Dallas Jenkins’ The Chosen—a multi-season series about Jesus—began as a $10M crowdfunded project after his 2017 studio flop, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. Rejecting Hollywood’s "hero’s journey" tropes, Jenkins portrays Jesus as deeply human yet divine, blending humor and relatability to appeal even to skeptics. Free streaming during COVID-19 quadrupled donations overnight, proving its cultural impact. Studios now court The Chosen, despite lingering bias, as Jenkins’ outsider approach—prioritizing craft over fame—challenges faith-based filmmakers to master their skills before seeking success, debunking the myth that divine calling alone guarantees excellence. [Automatically generated summary]
Jesus is obviously the most controversial figure and also the figure who has the most amount of ownership from entire people groups.
That's my Jesus.
And if we do anything that contradicts their vision of who their Jesus is, they'll say, well, that's not my Jesus.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Dallas Jenkins, who is the creator of The Chosen, a Jesus story that began, I believe, on apps and is now streaming and doing great business.
I wanted, so I'm really eager to talk to him because for a long time, I believed that only Christian filmmakers had found the key to getting around the headlock that basically the left had on Hollywood.
And I think that basically is still true.
And for a long time, I was kind of, I didn't like Christian films.
I've talked about this a lot.
I didn't like their sunny attitude.
I didn't like the fact that prayer always worked.
I didn't like the fact that there were not, there was no darkness and tragedy in them.
But then I realized that I was actually wrong, that those kind of films brought in an audience.
An audience brings in talent.
And then the films get better.
I've always talked about the novel when the novel started, the English novel started in the 18th century.
It was just a sort of thing that they gave to women.
Women read novels.
It's a pastime.
It's nothing serious.
And then Jane Austen was attracted to those crowds and turned it into the great novel of the 19th century, which then was followed with Dickens and all the greats who came after him.
So I think that's what's happening now.
I mean, I think that The Chosen is an incredibly original version of the Jesus story.
It uses, well, you know what?
Let's bring on Dallas Jenkins.
He's called one of the most important, most powerful TV producers.
He is just a really talented filmmaker and creator.
Dallas, it's so nice to meet you.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Andrew.
And I want to say real quick, besides the fact I'm a big fan of your show and your work, I do apologize in advance.
My eyes, I just had a minor eye surgery done last week, and so there's still some swelling.
So if anyone's watching going, he looks funny, that's why.
So I just wanted to get that out of the way.
You don't look at it.
Thank you for your kind words.
Well, you know, the thing that gets me about The Chosen is you made a, it's a pretty, in some ways, a very simple thing is you simply made Jesus fully a human being.
And he's got a kind of wry sense of humor and he's actually participating in the lives.
And one of the results of that is when he performs miracles, it really makes you choke up because they're so real.
Is that what you started with?
Where did this come from?
Yeah.
So the notion that, and I think you'll appreciate this, it sounds bad when I say it, but I think you'll understand.
Jesus doesn't make for a great main character in a drama.
He's not a traditionally, like if you were coming up with a Joseph Campbell hero's journey, most, the vast majority of storytelling rules wouldn't really fit well for Jesus as a protagonist.
He doesn't learn, you know, during the course of his ministry, he doesn't, you know, improve.
He doesn't have some sort of flaw that he needs to overcome.
He doesn't have some sort of journey that he embarks on, but he's resistant the whole time.
And then eventually he figures out a way to solve it.
He's perfect.
And so that concept has, I think, caused multiple Jesus projects over the years to suffer because they always come from his perspective.
He's the main character.
So we go from Bible verse to Bible verse, miracle to miracle.
He'll see a blind person, he heals them.
And then he moves on to the next person who has another problem and he heals that and fixes that.
And so a lot of times we Christians and Jews and even people who aren't believers are watching it almost voyeuristically.
There's nothing visceral about it.
There's nothing vicarious about it.
It's just, oh, this is an interesting approach to the texts that we've read many times or the stories that we've heard.
What we did is I think our approach was influenced in some ways by the West Wing, which is about the presidency, but not everything is through the president's eyes.
You're seeing just as much about the people around him as you are about him.
And so by giving voice to and life to the people that Jesus impacts, the people that Jesus meets, and you identify with Mary Magdalene in her depravity and desperation.
You identify with Simon Peter, who's desperate to feed his family and is making mistakes, but also having victories.
