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In this episode we’re just outside of Chicago connecting with Phil Vischer, the visionary, creative who founded Veggietales. To date it's the most popular direct to DVD series of all time with more than 65 million copies sold. It led to feature films, Netflix Original series and became a cultural icon.

Phil tells us the story of Veggie Tales meteoric rise to success, the struggles and pitfalls of maintaining that success and truth about what is required to find and keep one’s identity rooted in the one who created us. While his story is not unusual, the wisdom and lessons learned via the journey are exceptional and is deserving of a close listen on what it means to belong to Jesus – not simply as your Savior but as your Lord. Salvation was never really the goal just the tool that is to lead us all towards a relationship with God rooted in His lordship and the restoration of what was lost in the Fall.

This week’s episode is calling us to ask that all important question: as we’ve accepted Jesus as Savior have we also accepted Him as Lord? If you have, we would love to hear how this has impacted the organizations for which you are responsible because after all, proof is IN the pudding. Share with us your stories in the comment section below.

Useful Links:

Phil Vischer.com

VeggieTales.com

We also have a very brief survey we’d love for you to take that will help us shape the direction and future of the FDE podcast. As always, we love taking your questions and hearing your comments. Feel free to submit your thoughts in general here.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

Henry [00:03:14] Phil, thank you very much for joining us. Show this is a big treat for all of us and we want to be able to dove into some of the experiences you've had, those that have been thrilling and those that have been cautionary. And I know that you've got a lot that you can share to encourage and challenge and maybe even help some of us to be more mindful of. But there's going to be some amount of people who are listening to this podcast who, unlike the three of us co-hosts, don't know a lot about VeggieTales. And they understand that you've had a lot of distribution, a lot of success. They've probably seen some of the things up on maybe some of the movie posters. But before we get started, can you just give us a little bit of a sense of what VeggieTales was, what were the characters, what was it all about? And then let's get into some of the stories that you learned is not Panaro.

Phil [00:03:58] Yeah. As I've often said, VeggieTales is something that on paper makes no sense whatsoever. It is a program where limbless, hairless, naked talking vegetables reenact Bible stories and it was for kids. I launched it in 1993. We made the first one. Three of us started in a spare bedroom, moved to a little storefront on the north side of Chicago because I couldn't have other guys coming into my spare bedroom. My wife didn't like that very much to work on the show. And Bob made a cucumber deal with asparagus. Archibold Asparagus, Jimmy and Jerry Gore.

[00:04:38] There's, oh, I don't know, 20 or 30 characters over the years and do that. Every show starts out on the kitchen countertop with Bob. Larry, they get a letter from a kid, the kid, a question. And then we go off to answer their questions through either the retelling of the Bible story or a parody of pop culture. We've spoofed Fat Man. Star Trek, Gilligan's Island, all sorts of stuff. We'll just have fun with and veggie eyes that fill it with vegetables. So it's kind of a troop of characters, not unlike the Muppets where you can put them in different contexts, in different settings and you kind of know how they're going to act because you've gotten to know those characters over the years. So that was ninety three. So it's been going on 27 years.

Henry [00:05:19] So when you talk about these characters, which ones were you?

Phil [00:05:23] I'm about half of them, so whatever they are, two that are together, one is me and the other is my friend Mike from Bible College. We met in Bible College on the puppet team in northern Minnesota. And so I am Bob. He is Larry. I am Jimmy Gaurd. He is Jerry Gaurd. I am Felipe the Pea. He is your general clog the buddy that I am. Also, Mr. London, Mr. Nasr and Pog. Great and Archibold, Asparagus and Goliath, the giant peggable. And I think I've been about 20 characters over the years.

Henry [00:05:54] With these 20 different characters, and I'm familiar with most of them because I've got three boys who are now in their teens and grew up with VeggieTales, which is those characters. Would you say you see yourself most in or maybe your wife has said that?

