we should be doing because it tells other people, I find what you’re doing, your goods or services more valuable than the money that I am willing to give it up for. So for me, that’s what it is. The other thing I’ll share is that this book for me is sort of like, as I mentioned before, the merging of two huge passions in my life, Christianity and Bitcoin. And I was at a conference last year, a big block boom. It was Bitcoin conference and it was in Dallas. And I gave a talk and somebody asked a question and I revealed that I was a Christian at that conference. And I also told the audience at the end, hey, I’m writing a book about this, if you’re interested, please. Talk to me afterwards, no less than 30 people throughout the next two days came up to me and told me that they are Christian, that they are Bitcoin. They were afraid of saying something. And for me, that was a huge validation of what God was doing, because it was clear that there are a lot of Christians that don’t want to be known as Christians. And a thing for me when I think about that is, wow, how sad is that? Because according to the Bible, these are Jesus’s words. He says, if you are ashamed of me, I will be ashamed of you before my father. And my hope for your listeners is that they learn to be bold with their faith. And, you know, we tend to think, OK, God doesn’t want me to be ashamed of him, but then I’m going to get embarrassed. That’s not the way it is, at least for me. My experience has been that God has blessed me, that he wants me to be bold so that he can bless me and what I am doing. And this book has come out as a result of that. We’ve got a lot of reviewers from that conference that were able to chime in on Bitcoin and Christianity and give us some really good feedback that we incorporated. But for all your listeners that are thinking about investing better in these industries where, you know, it might not be cool to talk about Jesus, take a chance people about it, because God wants to bless you.

Henry Kaestner: Amen. Wow, that was really, really awesome. I love what you’re talking about in terms of being able to deliver value. We should be about being used by God under his power for his glory to bring about his kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven. And we need to be creative and adding value to the marketplace, creating goods and services to bring about his kingdom and to love our neighbor, and in that process, superimportant. So that’s a great word to leave us on. And then the admonition, of course, to be always ready, willing and able to be able to boldly and yet with gentleness and respect to share the reason for the hope we have. So great word for me, a great word for Luke, Justin and the entire FDE team and our listeners. Jimmy, we’re really grateful for you. Thank you very much.

Jimmy Song: Thank you for having me.

Jon Erwin: There’s never been a more powerful tool of storytelling than mass entertainment. It’s America’s second largest export behind agriculture. You know, there’s enormous infrastructure being built worldwide, completely flips the model of sharing the gospel because countries pay for American movies. And if you can cross a certain threshold of success, these movies go on global autopilot and these countries are paying you. And so it’s an incredible model to get the gospel around the world. It’s an industry that we’ve historically been underrepresented for quite a while. As Christians, I think it’s our fault. I don’t think you can blame it on some evil Hollywood agenda. I think we’ve abandoned the playing field. In my experience, people are open. They just don’t. I mean, like the chairman, the motion picture group was a great friend, a mentor at Lionsgate. I’m the only Christian he knows, you know, and that’s Christianity’s fault. So I think we got to stop blaming some evil conspiracy that doesn’t exist, in my opinion. And I’m deep inside the industry and we got to get in the dating game again.

Henry Kaestner: John, it’s awesome to have you here, thank you for joining us.

Jon Erwin: Thanks for having me. And love the theme of your podcast. I remember when we did the deal at Lionsgate, we make movies there, the studio. They said, what’s most important to you? This was after the movie. I can only imagine. I said I’d like to be seen as an entrepreneur first and a filmmaker second. And so I think I actually value just entrepreneurism over entertainment. In a way. There’s so much creativity in the process of creating, you know, a company or a revenue sort of engine or a story for a film. There’s a lot of creativity in both. And so thanks for having me on for sure.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, you’re on the right program then, obviously. So one thing we like to start every show off with is getting a little bit of your background. So tell us about growing up in your own household, your relationship with your brother when the movie-making becomes something you thought about pursuing after you thought about entrepreneurship.

Jon Erwin: Yeah, well, I’ll say this. Some details of the story I’m not recommending. I remember doing a program I think called Money Life, and some of it was like that person was condoning lying. I’m like, I’m not I’m just telling you what happened. I’m just going to preface it with that. But I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and love the South. I live in Nashville, Tennessee today and commute to L.A. And when I was probably 12, I started working at a cable station and when I was 15, and to anyone that’s young and interested in filmmaking, start now the tools that’s never been as readily available. One of the great assets I had was just to start, you know, very young, you know, probably 10 years younger than most people. And in the providence of God, just he opened up an incredible door when I was 15 at the University of Alabama. We got it.

Henry Kaestner: We got to stop here. So, William, huge Alabama fan.

Jon Erwin: So I could say right here, am I able to say roll tide? Because all can say it sings to my heart, John.

William Norvell: You know, I get I get made fun of all the time on the show with people. And I talk about, you know, how successful we are all the time and just bothers people.

Jon Erwin: You know, Roll Tide in Alabama is a way to say hello goodbye. It’s a way to affirm, you know, healing. Yeah. It’s a way to sit in going for it. It’s a there’s many uses to roll tide.

William Norvell: You know, we need a link to the ESPN commercial and the bottom of the podcast.

Jon Erwin: Mini, an Alabamian has died and their last words were all tied before doing something really stupid. But anyway, it will roll tide, by the way, at any rate, a cameraman got sick three hours before the kickoff and I was apprenticing for a cameraman for my church named Mike. And for about a year I worked for him for free, carried around a tripod.

And he called me and he said, John, get over here right now. I told him I knew a guy like me. Lying is such a strong word. It’s like just neglect to inform them of your age and your level of it. Just don’t say anything at all. Just get over here. So I got in the car. My dad drove me over because I didn’t want him, but I couldn’t drive. He dropped me off four blocks from the stadium. I walked in and did what Mike told me to do. Just basically he didn’t say anything. He just said, I’m here and I’m I’m one of you and all that stuff. And I went up to Karma for and football shoots is the highest camera in the stadium. She’s up and down the field like field goals. And I was used to cameras that were very small. And this was like a telescope was huge and the lens was so powerful it could zoom in and out of a quarter of the moon. So I was just this kid is fifteen year old, homeschooled, conservative, you know, never met anyone that wasn’t a Christian, you know, share my world view kid that had just sort of joined the circus. I was literally zooming this camera just in and out of the moon and having the time of my life. And I just I got bit hard by the entertainment bug. I fell in love that day and they paid me three hundred dollars. I had never seen that much money. We didn’t have a lot growing up at all. So then I was really in love. And I remember I played basketball all the time. And we have another podcast on sports. And my coach called me and said, Are you come out for the team? And I’m like, Now they’re paying me to film games. And he didn’t have a response for that. So that was the end of sports for me. But the next week, crewing agent called me because I was, you know, Birmingham, Alabama, again, providentially is right in the heart of the SEC, which is the best conference anyway. And so there’s games within a five, six hour radius everywhere. So occurring agent called me and said, are you a freelance camera operator in Birmingham, Alabama? And I didn’t know if that was three individual jobs and I had to pick one or if that was one job. So I just said, yes, that’s I’m that that’s what I did. So she sent me down to Auburn and did another game there. And is that the airable or are involved on the air but just didn’t Auburn football game and the Auburn stadium was always very cold. At any rate, I work for ESPN really full time after that. And when I was 16 years old, my dad used money he didn’t to help me get a camera, probably the best gift I’ve ever received. And he helped me and secure a ten thousand dollar loan, which you probably shouldn’t do. There’s a lot in this story you shouldn’t do for a sixteen year old. And he taught us something that has stayed with us. He just said dream bold, dream big dream the impossible. And we’ve tried to live up to that. Ever since and we just started making stuff, you know, I think that there’s a great principle I love to read and I would just highly recommend reading. And there’s a great book called Outliers. And Malcolm Gladwell, the author of that book, talks about a principle called The Ten Thousand Hour Rule that there’s no overnight success in anyone that’s kind of achieved sort of breakout in anything, has spent 10000 hours honing and mastering their craft. And I think as craftsman, as Christians, we don’t respect the season of preparation that precedes a season of influence. And sometimes the season of preparation is a lot longer. And so we just started making stuff and made all kinds of stuff. I don’t remember. I mean, I filmed so many weddings and surgeries and birthday parties and used car commercials and all kinds of stuff, but just round and round the Praxis track, learning my craft. And I think people get it wrong when they consider film an art form. An art is something you express. I consider this a craft. A craft is something you master over a long period of time and just made all kinds of stuff. And then the Christian artist, Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant, the music artist, gave us a break for reasons I still to this day don’t understand, to do music videos for them. And the first one we did for somebody went to the top the charts, and that led to a career doing music videos, working for just a ton of both Christian and country artists and winning a lot of awards. But it was still just a job.

Henry Kaestner: Give a story on that before I go off, because I came of age in the MTV generation is a lot of our listeners did. And so we’ve never talked to anybody on this podcast. It actually made a music video. Give us a good story behind the scenes and music video.

Jon Erwin: There are many, but I’ll tell you one, we used to write these enormous treatments, five, six, seven page treatments and a label would give a song out to 10 or 20 directors, and we’d all compete by writing treatments and then they would award the video. Well, and then I had one at a time, music video of the year, I think three years in a row. And so we didn’t quite have to write as long as treatments. And so there was this band is very sort of heavy rock band, great band called Skillet, and they had a song called Hero. And so I wrote a treatment that just said, basically the band’s singing at night. Things start to blow up. Then it starts to rain. Then it rains and things start to blow up. Then everything blows up the end and gave it to the band and they’re all like, let’s do it. There’s a little paragraph treatment. And so we got all these pyrotechnics and a lot of special effects and a lot of water and things you typically don’t want to mix like water and electricity and fire and gasoline bombs and all that stuff. And I love that stuff. At any rate, the first take the drummer, I forget the name. It was their first video and she was the drummer, so she was the closest to it all. And so we go through the first take and then we yell cut. And she runs screaming because she didn’t know because it was the first video that she could stop to take if she didn’t feel safe or whatever. And so she runs screaming for a trailer. So I’m like, Andy, you should sort of deal with that.

Andy, he deals with the gas, the actors. And then I sat down in her seat and I’m like, Hey, guys, just give it to me full. And it was the propane mainly. It’s like big fire, you know, sort of like patterns of propane. And so they gave me everything. And I’m like, yeah, I feel like my skin’s melting off. We should move the band forward, you know, and no one was hurt. She’s OK. But yeah, that’s called a skillet hero. I think we can see that honestly. It’s actually the most watched Christian video of all time. Well, that one or the movie they did monster that we did for them, I think is like 250 million views. One of them is put a link to that in the show notes and maybe that’s monster. We did Monster and Hero back to back. It was great fun. Anyway, I love that type of work. And so I went to direct the second unit on a movie called Courageous, a faith based film. That real Cinderella Story, a church in Georgia called Sherwood, was doing movies that Sony was releasing. And they were very successful and they had just done a movie called Fireproof that had done very well.

And they were doing this movie Courageous, and they made them primarily with church volunteers. So they’re like a thousand church volunteers. Well, courageous. They want to do a cop movie. They want to do action scenes, foot chase scenes, car chase scenes. Well, these are like wonderful things, like chase scenes in movies. You never want to combine them with church volunteers, or somebody will die, you know, in the process of making the movie. So I was brought in as a second unit director to just do the action sequences and try to get inside Alex’s head and execute those scenes for him in a safe environment with professionals and had great fun. And Alex, you know, Southern Baptists, sometimes I think the the most powerful thing in your life can be the right question. And Alex asked me a question and he just said, John, what’s your purpose and the purpose of your work? And I couldn’t answer it. And not only could I not answer it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the whole time working for them on their film, I couldn’t stop mulling over this question of, like, not what do I do? And by the way, that’s a great question for anybody. Simon Sinek wrote a great book, Start with Why just fantastic book and the idea most people know. What they do, some people know how they do what they do. Very few people know and articulate in lead with why they do what they do. And so it was just a process of thinking about why we did what we did and what our purpose was. And that led us jumping into the fray of faith based filmmaking, which is an honor. It’s very rare thing to be working in an industry that is emerging in such a way that you can have your fingerprint on whatever it becomes. And that’s an honor to be an early pioneer in something. I remember talking with gymnast and we were doing a film, Woodlawn together, and he said, I see you and Andy and Alex and Steven and Devon Franklin and these other guys as like frontiersmen. And I said, thank you, Sean. That’s high praise coming from you. And he says, you know, John, most frontiersmen die on the frontier. Settlers are like, well, the trail will be clearly marked and will be frozen, pointing to the summit. But it’s an honor to sort of you know, if you think about what Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant, who launched our careers and music videos, did for music, they were early pioneers in what has become a platform that a lot of young people can be heard. That was our career to calling moment after the movie Courageous.

William Norvell: Oh, well, that’s an amazing story. Amazing story. Woodlawn, also nice Alabama film. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Erwin: Real Black Bear Bryant after that, starting with a movie called October Baby. We got into the business of independent filmmaking and I like the quote from then on the Mike Tyson quote, Every boxer has a plan till he gets in the ring, gets punched in the face. You know, you get the ring and you learn. But that was the jumping off point to what we do now.

William Norvell: That’s awesome, John. And so walk us through a little bit. So you’ve got independent filmmaking and now you’re in Hollywood as well. You mentioned you commute back and forth, L.A. and you mentioned Lions Gate. Walk us through what that world looks like. I think some of our audience probably just doesn’t understand. Probably a lot of misperceptions on, you know, hey, it’s Hollywood antagonistic to faith driven films or does it matter as long as you make a really good movie? How that tightrope work? How do you think about yourself and the movies you’re making sort of coming through and out of a place that I think most people may think wouldn’t necessarily like it?

Jon Erwin: That’s a great question. I would say the majority of what we did for a while was outside the system. October baby, we had to raise the money to make and also to market. It cost a lot more to market and release a film that does to make it second film we did send out.

We did with Sony and then the third film we did Woodlawn. We did independently as well as I can only imagine. And the more success we achieved, you know, the more that, you know, it’s fun to sort of operate and develop a direct relationship. You know, one of the things that you can do today is develop a direct relationship with the consumer base, and that is very powerful today. So the more you do that, the more the existing sort of industry comes to you. And now we’re in business with a wonderful partner, Lionsgate. And I would just say there’s never been a better time. I mean, I like this verse in acts where Paul says of David that he served the purposes of God in his generation. That’s cool. Like the gospel never changes, but you got to own your time. Right? And so the way to get it to people does change. And I think that there should be a strong sense of ownership of I’m going to own the tools of my time and infuse them with the gospel. And I think when you think about it from that perspective, there’s never been a more powerful tool of storytelling than mass entertainment. It’s America’s second largest export behind agriculture. You know, there’s enormous infrastructure being built worldwide, completely flips the model of sharing the gospel because countries pay for American movies. And if you can cross a certain threshold of success, these movies go on global autopilot and these countries are paying you. And so it’s an incredible model to get the gospel around the world. It’s an industry that we’ve historically been underrepresented for quite a while. As Christians, I think it’s our fault. I don’t think you can blame it on some evil Hollywood agenda. I think we’ve abandoned the playing field. In my experience, people are open. They just don’t. I mean, like the chairman, Motion Picture Group is a great friend, a mentor at Lionsgate. I’m the only Christian he knows, you know, and that’s Christianity’s fault. So I think we got to stop blaming some evil conspiracy that doesn’t exist, in my opinion. And I’m deep inside the industry and we got to get in the dating game again. You know, now L.A. is the center of narcissism of the world, in my opinion. It’s like you could buy up every billboard in L.A. and put the words get over yourself and it would be a worthy investment. The entertainment industry is an interesting trifecta of sort of power, you know, money and sex. And so I think that there’s an interesting allure to it that my first manager said, you know, it’s not a business of psychopaths. There’s a bunch of really wonderful people, but it is one of those rare businesses where psychopaths can really flourish. So I think it’s not a safe place. But, you know, that’s not an excuse for us not engaging and harnessing the power of this medium. I think it’s really important. And I think we’ve gotten way behind. And I also think that we’re in this little sort of window of time where there’s, you know, the perception that. Entertainment is cheesy or less than or not as good, I see that as a businessman and entrepreneur is a massive opportunity for a brand, but that’s another subject.

I think if you look historically like we had our second movie premiere was at the Chinese theater and Sony put on a premiere for a movie there. And, you know, that’s like the Mecca for a filmmaker. But if you think about that theater, you know, the Ten Commandments are under glass inside. You know, from Charlton Heston’s movie and first movie premiere, there was Cecil B., the King of Kings. And, you know, there’s a lot of faith history. There was a time where faith based films were the epics and the blockbusters of the day. If you take the European art tour, you know, there’s an incredible fusion between faith and art. So we’re in this sort of ditch that we got to work our way out of and I think we can wear. Christian films are associated with poor quality for a lot of reasons. That would take a long time to unpack. But I do think it’s something that we can fix and that we can improve upon and then we can reestablish our voice and culture.