And then you encounter Jesus through their eyes.
Now, when he calls them or rebukes them or heals them or whatever it is, it feels, when you talked about emotions, it feels personal.
It feels authentic.
It feels organic.
And I think that's the thing that I would say without exception, or sorry, without exaggeration, upwards of 80%, 90% of the people who meet me in public and say something about the show will say it feels so human.
Yeah.
It feels so real.
And that's a funny thing to say.
Like I wouldn't go up to the creator of Breaking Bad and go, the show just feels so human.
Well, of course it's human.
It's about human beings.
The biblical genre of storytelling has not felt human.
I often say, you know, we usually see Jesus and his followers as stained glass windows.
And then even in movies about them, they still feel like stained glass windows.
And so what the chosen is, it's not an attempt to give you a new Jesus.
I believe we're just revealing the Jesus that's already there.
It's to show you Jesus and his followers, and yes, even his enemies as the human beings that they were in the first century.
And by taking off the sheen, by removing the formality, by removing even in some cases, and this may sound bad as well, the over-reverence that sometimes distances us from Jesus and distances us from God, we're removing some of that and telling just an organic, authentic human story, while not denying that Jesus is God and is perfect.
And that seems to be what's cracked the code for believers and non-believers.
We have a third of our audience are not believers and half our cast and crew are not believers, but they love the story.
You know, I have to ask you this because all of that I have noticed in the show.
And I find when sometimes I'll come on my podcast and I'll always be very clear that I'm not a theologian.
I'm not a pastor, but I'll talk about some encounter I've had with the text, with the gospels and what it's meant to me and all that.
And almost always, I instantaneously will get emails and comments on Acts saying, no, that's not, no, that's not what it means.
You know, there's kind of absolute, absolute certainty about what it is.
And I remember watching a scene where, in the chosen where Jesus heals a leper.
And when he's healed him and this guy is shocked that his horrible disease, and it really is a horrible disease, has been taken away.
Jesus puts a coat on him and says, green is your color.
And that it moved me so much because it's what somebody would say.
It actually takes the attention off Christ and puts it back on this guy.
It's a modest, it's a humble thing to say.
Do you get letters like that?
No, he would never make a joke.
And that's a joke.
He would never.
Yes.
Oh, I mean, we get all kinds of stuff.
I mean, Jesus is obviously the most controversial figure and also the figure who has the most amount of ownership from entire people groups.
That's my Jesus.
And if we do anything that contradicts their vision of who their Jesus is, they'll say, well, that's not, that's not, I'll actually see those words.
That's not my Jesus.
And what's interesting is two things.
One is people who aren't Jewish are the most commonly bothered by some of the humanity of Jesus that we have in the show.
When he's joking, when he's sitting down, when he doesn't have the halo around his head.
And all of my Jewish friends are Jewish scholars who speak into the show and give us advice and read our scripts and whatnot all say, oh, that's what Jewish rabbis are.
They sit down, they ask questions, they joke, they tell stories.
Again, the religiosity that we have applied, not only to God and faith and Christianity in general, but to Jesus himself is an inauthentic human projected religious thing that we've done.
Of course, Jesus would have said, oh, that's your color because he knew people.
He was charismatic and connective.
How else would he have gotten thousands of people to walk around and want to hear him speak and children to climb on his lap?
I mean, he had to be fun and again, a typical Jewish rabbi.
Making jokes, right?
Yeah.
So there's that.
And I think also the concept that the God of the universe, the creator of the world, laughed and brushed his teeth in a stream and danced at weddings and told jokes and laughed at jokes and was self-deprecating has proven to not just be not detracting from his divinity.
It's in many ways enhanced it.
It's in many ways caused people to go, I am so grateful and I'm so moved by the Emmanuel concept.
The word Emmanuel means God with us.
We usually think of it as a Christmas term, but it's a full-time term, which refers to the fact that God himself came and came to earth, sent his son to earth to say, I'm going to be one of you and live the life that you live and show you what true humanity should be.
Now, you can't get there because of your flaw and your sin, but this is the North Star.
This is the goal.
And that includes humor and that includes dancing and that includes all of the things that we love as human beings.
Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a Jesus with a wry, with that wry attitude that he has.
I think that's a, you know, but who's a Chesterton said, we never get to see God's mirth, but he must have mirth.
And I think that that comes across in the story.
Almost as important as the original way this is told is the original way it was distributed.
