In today’s digital age, the internet offers powerful platforms for sharing ideas and building connections.  Whether through podcasts, social media , or online communities, these tools allow us to reach hearts and minds across the world. How can we use  these platforms to make spiritual connections and conversations?

In this episode, I have Craig Dehut, CEO and Co-Founder of Appian Media. He shares how he brings the Bible to the world, gathers support, and distinguishes between valuable input and distractions. He discusses his journey into biblical content creation and how the content is used to bring people together. Tune in and learn more!

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Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting people with the content in the Bible. Now, as you know, in this show, I’m not telling you what to believe in or telling you what to think or anything like that, but the Bible has a lot of content that people need to resonate with and I think almost everyone should have some sort of a grounding in something bigger than themselves. My guest today, Craig Dehut, he is the COO and co-founder of Appian Media and a documentary filmmaker.

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Craig, welcome to the program.

 

Hey, thanks for having me. 

 

Well, let’s start a little bit with your story. Where did you originate? Were you always interested in creating content and creating stories and also documentary filmmaking? 

 

Yeah. So, it took a variety of forms, but growing up, I really was always interested in stories. For a while, it took the form of just writing stories. I wanted to be a cartoonist there for a while, so I was interested in drawing and illustrations. But, eventually, about 13, 14 years old, someone let our family borrow a camcorder and so myself and my siblings went out into the backyard and would create all kinds of ridiculous things and I just kind of fell in love with the medium and decided to go to film school, graduated from there back in 2007, and, originally, that was supposed to be kind of major motion pictures, I wanted to write and direct feature films, but my career kind of took the form of working at television news and other forms where I got to document real stories, actually shoot interviews and follow news stories of real things that are happening, and, eventually, kind of fell in love with that format, that form of storytelling, and was able to combine that with my love for scripture, my love for the Bible, and put those two things together. 

 

So, at some point, you decided to go out on your own, or not on your own but be the co-founder of your own company. What prompted that particular move? 

 

Sure. So back in 2015, I was working at a video production company at the time, but also had recently met my, who’s now my co-founder, Stuart Peck, another Christian creative who had moved to the Indianapolis area, and he and I were just shooting the breeze, meeting over coffee and talking shop, talking about the industry, and talking about the things that we wish were out there, especially when it came to like Bible videos. We were finding things that were hard to watch. Some of them were just kind of hard to watch. They were not keeping the attention of the kids that we had in our Bible classes. And it was actually Stuart who kind of pitched the idea originally, was like, “Hey, what would it take for us to take a group of us over there, over to the lands of the Bible, and produce the content for ourselves, something that’s biblically accurate but also professionally produced?”

’It’s got to be packaged well so that people will actually want to watch it and we wanted to make it freely available. Share on X

And so we did that by creating a not-for-profit called Appian Media. And we were able to, through donations, through crowdfunding, take our first trip to Israel in 2016 and have been creating content ever since. 

 

So when you looked at the content that was already being created, you obviously saw the gap, you saw something that was missing, something that wasn’t really capturing people’s attention. What was that gap? What did you see that was lacking in the content that you were viewing, observing, and watching other people share?

 

Yeah. So, specifically, Stuart, at the time, was teaching a high school Bible class. Schools have been using media and smart devices and technology to help the kids learn for a long time and he was noticing, at least in the Bible classes that he was participating in, that, for the most part, we were kind of encouraging to put all that away and use the book. I have no problem with the book. God chose to communicate his will through written word, but to also make use of these tools, these media tools, and Stuart was just finding things online that were either made such a long time ago that the production quality was very obviously outdated and was not keeping their interest or we were finding things where it was very clearly made – as you can imagine, documentaries about the Bible, a lot of them are kind of this sensationalized gotcha, kind of almost reality TV that feels too produced, too unbelievable, and we didn’t want that either.

Yeah. Is that part of the problem with some of the content, and even with some of the challenges that we observe now with the younger generation connecting with the Bible in general that people have documented quite well that, obviously, you have the outdated technology, which is going to just be okay, if you ever watched like a movie in black and white or something, even if I think all the way back to like the 1910s and 1920s when they had those silent films and it’s kind of fun to see where we came from but no one’s actually going to sit through, say, a two-and-a-half-hour silent film right now.

