Have you ever wondered how this podcast got started? How do Scott and Sean pick guests and topics? What's the future of this podcast? In this unique episode, Scott and Sean offer a "behind the scenes" look at their favorite episodes, some memorable stories of impact, and a few lessons they have learned since starting the podcast in 2017. Enjoy!



Episode Transcript

Sean McDowell: Welcome to Think Biblically, conversations on faith and culture. A podcast from Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. I'm your host, Sean McDowell, professor of a Christian apologetics.

Scott Rae: I'm your co-host, Scott Rae, Dean of faculty and professor of Christian ethics.

Sean McDowell: Today we have a totally different kind of episode for you. I see my co-host smiling over there, because normally we take a cultural issue and look at it through a biblical lens, but we're going to address some of the questions we get regularly from listeners like you. How did this podcast start? What makes it unique? How do we prep for interviews, select guests? Where is this podcast going? So I've really been looking to this Scott.

Scott Rae: Yeah, me too. I think this will be fun and hopefully interesting to our listeners.

Sean McDowell: I hope so. I guess we'll find out.

Scott Rae: We will.

Sean McDowell: We'd love your feedback. If this is helpful, maybe we'll do something like this again in the future. But much of this podcast comes out of our relationship, but also our experience at Biola. So you were already here as faculty member when I came. What was your story, before we get to the podcast, of even ending up at Biola?

Scott Rae: Well, it was highly providential. And as I look back on it, it was clearly a God thing that really caught me off guard a bit. I had done my grad work at Dallas Seminary and came out here to California, accepted a position at the International School of Theology, which was the seminary that was under Campus Crusade's Crus umbrella.

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Scott Rae: At the time, a fledgling place, where JP Moreland was with me, Klaus Issler, who ended up back at Talbot, was with us for a while. Then I did a stretch as a pastor, and realized that the pastoral side of me wasn't running on all my cylinders. And as a professor, I was. And so I started sort of looking around, and put in an application to be just an adjunct at Talbot, to teach a course. And as it turned out, we have a very close friend. Her name is Ellen Grigsby. A very dear friend, who was a single mom, lived close to us. My wife Sally and I did a ton of things with her kids.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Scott Rae: She and her ex-husband studied in Aberdeen, Scotland, with the Talbot dean at the time.

Sean McDowell: Oh.

Scott Rae: They were doctoral students again, and their families were very close, and Bingham [inaudible 00:02:29] Hunter, who was the dean at Talbot, kept up with Ellen after she and her ex divorced, just to sort of stay in touch.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: And so they were over on a Sunday afternoon looking through Ellen's photo album. And he started asking these questions, who is this couple who has all these pictures of doing things with your kids? Because we took their kids to the beach and to.

Sean McDowell: Gotcha.

Scott Rae: To events, things like that. And so she started glowing about her friendship with us, and Dr. Hunter recollected. He said, "I read Scott's resume on Friday," two days before that. And so, Friday he reads this resume, Sunday he's at her house and sees this stuff about how we interacted with her kids. And on Monday I got a call inviting me to take a position as an adjunct faculty member.

Sean McDowell: Wow.

Scott Rae: And so he wanted to see if I had the chops to do this. And the first course he gave me was at night, and it was an undergrad course in Old Testament.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Scott Rae: Of 250 students.

Sean McDowell: Oh gosh.

Scott Rae: I'd never had a teaching experience like that have before. And so things went well, and then they offered me a full-time contract at the end of that school year.

Sean McDowell: That's amazing. My story's probably a little less interesting. Grew up in the town called Julian, in the mountains of San Diego, famous for gold mines and apple pies.

Scott Rae: Yeah.

Sean McDowell: And when I was a senior in high school, I basically had a handful of criteria. I'd always been at public schools, wanted go to Christian school, and I wanted to be within a couple hours from home, so I was far enough away, not too many surprise visits. But my wife now, was actually my girlfriend, and she was a grade behind me, so I could go see her, and I wanted to play basketball.

Scott Rae: Yeah.

