Transcript of Fasting, Prayer, Meditation, & the Global Persecution of Christians (With Hallow CEO Alex Jones)

So I think if someone, not that people come to me for investments, but I think if someone, if you had come to me and said, I want you to invest in a prayer app, pretty sure I would have passed on that, not for ideological reasons, but for business reasons, that can't work. But Hallow seems really big to me. Tell us how big Hallow is.

It's all glory to God, but he's done. Yeah, had you told me like a thousand people would use this thing, I would have been mind blown. We built it initially just for me, but like 10,000 people, a million people. I think we're at 22 million downloads now. 600 million prayers prayed. We were no religious app or meditation app or wellness app or workout app had ever cracked the top 10 in the app store before. And this past lent, we were number one, which was crazy. So it was the first time in history, which, glory to God, it's just been a wild ride. He does really cool things when you let Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show.

We bring you stories that have not been show cased anywhere else. They're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson. Com. Here's the episode. It Really an amazing story and unexpected. Why did you build it for you? What does that mean?

I was raised religious, but fell away from my faith in high school and college, would have considered myself agnostic or atheist for most of that time. When I graduated, I got really into meditation. There were some secular meditation apps that I started using, and I started using them every day, and I loved them. They were like 10 minutes. It was almost like technology without technology. Like you press play, closed your eyes, plugged in your headphones, and then we're just led in this meditation. It was really the first time that I'd sat in silence. The strangest thing started happening, which is every time I would meditate or sit in silence, my mind kept feeling pulled towards something spiritual, like an image of Jesus, an image of the cross, the words Holy spirit, which I thought was very strange because I would have considered myself agnostic. I started reaching out to people who took their faith more seriously, priests, pastors, people who I knew. And I thought I had this really interesting question, which is, Hey, is there any way there's some intersection here between this meditation thing, this sitting in silence thing, and this faith thing?

And they all laughed at me and said, Yeah, we've been doing it for 2000 years. You probably should have heard about it. It's called prayer. And I was like, no, no, no. I know prayer. Prayer is the, Hey, thanks for stuff. Sorry for stuff. Help me with stuff, or the things that I memorized as a kid. And I had this one priest who said, Okay, those are great ways to talk to God. It's great ways to share with God what's on your heart. But have you ever tried to listen? And I was like, no, what does that mean? What does it mean to listen to God? And I started learning about this whole world of contemplative and meditative prayer within the church, things like lexia divina, Ignatian spirituality, imaginative prayers, sitting in silence, chant, all this stuff that I'd honestly never heard of before. And I sat down, Alexia Davena is a way of meditating on scripture. You pick a word that sticks out to you. And so I googled how to do that. I randomly opened up a Bible, and just 10 minutes in my living room, opened up my Bible to Luke 11, where the disciples, funnily enough, asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, and he gives them the 'Our Father', 'Our Father, our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

And hallow was the word that stuck out to me that I meditated on. And it was just 10 minutes, just in the comfort of my home. But I was just sobbing. It was this beautiful combination of this deep sense of peace, deeper than anything I I've experienced before, but combined with this depth of meaning and purpose. So like, Hallowe means to make holy. And I was like, well, is God trying to make me holy? Am I letting him make me holy? Am I supposed to be helping other people grow in wholeness? And the answer to all that was no. I was just doing my own career following my own ambition. What were you doing? I was in consulting, just trying to have a good job, make money. It was a good job. It taught me how to work, but certainly wasn't working for Jesus. And so I had to quit my job, drain my 401(k), at 25 years old or whatever it is, max, I have my credit cards, do this stupid startup thing, which isn't stupid, it's God's thing. But yeah, it was crazy. It was these really stressful questions, but wrestling with them in this place of deep peace.