And I just think if you want this is the language of the time. If we want to communicate with a generation, this is the way to do it. And I think it’s ours for the taking. I don’t think there’s ever been a moment where Hollywood is this accessible. There’s just incredible opportunities for anyone that brings a relationship with an audience. So I think when you look at I can only imagine it shocked the system to such a great extent. It triggered this phenomenon called FOMO, which is the fear of missing out. We’ve never been this connected as a culture, but we’ve also never been this lonely. And so people have an extreme fear of missing out and a need to belong. And so whenever a group, whether it’s crazy rich Asians or Fault in Our Stars or I can only imagine what parasite, for that matter, whenever any group rallies together, champions and celebrates something, it tips over into cultural FOMO, into the zeitgeist, and that’s how you start getting millions. Our unified voice is very powerful and very leverage able. And I mean, the industry thinks differently. I think LA’s problem is they think everyone is just like them and thinks like them.

And certainly a certain political mindset is somewhat of a religion. And I find we’re just not represented. There’s some Christian groups that try to influence Hollywood from the outside, but the entertainment industry is so specific you have to influence it from the inside. And that means you’ve got to get really good at what you do and you got to hold tight to your values while you do it. And I just think that there’s enormous opportunities. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what faith based films could become. I think that there’s a generation of talent behind and, you know, that will far outshine and out exceed our accomplishments. And I just think that we could make an enormous difference over the next decade in the entertainment industry. You know, my Bible says on this rock, I build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Nobody’s going to throw a gate at you. Nobody’s going to attack you with a gate. A gate is a defensive mechanisms. Gates are meant to be stormed. So we really need to embrace an offensive playbook culturally instead of a defensive playbook to reclaim our voice.

Jon Erwin: But that’s interesting. So I want to ask one question on that. So what is a faith based film mean to you? To people looking like I can think of your films, then I can think of you know, I think Angelina Jolie produced Louis Zamperini story on Brogan. And then, you know, some people were mad. It didn’t go enough into faith, but it was a story. It was pretty accurate to the book in my personal opinion. The book I read right, it maybe left out some things, but it was directionally accurate. You know, what does that phrase mean to you? And is it a broader hey, there’s multiple categories of that. But and so when you’re encouraging people, I’m interested in what are you encouraging them to do? What type of films, what type of influence could be achieved there?

Jon Erwin: That’s a great question. That’s a loaded question. It’s a question of great debate, you know, in the sort of entrepreneurism is space. One of the things that I think that you have to embrace as an entrepreneur is what differentiates you. And it’s OK to be different and to say, look, I love the work of all these people, but I see the world differently and here’s what I want to do. And there are faith based films that are meant to I think the sort of church term would be to edify the church. You know, they’re prescriptive. They’re films that are on topics that the church promotes. They’re meant for people sort of inside the church. And we start sort of almost by accident, really, on the film Woodlawn. And because it was so disproportionately used as a tool for evangelism, it’s fun to put a product in front of people and just watch how they use it. You know, I think one of the keys to being an entrepreneur is just extreme empathy for your customer and how they’re using the product. And we just start seeing tens of thousands of teenagers with Woodlawn come to Christ. And with the movie being used as a tool, we make decisions. Simon Sinek and in his book start with why I point this out. We make decisions emotionally and we back them up logically. So when you have a tool that goes straight for the heart, that’s just the way the brain is wired. That’s what God made us. And maybe that’s why Jesus told super relatable emotional stories and then he explained their truth. So the way entertainment works. I call it setting a volleyball that others spike, I’ll give you an example, there was a woman watching, I can only imagine with her son, I think, in Australia, and they were leaving the theater. And behind them was a woman they’d never met. Probably they had some sort of similar story, Dennis Quaid in the movie. And she was sort of wrecked. And she said to them, Are you guys Christians? And they said, Yeah, hello, nice to meet you. Are you? She said, no. But whatever happened to Dennis Quaid in this movie? I need to happen to me and I just need someone to explain it to me. Can you help? And they led her to Christ right there in the theater. So what a piece of entertainment. The way we design it is our when is when someone says, I need what’s in this movie, whatever’s in this movie I need in my life. And that’s happened over a hundred thousand times on the movies that we know of. And they just are these tools for people to take their results. Like if you show a youth group, if you present the gospel to youth group, you’ll have some sort of result.

But I guarantee you, if you show that same group, Woodlawn or I can only imagine you share the gospel after your results will be massively amplified. And that’s just because the movie is working on a heart level. The movie is working on a story level. A movie in its nature is a vicarious experience. That’s why it’s so powerful. That’s why it’s so dangerous. We typically observe art with movies or television. We enter the story and we experience the life of the character as if we were living in ourselves. It’s that powerful. And so when you give people a vicarious experience of the power of the gospel to change their life, they crave it afterwards. And it creates a window of time where they’re exponentially more likely to be open to the truth of the gospel with someone in their life at the local level. And that’s what we do.

So our simple metric, I guess, is we want to tell stories that are entertaining, cost as much to go to my movies. It has to go to Star Wars. So we want to entertain first. If you want me to lose my mind, people that say, well, the film doesn’t have to be entertaining, the film doesn’t have to be good because it has the gospel in it. I will lose my crap like the film should be. We should earn the message, not use it as a crutch for a poor product. So the film has to entertain and be emotionally relatable no matter what you believe. But it’s engineered to showcase the power of the gospel, to change your life or the power of the virtues of Christianity and society. And that’s our sort of funnel.

I don’t consider this to be a genre so you can do all kinds of different films that serve that same goal. But it’s film making on purpose and it’s films that are meant to lead people to life transformation. But that has to happen on the local level in relationship with people. So it’s so wonderful to see youth, pastors, moms, dads, football coaches, pastors use the films as tools to start life changing conversations. That’s the goal.

Henry Kaestner: So I love that. OK, so I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about the investing side of things. You know, enough about our ministry to understand that faith driven investor is about changing them dynamic that so many of us have done for years, which is to have all of our money run by a Merrill Lynch or somebody else like that over here in our left pocket. And then to the extent that we understand the biblical message of generosity, give away all the surplus or to different ministries over here, of course, a faith driven investor, we believe that we can accomplish many of those, if not all of those same ministry goals by storing our investment capital with an intentionality. OK, so you’ve just made the case, I think, very, very well for how movies by due to their vicarious nature through some of those examples in Australia and other thousands of times outside of movie theaters all over the world, how you’re able to accomplish that type of a ministry goal. And yet it’s also an investment by it’s right. Most investors say, OK, I think I’m getting the concept of faith driven investing. I can invest in a private equity fund or a real estate fund or maybe some public equities and things like that. But how in the world do you invest in movies? Where do you get started? And I’ve heard that these different tranches, the only people really make money are the distributors or whatever. Help us just navigate through all of that as you make the case that actually you can invest in these cultural change agents, if you will, and not only accomplish your ministry goals, as we just talked about, but maybe financial goals as well.

Jon Erwin: Help us. That’s exactly right. And to make something scalable and sustainable, you have to make it profitable. And I think that there’s a tendency in faith based filmmaking or faith based entertainment to sort of pull the finish line back to the results achieved and use poor performance or poor thinking to use the message as some sort of get out. Well, we got the gospel out, so it’s OK. And that happened. You know, I could talk about some early successes. Of course, the breakout that led to the Lionsgate deal is I can only imagine. So I could talk about the early models, but I’d like to actually hone in on failure because I think failure is really where you learn if you fail correctly, if you know how to fail. Correct.

Great retailers book principles great on that level. I love that book in terms of his process of you call looping, we did a movie called Woodlawn, by the way, that I get a mention.

Henry Kaestner: That’s first time radio has been mentioned on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. And I love that you did that for those people who had tuned in to the feature of an investor conference. You’ll notice Tracy Evans homage to Ray D’Alessio when he reaches for the Bible and he picks up, I think, the same book principles.

Jon Erwin: Yeah, it’s great. Yeah, that’s great. And Ray’s course not a believer, but his podcast on how to create a culture where the best idea wins is great. That led me to his book, which is much better and just a wonderful set of principles that work and a process for discovering principles through rapid experimentation and bite size failure. So I think to win, you got to learn how to fail. So we had some initial wins were October, baby made money, moms night out made money. They weren’t breakout hits. And I think we got a little cocky and we made Woodlawn now Woodlawn highest critical rating of any film. We’ve made our first eight plus cinema score.

There’s only about 70 films that have ever gotten any. Plus, it’s the highest grade an audience can give a movie, but I can only imagine to have that grade. We’re one of only seven directors that have to, but we made Woodlawn for about 11 million. We raised the money to make it and then we raised some of the Pinay, which is prints and advertising, which is the money to release it, but not all of it. And we didn’t sort of have control. And the long short of the stories, we didn’t accomplish our goals. We didn’t do what we set out to do. We needed to do about 20 million to break even a box office with only about 15. And it was the first real punch, you know, and what happened was, like you say, there was layers to the investment. So there was a lot of distribution fees and there was a lot of the play money in film as last in first out debt. And they got their money back, you know, with great interest rates. The money behind that, which is the equity, which is the people that are with you from the beginning, are buried at the bottom. And that was the first time I had not returned an entire investment. And I hate to lose like my role in life is like either we win or let’s play again, you know? And I just couldn’t sleep at night with the fact that we hadn’t returned the investment. About two thirds of all the money came back. But again, the equity investors took the biggest hit.

And we actually spent five months in a postmortem, which I won’t go into now, but just soliciting criticism from people inside and outside of the campaign experts. We just wanted to figure out. We wanted to learn. And that led to one hundred and seventy page playbook manifesto sort of postmortem. That was the playbook for I can only imagine. So all the thinking that led to this eighty six million dollar juggernaut that was, I can only imagine, came out of this thorough study of a failure. And I think it’s important to name it failure, because a lot of people think, oh, you got the gospel out and twenty five thousand kids were saved, but we didn’t accomplish our goals. And there’s a word for that. And it’s called failure. And I think stupid for Jesus is still stupid, you know, and we did some things that were dumb and we embrace those things. And we learned and there was a lot that we learned from I like this horse, shall said, quote, We’re leaders. That means we forfeited the right to make excuses. And so we embraced the idea that this is our fault and let’s just give that a hug. And we learned and out of that came a financial model. I would just say that God’s principles work even if they defy the status quo of your industry. And there was a status quo to my industry that these were two different classes of investors in your equity. Investors actually sit at the bottom and then either a studio or another investment group swoops in and you sort of graft into this vulture system and, you know, you don’t have any leverage or control, which are the two greatest words in my industry, at least. And you lose those things. And so you end up with fees that are out of control and a layered system and a totem pole of inequality.

And this whole category of money, this debt called Pinay to release the film, which is typically far in excess of what it takes to make the film. And that’s first in, last out. And typically in retiring that money, a lot of equity investors get screwed. And when I really started diagnosing the problem, the idea is no problem can be solved till it’s fully understood. So trying to take time to deeply understand a problem is a fun process and think your way to the bottom of it and understand its nature. I like read Alia’s book of looking at something as a machine, looking at a company as a machine and trying to understand the basic components of how that machine works. And, you know, basically this whole acquisitions market in film for studios relies on you bleeding out and having your movie and not having a means of getting your movie to the marketplace. Well, in any other business, if you just had the plan to make a widget but you didn’t have the playing time or money to market, distribute and sell your widget, you don’t have a business plan. You got a widget. Well, in film, somehow there’s just this recurring thinking that if we just get it made, everything else will happen. That’s not true. I couldn’t stay awake at night after I can only imagine because of the inequality of this financial model. And then I started thinking, like, if you look at the massive amount of Christian wealth, you guys know the stats a lot more than I do. Like, we should be able to spend our way back into the entertainment industry because there’s so much wealth within Christianity. So what’s wrong with the problem is it’s just been a lack of stewardship from people like me or other filmmakers or other people that don’t put the investor first. And people have lost money. Nobody likes to lose. And so most investors that could fund these things have either lost money in a film deal or know someone that has lost money on a film deal and that keeps the spigot turned off for entertainment as a sector. So we looked at that model of like, OK, here’s out of control fees, a whole category of money that swoops in, last in, first out, and then the people that we really love buried at the bottom. This does not feel fair.

What if we just took this sort of totem pole of inequality and turned it on its side and said, we’re going to create a blended vehicle and if you invest in this vehicle, 40 percent of your money will be deployed to equity, 60 percent to this payday, all your money making money. But we’ll have leverage to go out and get the deals that we want. And it’ll add stuff that doesn’t exist in the entertainment industry, like fairness and common sense, you know, and third grade arithmetic to the mix. And so we went out with that model with I can only imagine, and everyone inside the status quo and said, that’ll never work. These are two classes of investors. You’ll never raise the money because you’re also trying to raise more money and it just won’t work. That’s not how it’s done, but it just seemed fair and ethical. And so we went with it. And then at the time, I was living in Birmingham, Alabama, and I went to a wonderful church, a church of the highlands, the pastor there, because Hodges brilliant mind. And he was going over the financial model of the church. And typically, as a businessman, you sort of scoff at I’m saying we shouldn’t, but there’s this sort of thing like, oh, we’re smarter than churches. But he had this simple principle. I just I’m convinced life is about principles like discovered and applied. And he had this simple principle that basically the churches budget every year. Was 90 percent of their previous year’s budget, even though they grow 20 percent year over year. So the basic principle was they spent below where they were not projecting where they could go. They actually added margin. And so they’ve never done a capital raise and they’ve got like 150 million in cash and assets sitting in the bank. No debt because of the simple principle of margin.

What I realized is I was way over my skis trying to influence culture, betting really hard on where I thought we could go, not where we’ve been. So with I can only imagine we did this blended vehicle that added a dollar one return. We went out our whole pitch beyond the passion for the movie was let me just educate you how you or your friends have lost money in a film deal like it was a whistleblower pitch like this is what nobody else will tell you. And then here’s what we’re doing about it. If you don’t wanna be part of it, that’s fine, but at least you’ll be educated. And so we went out with that pitch and then we engineered I can only imagine we made a cheaper movie and we engineered it to be profitable at Woodland’s box office, which was fifteen dollars million. Now, I can only imagine did that amount of money in like two and a half days in the marketplace because we did like seventeen point one opening weekend. So everything between that number and the 86 million dollars that it achieved was margin and led to an enormous win for us and all the partners in a deal with Lionsgate. But it was a simple principle heard in a sermon.

Henry Kaestner: So I think if I have to I can’t go too much further, though, without asking, because it’s just stuck with me now. So the Church of the Highlands is one hundred and fifty million dollars in cash and they invest. This is something we can leave on the cutting room floor if this doesn’t go well. But I wonder, were they an investor in your film?

Jon Erwin: They were not. I’ve never gone out to anybody, but, you know, we work again. The other thing I think for entrepreneurs out there is just to know your investment type. I work with first generation, second generation self-made people with networks typically in the 10 to five hundred dollar range. I mean, there’s a few anomalies like the Green family is a wonderful family. They’re billionaires, but they don’t have that billionaire nest. Then they’re blue collar billionaires. You know, now, film is a it’s a speculative, high risk investment that belongs in the alternative side of your portfolio. So it’s for people that have money to burn that one to influence culture. And we structure the deals where you can make a fortune if the film hits. But, you know, I think the biggest thing for people in my line of work is you never take money that people need. And I think you put that out front and you lead with it. And we have an incredible track record, you know, with returning the investment in the money we make for people, because I think it’s all about hedging the bet. It’s all about modeling the downside, not getting stars in your eyes on the home run and really protecting that downside. So they’ve never I’ve never actually I’ve never thought of that. Maybe I should. But typically it’s people that, again, exactly what you’re saying that have done very well in some sphere of business and want to be a part of influencing culture through entertainment, through a profitable investment vehicle. But that’s structured to sort of change lives. So it was really through a thorough study. I just cannot recommend enough to entrepreneurs learn how to fail correctly in order to win and also just be constantly learning and seeking out knowledge and insight so that you can solve the problem. And I think if you can do that, if you can combine an extreme resilience with a certain level of intellectual curiosity, eventually you’ll win. You know, if you’re just the last man standing that won’t go away and you’re not afraid to confront your own mistakes and not take yourself so seriously and try different things, eventually everything will coalesce. And for me, that was March the sixteenth twenty eighteen when I can only imagine came out. And you know, again, it was interesting when my dad bought me that camera when I was sixteen, he said, if you give twenty years of your life, if you guys give twenty years of your life to something, you’ll really master it like if you stick with it. And it was twenty years almost to the month between buy me that camera and the release of I can only imagine. So I think it’s just about not giving up and learning and applying what you learn as an investor. If you’re looking at entertainment, I would say that I love one of our original investors, Raymond. He’s a wonderful friend in Dallas, Texas, and he said, you know, I don’t invest in movies. I invest in two kids from Alabama. I’ve always appreciated that about him.