Sean McDowell: And I ended up applying to Westmont and Biola, and after visiting Biola, being here was, this is the place for me. Now my senior year, I had both you and JP Moreland as professors in the MA Phil program. And that's one of the reasons I went into studying philosophy, doing apologetics and doing what I do today. So that goes back to 1998, at least.

Scott Rae: Yeah, that's wild.

Sean McDowell: You and I have been friends.

Scott Rae: Thought you were going to make a comment on how much older I am than you.

Sean McDowell: I'm glad you did, this time.

Scott Rae: Which is true.

Sean McDowell: That's awesome.

Scott Rae: Yeah. In fact, you may not remember, that I brought my club team to some of the games when you were playing.

Sean McDowell: Wow.

Scott Rae: And we had parents of our club kids, who were invited... Coach Holmquist invited our team into the locker room.

Sean McDowell: That's right.

Scott Rae: After the game, and all these non-Christian parents.

Sean McDowell: Wow.

Scott Rae: With these kids and they were... And so everybody was just kind of in awe of all these college athletes.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: And the first thing Holmquist says after the game is, "Who's going to pray?" It was this really powerful thing for all these non-Christian parents to see, because all these players that their kids were admiring.

Sean McDowell: That's cool.

Scott Rae: And looking up to, they saw them on their knees, in the locker room.

Sean McDowell: That's pretty cool, and that's fun. Well, I got to say, as you know, I sat the bench three years, finally played my senior year, and one of my all time favorite comments, is when one of your sons was out in the back, he was five foot three, did a dunk. He's, "I'm Sean McDowell." I was, are you kidding me? Nobody says that. I was that role playing backup point guard. You made my career. Just the fact that your son said that.

Scott Rae: I will remind Cameron of that.

Sean McDowell: Oh seriously. I have shared that story. Well, let's jump to the podcast, because this was your idea. You came to me, but tell me how you first came up with it.

Scott Rae: Well, it was. This was probably four... Five years ago that we started thinking about this, in probably early 2017. The number of podcasts, at that time, was sort of exponentially increasing. It seems like everybody and their grandmother had a podcast.

Sean McDowell: Right. Right.

Scott Rae: Including some friends of mine, who had very successful podcasts. And I thought, if everybody's doing this, and you have the technological means to do it. If everybody sort of can start one, why not us start one? Because I'd done a lot of radio. My dear friend, the late Frank Pastore, had taught me a lot about how to do radio well. And so I started thinking about, I don't really want to do this by myself.

Scott Rae: Who would be the best person to do this with? And there was really nobody else on the list besides you. Because I wanted somebody who was younger, who had connections with a generation that I didn't, but who had a heart for some of the same things that I did. You were, and have been, a perfect choice to be a partner in this. And it's been a delight to do this together, and I am more convinced than ever that I made the right call.

Sean McDowell: Oh, my goodness.

Scott Rae: By inviting you to be part of this.

Sean McDowell: That's really sweet. I remember that call. And at first I was thinking, oh, this would be fun, but I just didn't know if I could add it to my plate at this time. Called my boss, Craig Hazen, he was, go for it. And I am so thankful that you had that idea. And part of me is, we should have thought of this a decade ago, or five years ago. Now, fortunately we did have the idea before COVID hit, and now it's just exponentially growing. So God's given us a little bit of an advantage, so to speak. I saw this Babylon Bee headline that said, "The Last Remaining Man on Earth Without a Podcast, Starts a Podcast to Talk about What it's Like to Not Have a Podcast." And I chuckled, I thought everybody has one now.

Scott Rae: Yeah.

Sean McDowell: Which is fine. But I also really believe the cream rises to the top. If you do a good job and serve people, they're going to respond, and that's what we try to do.

Scott Rae: Well, this is the advice we got, sort of early on is, don't try to come out there and make a big splash with all these big name, high powered guests. Just be slow and steady and continue to produce quality content. And we've tried to bring out the quality, in terms of the guests that we have... And we'll talk about more of that in just a minute.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: Our philosophy has been, this is bigger than just the two of us. And we want to use our platform to feature people who are writing good things, and who are doing good things, and give them a platform, as well as one for Talbot and Biola.