I knew from then that I wanted this app. I like the structure of these apps, and I knew how to code a little bit, so we started building it. But we had about 20 to 30 people start using it just because they heard what I was building. One of them One of them was my aunt. I don't know. This is one of my favorite early stories, so I love to tell it. My aunt had just lost her son, my cousin. He was 40. He had just gotten married, and His wife had just gotten pregnant with their first kid. And he went into the doctor, said, Hey, there's something wrong with my chest. My chest feels tight. They said, You're fine. Go home. He went home and he died that night in his sleep. And it was my my godmother, my aunt's only son, and she was just heartbroken, just destroyed. She couldn't get out of bed for months. She couldn't eat. And we have this big family, a bunch of aunts and uncles, and we're all trying to figure out what could we possibly do for this woman. And nobody could do anything. I mean, it's a wound that deep.

I couldn't imagine losing a kid. And she sends us this note right when we launched. It was December of 2018. And she says, Hey, I just wanted to let you I don't know. There's one of like 20, 30 people using this. I had no idea. There was like 10 meditations on it. Now there's like 100,000, but there were just 10 minute little meditations on the thing. She said, I just wanted to let you know. Christmas is always a really stressful time for me. I got to figure out how to visit. She has grandkids. I got to I'd had to visit all my kids, my grandkids, get presents for everybody. It's always a time of stress and anxiety, but I just honestly didn't think I'd be able to get through it this year. I didn't think I'd be able to face my first Christmas without my son. I just wanted to let you know that these little meditations on this app have reminded me that even in the darkest moment of my life, which I am in the darkest moment of my life, but even in the darkest moment of my life, I can still have hope.

And they've allowed me to get out of bed and to carry on. And thank you for allowing God into my heart again. And I just broke down in tears on my floor. And I remember I went to my co founder and I was like, man, it seems like two things. One, it seems like God really wants us to do something with this thing. Maybe it's not just an app for me. Maybe other people are going to use this. At the same time, if all we ever do, if we work for the next 50 years, if we waste all our money, if everybody hates us, if everything goes terribly, and we got that one note, it will have been infinitely worth it. I do it 100 times over. Of course I would for that one note. The really cool part about Hallows, we just get to see these stories all the time from people who are in really dark, really tough places, and we get to see God bring his love and his mercy and his peace into their hearts. But yeah, from an investment perspective, the vast majority of people said no. I bet they did.

It was not a popular investment. I certainly did not think anybody would ever invest in it. But by the Grace of God, some folks did, which is certainly a longer story. But yeah, the vast majority thought it was a very stupid idea.

What did your wife think?

My wife is a saint. I own my wife more than I could possibly articulate. She's always taken her faith very seriously. It's actually been funny to watch how my wife and my mom have reacted to me coming back to my faith. My mom is the same. A saint of a woman. It's like the bedrock of our faith really tried to get me to I believe, growing up, prayed for me, I'm sure, a lot. But had you asked my mom, of the people in the country who would do anything religious, I would be the last on the list by far. If we just rewind for a second, why did you lose your faith?

It sounds like you grew up in a religious family. Yeah.

I don't know. I went to a public school in Ohio. People would go to church, but nobody really, at least the kids, my friends, nobody believed. There was no real believers. It's just like the way of the world, I think, is naturally destruction and naturally away from God. You have to really take this step into faith to believe. But for me, I just followed the way of the world. I just followed the way that what all my friends believed, which was this new atheism thing, which is like the Dawkins, Sam Harris stuff of like, yeah, this God thing is stupid. It's just what our parents did. There's no real evidence behind it. Although I never really thought about it. It was never a conscious thought. I just followed the tide of my friends and career and secular society of just falling away and drifting away from my faith, which is heartbreaking. It happens. It's the story of way too many people in today's world. But at the core, I think for me- It sounds like you were led away from your faith. Yeah, I think so. Probably the society I was in, the friends, the school I was in, certainly was very secular.

But for me, the thing that gets me excited about Hallowe and the work that we're doing is At the core, what I didn't have was a relationship with Jesus. What I didn't have was a relationship with God. I knew the beliefs. I would go to church. I went to CCD and church school and all this stuff. But I never had an actual encounter with Christ. And if you do, if you actually have a relationship with Jesus, it's really hard to pull you away from it. For me, if somebody now is like, Okay, well, what do you believe? Obviously, I believe in Jesus. And if they tried to convince me not to believe, there's a lot of intelligent people, people way smarter than I am, theologians, philosophers, whatever. But convincing me that Jesus isn't real is convincing me my wife isn't real. It's like, no, this is my best friend. This is the person who helps me in every moment. It's more real than my wife. And so it's this relationship. Yeah, it's unbreakable. And that's, I think, the thing that I really didn't have growing up, which is what we get excited about trying to help people to build that relationship and to find God in silence and in prayer.

