Podcast Summary: How I Write with David Perell

Episode: Bible Project: How Two Guys Changed Bible Education on YouTube | How I Write
Guests: Tim Mackey & John Collins (The Bible Project)
Date: June 25, 2025

Overview: The Art and Process of Teaching the Bible

In this episode, David Perell interviews Tim Mackey and John Collins, the co-founders of The Bible Project, about their creative process, the collaborative mechanics behind their viral Bible explainer videos, and their philosophy on reading, writing, and teaching scripture. The conversation goes behind-the-scenes on research, scripting, animation, and how their unique dialogue style makes the Bible accessible and engaging, regardless of one’s religious background. Along the way, they explore deeper questions about understanding, mystery, and the enduring influence of biblical literature on personal growth, writing, and Western culture.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Collaborative Creation: From Research to Script to Animation

• Genesis of Ideas
  • John typically initiates the study, immersing himself in a vast world of biblical scholarship and languages.
  • [01:10] John Collins: “Usually the ideas for what we're doing come from me saying to you, oh, we should really like think about this ... It's a whole world of Amazon lists of way too many books and not enough money kind of thing.”
• Hand-off and Dialogue
  • Tim plays the role of the intensely curious "non-expert", drilling John with questions, pushing for clarity and simplicity.
  • [03:12] Tim Mackey: “I don't have the patience ... just to sit down and study and read. But I'm just very curious. And so I love ... to just work with an expert and then just drill them and discuss ... It is a discovery process...”
• Process Pipeline
  • The process: John’s research → long-form notes → dialogue & Q&A → iteratively developed script → passed to animation team for visual conception → collaborative refinements.
  • [06:09] Tim Mackey: “So it goes from notes to discussion to script for a video, to then a lot more content, written content that our scholar team generally does, then to more notes...”

2. The Collaborative Animation Workflow

• Animation as a Tool for Clarification
  • The animation team often spots logical or narrative gaps that prompt script rewrites and deeper clarifications.
  • [07:54] John Collins: “A project that's in the pipeline right now is a theme study on wilderness throughout the Bible...our team ... pointed out the way we plotted the sequence of ideas was actually really hard to display visually ... so they just point out a couple spots like that. We're like, you're trying to set up this pattern, but it didn't fully repeat...Sometimes we're into draft seven of the script in that back and forth with the artists.”

3. The “Illusion of Knowing” and Embracing Mystery

• Illusion of Mastery
  • Tim describes how repeated exposure can fool us into thinking we understand more than we do.
  • [10:09] John Collins: “We'll go back to the same ideas over and over and over. And sometimes I'll be like, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask again ... That's the illusion of knowing, and I have to turn that off...”
• Certainty vs. Trust
  • For John, certainty in faith or biblical knowledge has yielded to trust—a willingness to sit with not knowing, to foster true wisdom.
  • [12:16] John Collins: “The hope of certainty has gone out the window ... Certainty is stemming from a desire to have control ... But that's really different than trust. So I think the story of the Bible is about a botched quest for wisdom and people trying to know or take knowledge that really isn't available to them...”
• Honoring the Mystery Through Learning
  • [14:47] Tim Mackey: “There's a beauty in being able to understand something in a new way and then enter into the mystery through a new perspective.”
  • [15:37] John Collins: “To honor a mystery doesn't mean that you don't think about it ... you come to better understand exactly what it is you don't understand.”

4. Designing for Depth: Clarity, Visuals, and Literary Art

• Why Visuals Matter
  • The integration of visuals enables the communication of both the clarity and the mystery inherent in biblical literature.
  • [19:01] John Collins: "Visuals are working on another level of human understanding. And I think that is our way of trying to honor both the clarity and the mystery of God that's being communicated in scripture."
• Layered Communication
  • The videos blend dialogue, sound, and visuals to create multiple layers of meaning—not just cognitive, but emotional and spiritual.
  • [20:34] John Collins: “Congratulations to our past selves. No, but that's right. It makes ... the point. And biblical literature is trying to influence us on all of those levels, you know?”