I mean, people don't understand that the bottleneck in making movies is not making movies because you can take a credit card out of your wallet and make a movie, but it's getting people to see it.
So now it's on Amazon, right?
Am I right?
It's on Amazon.
Yeah, it's on Prime Video.
We still have the chosen app.
We still, because early on in the process, I promise the audience, we're going to keep it free forever in some way.
Now, that wasn't our original intent.
I don't know if this was your question.
I forgive me if I interrupted, but there was a time during COVID when season two was coming out and the show had not really found much of an audience yet.
I mean, we were finding that people who were watching it were very passionate about it, but it hadn't reached critical mass yet.
And we had done it all independently.
I mean, there were no studios, streamers, broadcasters lining up around the block to do a Jesus show, and certainly not with myself, who had just come off a big career failure.
My movie that I'd released nationwide completely bombed and Hollywood was certainly not looking to be in the Dallas Jenkins business.
And I made this short film for my friend, for my church on my friend's farm in Illinois, 20 minutes from my house.
It was about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds.
And that was just intended to be for my church.
But while I was making it, I came up with the idea for the show.
And I said, boy, whoever does a multi-season show about Jesus is going to be really smart because I think it would really take off.
And that short film ended up being the catalyst, the concept for crowdfunding.
And when we put that short film out on social media, it generated over $10 million in crowdfunding, shattering the all-time crowdfunding record for media projects.
So that we were we were already outside the system.
We were trying to monetize.
We're trying to get enough money so we can do the second season.
Right.
So during COVID, I just put the show out on YouTube totally for free.
And I said, look, here's the show.
We want to be nice because it's COVID.
We want to give you a chance to watch it.
It's a goodwill gesture.
We're going to make it free for a couple of weeks.
And but if you want us to keep going, if you want us to make more seasons, if we're going to give this away for free, you got to give something if you can.
If you can't, don't worry about it.
But if you, and that night, the first day, the first day that we released episode one in a live stream generated a quarter of a million dollars of just people loving it so much, they just wanted it to to pass it on to others and I, after the first couple days, when our income had just quadrupled, we said, all right, let's just keep it free forever.
So it's always going to be free, available each season um eventually um, but right now it's on prime video.
All five seasons are on prime video.
It's also on the chosen app, which is how people watch it if they want to see it totally free, no subscription, no ads no, nothing.
They just want to watch it.
So that whole outsider spirit, I think, has not only been a, it's not been a negative, it's been a value add for a lot of people, because they say okay there's, there's a freedom to this, there's a, there's a risk taking to this.
There's a lack of artifice, a lack of care about how this is going to be received, because we have this whole spirit of like, look we're, we're playing with house money at this point.
I mean this is we just want to get this out to as many people as possible.
I think that that's helped the show.
Yeah I, I wish I could bottle what you just said.
I really do, because I feel like this is, this is the thing that drives me crazy.
I, I mean, I get letters every day, and you probably do too.
How can I get my material to such and such?
And I just think, you know, a whole new world of technology has opened up the question.
The question that I was going to ask, you asked answered most of the question I wanted to ask, but the but.
The other question was, did you come to that solution after knocking on doors and after going to people one by one and saying, will you look at this, will you, you know, going to all the faith-based studios, or did you just say, you know what?
I'm just doing this myself?
So uh, there was no doors to knock on, for the most part because I couldn't even get past the gate at that point.
Right, I mean, I had, I had, I had failed to the point where I, in many ways, i'd taken my shot.
I'd been making movies for a while, but all independent and varying degrees of success, and then uh, I finally got a chance to do a studio project and it just bombed and so um, I didn't, there wasn't a, there wasn't an opportunity really, and I knew that wouldn't, I knew it wouldn't come.
So I made the short film and it was uh, at the they're now called Angel Studios.
At the time they were VID Angel and they saw the short film and and freaked out and and heard my idea for the show and i'll give them credit.
Crowdfund Investment Opportunity00:02:54
We don't, we're not in partnership anymore, but I always give them credit for their Renegade, Renegade spirit is, they said, you should put this on social media.
And then afterwards, just tell them, you know, give people the opportunity to invest.
It wasn't actually donations.
It was a crowdfund investment opportunity.
And I thought it was a ridiculous idea.
But at that point, I didn't even know if I was ever going to make another movie or TV show again.
So I was like, well, this is my five loaves and two fish.