 

Right.

 

But also nowadays, with the impact that our shorter attention spans have produced on journalism and even on movies and stuff like that where people are just trying to get your attention more than actually expose you to information. 

 

Yes. We were certainly not the first ones to make videos from the Bible lands, we’re certainly not going to be the last. What we were finding was a lot of content where the camera’s on a tripod, someone’s standing there communicating biblical truth but the camera’s not moving, Jerusalem’s way off in the distance, and we don’t feel like we’re there. And so not just the technology that was being used but also just the mechanisms of storytelling. We wanted to help the viewers feel like they were actually on the trip with us so we go into the cities, we talk to the people, we eat the food, we experience the culture, and we get down into an archeological square and dig with the archeologists just to help them feel like come along with us, you’re there with us as we’re sometimes even discovering things in the moment and that’s what we were seeing was lacking. And then I think one of the other major things was a lot of content, if it is going to be produced well, and there is some good stuff out there, a lot of times, it’s behind a paywall. You have to either buy the DVDs or sign up for the subscription service and we wanted this content to be freely available. We wanted Bible class teachers or families, homeschool groups to say, “This is good content. I can trust this as a reliable source, and I wanna be able to use it at no cost,” and those are some of the key elements of what began Appian Media. 

 

Now, did you take inspiration from any other travel-related shows that seem to be holding a lot of people’s attention? And I just think of like Rick Steves, Samantha Brown, any of those like travel channel or even like food shows where people kind of go places and those shows have kind of reached a decent audience. 

 

We did. We certainly did. Stuart, at the time, was actually working as a producer for HETV and so he was familiar with the style that makes the viewer feel like they’re there and keeping things engaging and moving. There’s a series that continues to produce some good content. Dave Stotts with Drive Thru History where a different format, it’s a single host, he’s talking straight to camera but he’s walking through those places and getting involved and invested and I think that was some of those elements that we tried to borrow. There’s a series called That the World May Know that some solid biblical teaching, I think he did a really good job. It has been a couple decades since it was produced so it’s starting, in many ways, to show its age a little bit but we appreciated some things about that. We just kind of borrowed from a lot of different inspirations and sources and said I think that we can try to make it this way. 

 

And then when you first developed this vision and saying that you didn’t want it behind a paywall, you want children to have access to it, everyone have access to it, what kind of planning or considerations did you need to think through as far as making it happen in a way where you’re still earning the income you need in your life and having the time to basically live your life, like social life, family, connection, rest, everything else. 

 

Yes. Rest, yes. It is a good consideration and even now, eight or nine years into this, we all are working this as a secondary job. So we all kind of have our day jobs. I work as a freelance video producer, producing content for other clients and not-for-profits and Stu works in the media industry as a sound recordist. But you’re right, these things aren’t cheap to make. You can’t just say, “Let’s take a group over to Israel and it’ll cost a few hundred bucks.” Tens of thousands of dollars. In some of these instances, hundreds of thousands of dollars to take the kind of trips that we do and to produce content that takes 8 to 10, sometimes 12 months of post-production and paying the contractors, paying the creatives who do that work. And so that was a consideration right at the very beginning is if we don’t want to charge people for it, where’s that money going to come from, and we decided early on to become a not-for-profit. We wanted people to donate to that and raise the funds on the front end. We actually used Kickstarter for that first year as a crowdfunding mechanism. I had some experience consulting with a couple of different Kickstarter campaigns, some of them were successful and one of them was really not, and learned from the successes and the failures of that and said, well, let’s try to use that as a mechanism, and we did. We had a successful Kickstarter campaign. In the spring of 2016, we raised about $65,000 to take our first trip and to produce the content. And from that point on, we actually walked from Kickstarter and just encouraged people to donate directly from our website or in person or mailing in donations and have had numerous rounds of fundraising campaigns to support the next projects. And now we get revenue from a variety of sources and we do those fundraising campaigns, we have reoccurring donors, but we also sell workbooks that incorporate the videos and other written content, and then YouTube ad revenue. We put our content on YouTube and that’s been a blessing to us and it’s allowed us to do more because more of this revenue is coming in. 