But there is something to invest in, people, you know. And so I think if you’re looking at entertainment, invest in people that you believe in and stories that you believe in and ultimately voices that you want to see developed, I think that, you know, just know that, again, this should come out of an alternative side of your portfolio. There should be money that you’re not afraid to lose. The deal should be structured in your favor in the event that you win. For that reason, I love the industry that we get to work in because it is like brutally competitive. It’s like winner take all. And you have to embrace that. You can be a bare fisted capitalist and a Christian.

Not same time, you know, and it’s fun to win, you know, and we enjoy winning, but I think that when you look at this space, you know, you should again, look at it coming out of the attorneys to your portfolio. You should look at it as a means of influence and a means of developing talent and voices. You do need capital for a memorable call, patron. And the idea that every great move of God is paired with a patron and capital is the means of influencing in this space. But you just need to do it smartly. And I would say just understand that you need to hear a plan. Here’s some things that I would want to hear if I was taking a picture of filmmaker. First of all, I would want to hear a pitch from a filmmaker who also has a lot of knowledge about we don’t make films, we make films for people. And so you need to hear a filmmaker that has an extreme level. I would be listening for a sense of empathy and a great sense of knowledge on who the consumer is and who the film is for. A film needs to be made for a group, and my gotlib, who ran Samuel Goldwyn for many years, he taught me this great thing. He said, I don’t ever ask, is this a good or a great film? I ask, is this a great film for a group of people? How large is that group? And do I know how to get to them, you know? And so I would be listening for instead of like a lot of what happens is so passionate about the story and stuff like that, it’s like this is the film. And I really think this is the audience for the film. And let me tell you about the audience. I can tell you who the core consumer is for a faith based film down to their age where they live, how much their home is worth. You know, what is in their shopping cart when they buy the product, when they buy physical spending DVD, which they still do at Wal-Mart, as opposed to like lala land or something else. And so there just should be an extreme level. I just I’m a huge believer in extreme empathy when it comes to products. And so you should be listening for someone who has a relationship with an audience and has a knowledge of what that audience wants and is making a film for an audience and has some sort of a reasonable plan that has some sort of a logic of how they’re going to not only make the film, but distribute and release the film and market the film specifically. I think that there’s a horrible fault, some in entertainment. And typically this is why most people lose money in films, is because it’s a producer that’s really only thinking about getting the film made. And that’s a Herculean task. It’s so hard to make a film, but as a filmmaker, you climb that mountain and then the fog clears and you realize there’s a mountain twice as tall ahead of you that you weren’t prepared to climb. And that’s marketing and distribution. So I would look for a holistic plan to not only make the product, but take the product to the consumer. That makes sense. I do like this whole radio trick called the believability test in his company, which he wants to create a culture where the best idea wins. Everybody has a voice, but opinions are weighted and believable when someone who’s speaking has accomplished the thing in question more than three times successfully and has a great logic of cause and effect to back up their opinion, it just makes sense. I would look for that and then I would just know that the common problem and here’s a great question I would ask. The common problem in film is that there’s another category of money called prints and advertising, which is the money required to release a film nationally. So like, for instance, I can only imagine costs seven million dollars to make our initial Pinay budget was 13 and a half million, and then we scaled up to 19 million by the end. It’s very expensive to release a film nationally. So in the typical what I would call unfair system, not the studio system, but the acquisition system, the independent model, that money sits on top of the equity. And I would ask them, what’s your plan for the Pinay and just start opening that up as a discussion. I think that’ll show your sophisticated, but also show that you know how typically investors lose money and then the creative arts, you know, it’s all about empowering the right people and it’s all about talent and it’s all about, you know, working with artists is very strenuous at times, were complicated fonts. And so sometimes, you know, greatness is not going to be obvious. And so a lot of times what I do is I want to source down to the person doing the thing and make sure that person is qualified and present, oftentimes or not. So I would make sure if I were looking at a film investment that the talent is in the room and attached. A lot of times it’s sort of like you get pitches that are almost like it would be like a pitch of like, hey, I just hired Michael Jordan’s physical trainer. Let’s go make a basketball team. What’s your name? Michael Jordan. And so a lot of times you have like executives or business people, but the creative force needed to do the thing is not present in the deal. So I always try to hunt down to the bottom. Is their talent involved in this deal? You know, because it takes talent to create great art. And so I would look for that. I would look for a filmmaker that you really believe in. I do think overall it’s a worthy thing to invest in the entertainment sector. I think we should embrace that methodology of Caleb in the Bible when he said, give me this mountain, you know, to Joshua. And I think we should look at that hill with the Hollywood sign on it, with that same mantra of light. God, give us this. We want our voice back. Culturally, I just think you need to be smart about it and you need to be educated about it. And I just believe in giving. I think we keep repeating each other’s mistakes because we’re not sharing information. And I think that the way out of this is to share information. One of the things I did, I haven’t released it yet, but during College Board, I did a lot of teaching series on like ones on film writing, ones on how to raise fifty million dollars for films. And I go over all of the financial models in distribution, how to make money and where you get screwed and how to approach. It’s more for the entrepreneur side, but all the information’s in there. Happy to share that when it’s done. It’s just a way to try to get the information out there so that we can stand on each other’s shoulders. I think overall, you know, we should be encouraged that the ability to influence the world through entertainment has never been more accessible. I do defy the evil Hollywood agenda methodology. I don’t believe in it. And I’ll give you an example. I was talking after doing the Lionsgate deal. Lionsgate is the newest of the major studios, but they did like The Hunger Games and Lala Land and the John Wick films. And Joe’s the chairman of Motion Picture Group at Lionsgate. Wonderful guy, great mentor, great friend, really smart guy. And shortly after we did the deal, he said, hey, John, let me ask you a question, because you’re like the only Christian I know. He had just come in and taken over the Motion Picture Group and he said, there’s this book that’s floating around that was optioned sort of before my time, but there’s some momentum for it. And I just was wondering, it’s called Zealot The Life and Times of Jesus, the Messiah. I’m sorry, Jesus of Nazareth.

You know, you’re the only Christian I know what Christians like that think. I had read it like couple of times. I said, and the basic premise of Zealot is that Jesus was just a rebel leader, that Rome crucified like a Braveheart character. And all of the divinity stuff in Christianity was just added on later. And it’s not real. So no, Christians wouldn’t like it. But I was like, how do I explain this to you in words you can understand?

And I’m like, that would be like if I brought you a pitch for Harry Potter under the basic premise that magic wasn’t real, you’d have a kid running around London crazy with the stick. The fans would hate it. And that’s what this is. You’re taking the force out of Star Wars. You’re taking magic as a story. You’re taking out what the fans want out of the story. That’s what this is. And I said, look, I think my audience will be wrapped around this building with pitchforks and torches. I’ll go talk to him, but I don’t think they’ll isn’t. They’re going to burn your house down, man. And he laughed and he said, I get it if we won’t do that. And I said, if you don’t know what I think we should do, I mean, you do like a trilogy on the Apostles, like a character drama, like a band of brothers type thing on a generation that literally, you know, this family, this group of guys that shape the world as we know it today in one generation completely under equipped. That’s what I would do. I do a trilogy called Apostle’s is like, OK, I’m like, what is it? Let’s do that. I’m like, that’s a huge. That’s a massive. That’s a big. And I’m like, just.

He’s like, that sounds great, let’s go do it. And so that’s one of the things that we’re working on and developing, it’s going to happen. My point is, let’s say I wasn’t in the room. Joe doesn’t know. Let’s say Zellar gets made and let’s say every Christian conservative blog out there is like the evil Hollywood agenda. It wasn’t an evil agenda. It was a lack of knowledge because there’s no one in his life representing our audience.

It’s our fault we’re not in the room. And to know that I’m the only and it’s funny, we did the Lionsgate jump in was the CEO of Lionsgate is a great guy and he’s a good friend. And when he came out, did the deal, came out of his office, one of the heads of the departments waved me over. He’s like, come here, come here. And I’m like, hi, I’m Johnny told me his name. And he said, I want you to know I’m a Christian and I’m here. And there’s a few of us and we’re really glad you’re here, you know.

And after I said that, I think this is like you can come out about it, you know, I came in through the front door. They’re pay me a lot of money to be here. And this is your moment, you know? So I think that there’s just a complete lack of representation. And again, I love that or shows like what were leaders, which means we forfeited the right to make excuses. I just think as Christians, we have to take on the mantra. We have to stop blaming and we have to engage and we’re not in the game in Hollywood. That is our fault. There was a time when we were I don’t know why we’re not today, but we’ve abandoned the cultural playing field and we’re suffering the consequences. And I think the only way to get to a generation is to get back in the game. So I think before you change the way you act, you have to change the way you think. And we have to start thinking differently about the nature of the problem when it comes to entertainment, because I think we’re in this perpetual victim mindset and we’re getting nowhere with that mindset. And I think that mindset, you know, we all have the right to our own opinions, but we do not all have the right to our own set of facts. You know, there’s one set of facts, and I’m deep inside the industry. The facts don’t line up with our opinions on the issue of evil Hollywood agenda. It’s our fault. And if it’s our fault, it’s ours to fix. And I just think that we need to get in the game and we need to trailblazer a little bit and get some paths where a lot of other Christians can follow us. I just think that there’s enormous talent emerging and we need to give them a voice and we need to give em a voice as quickly as we can. The only way to do that is to be smart and to be smart, not artists, to be smart entrepreneurs and to do smart investments and to learn and to embrace the idea that the entertainment value of the product, the success of the product in the marketplace is as important as the message we’re putting into it, because that’s the way we make the scalable and sustainable over the long haul.

William Norvell: John, thank you for joining us. This is just been amazing. I’m just thankful for you sharing this and being a part of this industry. And unfortunately, we do have to come to a close. And the way we love to close our shows is exactly what you have laid out in what you do for a living. So no pressure, but we’d love to see how God’s word transcends our guest and our listeners. And it’s just amazing the stories we get to hear where God was working on your heart on a certain piece of scripture. And one of our listeners needed that as an encouragement or an admonishment or exhortation or whatever that may be today. And so if you and I we invite you to share where God has you and his word could be something you’ve been studying for months, could be the season, could be something he told you this morning. But just invite us into your world and in your study of his word.

Jon Erwin: Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. Number one, on the level of just being an entrepreneur, one of the things I like is when Paul in Philippians three says, you know, not that I have already attained or already perfected, but I follow after so that I can sort of apprehend that for which I’ve also been apprehended. And he said, I don’t allow myself to sort of have done this. I was forced to memorize in the King James version because I’m from Birmingham, Alabama Baptist, he says. But this one thing I do, forgetting what’s behind and reaching towards what’s ahead, I press on towards the price of my calling of God in Christ Jesus. I think that idea of relentless focus, you know, and just focusing on a few things that are important instead of a lot of things that aren’t important, I think as an entrepreneur would be my advice. And I think that that just keep the main thing, the main thing. Know what your purpose is. No. What you want to achieve. No. What’s most important and not necessarily just what’s most urgent and just chase those things relentlessly. I think the people in my industry that succeed have a level of relentless drive and passion, energy and focus that’s uncommon. And I think that’s biblical. I would say on a personal level, you know, we’re doing this covid document. I’m not really allowed to talk about it, but I’ll mention a little bit on sort of the all encompassing history of Christian music. And every artist in the world is involved in it because they all had nothing to do. And one of things I love about it and then I just thought about the Bible. So many of us feel like we’re not equipped, therefore we can’t be called like I’m a messed up human being. I have problems. You know, I’m working in the entertainment industry. I don’t have a college degree. I’m from Birmingham. And then you read through the Bible. And it was just interesting with the music. How all these artists sort of built on each other’s shoulders and then built something really magical and inspired the world with their music, with a lot of flawed people in there, a lot of tragedy, a lot of betrayal, a lot of heartache, and yet great music, wonderful people, but flawed. And then you look through the Bible and God goes out of his way to call flawed people for reasons unknown, I think. So he gets the glory instead of us and you know, the whole jars of clay idea. And I think that that was a great inspiration to me, because I think if you look at yourself, you can say, you know, I’m just not good enough, I’m not a good enough Christian or I’m not educated enough or whatever. There’s always that. And I think to just rest in the idea of God called me, I didn’t call me. And because I’m called, he’s going to qualify me. Right. So God qualifies those that he calls he doesn’t call the qualified. And you don’t have to be perfect or be unflawed to be able to relentlessly chase your calling and be a person of influence and great influence to be educated. You don’t have to do what the world would say is the person that would. A buddy of mine Mike Flaherty founded a company called Walden that I really like. They made the Narnia films and he’s a believer. And he’s like, if Lionsgate only knew that they’ve rested the future of their studio into home homeschooled kids from Birmingham, Alabama. You know, and I just think that if God puts a calling in your life, you don’t have to feel like you’re qualified to use your gift. And that’s probably really recently been on my heart and soul in mind just from this documentary that we’re working on. And I’m far from perfect. And yet God called me and I’m far from qualified, and yet God called me. And I think you can be, too. So I think that that’s what’s probably most on my mind these days.

William Norvell: Amen, Amen, Amen such a great place to end. And especially as most of our entrepreneurs see see big dreams and see something in their soul where God’s gone towards it and there’s no lack of naysayers or you shouldn’t do that or whatever that may be. So I just thank you for sharing that message. Thank you for spend time with us. Thank you for running towards a place where people have run away from in such a great way.

Jon Erwin: Well, you guys, too. And thanks for putting the resources out there, both for entrepreneurs and for investors to make a difference in the world. You know, again, many of the things that I didn’t know the difference between I can only imagine massive success. And Woodlawn was not a better movie. I had to become a better leader. I had to become a better entrepreneur, and we had to become a better company and we had to model some smarter financial principles that are universal. So thanks for taking the time to put resources out there. And thanks for your podcast. Thanks for having me on. God bless you guys.

Henry Kaestner: So along the way at Wal-Mart, and then you ended up in Motorola and GSK and a bunch of other organizations at the center of an organization you end up finding yourself struggling to manage people and mentor others. How did that how did you talk to us through that progression and how that how you started to realize that you had something to impart to others?

Alan Clayton: So I think part of that came through like me. I met my wife working at Wal-Mart and then and managing the people there was interesting. So I probably had a team of 10 people working for me at that stage. But like I say that my sense of working in a very big organization was there was a kind of limit to what you can do. And some of the people that I came across and some of the ways business was organized didn’t really kind of sit very well with what I thought life was supposed to be about or what what I wanted to do. I mean, in the world of sales and marketing, it’s a lot to do with like people and, you know, community and, you know, buying and selling and trading and telling stories and all all the people and ideas stuff, basically. So if you think about left brain and right brain people, you know, I’m pretty sure at that stage I was clearly identified in my own mind as a very right brain kind of individual. So what happened was I left Wal-Mart at that stage and actually the first thing was I set up a children’s book publishing company with a friend. So this was into entrepreneurship on a very small scale. And second step beyond that, because I didn’t have a stake in that particular company. We published and sold a lot of books. But the first thing that I probably did was to go on to the mentoring thing was I in my own world, I set off to pursue a vision which was very clearly to go live in a particular part of the UK known as the Lake District, like amazing part of the countryside, Coleridge and Wordsworth and all the poets grew up. I spent ages walking around climbing hills in that part of the world, so I knew that’s where I wanted to live. Secondarily, I needed to earn a living. And so I won’t tell you the whole story today. But I basically bought a small hotel because I desperately wanted to have some community kind of place where I could live and work and contribute to others. So this business where I actually converted a very successful steak house into a not so successful vegetarian restaurant back in 1990.

Henry Kaestner: I’m imagining right now I just have to interject. I’m imagining John Cleese in Fawlty Towers right now.