If God wants to multiply it and feed 5,000, that's up to him.
But all right, here we go.
I didn't think it was going to work.
And there was something about that short film that for a lot of people, and I still run into people who today who invested and who were early adopters who just said that short film was transcendent for me.
It spoke to my heart.
It was a portrayal of these stories that I'd never seen before, never considered.
And so that it took off.
But yeah, it wasn't until the second season that Hollywood Studios goes, whoa, wait a minute, this is something you've cracked some codes that we didn't know were crackable.
And coming at a time when the industry was, the bubble was bursting on streamer content, the COVID had impacted theatrical releases, and they're seeing this outsider, this outsider group just come along and build an audience of what's now several hundred million people completely outside the system with duct tape and string.
I can't take credit for all of the ideas, but there was something about it that worked for this project.
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Opening Up Faith-Based Wings00:06:28
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You know, the hostility to Christians in Hollywood is fairly intense.
I mean, it's almost, I wouldn't call it hostility so much as disdain.
I mean, I've been in many rooms when I've listened, especially after Mel Gibson's film came out, where it was clear that Gibson had taken money out of his pocket.
Now he has a big pocket, but still, he took money out of his pocket.
He made a beautiful, beautiful film, and it made a fortune.
And so everybody kind of opened up a faith-based wing of their studios in response.
But at the same time, they would make films like the Noah film in which God destroyed the world because we weren't environmental enough.
And they made the film Moses, where I remember Christian Bale going out and saying Moses was kind of a terrorist.
And it was like this struggle in their souls.
Now, now that you have such a command that you've made such a, reached such a commanding height, do you find that's still there or do you find Hollywood is opening up a little bit?
So absolutely opening up in many ways.
Here's the interesting thing.
We complain often about as artists, and I think it's a fair complaint that kind of the corporatization of Hollywood and how studios now are owned by huge corporations and all that.
And as artists, sometimes it feels like that makes things a little bit more vanilla, more safe, yada, yada.
And there's some negatives to it.
The positives are that at the highest levels of these studios, and I've now met with and attempted to or almost had made deals with almost all of them, there's not hostility.
There's a, how did you do this?
We want to be part of it in some way.
Now, amongst the community, it's one of those things where it's not cool to talk about it at parties.
You don't go to a Hollywood party and brag about I had a hand in the chosen, in the Jesus project.
There still is some of that, of course.
I just don't, I don't notice and I don't, and I don't even mean this to be combative.
I just don't care anymore.
I used to really care about affirmation and legitimacy.
That was my drug of choice.
I wanted to be approved.
I practiced Academy Award speeches in my mirror that I really hoped that someday I could get an award from the Academy and all that.
And God took all of that away from me after I failed and I really was surrendered before God and I truly gave it all up.
And I said, okay, I'm willing to do whatever you want.
And if that means no more movies or TV shows, I'm okay with that.
And I think that's when God said, well, now you're ready for the chosen.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Now I don't care about that anymore.
So I don't get into as much the culture wars as I used to.
And I found that there's many people in Hollywood.
I know you know them as well.
Some people are absolutely lovely and some people are absolutely agnostic when it comes to content.
They're interested in relationships and making money and it's a business.
But there's always going to be people.
And this is true in the faith world as well.
This is true in the conservative world as well.
There's people who just are so tribal and find people who are outside of their tribe so despicable that they can't bring themselves to want to be happy for some sort of relationship or some sort of content provision.
But I found that like Prime Video, for example, absolutely wonderful, absolutely a great relationship.
They're thrilled to see on their top 10.
I mentioned this to you before we got on the air is three projects last week were in the top 10 and on Amazon Prime that were Bible projects.
The Chosen, The Chosen Adventures, our new animated series, and then House of David from the Wonder Project.
Bible projects made by believers, made by people who want the Bible exalted in some way.
I'm making a Joseph miniseries right now about Joseph of Egypt, the Old Testament Joseph, and Prime is financing that and supportive of it.
And they watching the episodes and reading our scripts and are loving them.
It's a new world in many ways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's the way the movie business was at the beginning, you know?
I mean, it was a bunch of Jewish guys saying, hey, if people want to see Ben Crosby as a priest, put Ben Crosby in a collar.
That's how they made Hollywood great.
So I feel the way we started in Media's Race, we started in the middle, in the successful moment of your career.
But where did you come from?