 

And when you look for funds, when you do the fundraising, when you first did it, what kind of messaging did you send out and what kind of people did you attract as far as people that were willing to believe in your mission enough to donate money to it? 

 

That’s a great question, and that’s something we consider every time we ask. You get a variety of people. It’s not just one group. In fact, our eyes were kind of set on the high school group as our audience originally but we quickly realized most people want this content and would benefit from this content. So we have children watching our content and we have people, senior citizens who are saying, “I’m too old to travel there myself but you’ve brought it home to me.” And so it now attracts people of all ages. What we have found, mostly, is the people who are our most ardent supporters are those who want to make sure that it gets in the hands of as many people as possible and so they’ll donate and say, “We don’t want swag, we don’t want rewards, we just want to hear from time to time where the content is going and who’s watching it? How many countries are consuming this content? And that’s really cool for us.” And so that’s preachers, that’s parents, that’s school teachers, that’s retirees who are just wanting to leave a legacy. But we’ve also found that it’s young people as well who say, “Hey, maybe I can’t give thousands of dollars but I’ll donate to this because I know I’ll enjoy the content,” and they like what they see. And so it really has become a fairly broad audience and from a variety of different denominational backgrounds as well. We’ve got people who have reached out to us who don’t seem to be particularly religious but they love the educational value of the content. And then we’ve got churches who are saying, “I want this for my classroom. I’m gonna use this in my sermons,” and so the spectrum is actually quite broad. 

 

And then whether you’re trying to get someone to donate or trying to get someone to invest, I always think of there being kind of two hurdles to cross on this and one is you need to get someone to believe in the mission, believe in what you’re trying to do, and then also get that person to believe that you or you and your team are the right people to do it. How do you approach that aspect of it? 

 

That’s a great question. So that first Kickstarter campaign was challenging because many of us had not done something quite like this before. We all had been working in the industry for some time but I had never traveled overseas before and so we had to kind of sell them on the mission, sell them on the goal without being able to show them yet that we had done it and what that involved was getting people to buy in on the mission, which was we want freely available, biblically accurate, and professionally produced content. And the more people we talked to, the more we realized everyone wanted that. There were a variety of groups saying, “I’ve been looking for that too, and you’re saying you can make it for us.” Our first documentary series there in Israel was about Jesus, the life of Jesus, pretty broad audience there, but we’ve done other things too. We’ve done a series on the seven churches of Revelation. We traveled to Turkey and did that. We’ve done a series on the first kings of Israel, Saul and David and Solomon, and that’s really heavy on the archeology, but core to all of those is that mission of let’s bring the Bible to life. Let’s help our imaginations engage in a proper way by giving the right kind of visuals and everyone is, deep down, a visual learner, some people, I think, far more than others, but I’ve never met anyone who said, “Don’t show me pictures. Don’t show me visuals.” No, I’m learning something, I’m reading something, you’re reading the biblical text, and the benefit of seeing the place yourself, the benefit of seeing a shepherd lead a group of sheep in the hills of Bethlehem and go, “Okay, okay, I can start imagining what that hillside looked like on the eve of Jesus’s birth,” and so we have found that truly beneficial for everyone. 

 

So it sounds like what you’re saying is that the power of the mission, and I’m bringing this up for the point of some people who may be listening out there who have an idea, have a mission but aren’t really well known yet, they haven’t really established themselves yet, because, sometimes, you see, especially with books, someone will get a book deal mostly because of who they are, who they did in some other aspect of life to get noticed, but then you have people who aren’t know, you’re not famous yet, you’re not even well known in your industry, and you’re saying that there’s a path that someone could use where, if you really have a powerful mission that a lot of people can resonate with and then a really clear way to communicate that mission and you’re saying through like pictures, videos and stuff like that, you can find a way to get from that spot where it’s like, “Okay, I’m not well known, but this mission resonates with so many people that people are willing to give me a try or support me to try to do it”? 