Sean McDowell: Well, this is obviously a team effort and we have different ways of bringing guests and topics, but how do you think about, and approach, when we have, say, a number of interviews coming up? How do you plan for and pick both topics and guests?

Scott Rae: Well, where we've ended up is, we've done this around new books that are being published. We've tried to do two different things. One is, we tried to feature good books so that our listeners will read them.

Sean McDowell: Right, right.

Scott Rae: And engage with them. And we've also recognized that, as Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, the writing of many books is endless. So I'm not worried about running out of things to talk about.

Sean McDowell: Exactly.

Scott Rae: Because people continue to publish good stuff. The major Christian publishers now send us all this stuff, unsolicited. Which is great, because we don't have to go hunting around for good stuff. But I look through the catalogs of books that we get, that are coming out. And I think what looks really interesting to people?

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Scott Rae: What is going to capture people's attention? What can we talk about meaningfully in 25 to 30 minutes? Because not every book is like that.

Sean McDowell: Yeah. That's true.

Scott Rae: And then, what's going to touch a felt need that we think our audience has? Now we've got a certain sort of niche in the culture and apologetics realm, but we've also talked about some other things that are just issues that people might be wrestling with. Those are the criteria that I basically use. How about you? I think you view it maybe a little bit differently.

Sean McDowell: Yeah. One thing that I do is, I just look at, does this topic excite me? Am I interested in this? And in some ways I know if I am, I'm going to prep that much more. I'm going to bring more energy to an interview. So sometimes I feel bad because there's probably some biblical topics we haven't addressed. And for whatever reason, my experience, my training, I just can't get myself excited about it as much. Now we try to make exceptions just because there's people out there that are going to be interested in things that you and I may not. But that metric... And that actually came from Frank Pastore, he said, influenced you. He told me, ask questions that are interesting to you. I cover topics that fascinate me, and if fascinates me, it's going to fascinate our audience. I think the other thing with guests is we primarily do books.

Sean McDowell: Sometimes articles, sometimes just issues that people are experts in, as well. But we just look for people who are trained in an area, who have produced at a high level of content, and have something important to say as an expert, and, in particular, can help us think biblically about that topic. So we do something on poverty. We want somebody who's thought about this deeply. We do something on the issue of race. We want someone who's thought about it deeply. Whatever these issues are, and tie it into scripture, that's what we're looking for. Now, one more question for you, I'm curious. When we say Think Biblically, what that means at Biola is going to be different than somebody, say, to the far left, or maybe to the far right of us.

Sean McDowell: What criteria might you use, for example, when we think about some of these more sensitive issues that we talk about on this podcast? We've talked about race a few times, we've talked about LGBTQ, we've talked about immigration. And within biblical thinking, on some of these, there can be a range of perspectives. So what's your thinking when we go to cover one of those more thorny kinds of issues?

Scott Rae: Well, for one, I want to be fair to the different views that I think, on some of these issues, can exist within a biblically orthodox framework. So for example, on immigration, we've done five podcasts on immigration. Two with our own colleague here, Marcus Zender, our Old Testament prof, who comes from Europe and has a different view of immigration than somebody who might have come from Latin America, for example. So we've had him, then we've had my good friend, Danny Carroll, who spent part of his growing up years in Latin America, but ministered in Central America for many years, and has a very different view than Marcus does about immigration. Both of them, I think, fit within broadly biblical parameters.

Scott Rae: So we've tried to be fair on issues where there is freedom within biblical parameters. And I think we've also had some people on, who are not believers at all, who we think have something to offer. For example, one that we posted not too long ago, was the story of the Uyghur Muslims.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: Basically three million of them being held in the virtual equivalent of concentration camps in China. And for all of us who said never again, after World War II, well, it seems to be happening again. We had Helen Pluckrose on.

Sean McDowell: On social justice.

Scott Rae: On social justice.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: Who is a self-professed disciple of Richard Dawkins.

Sean McDowell: Yes, that's right.

Scott Rae: So we just said, we'll agree to disagree about sort of fundamental theological things.

Sean McDowell: Sure.