5. Reading the Bible: Altitudes and Approaches

• Zooming In and Out
  • The Bible invites both close reading of detail and high-altitude pattern recognition—seeing chiasmus, numerology, recurring motifs (e.g., significance of "40", tree imagery, etc.).
  • [24:08] John Collins: “Flying high altitude, but having done the detailed work, is actually how the biblical authors themselves want the ideal reader to engage.”
• The Ideal Reader, Meditation, and Community
  • Psalm 1 and the concept of "hagah" (meditate): The Bible is designed for daily, lifelong meditation—muttering, pondering, dialoguing.
  • [25:39] John Collins: “In Psalm 1, we read about the ideal Bible reader ... you slowly, quietly read the Bible out loud to yourself and then go talk about it with your friends ... The Bible starts to read you because ultimately the writers of the Bible want you to adopt this story as your story.”

6. Why Poetry, Riddle, and Narrative?

• Metaphor and Meaning
  • Poetry, parable, and indirection aren’t glitches, they’re a feature meant to stock our minds with images, drive deeper reflection, and avoid simplistic answers.
  • [47:49] Tim Mackey: “In reality, I think this is how it works ... the way we understand anything is through metaphor. And so there's metaphoric schemas behind all of our language and everything that we think. And so how do we learn new things and how do we change how we think? It's by adopting new metaphors.”
  • [53:40] Tim Mackey: “Why does God write to us in poetry and in narratives, and why does Jesus teach in riddles?”
  • [46:30] John Collins: “… the biblical authors assume that the most important ways our words can influence each other is not by making everything crystal clear the first time, but by sparking a learning journey that will last a lot longer…”

7. Dialogue as Pedagogy

• Modeling Communal Discovery
  • The dialogue script structure models real learning as a social, communal, and iterative journey.
  • [65:48] Tim Mackey: “I am asking those questions. I do know it gives permission to the viewer to go, yeah, that's my question too...”
• Intentionally Conversational Writing
  • The videos consciously script in learner/teacher voices to make the viewer feel welcome, not intimidated.
  • [66:39] Tim Mackey: “Yeah, we'll write our voices into the script. Which is weird because then we are rehearsing and performing a script ... It is a condensing of an actual conversation that we had.”

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Nature of Understanding:
  • [10:09] Tim Mackey: “If we realized how little we actually understand about the world, we would go crazy ... my brain plays this trick on me that goes, you get it, you know how this works. But I don't.”
• On Certainty and Trust:
  • [12:16] John Collins: “[Certainty] is stemming from a desire to have control ... But that's really different than trust ... I have no problem knowing that I don't know the answers to most things …”
• On the Project’s Aspirations:
  • [28:25] John Collins: "Our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos ... our goal is that people actually become more wise readers of scripture and spend more time meditating on scripture so they can follow Jesus with more devotion."
• On Meditating on Scripture:
  • [26:30] Tim Mackey: “What you meditate on becomes the thing that you desire. And what you desire, then you meditate on. And this is what Psalm 1 is training you to think ...”
• On Visuals and Literary Parallels:
  • [22:09] John Collins: “You can make the visual composition of each story parallel to each other. And that visual parallelism is actually an expression of the literary parallelism. And it's so fun ... It forces us to think literally about the Bible as words on a page, but then also as parallel images in a storyboard.”
• On The Bible as Literary Art:
  • [17:42] Tim Mackey: “I've come to this appreciation of the fact that this is literary art that actually puts a lot of riddles and mysteries in front of you on purpose and is asking us to engage with the mystery and the riddles ... so that we Can, I guess, wrestle with it in the right way...”
• On Communal Learning:
  • [68:21] John Collins: “What we're also trying to model is ... we discover our most important insights for our growth as human beings, in community, from. In relationships to something other than myself ... we're a kind of species that develops through communal knowing and learning.”