Why silence?

Well, scripture is pretty clear on this. The saints are pretty clear on this. I mean, Mother Teresa, I think, is in the silence of the heart. God speaks souls of great prayers, souls of great silence. Elijah climbs up to the mountain, and a great wind comes by, and God is not in the wind. And a great earthquake comes, and God is not in the earthquake. And a great fire comes, and God is not in the fire. But then a still small voice comes in the silence, and God is in the still small voice. It's in in the silence that you hear God. And it's so funny because for me, I just grew up my whole life, I was just busy. I was just busy and noisy. My whole life was noise. I was just scrolling. I was worried about work. I was worried about relationships. I was worried about my career. I was worried about money. I was worried about everything. I was just thinking all the time and just talking to people all the time and just listening to noise all the time. C. S. Lewis says this in his Screwtape Letters, which is this book about...

It's from the perspective of a demon trying to tempt people. Screw tape letters. And his big thing is noise. We need to make the world noise. The demon wants to try to make the world noise, get away from music and get away from silence, because that's where the people find God. But as demons, our job is to create as much noise so that they don't think about stuff. And for me, it was just that. It was so much noise. And as soon as you take 10 minutes in silence, away from the noise, you find God. There's a bunch of these stories of people who have experienced this that I just love to share. But one of these was a woman who wrote to us six months ago. She was married with three young girls. She worked in the city. She would go to church, but she had this overwhelming sense of shame all the time. She could never really connect with God. Her life was full of noise. She could never really find silence or peace. She developed an addiction to alcohol and opioids, to drugs, and became involved in a long-standing affair with a guy from work.

And her husband found out about it and left her and took the kids. And she said she was destroyed at the lowest possible point of her life, shattered into a million pieces for the whole world to see all of her shame. She thought often about ending her own life. And she was scrolling on Instagram, just stuck in the noise of life. And she sees this post from Mark Wahlberg talking about prayer. And she's like, Wait a minute. That's the guy from these bear movies talking about Jesus, talking about prayer. That's just weird enough that I'll try it. And she opens up the app and she just does a meditation in silence. And she said she realized she was right in that moment, just like 5, 10 minutes. She realized she was right. It was the lowest possible moment of her life. Everything she loved had left her. Her whole life was destroyed. But that she was wrong. She was not alone. Jesus was there with her and he scooped her up into the thousands of pieces she had shattered into, scooped her up into his arms and put her back together piece by piece. And she started using Hallow like 15 times a day, which is way too many times to use.

It started going to these retreats. She prayed for her husband's forgiveness. Her husband had his own miraculous experience with Christ, where he told her to forgive his wife and their families back together, and they're having another kid, and she just wrote to us and just said, Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I'm confident I wouldn't be physically standing here alive today if it wasn't for the grace that God gave me in silence through this app. And so for us, it's just Man, glory to God. But what he can do when we give him just 5, 10 minutes in silence of our life, and it's hard. Silence can be intimidating, which is why we built the app. It can be intimidating to sit in 20 minutes of silence for the first time you do it. It's helpful to have a structure and somebody to lead you through it when your eyes are closed, you're just listening to something. But what God can do in that 10, 20 minute time is just it's miraculous. It's beautiful.

That's amazing.

Yeah. Glory to God.

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What's interesting is that this device is the vector for noise.

Yeah, certainly.

But you've used this device to bring silence back.

