Healthy Faith
May 4, 2022

Why The Fruit Of The Spirit Important

Do you know the fruits of the spirit? Chris Evans is here to tell you why it is so important to really grasp and understand these virtues as a Christian.

Chris Evans is here to tell you why it is so important to really grasp and understand the fruits of the spirit. These virtues connect everything we do so it is valuable to know why God chose these virtues in the first place.

Chris Evans is a Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network North Carolina entrepreneur-in-residence. He is an entrepreneur and philanthropist with offices in Raleigh, NC. Chris is the CEO of Aries, an ultra filtration & breathability mask producer. Chris currently serves as the executive chair of Tethis, a Raleigh-based biomaterials company. Evans currently serves on the board of directors of Community in Schools of Wake County, NC State’s Entrepreneurs Initiative advisory board and DOOR International. He also serves as an advisor to several businesses and not-for-profit enterprises in the US and Europe. He is also the author of Fruit at Work – Mixing Christian Virtues with Business, which was published in 2012 by Lanphier Press.

CHRIS'S COMPANIES

ARIES: https://aries-usa.com/

TETHIS: https://tethis.com/

CHRIS'S BOOK: Fruit At Work: Mixing Christian Virtues With Business

CHRIS'S SOCIALS:

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/THEchrisevans

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisevans3/

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Growing up we are often taught to remember the fruits of the spirit and recite them back to a Sunday school teacher or our parents. Do you know the fruits of the spirit? If not, Chris Evans is here to tell you why it is so important to really grasp and understand the fruits of the spirit. These virtues connect everything we do so it is valuable to know why God chose these virtues in the first place.

Why The Fruit Of The Spirit Important

I have a great guest, Mr. Chris Evans, on the show with me. Before I introduce Chris, go over to our new name channel on YouTube, Iron Deep. Subscribe to that channel and leave a comment in the comment section. We love replying to comments. Also, go over to our new website, IronDeep.com. If you're looking for a mastermind men's community, more of a brotherhood that is and you're looking for a deeper relationship with God and with other businessmen, please go over to IronDeep.com and apply. We love for you folks to apply and see what we can do there if you're a good fit for our community.

Chris Evans is a serial entrepreneur. He is a Christian man and a philanthropist. He has started multiple companies and sold companies. He is always in the cutting-edge technology. He describes what he's into now. Chris could be the smartest person I have ever interviewed on this show, by the way. He is super intelligent and has so much wisdom behind his ears, but his humility exceeds all of that. He's a down-to-earth guy. I loved my interview with Chris Evans. He talks about some things that he's doing in the business world and some ministry things that he is doing. He is always interested and very passionate about businesses that are making an impact. Now, here he is, Mr. Chris Evans. How you are doing, Chris?

I'm doing great.

I’m super excited about this episode interviewing you. You're one of the most intelligent men I've talked to. We chatted for about fifteen minutes before the show, and I was like, “Wow.” You have a lot going on. You are super smart.

That's kind of you.

Chris Evans, serial entrepreneur. You've started a lot of companies and sold some companies. You're involved with a lot of different things. You're open about your Christian faith, which is amazing. You're a philanthropist and you got your foot in a lot of different things going on there. We're going to talk about some of these different things. You have a book, Fruit at Work. We're going to talk about mixing Christian virtues in the business world. We're going to get into that, but let's start with this, Chris. Who is Chris Evans?

That's a lifelong question. I would say that Chris Evans is insatiably curious, always looking for something new to learn about at different times. I've dug deep into theology, but I've also learned how to be a sand sculptor and repair pinball machines. I'm working with a friend on a technique for building local energy distribution networks for neighborhoods once solar allows it. We live in a big world. There are always new and exciting things to learn about. That's where I am.

I know you've had so much success even at an early age. You've built up companies, sold companies, and even now before the show. Talk about a few things that you're into now. You always seem like you're in some of the latest things, inventing things, or being a part of that at least. You have a face mask company that you're working with and new technologies. Talk to us about what you're doing now.