Scott Rae: But we do have some common ground that we can build on. And I think those are really helpful models of engaging with people who may not share the same worldview that we do, but we do have things in common. And I think some of the people we've had on, on race, view things differently.

Sean McDowell: Sure.

Scott Rae: I think there's a pretty broad continuum of how you can come down on some things on race. We've had people who are very, very skeptical about critical race theory. We've had others who give it some ability to contribute to the discussion on race, without necessarily buying into the whole package, lock, stock and barrel.

Sean McDowell: So I think it's important for listeners to know that we don't necessarily agree with everything each of our guests believe. And at times we give each other looks, oh, I'd love to go down that road and press this. Not the time, not the place. But the larger area is biblical orthodoxy, unless we just make it clear, for a bigger reason, Hey, we've got an atheist here. We have a Muslim here, welcome them on, if there's some common ground, with a cause that we believe in.

Scott Rae: Yeah. And we do our best, when we disagree with people, to point that out.

Sean McDowell: Sure. Exactly.

Scott Rae: And we're not shy. Neither of us are particularly shy about challenging people that we disagree with.

Sean McDowell: Sure.

Scott Rae: But we're also trying to do it in a way that's winsome, and builds bridges and relationships, rather than fences.

Sean McDowell: I think that's great. So how do you prep for interviews?

Scott Rae: I read voraciously, because the way we do this, just for our listeners, we don't do these sort of one day at a time. We do these every couple months, and we do them all day.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: And we have them lined up back to back to back, you starting eight o'clock in the morning and ending at three or four in the afternoon.

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Scott Rae: And hopefully our listeners can't tell, but sometimes, by the end of the day, we're both verging on incoherency.

Sean McDowell: We are.

Scott Rae: Because, I think, doing six or seven of these in a day is a lot to ask.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: But our schedules really don't allow us to do it any differently than that. And fortunately, our technology allows us to do almost all of this remotely. With guests and the technology... Kudos to our tech team over here.

Sean McDowell: Yeah, they're amazing.

Scott Rae: They're stars. Because all we do, we do all the prep, we invite the guests, our assistant communicates with them, but we literally walk in, record, and walk out, and they do the rest of the work. And God bless them for doing that, because, God forbid, that you and I would have to do the tech side of this.

Sean McDowell: That would not work well.

Scott Rae: We both, I think, we read everything that we talk to guests about. We're not one of these folks that brag on the fact that we do great interviews without ever reading their stuff. The reason, I think, we're able to put good questions together, and to have good conversations with guests, is because we've been very careful to read their stuff well. And usually I'll take half the guest and deal with the question.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: Sean, you'll take the other half so that we don't have to read everything quite as carefully. Since we started this, we've both just read... We've read hundreds.

Sean McDowell: Yeah, that's true.

Scott Rae: Of books.

Sean McDowell: That's true.

Scott Rae: That we've had on, because in four and a half years, we've done over 200 of these things. So those are several dozen books that I probably just wouldn't have had time to read, without this making the time for it.

Sean McDowell: When I'm being interviewed by somebody else. I can almost always tell a few questions in if they have read my book or not. And I understand that some people don't have the time, maybe they have assistants do it, maybe my PR manager sends them a list of questions. I understand that happens, but I think it's subtle, but powerful, just qualitative difference in the output of an interview, when you ask the right questions. And that only comes from reading the books, thinking about it. I'll come up with 15, 20 questions, then I go back through and I look at it, and I narrow them down. So each one of these interviews, there's been probably, I don't know if I'd say dozens, but there's been hours and hours of prep and thought going into it, to try to get the best interview that we can.

Scott Rae: Well, and we think hard too, about how which questions follow next and next. It's important to us, I think, to hear a bit of the author's personal story behind this.

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Scott Rae: So why they wrote this. Why they felt compelled to devote this huge slice of their life to writing this stuff down. Usually it's pretty telling about what's important to the author, and sometimes are things that we've really fruitfully follow up on.

Sean McDowell: Yeah. There's always a story and the motivation why somebody would spend the work and time to write a book. It's not comparable to giving a child, but obviously, people make that comparison to, at least talk about the work too. So I want to know what motivated you, what sparked that interest. So we often start there.