Alan Clayton: Right. So so this is it. So to this day, running this business, which was known as the great little teashop, it was it was partly vegetarian restaurant, partly coffee shop. But the important thing for me was that I wanted to put something back into the environment and to have groups of people do this. So we ran conservation holidays for people, a level above students who want to sleep on a church hall for the weekend. But to for people like me who want a glass of wine with dinner and a hot shower after going out building footpaths up the hills for the day. And so this was this was my business. Now, the challenge is being a left right brain individual. I didn’t actually have any money to do this, so I had to borrow more than 100 percent of the money in a world where interest rates were 15 percent. And I can do math, but like that was the challenge that that business faced. So what happened was that I got together with three or four of the other individuals that I’ve been involved with in the kind of personal development world in the workshops there. And we decided to set up a coaching consultancy. So the idea was, you know, I had this incredible personal experience. If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have believed I could do it. So to to to buy a hotel with no money and to set up an enterprise like that of the like that I did that was a demonstration to me of actually how much most of us are capable of so much more than we think. And so armed with that experience, two or three people we got together as maybe we could put a sort of sort of executive coaching type program together and go back into big business and multinational companies and basically share some of those techniques and tools and processes, but also backed up by the experience. And that’s how the coaching thing became became a thing and the mentoring. So, you know, starting from scratch again, I had to sell executive coaching programs to the likes of Unilever research from scratch, which, you know, because of my setting up my own business experience before that, like, I managed to do that. But looking back again, it’s like, you know, how did I do that? And all along, you know, as I look back now, God had a plan. God was taking us from like a church community to church community as we moved around the country a little bit and each time. Those were very different and very kind of supportive and ran very much in parallel with everything that was going on in a in a kind of work life.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so I’m going to hand this over to William here in a second, because I know he’s got a ton of questions to ask you on this. But before I do that, I just want to ask you one thing, because that’s a very interesting background. That is not the usual path to what somebody would think is executive coaching experience in big business. Lots of bureaucracy going off and doing it on your own and running this this restaurant and hotel. What changed about your executive coaching? I think I might know the answer to this about taking a risk, but maybe I don’t. What about your time as a proprietor as a as a business owner, entrepreneur? What changed your perspective of how to coach people at a place like Unilever that you didn’t have, having only been in a big business?

Alan Clayton: Right. So there’s a very simple answer that basically it was the idea that if I could do things that I didn’t believe I could do before, then maybe I could help other people to do their equivalent so that the big the big a ha was. Most of us are capable of doing more than we can. And obviously what large organizations are desperately trying to do is encourage that that staff that in this case, they’re kind of fast track managers to really become the potential leaders of the future that they have inside themselves. But they didn’t really have a process to help bring that out. And I think that’s what you know. So there was the tools and the practice, the practicalities of it. But again, you know, so encouraging is a lot of what I spent my days doing. And that’s in the early days. That’s really what I was doing for people that Unilever had earmarked as leaders of the future. And my job was just to kind of push them back out. You can do this, trust me. You can do this because even an idiot like me can do it.

William Norvell: That’s a good that’s a good book title right there. I don’t know if you’re I don’t know if you’re looking to write a book, but even idiot like me can do it is that’s got a ring to it. Just throw it out there

Alan Clayton: Ok. note to self

William Norvell: if you know, I only take two percent of the royalties for the idea. Alan, so you’ve been able to explain to tell us to bring us up to date. What do you do now? I know your title on LinkedIn because I saw it and I was like, that’s what I want to be one day and I don’t even know what it means. You call yourself the global roaming mentor. Tell us what organization you work with, what that means, and kind of what you do with SOSV.

Alan Clayton: So after the coaching in in the likes of Unilever or Motorola, my wife and I moved to Ireland, which is where I am today. So that was 23 years ago ish. We then started up a couple of other businesses. Somebody invented the Internet for me. And so I thought what we should do is have a build a business where you could earn money while you’re asleep. So we built a company called […], which was essentially a fair trade chocolate company online. We sold chocolate worlds from part of the price of which went directly to hunger relief projects in Africa. So we partnered with a charity and honored at the time. So that was another business. Then we started bringing Fairtrade Foods into Ireland and putting them into distribution and so on. And then I met a guy called Sean O’Sullivan who came to live in Kinsale on this lovely town in Ireland. And Sean, successful entrepreneur, originally from New York, came here. We met. He invested in another company that I set up, which is a rather fair trade kind of food company. And after two years of doing that, Sean said to me, well, what S.O.S Ventures is going to do now is we’re going to run accelerated programs and we don’t need you to do is bring this kind of people in ideas, mindset, all this kind of right brain set of skills and characteristics, if you like, together with a lot of the tech entrepreneurs we’re about to invest in. And I want you to do that for all the startups that we’re going to invest in. So that’s why I go back 10 or 11 years. That’s how I suppose we started. We started running accelerators along very similar lines to textiles and other people. We started doing it in China because that’s a place that nobody was doing it. And and yeah, so so that’s only then shows that when you need a job title. And so basically I just made up so the programs all over the world. So I guess it has to be global. I would doing a lot of traveling, which I kind of enjoy. So that’s the roaming bit. And essentially I visit all of the programs every year. I meet all the founders and all of the companies and provide some kind of assessments and processes to help them become better entrepreneurs over time.

Henry Kaestner: Well, now I understand why it’s called SOSV, right. Although I get that, you know, it’s the amount of investments and the amount of entrepreneurs. That you invest both time and money in is staggering. It’s very significant. Tell our audience a bit about that.

Alan Clayton: Yeah, it is. So in the last 10 years, it’s like last October, I think we got a thousand a thousand start ups that we’ve invested in roughly 20, 30, 40 million dollars a year across all of those companies. The companies have come from over 75 different countries, but it started with the program, which actually is celebrating 10 years birthday this year called China Accelerator. So China Accelerator is a software accelerator program for entrepreneurs coming from anywhere. Most of them are not actually Chinese. It’s kind of cross-border Internet helping software entrepreneurs, trying to build a market inside China or around Asia. And so in, you know, typical accelerator style, we would we would recruit 10 or 12 companies in a program the entrepreneurs would come to in the early days, a place called Dalian in China City I’d never heard of, which is obviously twice the size of the country I live in. And we ran the first program. And then because we were in China, people said people started applying to a software program, but they wanted to build hardware. So and you can’t really do that in Dalian and nor even in Shanghai, where we moved the China accelerator program to. But you could probably do that in Shenzhen, down just next to Hong Kong, obviously. So that’s the inspiration for the second program we set up, which is known as Hack’s Hardware Accelerator. So that was the second program. So, again, we were running two cohorts of each of those programs every year. So each program is you know, we’re probably investing in 25 to 30 companies per program per year. And at that stage, seven years ago, there were the two programs. And then we set up a biotech program out of San Francisco about six, seven years ago now. And we also ran a European version of that program for four or five years. And that has kind of moved, if you like, to New York. So now we have a program in San Francisco and a clone in New York. We ran a food program out of New York for a few years. And the China program has a spin off in Taipei, outside of China firewall, if you like, which is really for mobile only startups that are looking to scale into Asia. So if you add all that up, there’s sort of five main programs running twice a year, 10, 12 companies per program. We actually also have a block chain kind of program out of New York as well, which is invested in probably 30 companies in the last two or three years. So if you add all that up together, it’s a thousand companies, ten years, a lot of money. And me.

William Norvell: And and and a lot of mentoring, I would assume, as a global mentor.

Alan Clayton: So there is a bit of structure to it, which I probably didn’t point out.

William Norvell: So this is great. I want to get into the entrepreneur investor relationship a little bit. What walk us through kind of what America’s mentoring is a word. You know, I mean, I feel like it gets thrown out a lot. And and I personally have a view that almost every every other person I talk to has a different version of what that word means. And especially in the investing landscape, when someone gives you money, are they are they supposed to be your mentor? Are they supposed to help you find a mentor? Is that what a […] Role is? If so, what does that look like? I would love for you to dove into that a little bit.

Alan Clayton: OK, so so I have a kind of particular answer to that. So one of the things that I studied all looked at over the years is the whole field of neurolinguistic programing, which worked until now, until natural language program was invented a bit later. That’s the only MLP I’ve ever heard of. Anyway, so in the world of neurolinguistic programing, there’s a model known as neurological levels. And without drawing it or explaining it in detail, the way I can relate to mentoring is, you know, we all we’re all very busy with our To-Do lists. And if you know, the clue is in the word, the things that we do are obviously our behavior and the way you kind of control or organize your behavior, if you’re if you need someone to do it for you, you have a supervisor. So supervising operates at the level of what we’re doing. Our behavior, if you like training, which is another word, is often in the mix. Training is a bit training is what you’re doing when you’re basically equipping somebody with a set of skills. So you teach somebody an ability or a competence to do something which is thighed. The next level up, the next level above that, which is really are kind of values and beliefs, if you like. That’s what I think of as coaching. So coaching is a relationship where the client is trying to get from A to B and they need to know where and B are. And the coach is the person who comes along with a set of process tools so they don’t have to be an expert in the domain. If that is a good idea that they’re not, they have to be an expert in process. And so that’s coaching. Mentoring is kind of a level above that. So all I know about mentoring is like I think about it like this, to be a good mentor, you just have to be human and you have to be able to sit in a room with another human being. And as a mentor, the only thing you have is the best interests of your client at heart. If you can do that, you’d be a good mentor. So in the end, in the startup world, in the investing world, those things do get confused. So sometimes mentoring is basically supervision because this person is telling you what to do. Let’s not mentoring. Sometimes they’re, you know, they’re just making connections for you. That’s not really mentoring either. That’s just making introductions or they’re just giving you the money, which is not mentoring, obviously. So, yeah, it’s a it’s a really interesting topic. But know for me, mentoring is essentially just sitting down with another human being. And the key is for you to have their best interests at heart. I mean, you know, if we think about this as a faith conversation, you know, Jesus is a great mentor. Jesus only has our best interests at heart. He has very little idea about what, you know, some of the things that got in my mind or the world that I live in in detail, he hasn’t got time to supervise me or even coach me. But he’s an amazing mentor.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so, yes, is this is a faith conversation, the reason why I’m so interested in talking about this, because I think that there’s an increasing number of Faith Driven Investor that are coming into the the angel world and many of them have already been there. And there’s some amount of I was going to say that on one level, some angels think of themselves, fancy themselves as venture capitalists, and they’re looking for 100 percent markup in the next year to the next institution around can get done. And and they think of themselves as venture capitalists, except that they don’t have to raise outside capital. And I think that they can be oftentimes a recipe for a challenge and that it presents pressures onto the entrepreneur that may or may not be helpful, that are likely mostly not helpful. However, the reverse part, the glass half full part of this is that we as investors have a unique opportunity of coming into the life of an entrepreneur and to encourage them, to mentor them, to disciple them. Even maybe discipline is a part of you know, maybe you can unpack that a little bit about the spiritual formation and how to love one an entrepreneur and what that looks like, the special role of an investor that has skin in the game. They have a vested interest in the enterprise. That is the passion of the entrepreneur. And yet, if you do it right, you can be an encouragement, but you can also help the entrepreneur in and in loving on them. Can you love on somebody as a mentor once you unpack that a little bit and help me to go where I’d like to go?

Alan Clayton: So it’s great that you introduce the word discipleship because I just quickly thinking, I mean, mentoring and discipleship and discipling probably seem to me like roughly at the same kind of level in the same kind of things. The thing that that I’m just the two thoughts in my mind. One is like what makes it what makes a good relationship between an angel investor and any other investor, really and an entrepreneur is is the idea of a shared vision. So something in a sense that both parties have consciously committed themselves to. And when I say committed, I mean so you could there’s a difference between being committed to something and being dependent on something. So sometimes as an investor, we sort of we’re committed to the business, but we’re actually dependent on getting a return on our money. And so the you know, somewhere along the pathway, the the shared vision or the common interest slightly diverges. And ultimately that’s going to cause the issue. So if people are genuinely committed to the end result, then, you know, by definition, both parties will do whatever it takes. They will sacrifice whatever it takes based on what they have, their own resources and their own skills to get to the end result. Often, you know, even though, you know, in the short term or consciously, people think they’ve done that, sometimes it turns out that they haven’t. Does that make sense? So for that reason, I believe that, you know, that relationship discipling and or mentoring or whatever between the investor and the entrepreneur absolutely can work and should work.

Henry Kaestner: Where do you see opportunities and, you know, you do a lot of mentoring, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs, some large number of those entrepreneurs have other investors in their cap stack, other angels, other direct investors. Where do you see common mistakes that an angel direct investor would make as they interact with the entrepreneur that they’ve invested in?

Alan Clayton: So it’s funny because, I mean, in many ways, when I saw […] investing because it’s at the very early stages, we’re not that unlike a corporate angel investor, if you like. And so the challenge in my experience comes when the business led by the entrepreneur starts to grow. Obviously, other investors get involved. And let’s you know, if I was to think of ourselves as the angel investor, we we get a bit crowded out. So other investors come along, invest bigger sums of money, eventually bigger stakes in the company and sort of without realizing it or anybody consciously planning this, they they seduce the entrepreneur. If that’s the right word or distract the entrepreneur, they become a more important influence, certainly in the practicalities of the business. And so, you know, if we’re left with only a small stake in the company, there’s a limit in practical terms to to what we are an angel investor can do. So the danger is that the other the other investors that come along maybe don’t quite share the same kind of end result or the same vision.

William Norvell: That’s interesting, I mean, so I want to switch switch gears just a little bit, one of the things I’ve seen you write about before, and I’m sure we’ll link to, is I want you to have a chance to mentor some of the investors here and, of course, maybe how they would interact with entrepreneurs as they come in. And, of course, we have entrepreneurs listening as well. Could you talk a little bit about your concept of pitching in pairs and walk us through that concept and kind of what you’ve written on that?

Alan Clayton: Yeah, so, yeah, so so I mean, I’ve done a bunch of selling in my lifetime and I’ve helped other people try and do that as well. And whether you’re selling your wares or whether you’re pitching your business to investors, it’s pretty much the same thing. It’s all a negotiation between human beings. And one of the things that I learned is that if you go to a meeting with an investor or indeed with a customer on your own, there’s generally there’s too much to do. So we all talk often about the fact that if you have your first meeting with an investor or indeed with a customer, the best thing that you can possibly walk away with at the end of that meeting with is a friend, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to walk away with a deal. It just happens that at any meeting in those sorts, there’s really two things to parallel activities going along that it’s very difficult to be master of. It’s difficult to be master of both. So on the one hand, you have the sort of task at hand, which is get the investment, get the customer deal or whatever. And that involves showing up on time, having your presentation ready, making sure you get the answers to the preplanned questions that you have leaving on time, basically going through really the left brain side of the whole process. But in parallel, there’s this kind of somewhat more unconscious thing going on, which is called building a relationship, you know, engaging with another human being, getting them excited, because, as we all know, we we have more kind of governed by our emotions than our intellect. But to have a single person in a meeting trying to concentrate on getting the deal done and making a friend is pretty difficult, even even technically. So what you what I’ve always learned to do is like two people going to the meeting. One person’s responsibility is to try and walk away with the deal done or the outcome. And the other person’s responsibility is to make sure we leave with a friend. So it’s been kind of technical terms, that means somebody is sitting in the meeting doing nothing other than just keeping an eye on this other human being in the room. So it’s all about kind of body language, all of those kind of practical things, and noticing whether this person looks uncomfortable at all, noticing whether this would be a good time to crack a joke, noticing whether this would be a good time to call a time out and have a cup of tea or change the subject completely. So their job is just that kind of, you know, right brain humanistic approach to life. And the other person is the more organized get the deal done, the kind of closing approach to life.

Henry Kaestner: So, Alan, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I’m actually surprised that I’ve that we’ve never talked about that at Faith Driven Entrepreneur before, because that is absolutely the value of a partnership. Right. We at Sovereign’s Capital Love Investment Partners. We think that there’s so much about God sending us out in twos. There’s iron sharpening iron, and there’s just really something about being in the throes of business together. You can look at […] and look at all sorts of different great examples in the Bible and literature. And yet when people ask me for practical example, I come down to just this. When I think about the key business meetings that we had had, it began with how many times will come out of that meeting where David says, I think we need to go back in and we need to change this part of the proposal, because he noticed the way that he crossed his arms differently or just was able to read something that I completely didn’t see. It’s not as if I was blind. I was watching what he was doing, too, but I didn’t pick up on it. And he’s able to understand, David, to be able to understand the interplay that I had and how he would respond in. And there’s something very valuable there. And I’m glad you mention it, because I think most entrepreneurs miss it. I also think that there’s there’s great value on the investor side. I think that many investors will take meetings with entrepreneurs one on one. And yet when I have a meeting with Luke or any one of my partners at sovereigns, we’re able to pick up different things about the entrepreneur, about their command of the business plan or the competitive landscape, or just where they’re uncomfortable about different things. That helps us to pick up on yellow flag for integrity or how they talk about their faith or a whole bunch of different things. It’s almost impossible for just one person to pick up. And when you’re thinking about putting an investment capital behind somebody, that’s a really good chance to make sure that you’ve got somebody else who is there providing counsel who is able to interact. That’s different than having an interview with an entrepreneur, then coming back to an investment committee and getting all clinical. We’re investing in people and we can’t do it all ourselves and picking up on all the signals and all the clues. And we need to

Alan Clayton: I think the other thing I usually explained to me was like, if you do walk out of the room without a friendship, you won’t be going back. But that’s why in real life, if nobody’s going to invest in someone they don’t like and nobody’s going to buy anything from someone that they don’t like, because there’s plenty of logical reasons that we usually make up, if we have to, to get get that done so that, you know, as long as there’s a working relationship, all bets are on potentially good.