We live in a time where there's a lot of new innovations coming out, but there's a big gap in how you get them to market. I did start a company during COVID times that was making face masks. The company's called Aries USA. What happened was that I happened to be introduced to a professor who's one of the world experts on filtration media. The face masks that we were all wearing, the medical ones or the ones that filtered decently, pretty much using the same tech that came from the ‘80s. Not a lot of change there. He invented a new material that decreases the air pressure or the amount it takes to breathe through the mask and that cuts it in half or even less for the same amount of filtration.

He had the fabric, but he hadn't made a product out of it yet. We worked out a way to be able to get a product made, several hundred thousand of them pretty rapidly to help respond and, at least, provide a more comfortable product for all of us who are stuck having to wear masks a lot of the time. Outside of that, near and dear to my heart is an organization called DOOR International. DOOR is working with the deaf around the world to do church planting because there are hundreds of deaf sign languages and very few of them have any Bible translation.

That also means that we're having to do deaf Bible translation, which is translating the Bible into sign languages closer to making Harry Potter the movie than making Harry Potter in Italian. There are a lot of different steps that you have to do. They're wonderful. Now that video is cheap enough to distribute everywhere for free, this is the first time because sign language isn't a written language. Gutenberg made no difference to them. This is the first time in history that deaf can be mass-distributed in their languages. We are at a Gutenberg moment for the deaf, and it's fascinating to see the gospel exploding around the world over them.

That's super amazing. You're doing so many. You have a diaper company you're part of too.

I had another friend of mine or somebody I was connected with, who had come across an invention to make super absorbents, which is the stuff that sucks all the liquid up in diapers and other things. Now, that's all made out of petroleum-based products. We found a way to do that with cornstarch. Not only is it bio-derived and biodegradable and makes a much greener diaper. It's also tied to the price of corn, not oil, which is good news for the manufacturers while they're watching oil spike up and losing control of their cost processes. A lot of times, I'm touching them in certain places, helping them figure out a particular strategy, or connecting them with people necessary. Most of the work is being done by the full-time entrepreneurs in these organizations.

It seems like you are passionate about being a part of organizations that make an impact and that makes the world a better place. They're doing good. All these companies, you're trying to help people and it seems like that's what you're passionate about. You're talking about your faith. You wrote a book, Fruit at Work: Mixing Christian Virtues with Business. You started off your talk by talking about how you gave your life to Christ, but you had what you would call Christian amnesia. Can you talk about what that means?

I would go to work and maybe I would be listening to worship music on the way to work or have a nice quiet time. I'd get into work, then I'd get into a couple of meetings. The day would come on, and I'd leave the office. It was like, “I totally forgot I was Christian today.” Either that or there might be almost like, “Here's a commercial message from God. This is out of context, but let me jam this thing in here somewhere.” Which is also weird and unsettling to the people around you.

To me, the challenge was that if your faith is in your heart, it's coming out of the core of who you are, then it ought to be organic, natural, and something different about how you are all the time, not just, “Let me step into this Christian hat on, do that thing, and now I can go back to my meeting and focus on getting something done.” I've always been trying to figure it out. How do you do that? How do you walk in that way? T led me to the study of the fruit and spirit.

You basically wrote this book. You talk about the fruits of the spirit. It's broken down into the nine fruits of spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. How did you use the fruits of the spirit? You seem like you're a very practical individual. How do you practice that? How do you do that? You started to study these fruits, so how did you use them in the workplace?

IDP 75 | Fruits Of The Spirit
Fruit at Work

What happened was that, originally, I had a pastor ask me if I would teach a class in workplace evangelism for Sunday school. I said, “Let me think about it.” I prayed about it and I came back. I turned him down and he said, “Why?” I said, “It’s because you're not teaching the prerequisite.” He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “You're not teaching workplace Christianity. How would you possibly want to duplicate what's not working in clumsy?”

He shrugged and said, “We’ll teach that then,” and walked off. He got the last word on it but now put me on the spot to figure out what I could teach on this. What led me to the fruit of the spirit and what I like about it is it's a series of attitudes and habits that are authentically Christian. Love, joy, peace, and patience, these are things that as we try to grow in our walk, we try to get better in these things.

They also, when practiced artfully and honestly, are highly valued in the workplace. Here's an approach where if you're thinking about, “I come every day with this tool set.” Everybody, you don't have to be a Christian to have love, joy, peace, or patience. We're putting extra time in while somebody else is working on their slice on the golf range or beating the next ultra-boss in some video game. We're working on trying to refine our Christian selves and trying to align more with Christ.