Where do you start off in this?
How does this journey start for you?
Yeah, well, it starts, if you go back further, my father is Jerry Jenkins.
He wrote The Left Behind books.
He has written over 200 books and is a very prolific storyteller.
That's where I got my passion for movies and storytelling.
He introduced me to, started introducing me to movies in high school.
I've had a pretty protected childhood.
We only watched family films and not very many of them and weren't a big TV family, but he was, he was a big movie buff.
So finally I get to high school and he's like, all right, it's time for you to learn and to see, you know.
And so the first movies that I was watching on a regular basis were like The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde.
And I'm just going, where has this been all my life?
I was going to be transported.
And it was when I saw one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
I was in high school and I was watching it by myself at home.
And I remember when Jack Nicholson is doing a fake broadcast of a World Series game because Nurse Ratchet won't let him watch the World Series.
And it was so moving and so exciting.
And I literally stood up.
I almost get emotional thinking about it now because at the time I was interested in sports broadcasting myself.
It was one of the things that I liked.
And I just was so transported that I said, whatever that is, I want to do that.
I want to cause people to be moved and inspired and emotional in some way through storytelling.
And so for the first 15 to 20 years of my career, my dad and I kind of formed our own company and tried to do things outside the system.
Well, I mean, we were trying to get in the system, but we did sing independently and had varying degrees of success, like I mentioned, but it was all fairly small.
And then I got this opportunity to work with a couple of the biggest producers in Hollywood.
Jason Blum, who runs Blumhouse, who's responsible for some of the biggest, most successful horror films of all time.
Wants To Inspire Through Storytelling00:02:53
He's one of those, one of those Jewish guys who's like, hey, you want to put Ben Crosby in a collar?
Let's put Ben Burke Crosby collar.
He himself is proudly liberal and Jewish and whatnot, but he's also like, he loves underdog.
He loves telling stories.
And he thought, well, this faith-based thing is interesting too.
There's an audience there just like horror films that aren't cool at parties, but let's serve them in some way and got connected with me and gave me an opportunity to make a movie.
It was called The Resurrection of Gavin Stone.
It came out in 2017.
And it just completely bombed.
It was a good film.
It wasn't a great film.
And that's where I just had my moment of surrender.
And I had this extraordinary day this afternoon where I'm with my wife Amanda at home alone and we're crying and we're praying and confused and felt like God had called us into this into this field.
And then it just was all kind of taken away in just a couple of hours.
And I thought, man, I just don't know that maybe I missed my calling.
Maybe I was wrong.
Maybe this was not God that had brought me to this.
And maybe this is God telling me now, get out.
And he really put it strongly on my wife's heart to read the story of the feeding of the 5,000.
And we read that story and couldn't quite figure out why God had it for us to read.
And we're wrestling with it all day long and thinking maybe it meant that the numbers in the box office were going to magically turn around and God was going to take our desperation and hunger and turn it into this big miracle.
And that didn't happen until middle of the night.
Some guy just randomly Facebook messaged me.
I'd never met him before, just out of the blue.
No, didn't say hi, didn't say hello, just said, hey, remember, it's not your job to feed the 5,000.
It's only to provide the loaves and fish.
And I looked around.
I thought maybe my computer had been recording what I'd been talking about that day.
I just said to him, why did you say that to me?
It's four o'clock in the morning.
I'm working on a memo analyzing what went wrong and how I can fix it for next time.
And he said, oh, that wasn't me.
God told me to tell you that.
He was in Romania just walking home from a grocery store and saw the box office results and he felt God just pounding on his heart.
Like, tell Dallas.
He's like, I've never met the guy.
He's like talking to God, you know, tell Dallas it's not his job to feed the 5,000.
And that changed my life.
That moment I stopped caring about results.
I stopped focusing on the results.
I genuinely had a life change in my 40s and gave it all up and said, okay, whatever you want.
And that's what led me to do a short film about Jesus, the birth of Christ for my church.
Didn't feel like five loaves and two fish felt like one loaf and half a fish.
But I was like, I'm going to, you know, this is what God has in front of me.
And then the rest is history.
It's such an amazing story.
I sometimes sit around with Michael Knowles, my colleague here and my friend, and we exchange stories like this and we always stop and think like, oh, yeah, it's all real.
Good News, Bad News00:05:06
That's the thing.
Where you go, either I'm lying and I just made that story up.