William Norvell: So that one of the last things I’d love to ask, that’s that’s really interesting. So I do feel like at times, you know, I do this and I’ve seen other people do it, you know, there’s a chance to romanticize an investor entrepreneur relationship and say, hey, I am going to be a mentor. And I and I just care about their wellbeing and all of those things. I’m interested. Do you think that’s possible and still be a fiduciary? Do you think that’s a unique role that you get to play where someone has set you up in a position to love entrepreneurs within the portfolio differently than the lead investor? Or how do you think about that? How do you think about that? Is that’s something to pursue for everyone? Should they set someone up like you just just kind of walk us through how you would think about doing that throughout these relationships?

Alan Clayton: Yeah, it’s funny in a sense, because you could argue that I’m like a nominated mentor for all of the all of these companies. And the truth is, when I meet them all, but I probably spend like half a day with all of them and sometimes in groups, and then the relationship continues with some over a period of time. So that’s the idea of mentoring. I mean, in large companies, again, mentoring is often confused because the mentors are nominated by the company and given to the mentees, whereas the best way that mentoring works is for the mentee to to choose their own mentor. You know, I think one of the things that I talked about a lot in in church that that I’m familiar with in San Francisco, that at APEC is the idea of a wisdom table. Now, the people that you have your wisdom table, if you like, you choose them to be that they don’t choose to be there. So the mentor mentee relationship, you know, should be one where the mentee gets to, you know, invite and choose their own mentors, not the other way around. So, I mean, the other part of your question, I think maybe that I have a gift. I have some gifts that allow me, like in a financial I don’t really have any very I don’t have any significant ax to grind in terms of the financial outcomes of these relationships. So, like, what else is there? So the rest is is the is the human side of things. I mean, you know, life is about living in community and, you know, pursuing a dream or vision, building a kingdom

Alan Clayton: As a mentor and a disciple for somebody motivated by their faith. What are the challenges that U.S.A., our struggle with that might otherwise surprise somebody? How would you characterize maybe maybe that’s an unfair way to characterize the question, maybe it doesn’t matter where they surprise somebody or not, but what are the attributes that you pick up on an entrepreneur from having mentored and worked with thousands of them that you might impart to a investor that may have only had 10 interactions with entrepreneurs before? And what are the things to be alert for? What are the some common needs that they have that otherwise you might not pick up until the fourth or fifth meeting, but maybe you could ask some questions earlier on to draw things out.

Alan Clayton: If if there’s one really simple thing that investors often don’t ask the founders, it’s just to ask them what they do at the weekend, because, like I say, the whole thing is going to rely on a relationship and it takes time to build a one, you know, piece of that that is going to have to be around forever, which is trust. And if you think about it, trust, if you think about the people that you trust, the people that you would give the most challenging tasks in the world to, that you just don’t have time or ability to do. Those people are always the people that over time have consistently kept the promises that they made to you. That’s why you gave them that job, because you can rely on them. So I don’t think there’s any shortcut actually to building that kind of trust. The only other way you might I mean, you can find references and talk to people who’ve been around this person for some time. But I mean, in terms of a direct relationship between the investor and the entrepreneur, it does just take at least a little bit of time. But the fundamental kind of building block of that is, you know, if this person consistently shows up exactly on time, if they’re always prepared, you know, if they if basically if they keep their commitments. So as a company grows, you know, what the investors are looking for is a never ending growing revenue stream. So often the startups will present the figures at the beginning of the year and say, well, you know, we’re going to turn over a million dollars this year and at the end of the year, what they fail to realize is that if you don’t do that without really realizing it, the most important thing that you will lose is, is the trust of your investor. It’s nothing to do with the performance of the company or the ability or interest of the investor to invest. It’s this kind of trust thing. So the more the two parties trust each other, the more this thing is likely to grow. And I’m not sure there’s a desperate shortcut that I know of to to figure that out.

Henry Kaestner: I’m going to suggest something. And we’re doing a podcast as an audio podcast so people can’t see the video. And so I think that one of the secret sauce sources to you and your effectiveness, because you’re known as being very effective at this, is the fact that you have this winsomeness about you and you have a very encouraging demeanor. You smile a lot. You have an expansive expression, and you just buy who you are and you lean in. I mean, even right now, an audio podcast, you’re leaning in. And I think that there’s so much to the to the body posture and just the fact that I think that it’s impossible to spend too much time with you. And I get the fact that you actually are interested in being somebody’s friend. There’s an integrity there. There’s a genuineness there that can’t fake it. And maybe there are no shortcuts to being able to be a really good mentor. And yet, if you spent time with Alan Clayton, you get a sense that he actually really does care about you. And if he asked you about your weekend is because he’s actually really interested and you’ve got know, I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, but you’ve got to winsome smile and just and I think that that’s really key and that’s so basic. Right. So basic. But, you know, whether it’s a doctor with bedside manner or just people in business, you miss that. You have a genuine interest in another human being which allows you to to do that. You’ve got an interest in you know, you are interested in the Lake District and and building footpaths and building restaurants and hotels. And you’ve got this lifelong you know, you’re living in a bucolic, incredible town in southwestern Ireland. You’re an interesting dude yourself. And so I’ve been blessed by spending time with you. Why? I’m always asked the same question of all of our guests as we close out. So, William, I definitely want to make sure we do that here, too.

William Norvell: I’ll just say I agree with Henry’s assessment to save us time here and grateful for your time, Alan. And as we do come to a close, the thing we love to do is try to encourage our guests and our listeners to come alongside God’s word in scripture. And so what we ask is, you know, is there is there a place in God’s scripture that may be coming alive to you during the season? Could be this morning. Could be something you’ve been meditating on for a while. But if you wouldn’t mind sharing with our listeners where he has, you would be most appreciative.

Alan Clayton: Josh. Yeah, um. That’s a really hard question. I think that’s

William Norvell: why we love it.

Alan Clayton: Yeah, I know. I guess the there’s a word, actually, so when I think of enthusiasm, I’m not great on translating these words, but somebody translated the word enthusiasm to me as an energy from God. And, you know, I think it’s a fantastic attribute. And if there’s anything I can do by way of encouraging and playing the role that I play, like God’s energy, enthusiasm is something that. Yeah, that makes me excited.

William Norvell: Amen, amen, may we all find more of God’s energy and enthusiasm this day and through your podcast?

Henry Kaestner: Allan, thank you very much. Grateful to have you with us.

Alan Clayton: No worries. Really a pleasure to meet you guys. And if you can edit that into something that is even half respectable,

Henry Kaestner: I’m sure I’m sure we can be grateful for your brother. Worries for the next time.

Alan Clayton: Thanks a lot. OK, cheers, William. Bye bye.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast special edition, kind of halfway in between last year’s 20 20 Faith Driven Entrepreneur conference, which I thought was awesome. We can talk about that and maybe share some favorite moments with my co-host and great friends, Rusty Rueff and William Norvall. And then halfway between then, of course, and the one that’s upcoming. So a good chance to reflect on the things that we were learned last year, the things that we’ve been reflecting on over the course of the last six months, and then the things that were kind of anticipating and hopeful for over the course of the next six months leading into, of course, this conference. So Rusty, William, welcome.

Rusty Rueff: Always good to be together.

Henry Kaestner: So fascinating. You know, Justin and Sue, Alice and Jonny have come to us to ask us to talk about the conference. And there’s so much to talk about because this year we’re going to be rolling out a new watch party. We’re going to have much more of a local implementation. We’ve got an incredible lineup of speakers again, which is kind of hard because we had so many great ones last year. The thought is you go back to the same great people like Phil said, you say the same thing or not. But we’ll talk about how we’ve been able to avoid that and why we’re so excited about this actually being a new slate of topics and speakers. But before we get there, let’s reflect a little bit. It’s been six months since we did the last conference, and there have been some presentations that have continued to really make an impact in my life. And some I knew it at the time and then some have just been kind of creeping back up. Upon reflection. I don’t know if you guys have experienced the same.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I actually think it’s worth even before we dove into that, just let’s remind everybody that, you know, the conference that was the conference was not the conference that was going to be the conference. Right. I mean, we went into this planning for a couple of days of fellowship in Dallas and, you know, being together and shaking hands and giving hugs from people from all over the country and all over the world who’ve been our listeners and participants and guests and everything got turned upside down by covid. But yet we persevered through and we tried something that, you know, we didn’t know would work or didn’t work. And it did work by God’s grace. It’s actually now leading us as we talk about what we’re going to do this year, you know, into a hybrid of that. But, you know, it was pretty special given the fact that we were all doing it from our homes and our offices and, you know, sitting there on Zoome nonstop for a couple of days. But, you know, hats off to, you know, the team who pulled it all off, you know, and coordinated that. That’s not easy.

Henry Kaestner: No, it’s not easy. William, you probably had some favorites. I know you had some favorites. I know you’re a huge fan. I know you’re a fan much of all the speakers. And that’s one of the things the team was nice enough to allow us to get some input and last year’s speaker list in this upcoming one as well. But tell us about some of the speakers. And by the way, as we talk about that, know that we’re about to launch and maybe by the time this is released, we’ll have released the Faith Driven Athlete, all of these speakers, all these talks that we’re going to be talking about, you’re going to be able to see on your mobile device, on your computer, and really we’re just really fired up about that. But OK, William, would you like.

William Norvell: Yeah, it’s exciting. I’m excited to be up to another team and working hard on it and to be able to take a five hour conference, you know, that we did with, I think, close to 40 speakers and sort of distill that down into different topics and different areas. So you have to watch all of it right now. If you if you try to find it, you’ll probably find the five hour link or some some things. But it’s going to be amazing. And as I do hope, people will find that if they haven’t found it already once this releases and. Yeah, I mean, reflecting back, yeah, I’m a big fan and he just always is just amazing. I think Andy has a unique ability. You know, all of our speakers have some unique super power. And I think Andy’s is to just like get to the soul of what is going on. And he can speak to the soul of an entrepreneur better than anybody I’ve encountered. And so just as you know, 30 seconds of his talk, I think it was 12 minutes. I would encourage you to go find it and watch it. And we can and we can link to that in the app. But his main point was he talked about how. How to flourish as an entrepreneur and what he talked about was he believes that flourishing happens when authority meets vulnerability and the way he defined authority was the capacity for meaningful action. And the way he does, he defined vulnerability, was taking meaningful risk. And he said when you have the capacity to take meaningful action and you choose to take meaningful risk, that is where an entrepreneur flourishes and he teases that out over over 12 minutes and just walked through. And just to buy two guys, you’ll see some great two by twos and and just how Jesus fits into that paradox of of creating that flourishing moment for an entrepreneur. And I just just it just hits me. I’ve watched it five, six, seven times. I’ve sent it to numerous people that are thinking about being entrepreneurs that have maybe I put myself in this category, always been on the edge of maybe going out and trying something. And he just beautifully lays out the encouragement for that and says, yes, like God did design us this way. If you’re feeling that maybe he designed you that way to

Henry Kaestner: Rusty, what did you like? What is your impression?

Rusty Rueff: Well, you know, I got two instances with your former co-founder, Dave Morgan. Right. So not only his his discussion on why excellence matters, but also a little breakout session that we did together. And, you know, I just am always so impressed with the amount of humility he brings to the success that he’s had and just the way he can be. You know, I can imagine I’ve only interacted with him here on the podcast a couple of times, you know, watching it on the conference there and then having that panel together with him. But I can imagine that, Dave, you know, he’s pretty driven guy, right? I mean, there’s you know, there’s no you know, hey, I think we’re not going to make this goal kind of guy. He’s you know, we’re we’re going to take this hill. But at the same time, there’s a purity to him and there’s a gentleness, even with that ability to push that comes through in his humility that I thought was just awesome in both sessions. And, you know, I just admire and felt really challenged to step up my game, you know, and whatever I do to make sure that I’m being excellent.

Henry Kaestner: You know, it’s interesting that if I were going to talk about how he gets that, it’s interesting. It’s not a focus on excellence is part a function of the fact that he is being given by some really unique gift things and is making the most of them. But pragmatically, I think that the blend of excellence with humility that I really do think that he gets and is wonderful to continue to experience that through a 20 year friendship and partnership is the fact that he prays one hundred times a day. Plus he’s constantly in prayer and he’s got it. This is one of the podcast interviews we did with them. He’s always praying, God, thank you. God forgive me, God, please, all day. And if you spend that much time walking right next to God when your thought is that any time you have a thought. Delayed at God’s feet, then you can’t get to under yourself. You can’t, and I think that that’s kind of the secret there. And I think it’s interesting you pointed that out, of course, from my perspective. I love David talk. It was great having Victor Ho talk about Sabbath, some of the earlier podcast we did. There’s a part one, part two that we did with Victor. One hundred and sixty podcasts ago or something like that where he unpacks Sabbath. And a couple of things that I like Victor about. And actually coming back to our very first blog we ever put up on the podcast was Andy Crouch talking about Sabbath as a very first century we ever had. The second one was I think it was John Drexler’s essay on the Silicon Valley episode where they talked about you can be anything in Silicon Valley, but you can’t be a Christian. And the satire, the brilliant satire that that was. And John did such a great job. And I think we’ve had thousands and thousands of blogs since then. But Sabbath is so important. Victor Ho did a great job pointing that out. And what I’m talking about, Victor. Of course, we’ve got to go back to one of the favorite lessons I’ve ever learned from Victor is the emphasis on delighting our customer and the work he did at McKinsey, at Harvard Business School, and then now through five stars about what does it look like to delight a customer understanding that it is significantly more cost effective to retain a customer that was otherwise going to churn than to go out and buy a new one? Just the way he talks about that, I think is really good. But I think that my favorite interplay from the Faith Driven Entrepreneur conference is Phil Fisher and Casey Crawford, these two guys who are passionate about their faith and the interplay fills a little, maybe more bookish, very creative. And Casey’s Super Bowl, when a six foot six is completely chiseled, they’re different in some ways. They’re very, very similar in some ways in that they’re both students of entrepreneurship as it relates to knowing God. And the interplay that Casey had with Phil I thought was really cool. Now, they weren’t on the stage at the same time, but it really started off as a continuation of something that happened here on the podcast. Right. We had been talking about Phil’s podcast on identity. And if you go back to Phil Fisher podcast, I think it’s minute 16 to minute 20 or so. Phil talks about the identity of a Khristine entrepreneur. That is really, really good. And as we’re getting ready to interview Casey for his podcast, we were reflecting on it. And Casey was talking about, gosh, I know that we’re called the not have anxiety, but yet I still feel anxiety and I feel that Jesus was in the garden. He’s sweating blood. And I see David having some real stress and anxiety. And so how do I think about that? And Katie’s talk was on are we called to comfort as Christians? And that made a real impression. But it just I just love the interplay between the two of them. I love the fact that they’re both so thoughtful about being a Faith Driven Entrepreneur. They had such incredible experiences. And I love just the highlighting of the tension that comes about with the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. What’s the tension? How do we deal with things like balancing work and family? How do we integrate our faith? How do we think about financing? How do we think about our issues? And there can be a tension there. And it was fun just to see them both unpack that a little bit.

William Norvell: Yeah. You know, the last one I mentioned as reflecting on this is because you made me think of a delighting your customer. One of the most interesting talks I remember is, is Lacroix’s talk about being an artist. And I was really fascinated when he went on the riff of really trying to understand his his customer and design music for them because I just blew me away. I just always think of artists as, no, I’m just going to go in a box and create whatever I create because God told me to. And if people like it, people like it. But, you know, he’s like, no, I definitely see myself as a product and I have a product to sell and I have an audience and I need to understand my audience. And I thought it was kind of a really brilliant riff on an area that I’m not very accustomed to. And I think that’s what the government is grateful to. If you can come see different variations of people coming from different walks of life and how those things can be applied to your universe, even though you may not think they can be applied to your universe. And that’s what we we’ve tried to line up here this year to.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. What are you talking about? Lecrae That’s one of my most gratifying and hopefully it’s not a prideful moment because it will always be something I’ll struggle with to some extent. But when Lecrae really leaned into the ministry and really got excited about it through the podcast and then his participation in the conference and understanding that he as a creator is very much an entrepreneur and felt that we are his people in his tribe, so to speak, so much so that he has, of course, written the forward to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur book and just really great for us to be able to be, I think, in one way culturally relevant to a new generation. I think about my kids. I mean, I can talk about the 20 different presenters that we had on and the conference and and the one that they’ll get really fired up about as Lecrae. And that’s really important to me as a dad, because I’ve got three teenage boys who want to be able to have heroes that are thoughtful. About how to delight their customer, how to find their identity in Christ and then how to get out there and create and flourish, and so that was also a really cool moment.

William Norvell: You know what I said last time? But on that, too, talking about, you know, we talk about identity so much here, I thought Gelberg Solomon just did a wonderful job of talking about how the day she sold her company was the worst day of her life and how she woke up the next day and didn’t think she had anything to live for and how she had to fight to recover her identity, not as a CEO, but as a child of God. And we talk about that a lot. But her story of how she felt it and and when she felt it and how she had to recover it, I just thought was it was really fascinating.