If we're investing that time, then these are things that we ought to be able to get better on. It's a foundation to build upon. As we practice them and learn to practice in the workplace, it also makes us more authentically and feel more authentically Christian outside of it. We can talk about some of them, but that was the idea of it. It’s to be able to take this set of words and have it be something that a toolset that everyone can walk into any job and feel like these are the tools that I have as a Christian to bring to my work.

Let's give a couple of examples. We break down the nine fruits of the spirit. Let's talk about the first few, love, joy, and peace. Can you give them some practical situations in the workplace where you may personally have had to think about these three things and practice them?

Love is a tricky word in the English language because it's one word that means lots of different things. There's an erotic love, which is probably not a good thing to bring to work. That gets complicated. There's a brotherly love that is natural. You have this brotherly love for your teammates and you like being a part of a team that's working well together. There's that, but the love that shows up here comes from this Greek word Agape that wasn't written about by Greek philosophers. They didn't talk much about this word. It didn't show up until Jesus started using it in the gospels. The reason was because they maybe saw it as fiction.

It had to do with a love that was a non-self-interested love. You're basically loving somebody for their benefit, whether it helps you or hurts you. I love what it feels like to be a part of a team, so I'm going to love you because it makes me feel like I'm a good part of a team. Erotic love comes with its own attractions, but this is a love that God demonstrates his own love for us. When we are still sinners, Christ died for us. That’s Romans 4:20-21. We could do nothing good for Jesus. In fact, he knew that we were going to murder him, yet he had love.

The Greeks didn't know what to do with this. It was theoretically possible, I suppose, but who would ever do that? Gospel showed up and showed the power of it. In the workplace, when I try to approach somebody, I'm trying to figure it out as I talk to them. What is usually for an entrepreneur is it's serial problem-solving. They’re always trying to figure out, “What's the next thing I have to solve and how do I solve it?”

Sometimes it's in parallel, but a lot of times when you talk to somebody, eventually you figure out the thing that is keeping them from moving to the next level. Sometimes in talking to somebody, maybe it somehow benefits me to help them. Sometimes it doesn't help me at all. It might even hurt me. My interest in that person or that conversation is understanding what that need is. Within work, it may seem like you're handicapped if you're doing it this way, but you're not. What I found is that to get anything done and work, requires trust. There's a certain amount of trust for somebody to agree with you to do anything, whether to come to work for you, invest in you, buy your product, or write about your product in the press. All these things require some level of trust. It turns out that the people who you trust the most are the people who love you, every time.

IDP 75 | Fruits Of The Spirit
Fruits Of The Spirit: There's a certain amount of trust for somebody to do anything, whether to work for you, to invest in you, to buy your product, or to write about your product in the press. All these things require some level of trust. And it turns out that the people who you trust the most are the people who love you every time.

If you develop this habit of being interested in people and how you help them forward without having to calculate, “Which ones do I invest in? What do I get out of that? How can I make this thing turn to my advantage?” you wind up with this deep well of trust to be able to draw from that you can then leverage to get lots of other things done. To me, that pool of trust is a more useful tool than any tactical advantage that you might take in a particular relationship or friendship.

Every business works with people. If you can apply these fruits of the spirit towards people like love, patience, and being kind to them and it builds this trust that you talk about even in your talk, trust is huge and everything. If I trust you, that means so much. People look at our business, look at me, and they'll give me investors. You talk about companies and investors. It's not even about the numbers. It's, “Do I trust you?” That's the main thing.

There's a whole economy of trust. It's the first currency that an entrepreneur has access to before they have capital and money to work with and everything else. When you're starting with trust, a lot of times, it's almost like you're having to go to a trust banker, somebody who already has trust with a person that you're working with, who's willing to lend some of it to you. You may return that trust and interest, hopefully.

A lot of times, I'm always doing this. I'm always connecting people probably five times. I send emails saying, “You two ought to talk to each other. Here's why you ought to hear this person out and see what's going on.” If I make good use of their time, if I have somebody who can help an entrepreneur advance and I make that connection, and that person was like, “I'm glad you set that meeting up,” then I got interested in my trust investment.