Phil [00:06:06] Yeah, there's a little of me in all of them. There's a whole lot of me and Bob the tomato. So, Bob, I've described to Bob the tomato as a frustrated Mr. Rogers in that if you've ever watched Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers, Old Jones, it always goes perfectly. You know, he is in complete control. Nothing ever happens that makes him frustrated or cranky in Mr. Rogers neighborhood. It all run like clockwork. And that's what Bob the Tomato wants.

[00:06:37] I think that's what we all want. We want our lives to run like Mr. Rogers neighborhood. So, Bob, the tomato wants to show to run like Mr. Rogers Show and just be perfect and completely under his control. Accomplishing all of his objectives. Right on time, right on schedule. And of course, the comedy and the show is that it never goes that way. And his friend, Larry, the cucumber is the most laid back. Okay. Bob, every day you'll be a fly in the world. And it drives Bob crazy because Bob is the one who has to keep the trains running on time. And Larry is happy and having fun and doesn't seem to have a care in the world. And that's Mike. My friend Mike Muraki, we met in Bible college and I was trying to change the world and he was just enjoying his life. And those personalities turned into the tomato, Larry. Cucumber.

William [00:07:29] That's amazing. I am probably the interesting one. I did not grow up on VeggieTales and actually just found out about it about three or four years ago. So my goodness, thanks to Netflix, I now get to watch VeggieTales and Dave and the Giant Pickle was my first experience with a group of mid people that grew up on VeggieTales that literally could not believe that I had never seen one of these.

Henry [00:07:52] So Phil used to our lives on your content's been 180 different countries but has never penetrated into Alabam. I see.

Phil [00:07:59] Yeah. That's a that's a tricky market to get into.

William [00:08:02] Yeah it is. It is. We can discuss market penetration later, but actually on that point I would love to know. I mean we we bring a lot of entrepreneurs on and talk about the growth of their company. Tell us a little bit about when you knew that this was taken off if you raised funds for growing the business. What that looked like, I would imagine talking vegetable characters is probably not the easiest PowerPoint deck to put together. Right. Right.

Phil [00:08:30] Well, I guess there was it was it was very much the right thing at the right time. When I was trying to put it together was the early 90s, the transformative technology sweeping through America's living rooms was the VHS deck. For the first time, parents could choose what program their kids were watching and find one that met their values.

[00:08:52] That was unheard of before then. If it wasn't on TV, you know, you couldn't watch it ever. So another thing that was happening was Christian consumers were starting to in moss, buy products as Christians. So they weren't just Christians who were consuming. They were Christian consumers. So they were going to Christian bookstores. They were picking up Christian product catalogs and they were buying books, records, DVD. You know, they were they were consuming as Christians. And that led to an explosion of opportunity for Christian producers, authors, musicians such as myself. The music started first in the 70s and then in the mid 80s. Some of the early musicians, especially in the kids' space, started putting video of their songs and then putting it on a VHS tape and then putting it in the Christian bookstore.

[00:09:44] So by the late 80s, that was starting to become a thing. And then around ninety one is what I noticed. And yet most of them were sockpuppet guy with an acoustic guitar. They weren't very adventurous either technologically or creatively. And that's when 91, 92 is when I came up with the idea for VeggieTales and thought, well, maybe I could do that in VHS for Christian bookstores. So I did a 10 second test of Larry Cucumber. I was an animator, a computer animator in Chicago at the time. I did a 10 second test to learn cucumber hoppin out of a dish on a yellow tiled kitchen countertop. And then I went to the Christian publishers and said, all right, look, I'm going to. Changed the world. This is the biggest thing since sliced cucumbers. Would you fund my show? Cause that's the business you're in, right? And they said, well, that's really interesting. If you go make that show, bring it back, we will consider selling it for you. And how am I supposed to do that? So I spent two years knocking on doors. Will you fund my show? Because it's going to be great. Trust me, it's a cucumber.

[00:10:52] And finally, after two years, I got nowhere. There was just, you know, if you go make it and then finish one and then bring it back. Then we'll take a look at it.