 

Yes, and I always encourage people, especially in the creative industries, shoot for the moon. By all means, shoot for the moon. But start with something small and achievable to prove to yourself and to others that you can do it because nothing in this industry is more powerful than a solid reel. And so that may mean that for the first little while, you’re creating something that has to do with your mission but maybe it’s not the thing that you really want to do but you’re starting small and you can start and prove to people that you can finish a project, and the more of those you get under your belt, the better it will be. Our most recent project was a trip to Egypt and Jordan and we did a series on the exodus. That is a subject matter that has been suggested to us almost from year one, and for a variety of reasons, it was way too complex and way too expensive. That project was a quarter of a million dollar project from start to finish, was not something that we could do in year one or year six or seven, but we had to demonstrate that we could be trusted with their funds, their time, and their energies and we proved ourself over time. The first year, we asked for $40,000 which wasn’t nearly enough for a project. This last project, we were talking $200,000 plus.

’And don’t get so hung up on the moonshot that you never try anything less. Sometimes, you’ve got to build some stairs to reach that moonshot. Share on X

 

So it sounds like your path to establishing yourself, establishing your nonprofit was having a grand vision that people can resonate with and then starting with a smaller project to just demonstrate that you’re trustworthy, whether it be a customer, a donor, anyone that you want to interact with your vision, interact with your company, your business, your nonprofit, whatever it be. If you have that attention getter, that hook, which for you was, this is the mission, this is what we’re trying to do, and then, of course, you then demonstrate and build trust afterward.

 

Absolutely. Absolutely. 

 

And then what is the overall impact that you’re hoping to have through producing these videos and having them available to anyone that doesn’t have money for it, essentially? 

 

Really, the ultimate goal is we want people to grow closer to God through a love for His Word. We’re not trying to replace the Word, we’re not trying to communicate that the Word, the book itself is outdated and it needs something flashy. No, these are tools that people can watch and consume so that when they get back into the Word, they’re in love with it again, they’re excited about it, they’re thrilled to be engaged with it and connected with God and that’s what we want for people and that’s what we’re pursuing – you know, we called it Appian Media, even at the very beginning, we didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves with Appian video. We said “media” because I don’t know what media is going to look like 10 years from now, but, Lord willing, Appian is going to be producing something in that and so whether that’s virtual reality, whether that’s 360 videos that you can actually feel like you’re walking through the lands, whatever that is, we want to produce content that gets people excited about God and His Word again.

 

And part of it also sounds like keeping up with your industry as well, right? So like if anything’s coming through, obviously there’s VR goggles, the Metaverse kind of was a flop, but you never know what’s going to happen with it later on.

 

You don’t know. They keep bringing it back up. Every four or five years, they try it again, and most of us have just decided I don’t want to meet in a virtual boardroom, I’d rather just do that in person. Yeah, it’s true, and Stuart and I can certainly, just like we did in those early days, talk about what’s coming down the digital pipeline, talk about what our industry is doing in technology. It’s changing and it’s changing fast. AI is changing the tools that we are using. I did not think I would be having the types of discussions I’ve been having this year, even 12 months ago, and I’m excited. Honestly, I’m excited to see what AI can do for us as creating other sets of tools. But it is. It’s keeping up so that whatever we create, it’s not obsolete in 10 years. That means that we don’t jump on necessarily the bandwagon of everything because if Appian Media had dumped a bunch of time and effort and money into the Metaverse as Zuckerberg did, no one’s going to be on there to watch the content, at least not yet, and so trying to be thoughtful with donors’ money but also trying to stay ahead and say, “Look, no one’s produced content like this for the Bible before. No one’s tried this yet. And so why shouldn’t we?”

 

Now, I do need to ask what differentiates the kind of content that you’re producing from, I don’t know, a movie like The Passion of the Christ where it’s a movie so it’s not a documentary, but, obviously, I think they had a similar, at least a goal, a similar mission, to communicate something.