Rusty Rueff: You know, if we were if we were given out courage awards, I think you’ve got to give it to Rob Thomas. Jeff Parker. Right. And that that segment is the one that I heard most from other people about. Right. Who said, hey, I tuned into this. I watch this. Wow. You know that. I mean, the idea that there could be that level of authenticity, that level of vulnerability, that level of sharing and walking through something as they did, you know, talk about courage, you know, just amazing, amazing.

Henry Kaestner: And it come on and tell the story again and again. And they, of course, were alive with us in the studio. And that was remarkably powerful. I think that

William Norvell: was it live in the studio

Henry Kaestner: was that everybody was live in Syria. That’s right.

William Norvell: Henry, Secrets, Secrets of the Calvert’s here. Slow down.

Henry Kaestner: Know some of the people clearly were calling in from other places, but they’re actually in physical proximity. With us is, of course, what I mean, I thought that was really good. Neither of them interestingly, we’ve had some incredible guests on the podcast. Everybody knows Phil Fisher with Trey Tim Keller, Chip Ingram, a lot of really bigger names. And yet those two guys, I think, are still in the top three. Most listened to episodes on our podcast, Carson and 60. And neither of them would nobody would know their name outside of that context. But the substance was so rich that people keep on downloading and forwarding it to people

William Norvell: because the title is 99 percent confession equals zero percent freedom. Was that right?

Rusty Rueff: About that last one percent? That last one percent, yeah.

Henry Kaestner: How about on the Faith Driven Investor side I go first. Yeah, I Phinney Kerviel is talk about the role of an investor I thought was really seminal for me. This is a guy guys in my PhD is one of the smartest guys on the planet and really, really smart people can oftentimes just lose you. And he could have lost me. I mean, because you remember this guy is an M.D., Ph.D. who ended up getting his MBA, I think, on the side while he’s getting his Ph.D.. I mean, is that smart? So he’s clearly capable of writing white papers and treatises and things like that. But he has a special gift of taking that and distill it into a simple concept, which was for me was as follows. He talks about Christopher Columbus and says, look, Christopher Columbus was an Italian. He had an idea for adventure. He went around to all his buddies in Italy to talk about this new venture. He’s going to go on and they all said no. So it’s OK. I’ll try my luck in Portugal. And they also said no. He went to Spain and worked out and said, you know what, they should be speaking Italian in Argentina and Chile today, but they don’t. And the cultural impact that that venture investment made and then fast for that and the relevancy for us now for hundred years on in Africa, there is going to be more entrants into the job market over the course of next 20 years than India and China combined. What language are they going to be speaking in Kinshasa? Are they going to be speaking secular or are they going to be speaking Christian? And what I mean by that is, are they going to be speaking Chinese? Are they can be speaking Arabic or are they going to be speaking? Where are they going to be speaking? Or is the marketplace going to be inhabited by entrepreneurs that are driven by their faith, who are able to speak the language of looking to create and do it for the glory of God? And what are their identities in Christ, where they’re able to love their neighbor and be able to have a redemptive frame as they think about creativity in the marketplace. And that was really impactful for me, just the deepness of number one. It was the importance of investing. All of our investments have impact and means something. Capital has influence. I think that there’s some deep theological truth in what he’s talking about. And then he just made it really applicable. I can get it. I think that people in Argentina and Chile should be speaking Italian, and I think that people in Kinshasa should be loving their neighbor and inventing products and services that bring about God’s kingdom.

William Norvell: You know, speaking of cultural impact, one of the ones I loved was John Irwin. You know, John Amen, the filmmaker, which is maybe like a little bit of esoteric asset. You know, if you’re thinking about investing his riff on, you know, in his opinion that, you know, there’s so many Christians that are upset about where Hollywood’s go and all these things. And he just had this. And he said, you know, Hollywood didn’t leave Christians, Christians left Hollywood, and he had this push to engage in places, just as Jesus did, and said, you know, that is our fault, not anyone else’s. We decided to revert back into our bubble and not fight the good fight anymore. And he said, you know, I’m I’m living proof. I signed a deal with the big movie studio after some Faith Driven Investor said helped him get to a point where that was an option. And beautiful story.

Rusty Rueff: You know, I was struck by something you said there, Henry, about, you know, we overlook a lot of times the impact that can happen here, right, by Faith Driven Investor and sort of thinking down the river, if you will. And you know what Pete Kelly shares or what he does with apartment life on the surface, you look at it go, oh, that’s you know, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. And the integration of the spiritual side of that and then how that turns out to be really great for apartment owners, I take that one step further. I say if he’s saving money for apartment owners, then they are able to pass back that savings in a way that creates more affordable housing. Right. Which is, you know, loving on our neighbors. Right. Figuring out how to be able to extend those things that we’ve been given from God to make it better for others. And I think what Pete’s doing there is really, really impressive.

Henry Kaestner: Now, we’ve got another conference coming up, and while the final guest list hasn’t been announced yet and I can tell you one thing, I can tell you that we will by far and away have our most famous guest that is committed. And we’ve had some famous Gammie, again, Phil Fisher. We’ve had Tim Keller. We’ve had some really, really outstanding presenters. This one, I think that when we announced this and we just don’t have clearance yet from the agent, but we nonetheless have a commitment. I think that this one will be one that everybody be really fired up about. It’ll be fun. And I think, again, super culturally relevant, much in the way that the crew has been.

William Norvell: I’m excited about it. We’re really we’re not faking this. We actually can’t say anything, but I can’t wait to celebrate it. It’s not just like, oh, they’re names big. It’s like, gosh, they’re it’s a fun group. And they’re going to bring some excitement, energy to the conference that I just think is going to be phenomenal.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, I just I love Gene Simmons. I really don’t know. That’s not the fun group. It’s not I promise you, it is not fun group. But would that be something that they talked about? Faith driven entrepreneurs. Yeah, Rusty. As you look at the list of the speakers come up, any that stand out for you.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I’m excited, Henry. I’m a huge fan of Sue Warnke and what Sue has done at Salesforce. And you know for sure. Yes. And she and I had our own little moment of overlap at work and ministry thing at our church back in twenty nineteen. That was really exciting. She happened to be there while we were doing a thing called the Tightrope Talks, and I called her out. I didn’t know she was in the audience because I had read in the Trailblazer book by Marc Benioff where he talks about faith force and he talks about Sue Warnke and about how such an impact that that has had on the culture of Salesforce. I mean, stop for a second and think about that. You know, Marc Benioff talking about a woman and a group of who are sharing their Christian faith with each other inside of the workplace, inside of a company, inside of a public company. And I just happened to mention that. And I asked if anybody who worked at Salesforce, this hand goes up. And I said, really? You know, you work at Salesforce, what do you do? It she goes, I’m Sue Warnke. I’m like, you got to be kidding me. You’ve got to be kidding me. So she’s a rock star in my mind. And I think that’s going to be really exciting for us.

Henry Kaestner: I travel around, I’ve been asking people, where do you think is the Center for the Faith and Work Movement in the United States? And if I’m in Atlanta, they say national. If I’m in Nashville, they say Dallas. If I’m in Dallas, of course they say Dallas. Right. People think about, I think in Texas. But I say to them, I will submit to you that I think that the Center for the Faith and Work Movement in the United States is in the Bay Area. And yes, I’m a little biased because I live out here. But I say this out here in the Bay Area where there are new are resurgent faith driven employee resource groups at Google and Apple at Facebook there. Before COVA, they were doing prayer walks on campus at Dropbox. They’re doing praise and worship music. We’ve heard in the lunch room. That’s right. And then, of course, at Salesforce, where it’s called faith for us. I think more than a thousand members up there.

Rusty Rueff: Oh, I think it’s double that now. Wow.

Henry Kaestner: Amazing. And, you know, and it’s and yes, of course, you know, if you’re a force, there are other faiths that are represented. But of course, we as Christians believe that truth stands out in the marketplace of ideas. And so guys doing something amazing out here in the Bay Area, which we hope is an encouragement. If you’re a Faith Driven Entrepreneur, you’re listening to this right now. Thing I don’t know, Faith Driven Athlete Resource Group, that sounds like a little bit of a far fetched bunch of people getting together and praying together. It might be too much. And gosh, chaplaincy maybe. I don’t know. But I mean, if Facebook and Google and Apple, you know, what I thought of is like the epitome of this secular organization have come to understand that having Faith Driven Athlete resource groups are good for their bottom line and good for their culture. I think that that gives us great reference. So as our employees come out and say, you know, you’ve got a group of people to get together, pray for each other and that feel a little uncomfortable about it, I think a lot of them will be able to see the fact that it’s happened in some of the very best and forward thinking technology companies will help give some cover there. So I also I’m a huge fan of Sue William. As you look through the list, what’s what strikes out for.

William Norvell: Yes, a couple of things I’m excited about. So guest wise, super quick ones. Andy Stanley needs no introduction. He just if you listen to that podcast, his church had a big part in my coming to know the Lord in a deep way. And so I just always think he has just like hard won wisdom. And and then on the other side, Seth Dillon, the CEO Babylon Bee. And not just because he’s hilarious, but he is hilarious, but his theology of satire and why it’s important to the church. I was surprised by that. I was kind of blown away when we did that podcast where he had this really thoughtful framework for why he does his job. It’s not simply that he’s funny and he thinks he can be funny and he can make money on it. It’s I don’t know what he’s going to share there, but the Babylon Bee is getting more notoriety. And so I’m excited for that. And that’s an interesting one. I’m excited for that to be shared in community. So. I don’t think we’ve talked about yet, we’re rolling this out as a hybrid event this year, and so we want local host cities, right? We want people in their cities to host and kind of raise their hand and say, I want to have 10 people over to my house or I want to have two hundred people at my church, whatever that may look like. We’ve already got over one hundred cities signed up to date. And I just think we talk about local communities so much here, and it’s just as such an opportunity to come around, watch these things together. And, you know, we’ve got a great guest to come on and talk about that. So Sue Alice has been on the podcast before, is the director of community at Faith Driven Entrepreneur and investor Sue Alice. Tell us a little more about your vision for the watch party format.

Speaker 4: You know, this has been a really hard year. Entrepreneurship is already a lonely journey. But throughout covid, it’s been extraordinarily lonely in many ways. And as things are starting to open up more, we know that a lot of people aren’t ready to jump on a plane and cross the globe to come and join us in person. But we can certainly cross the city and join together with other entrepreneurs, investors that live in our area and come together. And so we’re going to be live streaming the conference all over the world. Wherever you are, we are coming to you. And we want you to gather together in community host to watch party. All you need is a screen and a space will even help you with food. We want to make this as simple as possible for everybody to try and come together and watch this experience sit together, be able to wrestle with hard topics together and remember that God did not create us to be alone.

Henry Kaestner: Did indeed sue Alice, as you look ahead and want to put you on the spot and something to a question that you probably didn’t expect coming your way. By the way, I’m just so excited about the leadership that you provide to the ministry in the way that you’re able to oversee small groups. And we’re just getting started with the small group curriculum there. Three hundred faith driven entrepreneurs going through the class together. Twenty three different facilitators, entrepreneurs from all over the world. And that happens through the magic of us. Who else does, in addition to looking at the conference, but to Alice, as you look ahead to the speakers that we have coming up, are there any of that jump out to you, anybody that you’re particularly fired up about listening to?

Sue Alice Sauthoff: Yeah, you know, I have seen on the list Laura Casey is on there and we hosted her recently at one of our other events. And I feel like just being able to hear from these entrepreneurs, all of these speakers have such authenticity and what they’re sharing. And I just got to meet Laura recently and see that in her. So I’m really excited to hear from her again. I just connect with her a lot as a mom as well. And so it’s really exciting to hear from her on that list.

Henry Kaestner: Well, thank you. Thank you for coming over and joining the team and providing so much leadership for leading the Faith Driven Entrepreneur group practice and the conference. For me, I’ve got a new favorite speaker and he’s kind of a cross between Francis Chan and BAM Phelps. If you remember BAM Phelps, you remember bum Phelps, who’s the Texan cowboy that always wore his ten gallon hat. It was

Rusty Rueff: a cousin. It was a coach, right?

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Fantastic coach. There’s a guy named Jimmy Song and Jimmy

William Norvell: Jimmy Jimmy the other day. Oh really?

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. He is really, really good. He’s very thoughtful. He’s got great energy and charisma and he is really focused on what cryptocurrency means and grounding in theology and in scripture in a way that I didn’t think could happen. I didn’t think it could happen. And so he’ll unpack for us. What does that mean and how can a Christ follower think about the ramifications for cryptocurrency? Is it bad? Is it good? Is it neutral? And he has a firm opinion on it. And I tell you, you spend enough time with Jimmy song, you find yourself kind of coming along with his way of thinking because he’s just so thoughtful

William Norvell: in his book, thank God for Bitcoin and working through it so good. And he’s just so thoughtful about how God works through Bitcoin specifically. And he also has a famous story of buying maybe what could be called the world’s most expensive beef jerky. That’s Raichlen adopter. He buy bitcoins worth of beef jerky, which as of current day is a sixty thousand dollar thing of beef jerky, which I don’t think it was worth that to him. He said it was good beef jerky, but probably not that

Henry Kaestner: probably not dead

Rusty Rueff: yet. I’m I’m excited, as you guys are, about what we’re going to do in the fall. And I think one of the things we’ve got to remember, too, is that in our faith journey, there are these disciplines that we each are striving to bring forward in our lives and to internalize in our life. And, you know, this conference can be one of those it’s a part of the journey, because while we won’t be together face to face with our speakers, we’ll be through technology. We are creating community there and we are sharing and fellowship. But these watch parties that we’re talking about, the small groups that we have with FDE, you know, those are community. Those are people coming together and having the opportunity to fellowship and to strengthen each other. And as we know, iron sharpens iron. And we recently had an FDE podcast with our favorite entrepreneurial pastor, Chip Ingram, and he talks about how important it is that we have people in our lives that we can have strong relationships and friendships with and who we can be totally vulnerable and held totally accountable together. And, you know, what we don’t know is we walk into one of these conferences, we go to a watch party, we invite someone to our home to do this together. There in May be that person, right? That person. You know, God will deliver that person for us if we don’t already have them or if, you know, God will deliver more than one person to us. But we have to be willing to open the door. We have to be willing to share of ourselves and share of our time. And that’s part of what’s so exciting about what we’re doing here, is we are continuing to walk through that faith journey.

William Norvell: Amen grateful for all of you as part of my community and grateful for so many people that I’ve met through the conference and after the conference and became friends with because of some of the people that share their time with us so graciously did.

Henry Kaestner: We’re excited for you to come be a part. And again, as Alison said, if you have a screen and you have a passion and you want to share this community and encourage other Faith Driven Athlete. Noises, you yourself are encouraged. We really do hope that you become a watch party host, it’s easy. You can find it on the website. And thank you, Sue Alice. You know, you’ve been around the ministry not forever, but long enough to know that on our podcast, we ask every guest to share with us a bit about what they’re hearing from God and his word. And if you’ve also been listening to podcasts, you know that I’m not the one to ask that question. It’s William.

William Norvell: I thought you were just going to steal it from me.

Henry Kaestner: I thought for a second. And I was like I was

William Norvell: like, he’s going for it, tag. I’m going to have to have that truth and love talk after this episode. But, you know, no, we love figuring out where God’s story is. And and I know, you know, that’s where it’s coming. But just yeah. If you wouldn’t mind, share with our audience. We’re just glad to have you today in his word. And where is he taking you in his scripture and how is that impacting how you see the world today?

Sue Alice Sauthoff: Yeah, I have been spending a lot of time in Psalm thirty four and verse one says I will praise the Lord in every moment, in every situation. And I have to spend meditating on that a lot that whatever comes, the joys, the struggles, whatever, that I’m still looking to the Lord, I’m still praising him and that and I could go on with more, but I’m going to turn the tables around because our audience wants to hear from you three guys. And so I’m turning the tables. William, you always ask the question. So I think you should go first and then Henry Rusty up next.

William Norvell: Oh, goodness, I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t see that coming. Oh, gosh. Where would I go? Oh, gosh. Two to two verses come to mind that I’ve been meditating on. I’ll try both. One Old Testament, one New Testament I’m going to go to and I’ll do it quick. It’s not my strong suit. But first, Peter, five, six and seven, where God says that some version of the paraphrase is that, you know, we need to humble ourselves before God and it’s his job to exalt us. And that has just been meditating hard on my heart lately that my job is to is to serve him and to walk with him and it says that he chooses the time to exalt us if he wants to. And just what I’ve been frustrated when I found times that I thought maybe I should have gotten credit for something or something should have been viewed differently. I’ve tried not that I’m doing it well. Going to God’s. I got. If you want that to happen, you find the time. It’s out of my hands. And it’s not it’s not up to me, right? And that’s really hard and it’s really hard, but I think it’s truth in the second one is a piece of that. These are both sides of humility. Deuteronomy eight, where God says pretty clearly that he took the Israelites through the desert for 40 years so that they would learn humility and just to think at rest there, too, that God does not require anything of me or want me to think of me other than to recognize who he is and to love him for that and to humble myself at his feet and to walk with him every day. Amen.