[00:11:04] And my wife and I run a small group at our church in downtown Chicago, and there was a couple in the small group. And after two years of praying with us through this process, the husband in that couple came to me and said, what you're trying to do is too important for me to let it not happen. And he wrote me a check for eighty thousand dollars out of his retirement fund and said, I just want you to get started. And then I found a ministry in the Middle East that was doing media ministry. They were buying time on satellites in the Middle East to broadcast Christian programing across the Middle East. And they managed to sell them on the idea of giving me ten thousand dollars for each of eleven episodes for the rights to air. I had no idea how I make one episode of an episode. But they said, OK, you can make eleven episodes. We'll give you a hundred ten thousand outside one hundred ninety thousand dollars. Then I quit my job. I bought the computer I needed, which is like seventy five thousand dollars, so a third of my money was gone. The next day I rented a storefront on the north side of Chicago, about six hundred square feet in between a Spanish grocery store and a comic book shop. Everyone on the second floor apartments only spoke Spanish. The landlord only spoke Korean. It was fantastic. I couldn't talk to anybody. And then I hired two guys right out of art school, one from Universal, Illinois, one from the artists, two to Chicago that had touched computers was the qualifications they had. Just a little bit because this was 1993. So two, three years before Toy Story, the first computer animated movie, and three of us set up in that store fronts and we triple shifted the round the clock on the one computer that I could afford to animate the first episode of VeggieTales. I decided I wasn't gonna go back to the Christian publishers because they hadn't been very nice to me. And so I was going to start the Amway of Christian children's video and we're going to sell it direct. So I took out a hundred numbers in Christian magazine, spent, I don't know, twenty five thousand dollars worth of direct response advertising bought these ads. I thought this that it's gonna take off Christmas nineteen ninety three. We sold five hundred copies of the first video through my direct response ad. The animators had to answer the phone which was sitting next to the computer so they would animate the phone would ring that, write down a credit card number and then go back to animating. We shipped the first 500 VHS cassettes that didn't even cover the cost of the ads, unfortunately. But I noticed those orders are coming in that all the Christian publishers are ordering it. So in the end of nineteen ninety four, the first two VeggieTales videos hit Christian bookstores. We saw like sixty thousand copies into the stores. Back then there were a couple thousand Christian bookstores now. I think there's seven. So we sold that many copies into the stores for the first year. They did absolutely nothing. As parents walked in and said vegetable telling bible stories. I don't think so. Let's see what James Dobson as though they did nothing but what happened in nineteen ninety four into nineteen ninety five. A lot of college kids worked in Christian bookstores and because they were college kids they weren't allowed to touch important things like the Bibles. So they had to work out of the back of a star in the kids' department. And back then stores were all putting in VHS decks and VHS players and t._v.s so they could show the latest kids videos, which was the guy with the sock puppet and the acoustic guitar. And then VeggieTales came out and these college kids took him back to their dorm rooms. Watch them all the money python references and they just screwball humor and thought it was hilarious and then went back to the stores and switched out the tapes, which if you do at a Wal-Mart, you get fired. You can't switch things today. So that's going to happen today because everything's corporately controlled. What plays in a store? But back then, the kids in the back could actually change the tapes out. They put VeggieTales into the back of Christian bookstores, became VeggieTales theaters all across America. And we went from shipping 60000 videos that first Christmas to one hundred and fifty thousand of the second Christmas to 700000. The third Christmas 1996. And then started getting calls from Kmart and Target. Wal-Mart saying, hey, we want to buy these videos, too. And that's when I knew we were onto something.

Rusty [00:15:21] It's just an amazing story. I want to hear what it was like, you know, at the peak. I mean, what did it feel like in the company? Because we know there was an arc up and then we'll talk a little bit about yeah, hopefully about what happened after. But give us a sense at the peak kind of what was going, because I remember you talking about we're sort of like the Walt Disney Company and that was a big statement.