 

Yeah, I would say that the mission and the objective is very similar. It’s just a different way of accomplishing it. A narrative, scripted series is obviously very different to produce than a documentary, and the amount of time and energy that has to go into hiring the right actors to portray these important characters, writing the scripts in a way that sound believable but approachable, making those decisions about how to be historically accurate when, truthfully, when you think about the Gospel story, there are large gaps of that narrative that we just don’t know. There aren’t a lot of details given, they’ll just mention a character like Pilate, assuming that the original audience knew who that was, so there’s a lot of research that has to go into, okay, well, Pilate was a Roman governor, he was someone in charge of this area, and he had been given this role because of this and the amount of time and energy and research that the members of that team put in, I don’t know that I can fathom. And so it is. It’s a different approach and I think their goal is the same that when people watch that, we’re meant to relate to it, we’re meant to remind ourselves that these were real people, these were real places, these were events that actually happened, and that should then get us excited when we get back into the text that now I’m reading something about Peter interacting with Jesus or a man getting healed on the roadside and I actually stop and consider what that man must have been feeling. I don’t know that we do that enough when we read the text. Maybe we’ve just gotten so used to it perhaps. That’s something that I have appreciated about that series is it reminds me that these were people, warts and all, people with emotions, people with baggage, and they were doing extraordinary things in extraordinary times. 

 

And so have you looked into what groups of people are resonating with the content that you’re producing? 

 

Yeah, we’ve been so pleased to see – I mean, we post all of our content on YouTube. YouTube offers some incredible analytics to let us know that our content has been seen in about 160 countries and we have been able to translate several of our series to allow for Spanish captions as well as captions in a couple of other languages and that has broadened our audience. And so about half a million people are viewing the content every month and that’s been encouraging for us, at least just on YouTube. We also license our content out to other streaming services and so I think it’s fair to say about 20 million views across these various platforms of the content that we’ve produced thus far. And then hearing, like I said, from people of all ages, of all backgrounds, people of a lot of different religious beliefs, we’re not interested in creating it from one particular denominational slant, we’re opening the book, we’re talking about the Bible, we’re bringing in history and geography and people appreciate that. It seems to be a refreshing approach and we’ve seen great success with that. 

 

Now, is there any particular demographic, psychographic group that you were hoping to reach that you haven’t had as much engagement as you’d like with? 

 

That’s a great question. I think I will always feel like, yes, it was made in English, yes, it was made by Americans, I would love to see it made more freely available in other countries where other languages are spoken. I prefer audio dubbing rather than translated captions at the bottom, but English is not, when you consider all of humanity, it is not the predominant language being spoken, there are others, and so I would love to see our content being consumed in other countries. That’s really at the heart of what that word means. So “Appian” is actually based on the Appian Way. It was a roadway that Rome built in the first century. And so as they started conquering these other nations, they created, for the first time ever, a sophisticated and very impressive roadway and it’s one of the reasons history tells us that Christianity actually spread as quickly as it did when it was introduced because, for the first time ever, there were roadways that could carry people and messages into countries that were previously inaccessible, and so Appian Media, we’re using the roadway of the internet, a roadway constructed for various other reasons but it’s there and it’s reaching into every part of the world and some of these countries are places I likely will not be able to visit myself. Some of them are not safe right now to visit, but they’ve got YouTube, they can watch videos, and so we’re trying to get especially into areas that the message of the gospel needs to get to and the internet is allowing us to do that. 

 

Now, one country that comes to mind when I think about this entire conversation is definitely China, because I think some people have talked about it, it’s not really reported on any mainstream media but there’s kind of expansion of Christianity going on in China but there’s also a lot of government censorship of content and a lot of government censorship of the internet. Have you been able to translate your videos into Chinese or reach a Chinese audience at all?

 

We have not yet approached to get things translated into Chinese. That is obviously a huge untapped market. I do see from time to time people consuming it on our YouTube channel but, as you said, it is heavily regulated over there and they don’t have the same kind of access to things like that, but I would love to see that. It is encouraging, I have read it sounds like some of the same articles that you have, that where once it was very locked down and you just didn’t hear anything about Christianity having much success over there. People were obviously, and have been for decades, trying it but it was usually very low key and very small. There does seem to be a resurgence there and I’m encouraged by that and so we’ll keep trying and we’ll keep creating content that hopefully has an appeal, and looking for – that’s how things get translated with us. It’s looking for donors who are willing to donate the funds necessary to do those translations or those dubbing beyond the original budget of each project. 