Well, the device is a tool for unimaginable evil. I mean, what is contained in that device is heartbreakingly sad. I mean, yeah, noise and distraction, pornography, evil. I mean, there's so much evil in technology. There's so much evil in social media, in the ways of the world. We've had a lot of people... You can get addicted to your phone. It's very easy to get addicted to your phone, even if you're not looking at bad stuff. It's just like there's funny stuff on there, there's really entertaining stuff, or there's news or whatever. We've had a lot of people who are like, Well, you can't. Technology is bad. It's inherently bad, which is one of the complaints about Hallow, which you certainly have to find a way to escape from technology, to not get addicted, to find peace amidst the noise. But for us, it's just like God can use anything. We can't underestimate God. God can take any tool we have, whether it's the printing press, whether it's magazines, which also are used for tremendous evil, or whether it's this incredible tool which is used for tremendous evil. The vast majority of stuff on the internet is evil, is terrible, is awful.

But God can still use it. God can still reach out to people where they are. And it's the same. It's like churches in a city. It's like cities are places of tremendous evil. There's a lot of sad things that happen in cities, but God can still reach out to people who live in cities with beautiful churches and invite them into a relationship with him. And it's the same thing with this. Our job as Christians is to work within the world and to reach out to people where they are. And sadly, where they are is in their phones. And we've seen just time and time again where God can reach out to people through their phone and change their life. It's a beautiful thing for us to get to be a part of. And we have this incredible privilege to get to be in this position where we get all these stories from people whose lives have been changed. It's just... I'm going to go on forever about these stories. Please do. But we had this other young woman, actually, was just talking to a guy yesterday in Ireland who I had a very similar story to me, had fallen away.

In Ireland, in his friend group, apparently very unpopular to actually be Catholic, to really believe it. He had this radical conversion through technology, through the app, where he came back to his faith. But this one woman, I have a four-year-old daughter, so this breaks my heart, especially. But she was raised religious but fell away from her faith, described herself as a nihilistic atheist as a teenager, which is more intense than I would have described myself. But I had a really tough time at school, which like, man, the social media for young kids, especially young women, just reading comments about yourself or people insulting you. It's just, gosh, it's so hard. I have a little sister who's much younger than me, and I hold her phone for two minutes, and she gets 50 Snapchat notifications about streaks. She has to continue. And I'm like, I feel physically stressed holding this thing. And so for young people, just in today's world, it's It was so hard. But anyway, this young woman was a teenager. Her mom was worried about her. She made her download halo onto her phone and created an account. The young woman became so depressed that She decided to end her life when she was 15.

And so she climbed into her bathtub and filled it with... She did a bubble bath because she said she wanted it to be a pretty death, heartbreakingly. Right before she went through with it, she said, Look, God, I don't believe in you. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in you. She looked up at the ceiling, But if you are real, I will give you one last chance this. This is your shot. Prove it to me. And she had her little phone sitting next to her, and she opened up the phone, played some random meditation that we had. It was probably during lent because it was on Christ's passion, and it was on how he bled, how he died, how he suffered for us so that we didn't have to, so that we didn't have to carry that weight alone. And she said, I don't know what it was, but I realized in that moment that Christ was there with me in the room. He held out his hand. He picked me up out of the bathtub, and I dedicated the rest of my life to serving him. And for the last three years, I've been serving as a missionary in the inner city for Christ.

I just wanted to let you know I'm confident I would have ended my life that night had it not been for the grace that God gave me through this app, which is just all these stories, but it's about how God can use the thing that is most destroying us for his good and can reach out to you through it and transform everything, even bad stuff. He can transform it for his good. We can't underestimate the power of God. So, yeah, for us, I think people have to be disconnected from their phones. My kids don't have phones and won't for a long time, but God can use technology, and there's a lot of really cool parts about technology. You get to pray on a retreat with Father Mike Schmitz or some great pastor or leader for 10 minutes in the comfort of your own home, whereas without that, you'd have to pay a good chunk of money to go on a retreat once a year, maybe. We have these tools with technology, but we have to surrender them to God. We have to let God use them. We can't make them God, and we certainly can't let them distract us from the things that really matter.

Who's Father Mike Schmit?

Father Mike Schmit is incredible. I love Father Mike. He is the host of... He does a Bible in a Year podcast, a series, which you can find on the app, where he walks through the Bible and explains it in this really unique way, where it's not just from the beginning to the end, but about how the gospel is interwoven throughout the whole story. So it's beautiful. It brings scripture to life in a new way. And then he does a bunch of different things. We work with him on a bunch of different things: sermons, homilies, reflections, prayers, just things to try to open up scripture to folks in a new way, both to folks who haven't really had an exposure to scripture, but also to people who've been taking their faith seriously for decades. So he's phenomenal. How did you find him?