Phil [00:15:43] Yeah. I come from a family with a lot of evangelical ambition. I guess you could say my great grandfather was the first non-denominational radio preacher in America. Went on the air in 1923 and preached every Sunday morning from Omaha, Nebraska, until 1964 when he died. At which point it was the oldest, longest running radio show in America. So I grew up at Bible conferences and around missionaries and hearing stories and the amazing things that uncle who was the first white person to enter an area of Aryan Jaya and bring the gospel to cannibals, literal cannibals. You just don't get to do that anymore.

[00:16:21] There just aren't enough cannibals left on earth to be able to have that kind of fun.

[00:16:28] So I kind of grew up thinking, okay, what's the big thing I'm going to do for God that would make my grandparents and great grandparents say, hey, he's one of the good ones. We approve of this one. And when things took off, I really got the sense that, OK, this is me, this is my mission is to save the world through media, to save the children from the evils of Hollywood. God has made me the next Walt Disney. This is my destiny. You know, that sounds braggadocious and it sounds arrogant to me. It was more terrifying. You know, it was more a symptom. I guess I'm the one who has to do it. And I was that shy kid in high school that you never even noticed, you know, voted most likely not to be voted for anything, because I was in the basement playing with projectors and cameras and drawing when everyone else was running for student council. So at its peak, it was fun and absolutely terrifying because it was going so well. VeggieTales has been referenced in five different episodes of The Simpsons. It was parodied on Saturday Night Live in a two minute animated spoof. There were VeggieTales T-shirts and dance clubs in downtown Chicago. There were VeggieTales parties on college campuses across the country. So it went so well. I would for two years, 1998 and 1999, VeggieTales was the best selling home video series in the world. Number two was man. Number three was Scooby Doo. So when you get that kind of positive market affirmation, you know, oh, look, we just passed McDonald's. I guess things are going pretty well for my new restaurant. Where do you get that kind of positive market affirmation? It's very overwhelming. And it's also very easy to believe that you have a special mission in life that no one else has, and you'd better not mess it up. And that's kind of where I went was God has given me this amazing car to drive that could change everything. I had better not drive it off a cliff. I need to be better at driving because I had never done that before. I was twenty six when I started the company. I was 30 when it was big and I was a shy kid. So I started hiring anyone that looked like a grown up, that had a resumé that impressed me. So if you had Disney on your resumé, if you had Price Waterhouse on your resumé, if you had Procter and Gamble on your resumé. I didn't really care who you were or what you did. I hired you because I was so panicked that I couldn't do this. And what I ended up doing at the peak was build an executive team that I didn't know well and that I had no idea how to lead.