 

And then, speaking of articles that a lot of people have read, there’s been plenty of articles out there about how the United States, and even more so in Western Europe, Christianity has been in decline and some people saying that it’s not resonating as much with today’s younger generations. Do you have any comments on what you could attribute that to? 

 

Oh, that’s a big question, isn’t it? 

 

I know it’s probably –

 

No, it’s a great question. It’s one we need to be asking. The statistics don’t lie, so why is it happening? I don’t know that there’s a single answer for it. I’m personally of the opinion that if we want to get young people interested and invested in the truth of Scripture, a belief that’s going to outlast other cultural influences, we have to get young people into the Word deeper and longer than we have been. So let’s not sell them on church, let’s not sell them on an impressive worship group, let’s sell them on the truth of Scripture. And our hope is that Appian Media can play a role in that, but I think it’s going to be primarily in how the gospel is presented, something that’s deep and substantial, it has to be more than surface level, and that’s a challenge with young people. I remember being a teenager once before and we’re interested in a lot of different things and we’re usually not going to sit down and invest all of our time in something if it’s not presented in a way that’s interesting to us. And there was a young man who approached Stuart actually after one of our screenings and he shared this story and I think it’s fantastic, where I think he was about 12 years old, and he was like, “You, you guys have made the Bible cool,” and Stu kind of chuckled and he’s like, “Well,” like he knows we didn’t make the Bible cool, the Bible is already cool, but in this kid’s mind, we had done something that put the Bible, along with other things in his mind that were also cool and we’ve got to do that. We have to do that. We don’t want Bible just to be something that we do because, you know, it’s like eating my vegetables, I don’t want to do it but it’s probably good for me. No, we want them to go, “I want this and I want more of it and I wanna go deeper into it,” and I think, again, this is just my take on it as a 40-year-old, I think we’ve got a generation who has been fed surface-level Christianity for too long. They’ve been fed cotton candy and they’ve not been fed the meat of the Word and so they go out to college, usually, or just out of college and they don’t have the depth of faith that when there’s pushback on their beliefs, they don’t know how to answer it or it’s just too hard, it’s just too hard to stay true to it because they’re not as passionate about it as they should be. And so I think we need a new diet.

And in your, you said about nine years that you’ve been doing this, have you gotten any negative feedback from anyone? 

 

Oh, certainly. I will say very rarely have we received any kind of comment like, “You all shouldn’t be doing this. This is a bad idea.” It’s the internet so you get plenty of people saying, “You should try it this way,” or, “I don’t like that particular scene,” or, “That host is not…” Yeah, that’s the internet, and if you don’t have thick enough skin, you shouldn’t be posting things on YouTube so we do get that kind of feedback. And I would say on the whole, we value that we’re not perfect, we’re still learning. Our first series, we learned some things to do better next time. We regularly send our content through focus groups before we post anything and say tear this thing apart, like what’s wrong with it, what parts are boring, what parts are confusing, and if you’re not willing to have that kind of open dialog with your viewers, you, again, shouldn’t be posting content on YouTube. I could share some stories, man. I typically like to share them with my wife when I read the comments on YouTube, like, all right, well, they’re very opinionated about that particular video and it’s not going to be for everyone and I understand that.

 

You’re going to receive feedback in life and you need to kind of discern what feedback is worth your mental energy. And with YouTube or anywhere on the internet, I think of people who will just type something that they would never say to a person in person, right? “You’re a loser, you’re a douchebag, you’re on your meds, you probably have 18 illegitimate children and are addicted to cocaine,” or whatever they want to say, because just go into that. And whenever I think about that type of feedback that doesn’t really provide you any value, but then you are going to get sometimes feedback from people, occasionally online, probably more so in person, where it is going to be valuable. Someone will say, “Okay, well, your production quality was like this here,” or, “It would have resonated more with me if you had more of these types of characters or more of something like that,” and that’s the kind of stuff that you need to engage with. But when I think about engaging with that type of content, part of the ability to do so involves taming your ego a little bit. Has that ever been an issue for you or your cofounder or is that something that you’ve been able to kind of keep at bay from a young age? 