Scott Rae: I tried that analogy with childbirth.

Sean McDowell: And not go.

Scott Rae: After my first... It did not go well. So it's the last time I tried that.

Sean McDowell: Good, good tip.

Scott Rae: I will say too, there are a handful of guests that we have, that it really doesn't matter what they've written. I want to have them on. I would listen to Os Guinness read the phone book.

Sean McDowell: Yes.

Scott Rae: He could make that interesting and culturally relevant.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: And there are a handful of others that I think fit that.

Sean McDowell: What are some standout episode or two, to you, over the, I believe, four to four and a half years. And I'll tell you, one of the ones, for me to start off with is, I remember when we decided to do this, we were, okay, you said, "Sean, we need somebody who'd be articulate. Somebody who's well known. Somebody who we could start with right out of the gun. Do you know anybody?" And I was, I don't know if this was in the back of your mind or not, setting me up, but I was, my dad, that's an easy one. He'd do a favor for me. So we called him up.

Scott Rae: Because I realized that he would take your call quicker than he would mine.

Sean McDowell: Yeah. That is... And he'd take my kids, his grandkids, even faster than mine, for the record. But I remember we called him up and the theme was five decades of faithful apologetics. And he just knocked it out of the park. But the funny thing is, he made a comment, he goes, next time your ratings are dipping, give me a call. And as far as I know, we haven't had him back on [crosstalk 00:21:55]

Scott Rae: We have not had him back on.

Sean McDowell: We haven't needed him for our... Dad, if you're listening, shout out to you. We actually did invite him, and it fell through for different reasons.

Scott Rae: But it wasn't because our ratings were sagging.

Sean McDowell: Exactly. Exactly. So that was the stand out for me. That was fun. How about you?

Scott Rae: Well, I think that too, with your dad, it was so fun, because we reflected back on some of the first times I'd ever heard him speak, when I was a college student, and he remarked about, "Goodnight, you must really be old." And I resisted the urge, because next time I have him on, I won't, but I resisted the urge to say, well, you must be older than dirt if that's the case.

Sean McDowell: Yep. Yep.

Scott Rae: But I think, the number of times we've had Os Guinness on, those have all been highlights. In my view, doesn't get a lot better than that, because he is so well read.

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Scott Rae: And articulate and he's not an academic, although he doesn't claim to be an academic. Although I think he's more of one than he gives himself credit for. But he has watched this work on the streets, with the people he comes into contact with. That's been a highlight. The other one that I thought was a major highlight, was when we had Russell Moore.

Sean McDowell: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Scott Rae: He's so articulate, and such a winsome representative of the gospel, in some pretty difficult circumstances that he's found himself in. So that was a highlight too. Having Preston Sprinkle talk about matters of sexuality, because, in my view, there's nobody that's better positioned, better read and better qualified to talk about a biblical sexuality than him.

Sean McDowell: What about some of the impact of this podcast? I've gotten a ton of emails, comments, which are fun, but I'd love to hear from you, maybe a standout impact, you've heard about this.

Scott Rae: Well, yeah, one in particular. We can give the numbers here if we want to. But it has just been so encouraging to watch it just consistently grow. But one of the impacts that has come back to us is, one of our board members at Biola told us, probably two years ago, that he and his son download it every week. They listen to it separately. They live in different parts of the country.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Scott Rae: And it has become their way of meaningfully staying connected with each other.

Sean McDowell: Wow.

Scott Rae: It's been so encouraging. So they listen to it each week, and they have a set time when they talk for an hour or so by phone.

Sean McDowell: Wow.

Scott Rae: Or by Zoom, just about the content of the podcast for that week. I found that super, super encouraging.

Sean McDowell: One of the things that I do is, I teach a high school class, at a private school in San Juan Capistrano. And we have block schedule, but Mondays are short classes, and I assign all my students to just listen, all they got to do is listen to it that week. And then Mondays we talk about it. And it's a Bible class. So we've had conversations, again, on immigration, on sexuality, on race, on economics. And it's just been such a good tool, because it's only 25 to 30 minutes. And I've been able to teach them, Hey, next time you're driving somewhere, even if you have to put it on double speed, whatever, it drives my wife nuts, but I can listen to it. Put it on double speed and listen to it. Or when you're waiting around, or going somewhere, or exercising, just listen to it. And it's created a lot of really healthy conversation, and enabled me to kind of teach that discipline to the students as well.

