Solving the World’s Greatest Problems

AI has made Bible translation faster, but it learns from published text, and most of the languages still waiting for Scripture have almost nothing in print. Todd Peterson helped start illumiNations, an alliance of 11 Bible translation agencies and the givers who back them. When leaders saw the work on pace to reach the last language around 2150, they called it unacceptable and changed how they worked together.

Todd tells Justin Forman how agencies that once guarded their own work began sharing data, failures and funding, and how the goal moved to Scripture access in every language by 2033. He explains why the alliance put quality ahead of speed and cost, why givers and ministry CEOs asked each other for forgiveness, and what changed when he and his wife Susan stopped giving to 50 or 60 causes and focused on a few. He also shares how reading about God more than reading God's word caught up with him, and why he sees this as a moment for the whole church.

In this episode:

The 2150 problem

What AI can and cannot do for the last languages

Putting quality before speed and cost

Givers who refused to be dollar signs

Why giving to everything is not generous

No paycheck, still giving first

Please forgive me

Books about God versus God's word

Find your fight

Learn more about Solving Bible Translation: https://solving.org/bible-translation/

Full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jps8Cef1HN0

In 2014 a virus killed 10 million pigs in America, and it got into Pat Hord's farm. Pat is CEO of Hord Family Farms in Bucyrus, Ohio, a fifth-generation farm with 10,000 acres across six states and about 5,000 pigs born every day. He thought he might be the last generation to run it. Instead, 2014 became one of the farm's best years, and the family decided God owns the business and everything it grows.

Pat tells Justin Forman what it takes to feed 5,000 newborn pigs a day (about 400 semi-trucks of feed a week), why he says less than 2% of Americans have any tie to a farm, and how a near loss showed him his identity was in the farm more than in Christ. He explains why the family tithes the business and adds 1% a year toward a 20% goal, why they put a chaplain on the farm, how he felt called to ministry and was told to go farm, and what he wants to hand the sixth generation besides land.

In this episode:

5,000 pigs born a day

The Hord family story since 1905

Why people fear farms they have never seen

Called to ministry, sent to the farm

The virus that killed 10 million pigs

God owns the business and the fruit

A chaplain on the farm

Can you tithe a capital-intensive farm?

Sell it or pass it on

What he would tell his grandkids

Learn more about the Hunger Fund: solving.org/hunger

Full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gS7E5MxccBo

What happens when the factory moves to the farm? David Payne, a former Wall Street bond trader and co-founder of Kentegra Biotechnology, helped build one in Kenya so the money from a Kenyan crop stays in Kenya.

The crop is pyrethrum, a white flower that kills insects naturally. It was once Kenya's third-largest export, behind coffee and tea, until cheaper lab-made pesticides took over in the 1990s. David tells Justin Forman how Kentegra built its plant in the middle of COVID, signed about 20,000 small farmers, and spent years winning Europe's toughest approvals. He explains why one acre of flowers can bring in most of a small farm's cash, how farmers with no bank built savings groups that almost never default, and why he moved his wife and four daughters to Kenya.

In this episode:

The flower behind coffee and tea

Why the factory belongs where the crop grows

From Wall Street to Kenya

How a lab wiped out a Kenyan export

Building a plant during COVID

One acre that pays the bills

A bank with no bank

Winning Europe's hardest approval

God said move to Kenya

Learn more about the Hunger Fund: solving.org/hunger

Full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrFUoso7_AI

What if the food we send to hungry people is part of the reason they stay hungry?

Joel Cunningham is CEO of Hamara and a fifth-generation Zimbabwean. His family has spent 40 years in African farming, and they failed for a long time before they found what works. He tells Zac Sicher that most hunger in Africa is not caused by famine or war. It is caused by broken systems. Small farmers have good land around them but cannot reach good feed, vets, trucks or buyers. When charities hand out food in places like that, they can put local farmers out of business and leave people depending on help that eventually leaves.

Joel walks through how Hamara works instead: a buyer places an order first, farming clubs bid for it, Hamara pays for the chicks and feed, and the farmer is paid at the end. Zac shares the story of a farmer who went from about $500 a year to about $3,000 a year in 18 months. They also talk honestly about why we give, and what it means to love the poor well.

In this episode:

The charity that gave away eggs

Why most hunger in Africa is not famine

Best land, still hungry

Giving to feel better, or giving to solve the problem

How a small farmer can sell to a big buyer

Why cash never touches the farmer's hands

Loans that charge 4 to 7 percent a month

A heart for the poor and a mind for the poor

Learn more about the Hunger Fund: solving.org/hunger

Dallas Jenkins created The Chosen, the TV series about the life of Jesus, after his big Hollywood movie bombed and he had no idea what came next. He says the hardest part of success is staying broken and surrendered once it comes.