[00:19:18] And I've always said that I'm not a type A I'm not an alpha male. Most creatives aren't. It's unusual to have a creative who really is a type A. But I attracted type A's because I talked in these grand, you know, the flowery language of changing the world and building the biggest. Because I was reading business books. I was trying to catch ups and someone gave me Jim Collins built to last and I'm reading and built to last that you need a big, hairy, audacious goal of how you're gonna change the world in 20 years or you can't inspire your people. And I remember specifically thinking after reading that I don't think God has given me a big, hairy, audacious goal. But this book says I need to add one. So I'm going to make one up as a place holder. And then when God gives me the real big, hairy, audacious goal, I'll just swap them out. And so I came up with the big, hairy, audacious goal. I was gonna build a top for family media brand within 20 years. And of the top four family media brands. So Disney, Nickelodeon and Warner Brothers, whatever they would be at that time, we would be the most trusted big idea productions would be the most trusted of the top four family media brands. I put. That into all of the recruiting papers that we were sending out as we were starting to recruit senior leadership staff. I put it on the mission statement. I put it everywhere. It attracted type a alpha driven males who came in. And whenever you put a bunch of Taipei's in a room like dogs, they all sniff each other to see who's the biggest you know, who's the biggest type, eh? Because then I guess we have to follow him. And so they all came in. They all sniff me. I didn't smell like the biggest dogs. And no one really wanted to follow me, which was fine with me because I needed a break. I was exhausted. So I kind of pulled back into the creative part and let this new executive team run with it. They took my kind of delusions of infinity. You know, that we could build the next Disney and just doubled down on that. We ended up with a valuation of the company in 2000. The company was valued by a Midwest bank at three hundred and fifty million dollars based on the forecast that the new team put together. We put together an E saw stock ownership program. Twenty three million dollar credit facility with LaSalle Bank in Chicago, basically to make all my dreams come true. We started building a new headquarters building. We bought it old theater, a 1920s grad movie house in a suburb of Chicago. And we're going to restore it and reopen it for family films. We were planning a building that would hold 250 artists. We would have been the biggest animation studio between the coasts. We spent three hundred thousand dollars on a trade show booth to announce to the Christian retail world that we were for real. We went from 30 people on staff to 150 in about 18 months and increased the average salary by 100 percent so that we would be paying on par with Hollywood studios because we concluded that to not pay what people could make in Hollywood was morally wrong, even though we weren't in Hollywood and we weren't competing with Hollywood as a result. The price of the average VeggieTales video, the budget went from about a quarter million to a million. So it quadrupled. We had twice as many people working on each one and we were paying them all twice as much, which was fine because they were selling like hotcakes. But it wasn't sustainable for any other extensions that we launched. New shows now carried that same overhead. So as we came into 1999 and 2000 and about three months after I signed the senior credit facility with LaSalle Bank that loaned just $23 million to make all my dreams come true and give stock into the hands of the employees. Within 60 days of signing that we were out of compliance with the terms of the loan. I went through a huge turnover of my senior leadership team because I realized I had no idea how to lead them. I barely knew them. Half of them left a couple. I had to ask to leave. I brought in a new president who came from Hollywood and was one of the problems. We were in the Midwest. Hollywood people don't live in the Midwest and they don't want to live in the Midwest. So the people I was hiring were packaged goods. People were good people. It's a very different business than movies and entertainment. Salad dressing. We had expertise in salad dressing. We did not have expertise.

[00:23:32] So 1999, we hit about 40 million in sales and we were within six months of running out of cash and going belly up. The bank was ready to step in and take it over to find a new president. He went on a tear and raised 20 million dollars in 90 days because we'd started producing our first feature film, which was one of my dreams.

[00:23:56] I wanted to be Disney. Disney makes feature films. I also wanted to have a theme park someday Disney theme parks. I want to do everything that Walt did. So our building project collapsed under its own weight. I was rushing this too fast and it was too big. It was too much. The movie ended up costing about twice what I hoped it would cost. I needed about twice as many people working on it. It took longer than I thought.

[00:24:19] I thought, OK, yes, but this is God's will. This is God's plan. I'm the chosen one. I'm Christian, Walt. I have to save the children so we can just get this movie done and get it out in theaters. God will step in and everything else will be OK. It will do twice what we thought it would do. And then I can make all this work.

[00:24:40] And he did it. It did exactly what they thought it would do, which wasn't enough to recoup the money that we had spent on it. And at the same time, one of the ways we'd raised money was by changing our distribution, moving distribution of VeggieTales videos away from a company in Texas that produced Barney the Dinosaur to Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers wrote us a check for $30 million as an advance against those distribution rights. Well, a company in Texas wasn't very happy about that. So they took this to court and sued us for all the money they believed they would still have made on VeggieTales over the next 10 years that went to court in Dallas, Texas, took about a year and a half costs. Two and a half million in fees just to try the case, and we lost the jury and Dallas said that they were right and awarded them $14 million in damages. And that was two thousand and three. And the only thing left the movie came out, didn't make everything work. It did fine, but not fantastic. And walking out of court that day, I knew I had no choice but to file bankruptcy. So the end of 2003, going into 2004, everything that I had built, the characters, the songs, the company, everything was packaged up in a bankruptcy auction in downtown Chicago. And a company from New York came in and bought it all and moved the assets and about 30 of the staff to Nashville and left me in Chicago by myself. And that was the end of my story.

Rusty [00:26:15] Wow. So I guess it begs the question, as you look back over that arc, which is just an amazing story. Where did you turn right when you should have turned left? And the lesson to all of our entrepreneurs. Where would you have thought that God would have taken you in a different direction? And what was missing in being able to find that direction?