How did you hear about him?

Everything in Hallow has been the good Lord doing everything. So every story has been about us trying and trying and trying and trying and trying And then just giving up and surrendering and the good Lord doing it for us. Father Mike. I was a fan of Father Mike. When I was first coming back to my faith, I was trying to figure out whether I was Catholic or Protestant or whatever it was because I had come to Jesus through this prayer experience, but had a lot still to figure out. And so I started watching debates. I started listening to sermons, all this stuff. And Father Mike was one of the big ones. He has a handful of YouTube videos on a channel called Ascension, which is phenomenal. Yeah, I love them. But I kept trying to reach out. I kept trying to email them in different ways because we had just started this app, and I was like, Hey, man, is there any way that... Hey, Father, is there any way that we could work together with something? I'd love to share what you have with the folks who we have on the app, which was just whatever, maybe like a couple of hundred people at that point.

I gave up. I was like, All right, I've tried everything. I've reached out in every way. And then he just randomly reaches out to us in an email and just says, Hey, I was with a bishop who knew you guys, and he mentioned you, and that I should reach out, so I would love to do something. The first thing he did for us was we have these sleep Bible stories where at night you read scripture to try to disconnect yourself from the busyness of the world and focus on Christ before you go to bed. And so he did this sleep reading of, I think it was the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh. And it was just beautiful. And so then we kept trying to work with him forever. And he's one of the most incredible people I know. He is very close with my wife and my kids and I. And so it's been a blessing to get to know him, but also to get to share his message with people. And he's changed more lives than I could possibly imagine.

Mark Wallberg. I find everything about that amazing. How did Mark Wallberg become a part of this?

Mark is awesome. Mark is incredible. It's an honor and privilege to get to work with him. Yeah, he had this interesting experience he shared where he felt like God was... A few years ago, he felt like God was calling him. He's always taking his faith seriously. He's always been a very public witness of his faith, which is hard to do in Hollywood.

Well, not only hard to do, almost without any precedent, really. I can't think of the last famous actor who did something like that other than Mel Gibson.

For folks who aren't really in the Hollywood world, it's hard to understand how unpopular it is, but it takes a tremendous amount of courage. People will tell you your career will be over. Everyone will hate you. Okay, maybe you can talk about faith, but talk about it broadly. Don't talk about Jesus, specifically. You certainly can't talk about Jesus. And I have these conversations all the time. And Mark, yeah, has this incredible courage. But anyway, he felt like God was- Because I don't really What's really the upside for him? Oh, no, there's none. I mean, other than doing the good Lord's will, which is a tremendous upside in and of itself. But from a career perspective, certainly not. So he felt like God was calling him to use this platform, this gift that he's given, that God had given him for God's glory, to share what God had done with him. And he does this great... He does a great job of sharing his faith in a way that doesn't feel like he's ramming it down your throat or anything. He's just like, Hey, I have this friend named Jesus. He's changed my life. He's given me everything good in my life has come from God, and I just want to share that with people.

But anyway, he felt like God was calling him to do something. And so he did this film called Father stew. And this was a few years ago. He produced it. He funded it himself. It was all him. He started it. And it was this beautiful film. And we worked initially... Hallowe was decent size, but still pretty small. And so we worked with him to help promote it and to create some content around it. And he says, God, He thought he was making a deal with God where he'd do this one thing. He'd do this one film, and that would be his thing. That would be his God thing. And what's happened since is God was just cracking the door, and now he's slamming it wide open. So now he does all this stuff with Hallowe and with a bunch of things with the faith, but especially with Hallow, he does these incredible fasting challenges where he has many talents, obviously. But one of them is this incredible discipline. You see him all the time, wakes up at 4:00, does his cold plunge, does a workout twice, does prayer every day. And so leading people in fasting, which people often forget about fasting.