Rusty Rueff: That’s beautiful. You know, as I reflect back over this year, one of the things that I’ve maybe I was actually projecting when I was talking about how important it is for the conference for us to get together, because one of the things that I miss the most is I’ve missed the intimacy of friendship, like not being able to hang physically with, you know, my most personal friends and have those sort of conversations and things that pop up because, you know, you’re just you’re out working in the garden together or you’re taking a run together, you know, and conversations that come up. And so it really has had me thinking about the importance of reminding myself that Jesus is to be my best friend. And the verse that’s been on my heart is Matthew, six eight for your father knows the things you have need of before you ask him. And, you know, that’s what best friends do, they know the things that you have needs before you ever talk to them about it. And they bring it up to you. And, you know, I I’m I’m such an emotional guy. I mean, I cry at American Idol auditions, so you just need to know that. I mean,

William Norvell: hey, wait, who’s who doesn’t.

Rusty Rueff: So but, you know, I’m just reminded that Jesus is my best friend and that he knows the things that I need before I need them and that he’s gone, you know, in front of me for those things and is has taken care of me. So that’s what’s been on my heart most recently.

William Norvell: Amen.

Henry Kaestner: Well, I really should have gone first because you can’t top either of them two things that have impacted me from scripture recently. One is just the lesson of the good kings of Judah and second Chronicles, where these are the good kings. They’re not the bad kings of good kings. And yet each of them made a really, really bad mistake and not seeking God before making a major decision. For one, it was a trade deal. For others, it was about whether they go off in a war or not. And I think, oh, so God put that second chronicles. So I’ll I’ll be able to make sure that I don’t do the same thing. And because I’ve got the benefit of this type of teaching that they didn’t have at the time. And yet I still find myself not going to God with all my important decisions. And maybe I get the majority. But the good kings are due to have the majority of them. And they just one time, one time didn’t see God and it went really poorly for them. And I just I need to see more of God. We talked about at the beginning of this episode about how David Morgan does that so well and so regularly, habitually, if you will. And I need to do a better job of that. That speaks to me. And the other thing that speaks to me and I shared this with a larger Faith Driven Entrepreneur group that gets together in the area. We’ve been kind of inklings and I shared with them yesterday that as I go through the Bible with my boys and devotions, I love it when you kind of get a summary of the Bible, when somebody says, OK, what really matters is this. There isn’t a moment like that. The other day, as my family and I were going through Galatians five, and it was because we were going to look at the fruits of the spirit together. And of course, if you look at the fruits of the spirit, if you just focus on the fruits of spirit, you won’t find them. If you just focus on love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, you can’t find it. You find the fruit of the spirit comes from our relationship with Jesus and the fact that we have this relationship with Jesus. Well, what how do we know that we’re really in line with Jesus Christ in us? Is this fruit? So I was going to talk about that with them, but I didn’t. Instead, we just got hung up on verse six and is the second part of verse six. So the first part is for increased Jesus is neither circumcision nor UN circumcision have any value. The only thing they can’t. There’s a second part. The only thing that counts and like, oh my goodness, here we have in the second part of a verse, Galatians five, six, be the summation of the entire Bible. Three thousand pages of it. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. And what I was able to process with them and, you know, just partially, which is, oh, my goodness, if that’s the only thing that matters, how are we as a family, how are we as individuals thinking about how our faith expresses itself through love and how does it even happen? But I just love that just a simple thing to kind of just continue to meditate on. So, Sue. Thanks for turning the tables on the fair turnabout is fair play. That’s never happened. And we’ve probably recorded one hundred and seventy five different podcast episodes. And I’m glad that you did it. I’m glad because I was blessed by William and Rusty. Sharon, thank you.

William Norvell: Need to keep your head on a swivel here on the FDE podcast. Never, never know what’s coming at you.

Henry Kaestner: Head on a swivel and Kleenex next to the computer.

William Norvell: Hey, man, that’s a that could be our first brand Kleenex swag for the conference.

Ross Baird: Topophilia is the Greek word for patriotism, and if you think of Greece, you have the city state like Athens means something. Sparta means something very different. It’s the warrior city like love of place. Patriotism is love of your specific place for specific reasons. And so if you think of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, all wonderful cities, all very different. But if you live in Boulder, you live there for a specific reason. And if you live in Colorado Springs, there specific reason. And they’re very different cultures and neither is better or worse. They’re just they’re very different. And what Governor Hickenlooper said is like we have so many places in Colorado that have such a good sense of themselves that people are just very into getting involved in their place because they love it and they come here for a reason. And if you are a place with a sense of yourself, you’re going to have a dynamic entrepreneurial culture.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here, as always, are mostly with one of my very best friends in the world, business partner, ministry partner, life partner, Luke Roush in the house from Durham, North Carolina. Today, I see

Luke Roush: it is going to be on. Going to be on.

Henry Kaestner: It’s great to have you. So we’ve got a special guest. Speaking of Durham, North Carolina, I got to know Ross’s brother Henry when he was a student at Duke and I was a Sunday school teacher for Duke students, which is ironic. Many of you will know some of my story that I’m a huge road Carolina Tar Heels fan. But God loves Duke students, too. And I get to know Henry and also a little bit Henry’s twin brother, but they have an older brother, Rothbard, that has blazed the trail and has been super intentional about his faith in the marketplace for a long time. And I know at least Henry’s follow in your footsteps is he is a manager at Cloud Factory, which is this awesome, awesome organization. We’ve had Marc Sears on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast in the past, but I’ve been looking for this podcast, Luke, because of Ross’s intentionality of modeling out a different way of local community investment, bringing in real estate, bringing a community. He’s done it all over. But there are a couple of cities where he’s done it that have really made an impression on me. And one of them is New Orleans. And then the other one is Baltimore, because I grew up in Baltimore and that’s a big deal for me. So, Ross, welcome to the program. Luke and I are really happy to have you on.

Ross Baird: Thank you. Henry and Luke and Justin. The work you do, all of you do, and the ministry you are really practicing every day here is remarkable. And I’m a longtime listener. First-Time Caller, I would say great to be on the bike.

Henry Kaestner: That’s awesome. All right. That’s a great encouragement. I’ve told more and more people recently that when they say nice things about our podcast, because, you know, I have some amount of insecurity about it because I’ve been told that I have a face made for radio, but I’ve also been told that I have a voice made for print journalism. And so whenever anybody says something nice about podcasts, it just encourages me. So thank you for that. One of the things, as a frequent listener to the podcast, you’ll know, is that we always like to get started by asking somebody their background, who you are, where you come from, maybe a little bit about your faith journey. But what brought you right up to Village Capital?

Ross Baird: Yeah. So I guess starting at your question and working backwards to Village Capital is an organization I co-founded over a decade ago, really seeking to invest in entrepreneurs that are building great businesses, building successful businesses, but also having an intentional impact on the communities where they are and going. The first investment we made was in a couple of entrepreneurs in New Orleans. As you mentioned, Henry, post-Katrina, where there was an amazing all of the big companies had left New Orleans after Katrina and there were all these forecasts the city was dead. People will never come back. But there was this amazing community of entrepreneurs doing their best to rebuild the city from education to food to different types of industries. And what brought me to New Orleans as an anchor of this company I was starting going through the journey really was shaped by my faith and really was shaped by people who walked and guided me and walked along with me. A mentor of mine at university, I went to University of Virginia. So we have Duke and Carolina and basketball

Henry Kaestner: number in football for like 20 years.

Luke Roush: A rare opportunity, Henry, for you and I to tag team and just beat up on a guest together. Yes, it’s a shared a rare shared

Henry Kaestner: history very few times that we had that opportunity. And so let’s not let’s not miss it. Yeah.

Ross Baird: Keep it coming. You can make fun of me at the pace of play in Virginia. Basketball you have.

Henry Kaestner: Well, yes, so there’s that. But you do have the national championship. We’re going to leave out the fact that you had lost to my hometown, you MBC Retriever’s. But that’s clearly not important. But if you listen to the podcast before you know that I love the sport of lacrosse and there is a reigning national champion in lacrosse and unfortunately, it’s not Carolina.

Ross Baird: That’s right. But we’ll take it. So I was at the University Virginia, and one of my mentors is a woman. She was a religious studies professor named Nicole, heard very deeply committed Christian. She’d done her PhD work on Saint Katharine Drexel. And I was very interested in education policy and kind of education is the theme. And Saint Katharine Drexel had gone all across the country and set up these Catholic schools serving the poor and cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans. And after Katrina hit, this was 2005, right after the storm, Nicole had had a very strong relationship still with these nuns who ran essentially schools for poor black kids in New Orleans. And she contacted these nuns that she had built these lifelong relationships with and said, well, how can we help? And there were three schools. There were St. Augustine, Saint Xavier and St. Mary’s and St. Xavier Prep is right off Magazine Street. It was on high ground and it didn’t flooded St. Augustine and St. Mary’s had. And the nun who ran the school’s sister, Eileen, said, we are. Trying to do whatever we can to keep the doors open because not every kid is left and they need to go to school and they literally need to, Nicole organized students from UVA to go down. And we slept in the gym of Xavier Prep, which didn’t have power or hot water. And we did what we could. We cleaned out teachers homes. We worked on moving student records from trying and trying to get these schools back open. And I really was amazed and inspired by these nuns working to keep the school open and the teachers going back. Just the resiliency of everybody flashing forward a few years later. I have always been an entrepreneur, always been working on different ideas. And as I think about my journey, I think we’re really shaped by the people who come before us and the people who are examples to us. There is a guy who was a mentor of mine from church growing up. He saw around him might be listing name is Bob Patiala. He was a very successful real estate entrepreneur in Atlanta, and he got very into angel investing in startup investing, particularly in mission driven companies. And I started an education idea coming out of college at UVA. And I originally went and asked Bob for a grant to support my company, I think setting up as a nonprofit. But we had actually gotten a couple of contracts for sponsorship and we had some revenue coming in. And we need a little bit of money. And Bob, because you don’t need a grant, you need a loan. And I said that’s like you need a bridge loan. I would do that. I guess that sounds great, Bob. I’ll take it. What’s a Bridgland? And Bob said, let me take you waste when you have cash coming in, but you don’t have it today and someone makes a loan to you, you can pay them back. The Bob, explain to me the relationship. If I’m your grant maker, then you’ll just come back to me anytime you need money. But if I’m your investor, then we’re partners, then we’re in it together. And that was a real insight of and this is something you talk about on the Faith Driven Investor, Faith Driven Entrepreneur community all the time. The spiritual relationship of an investment relationship is two way. It’s a very different power. Dynamic partnership. I have money. You are someone who wants my money. You will do what I say because I’m the person with money. And so Bob really showed me why investing just was a valuable and resonant thing to begin with. And Nicole had introduced me this amazing community in New Orleans. And so make a long story short with Bob, I started what became village capital, which was one of the first impact investment funds, investing in entrepreneurs that had a core mission driving the company. And we were really looking for people who were overlooked and undervalued and off the beaten track. And so what I did, I called up Sister Eileen and went down to New Orleans and spent a few days down there with Sister Eileen, who still ran the school. And we met a number of New Orleans. And I think the insight of why start in New Orleans? And I think we’re going to talk about this podcast of investing locally. If you build a great business in New York City, you’re one of a million people who are making money in New York City. If you build a great business in New Orleans, there’s a greater civic and public and community good. And just seeing how people building, whether it’s a charter school or an agricultural company or something, how people in New Orleans were committed to the greater project of rebuilding New Orleans in addition to their own business success was I mean, it was a moment in time that was incredibly inspiring. So that’s a long answer to your question. That’s I guess that’s

Henry Kaestner: a great answer. I mean, you’ve got your origination story in there and a lot comes out. There’s the part about mentors. So I’ve heard about connecting with Bob a couple of times and I know how formative he’s been in a lot of people’s stories. I didn’t know that he had been formative in years. I think that’s super cool. I want to get back in to and just explore this a little bit more, because you’re right, we tend to be drawn to financial capitals. I live in Silicon Valley. People tend to think that companies that are started in Silicon Valley, at least in some sectors like tech enabled consumer goods and general technology, are better here. And yet there’s something different about investing in your backyard. And there’s even a name for that. And I tell you, this University of Delaware grad, I’m always grateful for a new word to be added to my vocabulary. I’ve got a long way to go, but top Ophelia. What is top aphelion mean and why does it animate so much of your work?

Ross Baird: So I studied Greek in college mainly for a number of different motivations. One is I wanted to read the New Testament and the original, which was. Wow.

Henry Kaestner: So my so my story on Greek is that I had to say the Greek alphabet three times before the match burned my finger. So we had different experiences learning the Greek language.

Ross Baird: I am Greek life and a number of ways, but so village capital we.

Henry Kaestner: But seriously, I’m sorry I’m running all over you on this, but that’s fascinating. As a college student, you wanted to take Greek so that you could read God’s word in its original language. I mean, that’s not bad.

Ross Baird: And the interesting stories in the ancient Pallot, I mean, I think we live with truths that are enduring. And so, you know, if you can read Plato and Socrates and Jesus in the original written tongue, that’s pretty enduring wisdom. And so the idea of these stories, insurance that have persisted for a long time and understanding what human rights are, is just that resonates with me a lot. So I took Latin in high school and loved it for a lot of the same reasons. And being able to study Greek, to be able to read Homer and Plato and the New Testament was really meaningful. I didn’t think we would get into that. But you asked to Ophelia. So long story short, I got to become obsessed with the word to Ophelia, which is now maybe my favorite word, because it’s a village capital. We built a portfolio of one hundred different enterprises, ninety five percent of which are outside of New York, Boston, San Francisco. We have a broad range of entrepreneurs. About 40 percent of our CEOs are women. About 30 percent are people of color. We have we have some amazing, amazing people in this portfolio. And I was in Colorado a few years ago and I was fortunate enough to have breakfast with John Hickenlooper, who was then the governor and now the US senator and Colorado. That year there had just been a study that came out that said Colorado had four of the ten most dynamic entrepreneurial cities in the country. And I said, Governor, what is it about Colorado? And he goes, I can tell you in one word, top Ophelia is, you know, it took a few years and I wasn’t like, oh, yes, I studied. I was like, no, tell tell me.

Henry Kaestner: And it was just a moment of real mischief. Did you know it? But you didn’t want to say it.

Ross Baird: I did know it. Friend of mine named Erik in high school one time told me, like Ross, you’re such a know it all. Like you try and finish everyone sentences and stories and it’s really annoying. Even if you knew the answer, just keep your mouth shut and let people tell their stories. And I mean, I don’t always like that is a good lesson. So, you know, I was into my high school friend and let him finish his story, which was great. And he said to Ophelia is the Greek word for patriotism. And if you think of Greece, you have the city state like Athens means something. Sparta means something very different. It’s the warrior city. And like love of place, patriotism is love of your specific place for specific reasons. And so if you think of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, all wonderful cities, all very different. But if you live in Boulder, you live there for a specific reason. If you live in Colorado Springs, are there specific reason? And they’re very different cultures and neither is better or worse. They’re just they’re very different. And what Governor Hickenlooper said is like we have so many places in Colorado that have such a good sense of themselves that people are just very into getting involved in their place because they love it and they come here for a reason. And if you are a place with a sense of yourself, you’re going to have a dynamic entrepreneurial culture. And that one word tip, Ophelia summed up probably ten years of observations from New Orleans in two thousand nine. If you move to New Orleans in two thousand nine, you’re going there for a reason. If you’ve lived in New Orleans for fifty years, you have history and tradition and things that matter. And so I think to Ophelia, for all of us, the place we live, the city we live, and how our family gets involved, the church we go to. I mean, my wife and I got married at a church in Atlanta as a church plant called Chiros. That is still, you know, we don’t live in Atlanta. It was still one of the most vibrant communities. I mean, when you’re in a place that has to feel it, you know, you just do.

Luke Roush: Well, the other thing but that just raises for me is this idea that as people are more mobile, there’s more and more self selection into different places in different communities and different environments. And there’s both opportunity in that. There’s also risk in that. Right, because you can find yourself in an echo chamber because you self select into a community that’s naturally more comfortable. And so it’s interesting. I want to get just tactical for a moment. And just if you wouldn’t mind sharing on to meaningful ways that you’ve discovered better invest in communities. So common threads that tend to correlate with more impact, maybe even more effective value creation financially. What are some common threads there?