 

Oh, I don’t think any of us are completely immune to it. I do quite a bit of the editing for Appian Media as well as for other clients and an editor needs to check his ego at the door because you’re going to make that first cut knowing that the thing’s going to get stripped and dissected by hopefully some helpful and honest feedback and you need to be okay with that. There may be a scene in there that you just really love or a scene in there that took you days and days to cut together but if it doesn’t serve the story, it needs to come out or it needs to change. Those first couple of years, people, I think, were so thrilled with the fact that we were doing it that they weren’t that opinionated about our approach or the content. As we started to create more, and we’re trying to improve with each one, there are some people who say, “I don’t like this one as much as the other ones that you did,” and they may give reasons for that and they may just complain about it. But, again, like you said, it’s about evaluating where the criticism is coming from. It’s far easier to criticize than it is to create. And so if someone wants to hop on our videos and merely criticize but not give any suggestions on how to improve it, I don’t give that a lot of validity, but if someone says that approach, you know, this scene was too long or too dark or I couldn’t understand, that’s really valuable to me and I’ll take that. If they say, “I don’t love this host,” I’m not actually any of the hosts on the videos so I kind of pick on them but we’ve got some very talented hosts, I think they do a great job, but they’re not for everybody, and they may say, “Hey, I like the other host in the other video.” That’s okay. That’s okay. We’ll take that into consideration and create content that has a variety of hosts. 

 

And then what does someone need to do in their mindset to avoid falling in the trap of seeing that non-helpful criticism and not kind of ruminating over it? Because I think a lot of people, especially when you know your business, whatever you’re building is something that you put so much time and effort into creating, it can be a little bit hard to hear someone say, “No, this is a piece of crap. You should never have even tried this,” even if it’s someone you don’t know and have no reason to care about. 

 

I think the best piece of advice that I can give is if a complete stranger were to walk up to me on the street and say this to me, because that’s essentially what this is, it’s a stranger on the internet and they’re typing something and they’re not even typing it to me, they’re typing it to the organization, would I be bothered by that? And the truth is, I probably wouldn’t. I don’t know this person. I don’t have any respect for them. I haven’t interacted with them long enough to have an opinion. If I wouldn’t give them much of my time in real life, why am I bothered by it online? And that’s a big question too, and there are a variety of studies that still indicate that it does affect us internally when we receive negative or positive comments or content online, but just training ourselves to go, okay, where’s this criticism coming from and do I value the opinion of the person giving it? I guess on the other side, can I be humble enough that maybe their approach was not great, they’re cussing at me, and they’re – that doesn’t happen often but occasionally, they’re cussing at me and criticizing me but maybe can I be humble enough to look in there and go, hey, actually, there is a piece of advice or suggestion here that I could use. I think we should be willing to consider those things and not dismiss everything offhand right away. 

 

I know a lot of messages, and even for some people, some members of our generation, have been turned off of certain religious groups because of the way it was packaged. The same thing can be said about this criticism, and it’s another good thing for anyone listening to kind of absorb here is the idea that there’s a way to issue criticism and there’s a way to do it where your packaging is going to turn people off and there are some people that are going to be like Craig, be able to look through all the weeds and find what’s the thing you can get out of it, but I think the vast majority of people, if they see you and you start out by cussing someone, you start out by insulting someone, your message is not going to get across. I don’t know anyone that has ever said to me, “Well, I used to have my opinion on this or used to feel this way, but then once you insulted me and insulted my intelligence and character, now, all of a sudden, I’m on your side,” that’s never going to happen. 

 

Yeah, I’ve never met, no, and nor have I said, “You know what, that 40 comment Facebook post where you guys argued with each other for three days really convinced me to change my mind.” I haven’t, and I’ve got to tell even myself, do I jump into this debate right now? Because I’m not going to change anybody’s mind. It’s like this with the gospel. It’s like this with any truth, the people who want to receive it or consider it will, and there are going to be some people who, no matter how you present it, no matter what you say, they just don’t want it right now. Okay. Jesus compared it to scattering seed with this parable of the sower and he didn’t say, “You stay in that ground and you make sure that it takes and starts to grow before you move on.” No, he just said scatter it and some ground is going to take it really well, some ground is going to take it for a little while and then lose it, some ground is not going to take it at all and that’s okay, that’s not your job, your job is to scatter the seed.