Dallas talks with Justin Forman, co-founder of Solving the World's Greatest Problems, about the short film he shot behind a barn in Illinois for his church's Christmas Eve service, and the people in prison who told him it made them feel seen for the first time. He explains why his team did not know if they had money for the show's next four episodes, why giving it away free made it grow, and how he broke a need for approval he carried for 42 years. He also shares his five loaves and two fish plan, why there are more non-missionaries than missionaries in the Bible, and what he felt on the last of 528 days of filming.

Chapters

00:00 Now you're ready

02:54 Day 528 of filming

06:25 No money for episode five

08:42 Same lake, bigger stage

11:52 Flop, then a barn

16:58 Jesus and business owners

23:18 Is ambition wrong?

30:15 Affirmation was his drug

33:30 What broke the habit

37:15 Be a control freak

41:15 What The Chosen fixed

44:32 Broken before blessed

47:11 Never seven seasons again

Links

The Chosen: https://www.thechosen.tv

Come and See Foundation: https://www.comeandseefoundation.org

Talk to our team: https://solving.org/talk-to-someone/

About the show

Solving the World's Greatest Problems backs the entrepreneurs and organizations working at the root of the problems most people have given up on. We fund them, tell their stories, and show what is actually moving.

Full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rzss-ds2l2A

Casey Crawford co-founded Movement Mortgage, where he is CEO, and capped his lifestyle before the money came.

Casey sits down with Justin Forman at the Billy Graham Library to talk about why money is so hard to talk about, and how he got free of it. At 22, an older teammate told him to decide how much was enough before the money came, write it down, and tell a few people. He did. He also talks about arguing with God over his own money, why giving gets harder as wealth grows, and why he started treating his giving with the same care as his investments.

In this episode:

Deciding how much is enough before you get rich

Arguing with God about your own money

Why giving freezes as wealth grows

Going upstream on the world's darkest problems

Giving with the same care as investing

Learn more about The Evangelism Gap Fund: solving.org/evangelism

Sean Dunn preached to stadiums for years. Then one paragraph in a book told him there were 33 million teenagers in America, and he realized the people he most wanted to reach were never in the room. "Scripture says go. And I kept saying come." In 2017 he moved his whole ministry, Groundwire, onto young people's phones.

Sean is the president of Groundwire, and he tells Justin Forman how the model works: interrupt instead of invite, a short video that shows a young person how they feel before it says a word about God, a coach ready to talk 24/7, and websites that carry the message in the address, like jesuscares.com and whenlifehurts.com. He also tells the story of the financial planner who said "I don't believe you," the audit that followed, and why every dollar Groundwire spends now reaches more people than the last one.

In this episode:

• Why "come to church" stopped working
• What an interruption looks like in a feed
• The message has to be in the URL
• The data is accurate. Your assumption is not.
• "Sean, I don't believe you. Your numbers are too good."
• Better than linear
• The one problem Groundwire has not solved yet

Learn more about Solving The Evangelism Gap Fund: solving.org/the-evangelism-gap

Set a number for your own security and the day you reach it is the day you are finished. That is John C. Maxwell's argument in this episode. He has written 92 books on leadership, trained leaders in every country in the world, and he says the people he meets who crossed their finish line still had thirty good years in front of them.

Maxwell tells Justin Forman how a leadership class in Jackson, Mississippi turned into a cassette tape club, why his publisher's news about who was buying his books sent him out of a church he loved, and why he spent seven or eight years after that saying almost nothing about his faith. He and his brother Larry started EQUIP in 1996 to train leaders in countries that have very few of them. It now runs 191,000 small groups, Maxwell says four million people have come to Christ through them in six years at about four dollars each, and he puts the present aim at a million people a month within six years. Along the way: what he does with the money past his number, why he keeps names and addresses rather than estimates, and the question he still has not answered in a book.

Chapters

00:00 Four million and nobody knew

02:46 The pink cassette tapes

09:49 What keeps the two apart

12:03 Why safe is the wrong goal

16:11 Rewards you have to earn

21:27 The finish line problem

25:31 Pick a number for others

30:27 The good news we hide

36:49 The day he crossed over

43:43 Values first, then faith

46:44 Four dollars a person

John C. Maxwell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/officialjohnmaxwell/

EQUIP Leadership - https://www.linkedin.com/company/equipleadership/

The Evangelism Gap Fund - https://solving.org/evangelism/

Solving the World's Greatest Problems - https://solving.org

Justin Forman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jforman/

Solving the World's Greatest Problems is a community of givers taking on the root causes of the world's deepest suffering. We fund the breakthroughs happening right now, together.

Full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xd3Lsvmgk4

Who paid for the first English Bible? Who paid for Amazing Grace?