Ross Baird: One thing that I think about all the time when we think about investing locally, I think in in the entrepreneurial world, in the San Francisco Silicon Valley, where people are so obsessed with scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, how do you invest in Greenville, South Carolina, or Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a quote on quote, scalable way. And if you look at Jesus’s understanding of power, when he sends out the disciples, he thinks about scale in a very different way. Jesus never leaves about a 30 mile radius in his entire life, because I think part of the lesson that I draw from that is active engagement and ministry is, by its nature, not scalable. And Jesus is fighting against the Roman Empire in a very profound philosophical way, where Jesus is asked to be the king that controls everything. And that’s the understanding of power through the eyes of the Roman Empire. And he says no. Instead, I am going to have a number of disciples and we’re going to be in a community together and we are going to minister to each other. But we are going to send you to Thessalonika or wherever you’re going, and you’re going to have your own 30 mile radius where you’re going to do your ministry. And that is what it looks like. And so I mentioned people like Sister Eileen in New Orleans or Bob Patillo in Atlanta, or he was on the podcast recently, my very dear friend and co-founder of Blue Print Local Brice Butler. Brice Butler is a great influence on me and a very close friend. Bryce has been a huge influence on my thinking of community investment with and he talked about this on the podcast. But his investment in one street corner and one neighborhood has had both really good financial outcomes and really strong ripple effects into projects we’re working on in places like Baltimore. It’s like, oh, we did this in Louisville. Here’s what we do in Baltimore. So the way the way to think about starting is if you are an investor allocating capital and you say, I care about Durham, I want to invest in Durham, figure out who is on the ground doing the work already, who has a very well thought out point of view and its values aligned with you. Or if you say I’m from Baltimore and I haven’t been back to Baltimore and think about who is on the ground locally, because I think the most effective people that we invest in and with have been doing the work for years, if not decades, and will be doing the work for years, if not decades.

Luke Roush: Yeah, yeah. Well, we’ve seen this too. And just, you know, communities here in the US and also communities internationally, people who are really committed to present steady direction, long period of time tend to have the biggest impact because they really understand sort of the local context. So as you think about kind of wading in in that manner, how do you think about identifying who the right partners are? Kind of on the ground? We’re huge fans of Bryce. His knowledge of Louisville is a great example of just kind of understanding the local context. How do you how do you find that you do that as you work in different parts of the country?

Ross Baird: I think the embrace of this on a prior podcast, I think the idea of one pocket investing or one pocket thinking is a critical precondition. And when I was raising those capital’s first fund early on, I pitched a very successful Atlanta entrepreneur who actually was very strong Christian, very moral guy, very big philanthropist on investing and mission driven companies to get a young man. I got two pockets with one. I make as much money as I can with my other. And his wife were extremely generous. He is with the other. We give it all the way. And so he goes, boy, which pocket are you asking me for here? And turns out I tried to explain what I meant and he didn’t get it. And it was just that was not my most success. He had a couple of those conversations. Yeah. Yeah. That was not my most successful new relationship conversation, but it did. The two pocket. One pocket has resonated with me. I mean, we for example, so we are doing a project in Richmond where we’re backing a local group who are from there. They’ve been there for thirty years. They’ve acquired an entire city block in a historically distressed black neighborhood. They’ve organized project four years. It’s going to open this summer. There will be mixed income workforce, affordable housing. Richmond’s fastest growing startup is relocating its headquarters, the neighborhood, which will be great for economic development. And then there’s a ground floor. There will be a food hall for local food entrepreneurs, nine men and women from the neighborhood who have always wanted to start a restaurant or a food truck. They’ll have space to do it. The financial engineering to do a food hall for local entrepreneurs, a headquarters for a great local company, and affordable housing is way more complicated. Even more complicated than if we just wanted to build a nice cookie cutter apartments that didn’t have any kind of affordability or community, but the person leading the project is from their lives. They’re so deeply committed making. And for him, all of these things flow together. To have a healthy community, you need to have a mix of rents. If the place is going to be worth living, it’s much better to have the local guy making barbecue than Dunkin Donuts or some kind of commodity. And I think when you get into business and impact, there is a false sense of trade off that if you are more intentional about your values and what you want to show up with your leaving something on the table, I think if you’re more intentional about your values, what you’re going to do is better. And I think this is why investing locally is so important in the abstract. You don’t see it, but when you put money into something locally, you have to live with the outcome every day for good or for bad. And a lot of the problems with our economy is people are short term thinkers and don’t see long term externalities and the long term externalities of a really bad project, if it’s in your neighborhood, like you’re going to feel that much more, you’re going to work harder to make it an awesome and redemptive project, because living with it every day will be a joy. Yes.

Luke Roush: Yeah. Well, I’m from Richmond, so I love the fact that you’re doing something there is in Churchill or what part of the

Ross Baird: Manchester south side of the river. So, yeah. And that’s be not a lot of investment has gone there, but it’s a very cool project

Henry Kaestner: and it’s like this emphasis a lot on local investments. And it’s amazing that you’ve got a project going on in Baltimore where I’m from, and Richmond where it looks from. It makes me think about for whatever reason over the last half hour as we’ve been talking, it makes me think about first to Jerusalem, then to some area and then to the ends of the earth. And so there’s some sense of locality like right behind, you know, this comes out of Jerusalem. So first here, then summer. And there’s a progression that includes this kind of a both in both local and then overseas. But there’s a sequence there. And I think that that’s really key. Also touch on something that Louis and I both have seen in our investment careers, which is the importance of local capital. Now, there’s a little bit different application here because you’re doing things in America. Look, of course, has much more experience overseas. He started the sovereigns in cofounding Sovereign’s Capital. He moved his family over to Indonesia. And one of the things that we found that was most successful was being able to invest with local partners. And without that, we would have been completely sunk. But with it, we’ve been able to have extraordinary returns to the fund, which we’re very grateful for. But if I was going to go back to something other than divine providence as to why that has been successful, it’s finding local partners, local skin in the game, if you will. So you are not living in Richmond, you’re not living in Baltimore, you’re not living in Louisville or New Orleans. US a little bit about that. For somebody listening to the podcast saying, how do I go about that? I think I get that intellectually. But how do you do it?

Ross Baird: Yeah, I mean, I think a huge part of investing is translation. And so the name blueprint is very intentional. We do not show up. I’ll give you an example. We’ve made an investment in Houston, which is workforce affordable housing, right by the Texas Medical Center, Texas Medical Center, a huge driver, biggest economic success story going on in Houston. The average employee think of a nurse or a frontline staffer has more than an hour commute. It’s not affordable for the young people who work there to live nearby there. So workforce housing right next door to Texas Medical Center, huge economic development priority for Houston. You go to Baltimore, there’s plenty of affordable housing. There’s a lot of Baltimore. The first investment we made was in the redevelopment of Penn Station, the Amtrak station, which is one hundred years old, historic landmark connected to DC, connected to New York, and connectivity to the economy and commercial activity is a much bigger priority in Baltimore. That’s kind of going pretty well in Houston. And so we didn’t show up to Baltimore or Houston and say, hey, everybody, we read a book about Baltimore. Here’s our idea for how to help Baltimore. We did a lot of sitting and listening and waiting for projects. And in both the cases in the Houston project and the Baltimore project, there are local people from there who have been working on those projects for a while, who led and where the investment capital behind it. The biggest challenge that the entrepreneur or the developer or the visionary in Louisville or Fort Collins, however, has often is translating what they’re doing to the capital markets. And I think a good investor is a translator of value. So if you are investing in mission driven businesses in Indonesia, the average person with money in the US would be like, why would you ever do that? How will I make money? Whereas if you’ve been on the ground in Indonesia and village capital, about half of our portfolio is in emerging markets. I’ve been to Indonesia in many places like it for many years. It’s obvious on the ground that there’s a ton of value, so. Translating value from where the capital markets are to where Main Street, literally or figuratively, is, is hugely broken, I think being a good investor means doing that. And so what we do and I think to give you a how does someone get started? I guess the question to ask is, what are your goals? Are your goals hyper local? If you live in Greenville, South Carolina, and you want to make an immediate difference on Greenville, figuring out who in Greenville is working on a compelling, mission driven project to bring a premium, because there’s an interesting project called The Chapel by a guy named Matt McFeely, who you should have on the podcast. He’s a wonderful guy. He’s building affordable housing event, space, commercial corridor in a distressed neighborhood in Greenville. Even if you don’t have a million dollars to invest in Matt’s project, maybe you could, as part of building an intentional community, locate your business or your nonprofit with the communities trying to build. Maybe you could send him referrals of people who could go there. There are ways that you can tangibly help with projects. That’s one way to I think the other than to say Henry is taking a step back outside of what you do in your day to day life, finding random people and figuring out how to help them look at what your money is already doing in the world and see if it reflects your values. So I would bet, for instance, the average resident of Greenville, South Carolina, spends more than 30 percent of their income on housing. It’s one of the most unaffordable cities in the country, per capita income. And also I know this from trying to invest in Greenville. There’s a lack of investment capital interested in Greenville, even though it’s a thriving city, mainly because the real estate funds of Wall Street view Greenville as a third tier kind of podunk southern town. And why would we ever invest there? Now, I would bet that the pension funds of the teachers who live in Greenville are invested in Wall Street firms that are investing in loft apartments in Brooklyn, in Miami. And so the people of Greenville, whether or not you’re rich, your money is in some ways making the problem worse because it’s being run through Wall Street without a values lens. So looking at if you’re wealthy, good for you. You have a lot of say over where your money goes, even if you’re not wealthy, asking questions around what is your money doing in the world and what are the problems you see in your community and how can you make different decisions with your money no matter the size of your pocketbook? Those are really important questions to ask.

Luke Roush: So I just want to double click on that, because I think it’s such a good point about the dislocation between Greenville pensioners and their capital going to New York and then somehow just kind of never finding a way back to kind of round trip back into the community where they operate and maybe just speak. Is that part of kind of one pocket versus two pocket kind of gospel of abundance versus scarcity like?

Ross Baird: Oh, yeah, I think I think about this all the time. I mean, I think about 30 to 40 years ago, this started happening. But Wall Street figuratively went to places like Greenville and Durham and Tulsa and said, we know how to run money. You keep doing your thing, send us your money and we’ll send you seven percent a year and don’t ask any questions. And then those firms started doing things like buying and merging the major employers of Tulsa and Greenville and laying people off. I mean, you could say if Ford or GM, six ships, seven thousand jobs overseas, that’s great for Ford and GM stockholders who might live in Dearborn, Michigan. But if you’re a Dearborn, Michigan, would you rather have seven thousand more jobs in your community or would you rather have 12 cents rise in your stock holdings, which has a lot less? So this detachment and I think this goes back to real spiritual questions around power and agency, this detachment of your own money and your own agency and who’s making decisions has been has been harmfully destructive, I think, for well, in

Luke Roush: somewhat amazingly, you know, in part borne out of a desire to protect consumers. A lot of the Consumer Financial Protection Act actually eliminates the ability for people to invest within their own community because it all has to go into publicly held stocks, which then pushes you in that direction. So it’s actually over the last 20 or 30 years, I think it’s become more difficult for the mass affluent or even to sort of the mass of humanity to be able to direct their capital into their own community.

Ross Baird: Yeah, I mean, it’s really it’s really interesting that Indiegogo, the crowdfunding site, the founder, tells this story all the time about how the Statue of Liberty was actually originally crowd funded by citizens of New York. I mean, this great American icon, there was a movement in New York to say, we want to say we’re welcoming. We want to you know, this is the first thing people see when they come to America. And the people of New York passed the hat and put in a couple of dollars and built the Statue of Liberty. And so if you are a pensioner or a schoolteacher or a twenty two year old recent college graduate. And you have some vision of what you want to invest in in Greenville or New York. It’s extremely difficult.

Henry Kaestner: I thought it was the French, I thought the French, out of their benevolence and open heart and love for all things American, just gave it to us.

Ross Baird: Well, there was some compensation for it.

Henry Kaestner: Oh, we pay them. Yeah. Oh, that story’s getting twisted. I’m not going to eat French fries anymore. OK, I want to ask you a question that we’re starting to ask all the guests that are coming on this show now, sometimes live on air and sometimes not. But it’s something that’s a big topic for both Luke and I and the team here, which is the biblical message of generosity. And in my story, I had my born again again moment when I came to understand how giving might really change my life by bringing me into the work that God was doing in the world. Talk to us a little bit about the way that you give and how you think about it, because I know you’ve thought this out and it’s consistent with how you invest. But how do you and your wife think about giving?

Ross Baird: First of all, the benefit of Google is I just Googled the Statue of Liberty story so our listeners have the right facts. The French gave us the statue. The crowdfunding was for the pedestal and oh, which was extremely expensive because it’s a big statue. So we didn’t sorry. The people of New York built a pedestal for the statue.

Henry Kaestner: It’s a very nice pedestal. It’s the best pedestal I’ve ever seen. So that is interesting. So I can still eat my French fries.

Ross Baird: You can sell your French fries and feel good about local investing when you see. Good job. So how do we get I mean, I think that the invention of the spreadsheet is one of the most seriously harmful things that has ever happened, because I think there are spiritual and non-financial benefits or harms to everything that we do. And I think that to say I give X and it does. Well, I think one thing that my wife and I have started doing in the last few years is turned our giving into a conversation and a practice within our marriage. We actually have a tradition of doing our annual giving in like a date night on New Year’s Eve. But we talk through what do we value, what do we care about? Last night of the year, a couple of years ago, our kid was up late. We didn’t get around to 11, 11. So start earlier in the night if you’re going to do this. But, you know, we thought over the last year about all the pain is happy in the world and how grateful we are for our family. And also all of us living across the US have spent a lot more time closer to home in our family. And so as part of our giving, we thought, what are things happening close to home for our family members that we value and they value? And if we make a donation to that, it will be a way to honor my brother, my sister, and also speak to our values of being in your community is something that’s fundamentally productive. So, for example, my sister lives in Austin, Texas. We gave to the Austin Food Bank because Austin’s a city with a lot of growth and a lot of inequality and a lot of food security. My brother Henry, who you mentioned, lives in Durham, and he was involved in starting a bail fund that’s been a hugely important driver of criminal justice reform in North Carolina, started a nonprofit bail fund and we gave to the nonprofit bail fund in honor of Hindry. And I think, you know, the conversations around why are we doing this and not that. One of our biggest donations was the city of Alexandria, Virginia, where we live. This nonprofit just built a really, really nice, very large homeless shelter about ten blocks from our house. And we walk and drive by it all the time. And we didn’t know anything about it, but we for not ever having visited, we gave them a large sum of money for us because being able to contribute to something down the street that was extremely meaningful meant meant a lot.

Luke Roush: That’s wonderful. I love the idea of what that demonstrates to your family also is that you’re plugged in to what matters to them. And it’s a great way to demonstrate that, you know, how you’re getting. We always like to close out each episode just by hearing a little bit of what God is teaching you right now. So what have you found in God’s word that has stuck with you recently?

Ross Baird: I think more than a year into the pandemic, I think I am just hearing from friends. Family for everyone is just so exhausted. And it is everyone’s in kind of a malaise and it’s a really challenging time. About a month ago, our very, very beloved family dog died and it was just like the worst thing to happen in a really difficult year. Her name was Greg. She was the best dog that will ever live. And I think I was way more broken up about it than I anticipated. I mean, I like crying like a baby. And she was seven and she had aggressive cancer. It was really, really, really sad. And I was talking with one of my best friends from grad school who his father died unexpectedly in the last month. And he was very close to his father and obviously very broken up about it. And I didn’t even I wasn’t even like, yeah, that’s nothing. My dog, just that I was like, I hear you’re suffering and I understand a lot and I pray for you every morning. And I was like, it is no comparison, but I’m really sad about my dog, too. And he said something that he’s a very religious guy. And he said, all of life is suffering. And it actually, you know, I actually feel like I can process what I’m going through with you because you’re suffering with something, too. And that matters a lot. And the verse that resonates with me. This is Second Corinthians one three. Praise be to God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of compassion and the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. There are probably very few people who have had an amazing and stress free year. I think that we are all suffering in big and little ways with a really massive disruption to our lives. But I think God is speaking to me a lot about kind of processing my own suffering and figuring out how to find comfort with. The Lord and also I am feeling called to try and identify suffering and others probably more proactively than I would just because of what’s going on. And I think the idea of this in some ways goes back to the local theme. I mean, we’re meant to worship in community. We’re meant to suffer in community. We’re meant to rejoice in community. One of the most deadly effects of the covid pandemic, I think, has been chronic loneliness. So it God is really speaking to me to to identify and call out what I am struggling with and what I need comfort with and also what other people in my life might be struggling with. It might be comfort with, too. And it’s been an amazing spiritual conversation.