Phil [00:26:41] Well, I think what was missing in the simplest sense was actually walking with God. I was working for God. I was running maniacally to impress God. I was not walking with God. So when it came down to critical decisions, I wasn't listening. I wouldn't take the time to slow down and just listen. I was so panic that I wasn't doing enough, fast enough to impress God. That I didn't realize he didn't want me to impress him.

[00:27:24] He just wanted me to be with him. And I was the middle child. My dad walked out when I was nine. Shy kid. And I never really knew who I was. So this lack of identity, I didn't find my identity. God, I found it in the immediate success of the first thing I tried to do in my adult life. So I became VeggieTales. That was my identity. And because that was my identity, I wrap that up as that's my relationship with God. God doesn't care about I don't know that it was said this, but I believed it. God doesn't care about me nearly as much as he cares about VeggieTales. VeggieTales can change the world. If I had slowed down and just said, you know what? Actually, I'm going to focus first on God and being with God. Second on what I'm doing for God. I would have had time to listen and say, OK, I'm at this fork in the road where I think maybe I know I'm a shy kid, but I think you want me to be Walt Disney and be a CEO and build a giant company. Does that make sense? Should I maybe fast and pray about that? Does it get out? Anyone who knew me as a kid, if you said would he be happier in the basement making films or would he be happier as a CEO running a giant company? They'd laugh at you. Cause he's been in the basement making films his whole life. That's what he loves. Why would you want to be an H.R. meeting half of the time? I wasn't listening to anybody and I wasn't listening to God because I wanted so badly to do as much as I could, as fast as I could to validate my own existence. Well, we don't find our identity in God. Not only do we hurt ourselves, but we hurt everyone who's following us. His people were excited to follow me. They loved to be a part of that story. They loved the VeggieTales. They loved the fact that there was something with Christian values that was competing successfully. You know, we won the Annie Award one year for best video over The Little Mermaid, too. I found out later there was a high level meeting at Disney to talk about that reality and what it meant for them that this little upstart. So that was an exciting story to be a part of. But I led them out of my insecurity, not out of my relationship with God. And that hurt a lot of people. People who had uprooted their kids, you know, in places like Burbank, California, or Orlando, Florida, left jobs at Disney to move to Lombard, Illinois, to follow me. It disrupted their lives because I wasn't listening to God. It also disrupted my life because as I look back on that, I realized, you know what, about 80 percent of the time, well, things were going so well. I was miserable. And the reason I was miserable is I was so panicked that I was going to screw it up. I was so panicked that I was going to screw it up that I threw the control of the company into anyone else's arms who would take it. And guess what? Yeah, they screwed it up, too. We all screwed it up together. In the end, it got screwed up anyway. But it all came back to making the work I was doing for God. More important than my relationship with God. And the price that you pay for pursuing your own insecurity rather than your creator can be staggering.

Henry [00:30:43] That's incredibly important. And I would go so far as to say this most important message that any of our listeners will ever hear about their entrepreneurial journey. And so much of your story reminds me of the times really at band-width in which we were being willful rather than faithful.

[00:31:02] But what are some guide signs for somebody who's listening to this and says, yes, I get it. I get I understand intellectually that I'm supposed to walk with God.

[00:31:10] I understand intellectually that my identity needs to be as a beloved child of God. And not being this person is growing at 20 percent month over month. And yet, as they're finishing this podcast as a point to the parking lot of work, they're about to get into things. What are four or five things that they can do? Either they're signposts that they're on the wrong direction or they can say, yes, that's me. I know I have a problem, but I bet you most people this foreign pie guess realize that some of this mirrors their experience where four or five, maybe two or three were some things they can do, because in Arkansas it tends to be this kind of driven person. They're trying to do it. Maybe they're trying to do it for God and maybe some of their medicine somewhat healthy. But how do you take some of that God given ambition and turn it to a holy ambition in which they can do two or three things that will help them to take action on something and yet have the right mindset?