On the other hand, if it's like, “That was a waste of time. Why did you have me meet with them?” that's a loss. You still do that. The nice thing about trust is that it's possible to accumulate. You can build on it over time, but in terms of relationships, there are a lot of things that you can get done as you start to look and say, “I don't have this trust now.”

Another place that it shows up is oftentimes when there's conflict when I have employees who aren't getting along with each other, you follow the trust. Somebody is not trusting somebody as much as the system was expecting them to. I had an employee. We had a new boss come in, and they were much younger than an employee. The employee didn't feel like the boss respected the experience that they had on the job. The boss didn't feel like the employee respected their position. They were patronizing them.

Between themselves, there wasn't enough trust between them to be able to break through that, but because I developed trust with both of them, I could come in and say, “Sarah, I know that you don't think that Mark respects you, but I've talked to Mark. I know that he does. That's not the issue. For my sake, would you take the next week and act as if he does, even if you're not feeling it?” “Mark, I know that you feel like Sarah doesn't see where you are. I know that she does, but this thing that you're doing is interfering with that and making it hard for her to see. I'm telling you that she does. Will you act as if she respects your experience within this space for the next week and see if things should work?”

I could lend and trust in that situation and break through a log jam within it. It's not like they send Christmas cards to each other every week or anything, but they were able to get through and get into a working relationship. A lot of times in personal relationships and other things, you're following the trust, figuring out what trust isn't happening, and whether is there a place that you can lend or inject trust into the situation to get things moving again.

It goes back to show when you do have that and you have the trust, even trust in the gospel, that you act, even if you don't feel like it sometimes. Many times, we're like getting tossed around with our feelings and we're going this way and that way.

That's what faith is. That's something that I've been writing about more. Faith is one of these squishy words like love. We're not quite sure what we mean by it, but it has something to do with our spiritual life and everything else. To me, faith is a muscle. As you said, sometimes God is so real to me. I can feel him breathing down the back of my neck. There are other times when I feel like I have an imaginary friend called God and I'm just playing games.

All of those times, I know why I've walked this way. When I don't feel him close, when I have that emotional doubt, and when my emotions don't line up with what I know, I can go back and say, “Has anything changed about what I know? Was Jesus real? Was his rock real? Can we trust that he said what he said? Can we trust that he was resurrected?”

When you put those things together, the place that I am is responsible and so I can continue working as if it was true until I start feeling like it's true again until that feeling comes back. That's faith. It's not just spiritual faith. I know, for me, so many meetings I walk in to have a conversation, even this one, where it's like, “Today's the day that everyone figures out I'm a fraud.” Brett is going to get on and he's going to say, “That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Why would anyone ever want to talk to you?” You can have these feelings.

You can't control that, but what faith allows you to do is it allows you to continue on the path that you're on regardless of how you feel about it. In selling situations when you're going in and having to sell somebody something or going into a meeting, all of these things, the muscle that you build up as a believer, to be able to live up those doubts and work past them, is the same muscle that allows somebody to go ahead and persevere when they're afraid that they're going to get laughed at the next meeting or something else is not going on.

The facts will never change in my faith in Christ. I may have a harebrained idea of my own that somebody should tell me, “Yes, that's stupid. You should stop doing that.” You have to be open-minded to it, but you just remember, “What are the reasons why I believe this is a good idea? Has anything changed? If it hasn't changed, then I should act like I believe it.” One of the strengths of believers have is that faith muscle that they can bring to their work situations, even when it's not a spiritual issue, but their ability to be steadfast in a way where other people may not have that practice to is important.

It is having that foundation, something that you can hold onto, grab onto, and carry with you, that foundation in Christ. You even talked about identity. One of the biggest things as business owners, and even for me personally, is that identity is huge. I said that in my business a couple of years ago. You might have experienced this as well.

After many years of running this business, grinding, stepping out, and letting someone else run the business, I was a little lost. I was a little like, “Who am I now?” Identity is a huge thing in a business professional's life. Maybe you can talk about this. How have you struggled? You've been in multiple businesses, sold businesses, and built businesses. How have you struggled with your own identity in your journey?