Scott Rae: I think significant impact out of this, is what it's spawned, I think, for you, Sean, because out of this has come your own individual YouTube channel, that has almost six figure subscriber list, where you were able to do it on video, and in longer interviews. We decided on the 25 to 30 minute limit, because, at least pre COVID, that was the time of the average commute.

Sean McDowell: That's right.

Scott Rae: In Southern California. And so we thought that time was just about right. Video is a different audience.

Sean McDowell: It is.

Scott Rae: But I think what that spawned, just for your ministry, has been just a really significant impact of this, and one that I'm thrilled about.

Sean McDowell: Well, it definitely made me think differently. Rather than being somebody who's interviewed, how do I lead a conversation? And I had no idea that there's certain skills you have to develop to ask a good question, cut off at a certain time, keep a conversation going. That is an entirely different animal to be. When you're a guest, you just have to answer, you don't have to worry about the time, you don't have to keep things going. But when you're interviewing somebody else, it's entirely different. So I started learning that skillset here. And one of the things, amongst others, that encouraged me to really focus on my YouTube channel, is when these interviews were done, I was, man, that 30 minutes went fast. I want some more depth with this person. And the difference between 30 minutes and an hour, you can slow down, you can breathe a little bit, go into depth.

Sean McDowell: So quite a few of the guests here, I started inviting on my YouTube channel, and said, Hey, let's reach a whole new audience. And I think it's gone both ways. I think a lot of people from the YouTube channel, some people just want to listen to a podcast. Other people want to see it. So there's no sense of competition. It's just a different medium for the same kind of thing. And we've even used some of my YouTube interviews here as bonuses and it's the same kind of thing. And some of them have done pretty well to our, Think Biblically listeners.

Scott Rae: Yeah. Yeah. Well, for our listeners, if they're interested in the numbers, the audience has grown significantly over the last... Especially the last two years, I'd say.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Scott Rae: Because at the end of 2021, we had roughly, somewhere between 650,000 and 700,000 downloads for the year. So we're averaging probably somewhere around 60,000 downloads a month.

Sean McDowell: That's great.

Scott Rae: Which I'm delighted with. Folks at Biola seem to be very happy with that. Where I'd like to see it go, just in terms of the numbers, is to see it, a year from now, be at 800,000, and in two years, be at a million. But the impact of that is much where I'm... And you are too, a lot more interested in seeing that go. And so what we're anticipating... We're going to launch some video podcasts ourselves.

Sean McDowell: Yeah.

Scott Rae: Some of that is, I think, based on the success that your YouTube channel has had. Which tells me that there's a different audience for video than there is for audio. And so we want to do our best to capture some of that audience as well. Now fortunately, I think we'll do okay on video. Some people suggested we have faces that are perfect for audio, but I think we'll do okay. At least if we have a good makeup artist, that'll go okay. But I'm looking forward to seeing how that changes some of our audience. I think that'll be a really helpful addition.

Sean McDowell: Me too. One of the cool things, before I forget, that I've heard from people, it's through the YouTube channel, even through the podcast, some people have heard about Biola and Talbot, who wouldn't have otherwise, and decided to come. That's a pretty cool, humbling thing. So of course we do this as a part of Biola. We want people to know about Biola. We wanted them to send their students here. We wouldn't teach her if we didn't believe in it. But it's also using the resources that God has given us to reach the world, whether they come or not. So as far as where I want to see it go, we filmed three recently, haven't posted them yet.

Sean McDowell: Although it's coming up soon, we will be. I would love to just get some of the viewers to come over and start seeing our faces, our interaction with our guests. There's just such a different kind of experience you can take away from it. So this is an experiment to us, in some ways, to be honest. We want to talk about what it takes to have a successful podcast. I'm looking at you, Scott, going, we don't really know. We just kind of threw this thing together. We're learning as we go along, we've made plenty of mistakes and we're trying new things, including video and other things, just excited to see where it goes.