Phil [00:32:07] Right. Here's a big one. Are you stressed? What you are trying to do? Are you stressed about it? Do you have anxiety about it? Because stress is not a fruit of the spirit that. Amaze me when I realized that I went back and looked at the list. It's not in there. Nowhere does it say, if you follow me, you will be stressed. And I realize for me, stress comes when I'm holding on to outcomes. And this is a fundamental spiritual truth. God does not call us to outcomes. He calls us to obedience. He doesn't care how big you get, how successful you get. He actually doesn't care what you accomplish. He cares who you are. He cares about your character. He cares about how you treat people. He cares about obedience. And joy comes from letting go of outcomes and embracing obedience. So post collapse. I mean, I started another company and I got back up, dusted myself off, spent about six months kind of whining to myself and then started telling my story as God was unpacking this kind of unpeeling this onion for me so I could see what I had done wrong. And the biggest one was just, do you recognize how unhappy it was making you? And the reasons I was entirely obsessed with outcomes. I wanted to be Disney. I wanted to be this far. This fast. This big. Why? Well, I'm going to couch it in spiritual language because God will like it. That's why. No, because I didn't know who I was. And I wanted to be more impressed with myself. Was a big part of it. So now. Today. OK. Stress. You know, they old canary in the coal mine thing. You know, if there's gas in the coal mine, the canary stops singing. If the canary dies. Get out of the coal mine. You know, cause you're in trouble. Stress is my canary. If I'm feeling stressed, I stop and I say, OK, what outcome am I holding on to? And it's typically my budget. It's my schedule. It's my goal. I wanted to be father by now. I can't see next year. I don't know what next year looks like. I get stressed about that. So I stop. I take a deep breath. OK. God, your job is outcomes. My job is obedience. I'm gonna open my hands and let go of these outcomes and trust that you have. That I will be exactly where you want me to be. Next year and five years after the bankruptcy, I sat down with a consultant to talk about how to relaunch a new product idea. And the first thing they asked was, where do you want to be in five years? And I realized I wasn't sure I should answer that question, because here's the thing. If I've given Christ lordship of my life, where I am in five years is none of my business. So if I understand the concept of lordship, where I am in five years is entirely in God's hands, not mine. So how do you plan? So I told him where I want to be in five years is in the center of God's will. So strategize around that goal. Consultants go for it. But now there's a project that can do a project and say, hey, this project is going to take two years. OK. Well, I need a plan for this project. I don't need a plan for my life because now I'm putting myself in the place of God. I'm putting myself on the throne saying, God, this is where I want to go. Would you please show up and bless me? So can you let go of goals? Can you let go of planning to accept separate projects? Plan projects? Don't plan lives. Let God take care of lives. And can you let go of stress or at least use it as an identifier to say, what's the thing I really need to let go of? Is it a schedule? Is it a budget? Is it my self-conception? Is it my identity? You know, I wanted to be as impressive as the guys I went to business school with. And they're all ahead of me. OK, yeah. That's something to just turn over to. God. It does take you to the cross. Nail it up there and walk away from it. Joy does not come from comparison. Joy does not come even from accomplishment. Joy comes from relationship. From our relationship with God and our relationship with others. So what I can simplify my life down to what is God calling me to do today and am I doing it? And that has as much to do with how I treat the girl who's bagging my groceries at the grocery store as it does with my big idea. That's going to change the world. I'm never going to save the world. Only one man ever walked the earth who could actually save the world, and his name wasn't Phil. So he's calling me to help him to work for God. Not because he needs me because he doesn't, but because he knows it will be good for me to be walking with him. So when I know that it's really just about walking with him, I know that I don't have to be stressed if I'm not doing enough fast enough because he doesn't even care. He just wants to be with me. And that's a place of joy. So I can now create out of and I can actually touch the world.

Henry [00:37:05] Wow. Well, that's the price of admission.

Rusty [00:37:09] Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, Phil, what's been the rest of the VeggieTales story? Where does it sit now?