It's like prayer and fasting must go together. And so he has these incredible fasting challenges that he leads people through on the app. But he's just been... Yeah, he's a great guy get to work with. I remember the first time he FaceTimeed me at 8:00 PM on a Friday night or something. It was one of the first times I'd talked to him. I don't often talk to super famous people. And so I was a little nervous. It was FaceTime for Mark Wahlberg. I was like, this is really cool. My wife sitting here next to me. It was just the middle of the night and we just talked. And it was like a 30 second conversation. He was just like, hey, I'm really excited about Father stew. It's going to be great. We're hearing great things from folks. It's coming together really nice. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. And he was like, yeah, and with Hallowe, Hallowe is going to be incredible. We're going to change the world together. I was like, oh, that's awesome. And he was like, yeah, Hallowe is going to be great. We're going to pray together. We're going to welcome the Lord into people's hearts.

Jesus is going to do incredible things. This is going to be great. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. And he was like, all right, man, have a great one. Have a good one. And then he hangs up. And my wife looks at me and people ask how you stay humble. And my wife looks at me and instead of saying, oh, man, that's cool. You got to talk to Mark Wahlberg or like, you know whenever that he just FaceTime'd you or any of that stuff, she was like, You know you said awesome a lot. That's all you said. I was like, Wow, I'm going to be thinking about that for the next two years of my life, how stupid I sounded on a FaceTime. But anyway, he's been really honestly incredible. This past Ash Wednesday, he went and did a bunch of PR where he goes and has a giant ash cross on his forehead and goes and does all these shows on... Nobody's seen somebody with a giant ash cross on their forehead on any of these shows, Today's show or any of that stuff. And I remember we did... This is another funny story about God being in charge.

But we were in New York, and we were about to go on all these shows for the launch of this Lent series, which are our biggest launches are... Well, we have one coming up about the election, One Nation Under God, and then we have a season leading up to Christmas, which is an advent launch and then a lent. So really right now, this time of year is where our biggest launches are. But it was Ash Wednesday, which is the day that our Lent challenge kicks off. We did a little mass in the hotel, just in a conference room in the hotel, a private Mass. We had a priest come, and it was just four or five of us. It was funny because the reading was how you're supposed to fast in private, which is true. You're supposed to fast and pray, not show off like, Hey, I'm this great person. I'm fasting. So that was the gospel. And then Mark goes up to get his ashes, and he was like, Hey, Father, I know I'm not supposed to do this publicly from today's reading, but could you make this ash cross really big and really dark and really black because I'm going to be on TV all day.

The funny thing about that is I had woken up in the app. We had never cracked the top 50 before. And I had woken up on Ash Wednesday, and the app was number three in the app store. And there were two apps ahead of it. I think one was OpenAI and the other was Temu, which is the giant, massive Chinese social media company that's trying to enter the United States by pitching itself as a shopping company. They have a billion and a half dollar Facebook ad budget a year just for the US to spend to try to enter this market. And they ran six national Super Bowl commercials. And so we're like, there's no way we're ever going to displace Temu from.

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Merchantspaymentscoalition. Com. How many Super Bowl ads did you run?

We ran a regional one, so it only covered like, I don't know, 30, 40 %, and it was one. And so I was watching the Super Bowl with my wife, and I knew that Temu was number one on the app store. And I was like, Man, we have a chance of getting up somewhere high, but there's no way we're ever going to beat Temu. I just hope that they're not going to do a Super Bowl commercial because It was last year, they had done one. A national Super Bowl commercial is five to six times the cost of the thing that we did. I'm watching the Super Bowl, and I see the first Temu ad come on, and I was like, shoot, man. Then I see the second, and I was like, Two Super Bowl commercials. And then I see the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth. I was just like, this is insanity. It's absolutely impossible that we would ever... So maybe number two. But anyway, I wake up and we're number three. I'm like, Wow, this is incredible. Nobody Nobody's ever cracked the top 10 before. That's, glory to God, that's insane. I go to open the app and it's completely crashed.