You talked early on that I was an entrepreneur. I started my first offer company when I was a freshman in college. We created the first email program to run on Windows. This was back in the ‘80s when you would just send email to other people in your office. There wasn't an internet where I could email you. I could only email like other people in my building, but that was still a big enough thing that people were doing it.

We had started in a college dorm room and built a business to where we had a couple of million users around the world. I was traveling all over the world, setting up distributorships and deals with people in other parts of the world to translate the software and sell it in their countries and everything else. I was doing this with my best friend. We were best men at each other's weddings. We’re a couple of kids in a sandbox figuring out how to be able to build things. One day, he said that he thought it was the right time for me to leave the company, which came as a surprise to me. I wasn't at all thinking that.

What I couldn't see from the inside was that I was an arrogant guy. I treated people like they were stupid and made it obvious to them that's what I thought. You burn a lot of trust that way. There were things that I needed to learn in that process. My identity, the thing that made me special and I was walking around, was when I was this kid, I was one of the only ones in our town who had started a software company and now I don't have that. What does that mean?

The moment that I heard it, it came as a surprise to me. Fortunately, I was already walking with Christ. I had big plans for my life, and to me, the process of becoming a Christian was trading in this treasure map I had with all the Xs I was going to dig up and everything I was going to build for this mystery behind the curtain, “Let's make a deal. Trade this in. I'm going to give you what's behind the curtain.” This is God, “I will tell you that I know you better than you love yourself. I love you more than you love you. It's going to be a blast.”

It's like, “I will take that deal.” Sometimes that means being in your car with a box outside your building wondering what happened, except that if God was going to go to all that trouble to arrange those things, then he must have something important going on next. You ask me who I am or what I do. Those are complicated questions for me because I'm in a lot of different things, but I'm just a child of God trying to do the good that's in front of me.

That's all I have to do. In fact, it's even simpler than that. It's John 14:6 that Jesus says, “The work of God is to believe in him who sent me.” That's all it is. We think that there are all these things that we have to do. All the apostles are, “Tell us what we need to do. We want to go do these things. We want to go kick butt.” He's like, “Believe in me.” That's it. You can put your pencil down. That's the only thing on the list. It is work, but it's a different work. From an identity standpoint, we want our identities to be in work, what we've achieved, or anything else. Part of our walk with God is to trade those things in and to be willing to be content with and prize the things behind the curtain.

IDP 75 | Fruits Of The Spirit
Fruits Of The Spirit: Part of our walk with God is to be willing to be content with and prize the thing behind the curtain.

It's that maturing of the soul. I see this happen a lot of times. We give our life to Christ and we don't mature. We keep eating and drinking the baby bottle of the gospel for our lives. You're talking about going deeper in maturing the soul. I want to bring up that the fruit of the spirit is self-control because the maturing of the soul is something that doesn't get a lot of praise. Love and having joy and peace in your life, that's some good stuff, but self-control, you mean I can't do all my desires want to do? Talk about that.

Yes and no. I have two confessions here. When I wrote the book, eventually, I had to finish it. I felt like I did meditate on most of the fruit of the spirit to get to a place where I had what God wanted me to share. With self-control, I spent time reflecting on it. What I write is a little more than this, but it's still a little bit of finger-wagging. Here are some good reasons why you shouldn't do those things that are going to get you in trouble. Here are examples of people who got in trouble, whatever.

I plan to revise Fruit at Work. It's been years since I've written it. The fruits are the same. A lot of the work situations are the same, but there's a richer story I have to tell about them. Self-control is a little bit different because now what I see is that self-control is more like willpower, which cuts in both directions. It's not just the things that you don't do. It's also the things that you do. I feel like there's a well of trust. There's another well of willpower, where there are habits that you know you should take on and you should break, but it takes energy to change the trajectory.

When you get home, whatever you do tonight was probably what you thought you were going to do tonight. If instead, you find a quiet room with a hardback book and a chair and be the person you want to be, the one who reads more and binge-watches less, there's some possibility of being able to do that, but there's a lot of momentum locking you into that next season of whatever it is that is waiting for you on Netflix. To be able to do that, it takes a certain amount of change. Also, maybe it's the 10:00 bowl of ice cream. It's something that you're not doing or maybe it's what's waiting on the internet for you to watch after your wife goes to bed.