’And so if we have truth, and that’s an important thing, we need to know that what we are saying and believing is truth, then share it. Share on X

Share it and be totally okay with the fact that most people probably aren’t going to want it. That was true for Jesus Himself, the greatest teacher of all time, and at the end of his life, very few people were following Him, at least in that moment. Did that make Him a bad teacher? No, it just meant that those people were not ready for the truth yet. They would be later.

 

And that’s an important thing to consider for anyone pursuing any passion, because I think ruminating on the people that aren’t on board with you, the people who don’t like what you’re doing, any kind of negative feedback does have the potential to sap up a lot of the energy that you need to build what you want to build. And this particular example here, traveling overseas to build a documentary and then doing all the editing and doing all the casting and doing everything else is a long endeavor, and keep your income coming in or you have other responsibilities in life, such as having children, having family, having community and stuff like that, that, sometimes, ruminating over people that just aren’t on board and aren’t interested or want to just be critical, cynical people can be a huge, huge waste of your mental energy.

 

Right. Surround yourself by good counsel. There is wisdom in the abundance of counsel is actually one of the proverbs, and surround yourself with people who are going to be honest with you, who are going to be able to tell you that idea is not a good one, try something else. And this is true for business, this isn’t just true for what we do with Appian, but it’s true for business. “Hey, I’ve got an idea for a product. I think it’s gonna be really great.” Well, surround yourself with good counsel that will either tell you no one actually wants that product. That’s possible. Or the way that you’re trying to pitch your project is not successful, it’s not going to be successful, try it this way, and then identify those that don’t have the right kind of motives and are critiquing you for the wrong reasons and don’t give them your energy. You only have so much. And that’s important to do, not to block everybody else out and say, “I’m convinced it’s a good idea and I’m gonna do it no matter what.” Well, no, it’s important for us, like I said, with our focus groups, I communicate with people that I respect with the church community that I have here, I’ll talk to my parents, I’ll talk to people that I respect and value their opinion and say, “What do you think about this approach or this idea?” and take that into consideration. But the people who like to yell at me on the internet, I’m not going to let them invest much in my brain space. 

 

Well, that’s a great way to kind of, I don’t know, be open but not too open.

 

Right.

 

Wonderful message and wonderful way for people to kind of even think about criticism in general, because if you go off and try to do something on your own, you’re going to get criticism at some point. Now, Craig, just to wrap up, what would be, if someone’s listening to this, if someone wants to find your channel on YouTube or someone wants to find you and even donate, invest, what will be the best way for someone to get a hold of you or to get a hold of your content? 

 

Sure. So, to consume the content, appianmedia.org is the website, but you can also look that up on our YouTube channel. Everything that we produce we have on our channel as well. 

 

That’s Appian, by the way, A, P, P, I, A, N.

 

Correct, A, P, P, I, A, N. And if you send us a message through the website, that’ll actually come directly to myself and to Stuart and so you can communicate with us in that way. If you want to reach out to me directly, honestly, you can Google my name. I’m apparently the only one on the internet with the name. So, for now, as long as I don’t become like an international criminal, it’s actually really helpful. Once I do, it’s not going to be a good thing, but you can easily find me by googling my name. 

 

Well, Craig, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. Thank you for telling your story about bringing something that you saw the world needing something new to the world into the world and the story about how you went about not only getting people on board but also taking the right input from the right people and ignoring the wrong input from the wrong people.

 

Absolutely. Glad to have the conversation. 

 

And I would also like to thank everyone for listening, for taking the time out to listen to this episode. Hope you’ll tune in to more episodes of Action’s Antidotes where I interview people who pursue the passions that they have in life and hopefully it’ll inspire you to do the same.

 

Important Links:

• Craig on LinkedIn
• Appian Media

 

About Craig Dehut

Craig is the Co-Founder and COO of Appian Media.