John Rinehart spent years chasing that question and kept finding the same pattern behind movements of God: a preacher everyone remembers, and a giver nobody does. William Tyndale had a cloth merchant who housed him and funded a translation that was illegal at the time. George Whitefield had an aristocrat. John Newton had a businessman who paid to print his hymns and hand them out. And Luke 8 says Jesus' own three years of ministry were funded by three women, named, out of their own means.

John is the founder of Gospel Patrons and the author of Gospel Patrons and 31 Gospel Patrons. He talks with Justin Forman about why radical generosity was normal Christianity in the book of Acts, why it is impossible to lose when you give, the years he spent believing business leaders were second-class Christians, and the coffee in Sydney that changed his life.

In this episode:

The three things Jesus could have done to fund himself

Who actually paid for Amazing Grace

Why giving is never a loss

The couple who funded the JESUS film

Believing you are a second-class Christian

What the rich young ruler forfeited

Not everything with Jesus' name on it has your name on it

Learn more about the Evangelism Gap Fund: solving.org/the-evangelism-gap

Pulling the Jenga Block: How Faith-Driven Capital Can Solve Structural Hunger

Host Justin Forman sits down with Zac Sicher, Fund Manager for Hunger & Joblessness at Solving the World's Greatest Problems, alongside Henry Kaestner and Rebecca Yuschak, for a conversation that reframes generosity as a coordinated, professionally-managed strategy rather than a scattershot of individual good intentions.

Zac left a trading desk at Goldman Sachs — where he'd worked through the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Russia's invasion of Ukraine — to spend eighteen months crisscrossing Africa, listening to farmers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders before ever proposing a solution. That listening tour shaped how he now leads SWGP's Giving Fund for hunger and joblessness: find the specific "Jenga block" in a broken system, and pull it, rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Key Topics:

• Why SWGP treats giving funds like professionally-managed investment funds, not one-off donations
• The difference between acute and structural hunger — and why only one of them can be solved with markets and innovation
• Zac's path from Goldman Sachs trading desk to fund manager, and the moment he said yes to God without knowing what it would look like
• The 21x yield gap between an average American ear of corn and a smallholder farmer's crop in Zimbabwe — and what closing it could mean
• How a donor-advised fund structure lets capital move between grants and investments as a theory of change gets proven
• Why 30–40% of food produced in Africa is wasted before it reaches anyone, and where market innovation can plug that gap
• How entrepreneurs, investors, and givers are being brought together as one community instead of working in silos

This conversation matters for anyone who's felt the weight of the world's biggest problems and wondered where their time, capital, or attention could actually make a dent. Zac and the SWGP team make the case that the answer isn't more hustle — it's better structure, better community, and a clearer theory of change.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform. Learn more about the Giving Funds and how to get involved at solving.org.

Alan Barnhart and his brother capped their own lifestyle in 1986, before their business made real money. In 2008 they signed 99% of the company, worth hundreds of millions, over to a ministry.

He says the decision was self-preservation rather than generosity, and that his family have been the beneficiaries of it, not the givers. He explains why he refuses to tell anyone how much to give, why he is a proponent of not leaving his children a fortune, and why giving while you are alive beats giving at death by 30 to 40 percent.

Brandon West runs a 24-person creative agency in Gainesville, Florida. It has funded 37 care centers fighting sex trafficking and extreme poverty, five years ahead of the goal he set. It started with one sponsored child bought on a whim at a concert, and a moment sitting in QuickBooks where he could not work out which category the charge belonged in.

The turn in this conversation is not the number. It is the day a nonprofit director told Brandon that the woman who used to clean his offices was the first trafficking survivor their city ever reached, and that she had been asking them to go and meet whoever owned that company. He had no idea.

Brandon and host Justin Forman talk about what happens when the blinders come off. Why his leadership team laughed when he first said the words safe house, and why every bed was full within a month of it opening. What he learned riding along on street outreach at one in the morning, when he was told to stay in the car. What the word dignity means when you watch someone receive a gift basket and ask what they owe for it. And the rule he gives anyone frozen by the size of the problem: do for the one what you wish you could do for the many.

In this episode: the cleaner nobody knew was a survivor. Why his leadership team laughed. All the beds full inside a month. Told to stay in the car at 1am. What dignity means in a gift basket. The QuickBooks entry that changed his math. A stranger's message that became $150,000. And where to start when the problem is bigger than you are.

Solving the World's Greatest Problems is a show for builders who want their work to count against the problems that outlast them. Entrepreneurs, investors and operators, telling what they actually did and what it cost.