Important Timestamps

• 00:45 – The starting point for making a new video: research, scholarship, languages
• 03:06 – The dialogue handoff, the teacher/student dynamic in their process
• 06:09 – Animation’s role in developing and clarifying content
• 09:39 – The “illusion of knowing” and how their podcast dialogue is genuine
• 12:16 – Certainty vs. trust in approaching Scripture
• 16:51 – Learning expands mystery, not contracts it
• 17:42 – The Bible as literary art and embracing riddles
• 22:09 – Paralleling literary and visual patterns; chiasmus, themes
• 25:39 – The concept of “hagah,” meditation, and Psalm 1
• 28:04 – The Bible Project’s true goal: encouraging independent, wise reading
• 47:49 – Understanding through metaphor; poetry as divine speech
• 65:01 – Modeling the conversation in videos; writing in dialogue
• 66:36 – Scripting permission for the viewer to be a beginner
• 78:28 – Contrasts in the Gospels’ writing styles, literary strategies

Writing Styles & Literary Devices in the Bible

• Comparative Gospel Analysis

  • Matthew and Luke: Structured, heavily hyperlinking to Hebrew scriptures
  • John: Poetic, intimate, “Rembrandt painting”—sparse in detail, but every detail is loaded with significance
  • Mark: More cryptic, denser, a source for Luke’s more accessible versions
  • [80:17] David Perell: “It’s like a Rembrandt painting … all the stuff that’s dark and then there’s this little bead of light and every single thing that the light is on is important.”

• Psalms, Songs, and Chant Tradition

  • The Psalms deeply embedded in Christian and Jewish chanting, shaping early church and monastic traditions.
  • [85:14] John Collins: “... when I began to read early ... theologians ... you can just see that this is somebody who has the psalms not just in their mind, like in their body, because they sing them every day.”

The Bible’s Influence on Language & Culture

• English idioms and Ethical Worldview
  • Many familiar phrases and a "sacred value of human life" trace back to biblical source, with Tyndale, Geneva, and King James translations shaping English for centuries.
  • [74:21] John Collins: “Oh, the sacred value of a human life ... that's not taken for granted in human history. It's not taken for granted in the same way on the planet today.”
• Biblical Imprints in Western Thought
  • Concepts like equality and justice, found in the Declaration of Independence, have deep biblical roots.
  • [75:01] John Collins: “That the person without power in a certain situation has the moral high ground just by being without power. That is ... nothing more Hebrew Bible and Jesus style than that way of seeing the world.”

On Teaching, Communication, and Jesus’s Methods

• Jesus as a Communicator
  • Preference for indirect, provocative, riddle-based teaching, designed to provoke rather than simply explain.
  • [76:50] Tim Mackey: “Jesus gave sermons, I suppose, but like he taught in riddles and he was very provocative and he just gave so much space to be like, yeah, you don't get it yet, but that's okay.”
• Why Parables?
  • To enable self-discovery and to protect the message in a politically volatile context; to reward persistence and curiosity among his listeners.

Final Reflections

• On Joy and Delight in Reading
  • The Bible isn't meant to be onerous or merely instructional; it is to be experienced with delight and curiosity, ideally in community.
  • [33:33] John Collins: “You can read the Bible with a few different aims ... That is a great and worthy task. It’s actually even really important, I think. But that's a different way to read a text than to read it and ask, what is this designed to do to me apart from what I want to do with it?”
• On Language and Memorization
  • The bodily practice of chanting, memorizing, and meditating on scripture “stocks your mind” with images/patterns, so scripture “reads you.”
  • [85:41] John Collins: “That is what I'm saying. That is. And maybe it's back to stocking your mental encyclopedia with the stories and poems. It reads you. It becomes the way that you read your life.”

For New Listeners: Key Takeaways

• The Bible Project’s process is a model of collaborative, communal exploration—fusing deep research, sustained dialogue, rigorous simplicity, and visual storytelling.
• Their videos and podcasts are crafted to make the viewer an active participant in meaning-making, not a passive recipient.
• Biblical literature is a masterclass in how to create—through ambiguity, structure, repetition, poetry, and narrative—a lifelong learner and seeker, not merely someone with correct answers.

Sample Notable Quote for Social Sharing:

“Our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos ... Our goal is that people actually become more wise readers of scripture and spend more time meditating on scripture so they can follow Jesus with more devotion.”
— John Collins, [28:25]