There are all these different things that are out there, but this self-control is the fruit of the spirit. The love that it's building in terms of you for other people equips you to think about putting them first, the joy which is more than happiness. Joy comes deep out from within you. It has this way of outshining whatever momentary pleasure it is that you think you are going to get from other things. When you see it, when you can grasp ahold of it, peace is an acknowledgment that I have the things that I have.

Paul writes in Timothy that wisdom with contentment is good because we brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it. He's writing near the end of his life at this point, so much left to do in terms of building a church. He's been able to find this place of contentment. He doesn't need anything else. There's nothing driving him to it. You can see how all these things stack up to be able to build this wall that builds and grows this pool of willpower to be able to draw from.

You related self-control back to love. The Bible talks a lot about the bride, groom, and with Christ. I relate a lot of times to this relationship. My closest relationship is my spouse. Sometimes I relate that to my relationship with God, but it goes back. I love my wife, so I have to practice certain levels of self-control. I can't just do whatever I feel like at the moment, and the same thing with God. If we truly love God, he calls us to have self-control in certain things.

How long have you been married?

I'm celebrating a couple of years.

That's awesome. Ten years is a good run. My wife and I have been married for many years. We started dating in high school. We were dating for six years before we got married. The thing is you become different. I've been married to several different women. They're all named Kathy, but the Kathy that I set my vows with in the church is a different Kathy than the one that we had kids with.

It's a different Kathy than the one that we raised and sent kids off into the world with. Other crises and unwelcomed crises come in and you have to deal with them. For people who are new in relationships, they may think, “I have this one person I'm going to be for the rest of my life. After the first ten years, what are we going to do?” The game will change. There are sequels, and it will be other things.

The seasons change. We were talking about that now. We have four kids. The first ten years have been a lot of babies, diapers, and new schools. Now we're entering the season where we're done with the kids for now and we're in a different season.

You grow into different people, and it keeps getting bigger, relationally. I thought I loved my wife as best as I knew how to or as best as I'd be able to at ten years, but we're in a very different place now. There are events and circumstances that we've run into that we never would've expected that have challenged us. Now, we will spend so much more. It's great being an empty nester. We can sit at the dinner table for an hour or an hour and a half just talking. There's nobody we have to help with homework with, to get to bed, or take baths. Nothing else waiting on. It's inevitable. Almost every night, a topic comes up and we start talking. The next thing, another hour or so has gone by. It's wonderful.

Thanks for sharing that. Chris, we're about out of time. Thank you so much for sharing everything. I wanted to just back to one thing. I was reading your bio and you were once and still are from the advertising age. You were called a Digital Media Master. I'm thinking of like a ninja, a black belt in digital media. You talked about starting this software company in your dorm room. Things have changed a little bit since the ‘80s and ‘90s. In our culture now, getting back to Christianity and media, don't you think it's a little bit inconvenient with your marketing background to put yourself out there as a Christian? Are you setting yourself up?

I wouldn't think so. Originally, where that came from was the third software company I created was one of the first ones to manage advertising on websites. When ad-supported websites were coming out, they needed some system that would decide what ad to put on each page, track them, and everything else. We wound up building that. There are a lot of jobs. At the time that we did it, there was one person who was doing internet advertising on a website.

Now, it's a whole office full of people with complicated workflows and everything else. For me, there's always been a matter of once you've solved the technology and you've figured out how to make a new innovation, you have to solve the psychology. You have to understand how this meets the felt need of somebody. How does this align with what people already want to do? Normally, the classic mistake is that people think, “My innovation is so great, so important, and so useful that people are just going to stop what they're doing and change to do it my way later.”

IDP 75 | Fruits Of The Spirit
Fruits Of The Spirit: Once you've solved the technology, once you've figured out how to make a new innovation, you have to solve the psychology.

Changing habits is expensive and hard. Most technology company failures that I follow came because they underestimated the amount that it takes to change a habit. I only did this because I knew that within our country, we were going to develop a mask habit by the time of the pandemic. Some of us will wear masks all the time. All of us were will wear masks some of the time, but it's no longer something that you only see going on in Asia on television. I knew there was going to be a new habit. There was an opportunity to fill that vacuum.

It was a forced habit for a while, then habits developed all of a sudden. At first, we were like, “This is weird. No one's going to do this.” Months later, we're all doing it.