Right.
Or God is real and does insert himself into our lives and works.
Yeah.
Because those kinds of things happen all the time.
And I just go, I've seen too much to not believe in it.
I can't go back.
That's it.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
No, exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, so many people write, I'm sure to you, to everybody who has made their way in an artistic field.
How do you get it?
What do you say to young people who have nothing, no connections?
Maybe they have a script under their arm or something like that.
What do you say to them?
Yeah, I get this question all the time now because back before I was very successful, there wasn't a lot of people asking me for advice.
But now it's like, how did you do this?
And here's the, there's bad news and there's good news.
The good news is anyone can make anything at any time now and can immediately put it out for the entire world with YouTube and any parts of the internet.
It used to be before the internet and even before YouTube, even when we had the internet and there was no platforms like that, you couldn't just upload your stuff and build an audience.
I mean, there was a couple examples here and there, but it was extraordinarily difficult.
Now anyone can do it.
And you can, I mean, there's been full-length feature films, award-winning films filmed on iPhones.
So that's the good news.
The bad news is anyone can do it.
Anyone can put it on any platform and millions of people can just make a movie on their iPhone.
So to stand out, to get attention, to get eyeballs is extraordinarily difficult now.
And so what I always say to people is, and I stole this a little bit from Steve Martin.
Some of it's just common sense.
Stop focusing so much on how to get noticed and focus as much as you can on being good.
Like work on your craft, be great.
Because if you put something on YouTube or you put something in someone else's hands or you put something on the internet in some way and it gets zero traction, it's not getting shared, it just wasn't good enough.
Like it just wasn't.
And I can say that as someone who's done it.
I'm not saying that I cracked the code and figured it all out.
There's many times where I've made something and the audience just didn't show up.
And when they did show up, they didn't share it.
They didn't tell their friend, oh my gosh, I'm going to sit you down right now.
You have to watch this.
That happened with my short film that I did for my church on my friend's farm in Illinois.
Low budget.
It just was something about it.
Changed people's lives when they watched it and they wanted to see more.
And if you do something like that, I can tell you it's probably not going to happen if you haven't taken a long time to try and fail and to work on your craft.
So just put your head down, get as good as you can, watch as much as you can, learn as much as you can, fail as much as you can.
Do a short film, a two-minute short film about two people talking around a table, you know, just to get, just to learn how to tell stories, learn how to capture good quality sound and audio and visuals and all that.
Eventually, if you're meant to do this, and not everyone is, in fact, most people aren't, someone will love it.
Someone will share it.
It will start to find an audience and they'll want to see more.
Yeah, that's great advice.
I mean, the thing about quality, whenever I talk to writers, which I try never to do because they're just awful people, as you know, the one thing.
I was raised by one.
I get it.
But they always want to know, how do I find an agent?
How do I do this?
How do I do that?
But the question really is, do you know grammar?
Do you know how to tell a story?
Have you read anything?
Do you read books?
I mean, those are the real questions.
It's extraordinary how many people don't.
And especially in the faith world, the Christian world, where it's a little bit more like a, I felt God tell me I'm supposed to do this.
They feel this kind of sense of calling.
And I think, well, when God calls you to be an architect, surely you don't go up to families and go, hey, can I build your house for you?
I haven't done it before.
I didn't go to college for it.
I didn't study from all the great architects.
I haven't even tried yet, but this is a God thing.
Obviously, no one would allow you to do that.
And the same thing is true of writing, of filmmaking, and all of that is do the work because there's millions of people, maybe not exaggerate, let's say thousands of people who you're competing with for eyeballs who are doing the work.
And Hollywood is run by and filled with people who did the work, who slept in their car, who studied and watched and learned and all of that.
And instead of complaining about how you can't get in and they won't let you in and just get good and they can't deny you.
And that's what ultimately happened with the chosen.
It became undeniable.
Yep.
Yep.
Even the bad guys in Hollywood work hard.
There's no question about it.
Dallas Jenkins, the creator of the chosen, really nice talking to you and just fascinating stuff.
I appreciate it.
I hope I get to talk to you again.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for having me.
Appreciate it.
Really fascinating, talented, first of all, fascinating articulate guy.
And that advice about learning to be good, it's like the hardest advice to give because nobody wants to take it, but it's great advice.
And if you want to see how a great podcast is done, you should come to the Andrew Clavin show on Friday.