Sean McDowell: But for me, the whole key is, when I think about an interview, it's, yes, something that's interesting to me. But honestly, I think about the great commandment, love God and love other people. As I'm prepping, I'm thinking, you and I have... I consider it a privilege, because we're professors, we get to read hundreds of books. A lot of people cannot read these huge books, just for time and the job that God has called them to, but we can take this, bring on guests and take these big ideas and get just the gist of it. And sometimes even more. That's a way of loving our audience. When it's all said and done, that's really what motivates me.

Scott Rae: Yeah. And I think, if we can continue to see that grow and increase, I'll be delighted. But I think the opportunity to serve the kingdom, in this way, to contribute to the lives of our constituents, our audience. I'd love to meet some more of these folks. I'd love it if people would communicate with us, the things that are helpful, the things that they would like to see us do better, or topics they'd like to see us talk about. That would be terrific. We would love to hear from more of our listeners. So.

Sean McDowell: What's the best way, do you think, for people to get a hold of us? Because a lot of people just contact me through my website, seanmcdowell.org. I get regular emails from listeners and can process it there. Do you have a way? And to be honest, sometimes I get so many emails, I just physically cannot respond to all of them. I do my best. But I read every single email that comes, that's for sure. Is there another way to get a hold of you, or just to send into the podcast to maybe your assistant, that would handle this best?

Scott Rae: Yeah, Probably just to send it to the mailbox at Talbot.

Sean McDowell: Okay.

Scott Rae: talbot.edu, it'll get routed to us. If you wanted to send it to seanmcdowell.org, that's fine with me too. But yeah, I think just in general, just the general Talbot address, which you can communicate with, through the website, talbot.edu.

Sean McDowell: Okay. Gotcha.

Scott Rae: It's probably the best way to do that.

Sean McDowell: That sounds good. Well, anything else? Did I miss anything? I think we covered it. We're pushing up against our time anyways. Not that we have to... We picked 25 to 30 minutes, like you said, because the commute, you can go longer. You can go shorter, but.

Scott Rae: No, I think it's been encouraging to us to see the different ways people utilize the podcast. When they're driving, exercising, when they're just sort of hanging out with time to kill. I post some of these episodes to my online classes, for students to listen to, as part of their assignments. When else are they going to get a chance to hear from some of the people that we have on? So I think there's a lot of different ways people can use it. I'm very encouraged that people are listening to it. If the Lord continues to bless it, then I'll be delighted, and we will continue to be faithful and produce good content as best we can. I think that's the goal, and just trust the Lord to handle the rest.

Sean McDowell: Amen. If our listeners have any suggested books or content, send them our way. We make no promises, only because, the great thing is, now I'm getting them weekly, which is awesome. Tons of books, which has saved me a little bit of money. I'm, oh, free book, this is great, but it's not. There's probably dozens of books we consider for each interview that we slot, and it could be something as simple as, you know what, we just talked about that topic. This book looks awesome. This guest looks awesome, but we just can't revisit it again. So if we don't have it on, don't make any assumptions, but we always love to hear from listeners, things you've learned. If you have stories that would encourage us, send them our way. If you have things you just want to know, and topics to cover, something to consider, we read all of that and take to heart. So thank you for listening. I'm not going to do the normal closing to this one. I don't think we need it, but we haven't really ever stopped and just.

Scott Rae: This has been enough of a commercial as is.

Sean McDowell: Yeah. Whoever has stayed to the end, I'm going to assume, already values this podcast and what we do, but I don't know that I've ever just stopped and thanked our listeners for the feedback, for just sharing episodes. I have people tell me, all the time, they're sharing episodes. That just is an encouragement to us that, maybe God is using this humble pursuit a little bit. So.

Scott Rae: No, we're very grateful to you, our audience for downloading regularly, for listening, for giving us feedback and for how you use it.

Sean McDowell: We will see you next week on the podcast.

Scott Rae: Amen.