You think about how often. What a huge change that was in a country. How much energy did it take? How much distraction? How much force did it take to change that and get that happening? It's so hard to do that. To me, when you're looking at different products, you're trying to understand people and what's going on in their hearts. What are they looking for? To me, that's love enabled. If you do it right, I don't think I've ever made a product or tried to make a product, but I thought I wasn't going to do Brett any good, but it was going to make me some money.

There are too many cool ideas out in the world that can make your life better, your kids' life better, or your wife’s life better. Those are the things I want to get out into the market. When you give people an opportunity where you think, “This is a way that makes their life better,” you're not asking them to make a huge leap from where they are. You're naturally leading them to a path. You have to understand people better and you have to want to bless people to do it.

Personal curiosity, since you're a curious person, you've been through the digital media age. What is your take now on social media, all that, and the consequences and the blessings that come with it? What's your take on it?

One of the other hats I wear is I teach a class at the school my kids went to, Trinity Academy in Raleigh. I can talk about whatever I want every week. It's anything I want to talk about. The topic was, should you delete your social media? We have employed a lot of people, and what doesn't feel like love is employing a lot of our country's brightest minds to figure out how to get people to stay watching something that's doing them no good for longer. How do I get them to click like, swipe right, or swipe down on the next TikTok?

Attention engineering doesn't feel like love within that process. The tough thing is, as an adult, Facebook is like a better more personal newspaper. I have a dear friend whose wife's funeral I made it to because I knew from Facebook that his wife had died. I might have missed it otherwise because I'd been out of town. The people I'm around, I can be connected to, particularly when we're geographically not seeing each other and next to each other as much as we are in college, high school, or anything else.

That's useful. Facebook isn't worth $1 billion if all it's doing is helping me know what my friends are doing. It's only worth $1 billion if you can make me do something I don't want to do or make me follow something that I don't feel like following and doesn't profit me. It's not a win-win game, unfortunately. It's a zero-sum game. There's an alternate history where Facebook was content doing the thing that it was good at blessing people and didn't make the founder a gazillion dollars, and it would've been fine. Now, in a lot of these cases, investment pressure is forcing them, to some degree, to corrupt the inherent goodness that's in the idea.

It goes back to if you're self-controlled, it can be a blessing like you go to your friend's wife's funeral, but most people don't even think about that. They just swipe and like. Anyway, that's a different topic for a different day. Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate you everything that you're doing. I always ask this question at the end to give a quick book reference if someone's interested. Your book, Fruit at Work, guys, pick that up. Is there a best book that you've recently read, Chris?

I read From Strength to Strength by Art Brooks. Art is a fascinating writer. He brings social science in. What Strength to Strength looks at is this question of what happens. There was an article that came out in the Atlantic that pretty much talked about, for most people, their peak brain strength in their 30s. If you're a physicist, lawyer, writer, or whatever, your best work is somewhere in your 30s. Once you're past 35, you're moving down the curve. The Atlantic's demographic is like people my age.

It’s depressing.

What Art said is there are a couple of kinds of intelligence. There's a fluid intelligence. Maybe the intelligence is pure creativity, creating something out of nothing. There's a crystallized intelligence that relies more upon your life experiences and the connections that you make. It's almost like you have a big library and you know where all the books are. You can say, “That reminds me of this. I'm going to connect this with this.” It speaks to being reassuring that your best days aren't behind you, but you might need to have a willingness to stop fighting to hold onto the thing that you were doing before and a willingness to jump into and try to be a different way to be smart.

Whether it's putting a new wine into old wineskins or other things, there are a number of places in that. From a believer's standpoint, we can always trust God with that. If you think about Paul's best years he taught, whereas he was going to be the next great Judaic scholar following all the best guys and he was going to get published, written up, everyone was going to bow to him in Jerusalem, and everything else, he went on a road to Damascus, and his life totally changed. It was a different intelligence, a different thinking that he was prepared for. To me, I could see the gospel. I could see how God's hand works in people in Art's book.

Chris, I want to say I enjoy hanging out with the Chris Evans at your age rather than when you were 32. I appreciate being on the show. Very smart guy. It's been a blessing, Chris. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Brett.

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