Get into the fight against trafficking: https://solving.org/trafficking

More at https://solving.org/

62 Billion Visits a Year. A Crime Scene Hiding in Plain Sight.

Host Justin Forman sits down with Laila Mickelwait, Co-Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, for a conversation that exposes how one of the internet's most-visited websites became a global engine of child sexual abuse and trafficking, and how a movement of 2.3 million people helped bring it down.

In 2020, P*rnhub was the fifth-most-trafficked website on Earth. 170 million visits a day, 62 billion a year, enough content uploaded annually to watch nonstop for 169 years. None of it was verified for age or consent. All of it was profitable. Buried inside were tens of millions of images and videos of real children being raped and trafficked on camera.

Laila Mickelwait found out how. She founded the Trafficking Hub movement, forced P*rnhub to remove more than 50 million images and videos, and helped push Visa, Mastercard, and Discover to cut ties with the platform. Today, as Co-Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, she funds strategic civil litigation that lets trafficking survivors take on billion-dollar corporations in court, and she's just getting started.

Key Topics:

• How a single upload test exposed P*rnhub as "a crime scene, not a p*rn site"
• The multinational corporate structure behind P*rnhub, MindGeek, and a hidden majority shareholder
• Why Justice Defense Fund targeted the credit card companies, not just the platform
• The role of public pressure, journalism, and civil litigation working in tandem
• Survivor stories including Serena Flaitis and the human cost behind the numbers
• How impact investors use charitable dollars to fund justice for trafficking survivors
• Finding common ground across ideological lines to build a coalition big enough to win

This is not one company's problem. It's a business model built on unverified, unaccountable abuse, and it won't end until the financial incentive does. The resources to fight it already exist. The question is who's willing to deploy them.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform.

Tim Tebow's father was at an underground pastors' conference in a country where faith isn't allowed. Men walked in and began auctioning four little girls. He emptied his wallet, about $1,250, and bought their freedom. Every other person at that table had a good reason not to. That story is where this episode starts, and it is why Tim Tebow is in this fight.

Tebow and Wes Lyons come at human trafficking from two directions. Tebow's foundation works on prevention, rescue and long-term survivor care, and he argues trafficking is a worth problem before it is a policy problem. Lyons is a general partner at Eagle Venture Fund, which built the first venture funds designed to seed a counter-trafficking industry. His answer to where the victims are is uncomfortable: 90% pass through healthcare, on average 15 to 18 times, before anyone identifies them. One entrepreneur they back has trained 6,000 frontline doctors and nurses to notice, with a rollout across 5,000 hospitals planned. Both men land in the same place from opposite ends.

Go further: join our Human Trafficking premiere event on August 27, with the entrepreneurs and investors in this fight: https://solving.org/human-trafficking-watch-party/

Links

Tim Tebow Foundation - https://www.timtebowfoundation.org

Look Again, by Tim Tebow - https://www.amazon.com/Look-Again-Recognize-Worth-Confidence/dp/1400254205

Wes Lyons, Eagle Venture Fund - https://www.eagleventurefund.com/team/wes-lyons

Eagle Freedom Fund - https://www.eagleventurefund.com/freedom-fund

The Human Trafficking Fund - https://solving.org/trafficking/

All episodes - https://solving.org/podcast/

About the show

Solving the World's Greatest Problems is a community of entrepreneurs, investors, givers and ministry leaders taking on the root causes of the world's deepest suffering. We have identified more than 30 of the world's greatest problems, and we fund the breakthroughs happening right now.

Why We're Solving the World's Greatest Problems

There are 1.8 million nonprofits in the United States and only about 4,500 publicly traded companies. That gap is the whole problem — too many good hearts, not enough coordination. In the first episode of Solving the World's Greatest Problems, co-founders Henry Kaestner and Justin Forman sit down together to launch a bold new chapter of the movement they started eight years ago.

Henry Kaestner and Justin Forman co-founded Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, growing a global movement across 130 countries and 55,000 foundation course participants. In this launch conversation, they trace the journey from stewardship to generosity to investing — and cast vision for why the next chapter isn't about giving more, but deploying differently.

Key Topics:

• Eight years of Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, and the cultural moment behind it
• Why "build first, then give" — and why investing was never the first move
• The story of Dave Munson, who built his own leather casket to proclaim the Gospel
• Dylan Wilk's reversal from helicopter commutes to a 600-job makeup company
• The upstream problem: why 1.8 million nonprofits can't out-coordinate 4,500 companies
• Illuminations and the race to translate Scripture into every living language by 2033
• Why the name "Solving the World's Greatest Problems" is intentionally audacious

This isn't a rebrand — it's a reordering. God doesn't need anyone's five loaves and two fish. He wants the people who hold them, deployed toward the fight He's already in. Eight Funds are live right now, and more foundation courses are launching every month this fall.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform. Then join the solvers at solving.org.