Phil [00:37:18] I lost it in bankruptcy due to that court case. The creditors filed an appeal. The appeals court threw out the lower court decision in about two hours. So the court case was thrown out. But the bankruptcy sale, it already happened.

[00:37:33] I have been doing some consulting and still doing voice work for VeggieTales ever since then. I'm actually writing for it right now. It's gone through four different owners. It is now owned by NBC Universal, which is owned by Comcast. So the cable company owns Bob Larry. It's sitting somewhere in Universal City next to millions and Shrek. But they've reached out to me actually just recently to say, hey, we just we realized we own this. You probably know more about it than anyone else. Could you give us some advice on what we can do? So I'm engaged with VeggieTales again. In the meantime, I did a series called What's in the Bible that takes kids all the way through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, books by books, answering all their big questions about, you know, why do we believe this? Why do we think this is true? A project that took about five years of my life that I never could have done if I was still running VeggieTales. And big idea. So God freed me from this, had a hamster wheel of madness to reengage, asking the question, what do kids need today and how can I supply that? The world changes so fast, especially in media, that it's like every five years. Unless you have a Netflix deal, you know, you just need to take a zero off the end of your budgets and try to come up with a new way to make the same thing for less.

[00:38:49] So I've been doing a lot of that, but I'm also boy, am I enjoying life more than when I was trying to be someone that God never created me to be.

Rusty [00:38:56] That's great. Well, William is going to wrap here. But if for any reason you need three new vegetables, you know we're here for you. We're onion and rutabaga and maybe turnip. How about those three?

Phil [00:39:09] That's fantastic. That's just a fact. It's an answer to prayer. I was just looking for those three vegetables. So I'll I'll send the release form shortly.

Rusty [00:39:18] Sounds good. Sounds good. Yeah. Thank you.

William [00:39:21] As we mentioned, I grew up in Alabama. Some vegetables, not really a thing, but I've eaten a few since I moved to California.

Phil [00:39:27] Yeah. Yeah. Alabama's I think it's all about the chicken. A lot of chicken is in Alabama, right?

William [00:39:31] Yeah. If you if you have fried chicken character, I know that goes against probably the moral philosophy of the show, but I'm all over that. I can really embody that.

Phil [00:39:40] OK. We're down.

William [00:39:42] Phil, as we do wrap, one of the biggest questions we love to ask is kind of bringing it back to God's word, bringing it back to scripture and say, where is he taking you right now? What is the story? Or maybe the verse or the book where you find yourself in this season of life, whether that's this morning or the last week or the last month or year, just what is God taking you to? What is he showing you in his word? And could you just share that with the audience?

Phil [00:40:08] Yeah, I am in the middle of having my nose rubbed all over some twenty three. So, you know, I memorized that when I was like six years old. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leaves, well, the waters. It's a beautiful poem. It's lovely. It's wonderful. Until you actually read it and realize what it's saying.

[00:40:30] And then it sounds absolutely ridiculous because it says, because God is my shepherd, I will not need anything else. And it's so hard to wrap your head around that that God is bringing me back to that. I kind of feel like I'm not allowed to read anything else until I can accept the truth. If God is my shepherd, I'm good. That's it. Not God is my shepherd. And you know, my business takes off. I can budget the next five years with clarity. All my kids are thriving. My marriage is healthy. And I can make my car payment. No, none of that is there. It's just the Lord is my shepherd. So I'm good. I'm fine. I'm great. I'm wonderful. And so I'm trying to internalize that figure. How does that affect my daily life? If God really is enough, not because of what he can give me, but just because of who he is, how does that change how I interact with people? You know, the needs I feel that I have, how I run my business, how I need my life. That's where my nose is right now. And I don't think he'll let me leave until I get it.

William [00:41:36] Hey, man. Thank you so much, Phil.. Thank you so much for bringing your story. Thank you so much for revealing what God's doing in your life right now and what he has been doing for the last, I guess, since 93, 25, 30 years or so. That's been a true pleasure to have you on the show. And just thank you for sharing your experiences with the audience.

Phil [00:41:55] You're welcome. Thanks for having me.