It's totally white. You can't do anything. It's not like-It's not funny. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's horrible. It's not like it loads slowly. I mean, this is the biggest day in halo history. And so there's hundreds of thousands of people trying to pray, millions of people trying to pray on this thing at this moment. And it's just white, just a white screen. And I know how to code a little bit, but certainly not. We have people who code much better than I do now. And so I call our developer and I was like, Hey, man, things totally down. And he's like, Yeah, okay, I'm on it. And it usually takes us about 30 seconds to get it to fix. But there were so many more people trying to use it that it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And it was just this spiral going down and down and down. And so it usually takes us about maybe one or two minutes to fix it because you can add capacity or whatever it is. But he can't fix it. He can't figure out how to do it. It's like this spiral he can't get control of.

And so we go to Mass, and the app is crashing through the whole It's crashing. It's down. Nobody can use it. And this is like, we have a massive spike right in the morning. There's a spike in the morning and in the evening when people pray at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, mostly. And so this is right in the middle of our biggest spike. I was just sitting there in Mass, and I was just like, God, what? I surrender this to you. Yes, this is yours, but why are you doing this? There's so many people trying to pray. Can you please just fix this half? I'm just struggling with this thing. I'm just so stressed and so anxious about it because it's just dying and no one can use it. Our customer support thing is blowing up and everything's going terribly. Then Mark is about to go on the Today Show and Fox and all these national TV shows. What's he supposed to do? Be like, Hey, download the app, but in a couple hours, maybe. So nobody else knows that the app is crashing. And so the priest comes up to me after Mass, and he's like, Hey, Alex, are you okay?

I was like, Yeah, Father, why? And he was like, Well, it seems like you're pretty distracted. It seems like you're pretty upset. Something about you. It just feels like you're upset. And I was like, Well, to be honest, the app has been crashing for the last 30, 40 minutes. It's just been down. Nobody can use it. It makes me sad. We're hoping, especially to people who have fallen away or people like that young girl who are in a really tough time. We want to be a resource for people. We want to help people pray. And he was like, All right, Alex, what would you mind if I just said a quick prayer for you? And I was like, sure, Father, I guess I'm the prayer guy. It's a prayer app. Yes, you can pray for us. And he just sits for a second. And he just goes, Okay, have a good day, Alex. And then I get a text, literally two seconds later, that says the app is back up. It's just like, God, this whole story, everything for us is just like, You try and you try and you try and you try and you try.

And then you're just like, God, can you please take it? And then he does. And he's like, I was just waiting for you to do that. I was just waiting for you to let me do it. And then it went on to displace Temu at the end of the day as the number one app, which is crazy because the top 10 apps, all of the YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, Temu, every app has 10,000 plus employees. We had 80. And so it was this crazy story of Hallow getting to number one over Temu, which was fun. But yeah, it's just God showing us like, Hey, I'm the one who's doing this. Just make sure you always remember, I'm the one who's doing this, which hopefully I do.

Amazing. Has it Has it hurt Wauberg's career since you said that it might?

Mark is in an interesting place because he produces most of his own stuff now and can fund a lot of it, and he's trying to build What he does really is he tries to focus on a handful of things that he really tries to build. So he has a health company, a clothing company, Hallow, and a handful of other things he's really focused on building. But honestly, there's a lot of... Like He'll post about, just stay prayed up. Just something. He'll literally just look at the camera and be like, Hey, stay prayed up in front of a church or in front of a statue of Jesus or Mary or something, and just invite people to pray. He had a friend of his come up to him and say, Hey, haven't you read your comments? Everyone hates you for these posts. And he's like, Comments? Dude, I haven't read comments in 30 years. You can't read comments on social media. That'll destroy you. And he's like, What I see is that these posts, whenever I post about Jesus or talk about Jesus, they get 10 times the number of views that anything else I talk about gets.

People are clearly hungry for this. And we've shared a bunch of these stories of how that woman who almost ended her life saw a post from him talking about Jesus and was able to... It's an interesting thing because to reach out to somebody who doesn't take their faith seriously, my face isn't really going to get him to stop. But Mark's face will. He'd be like, That's weird enough. The guy from the Bear movies talking about Jesus. That's That's a weird thing. It's just weird enough that I'm going to try it. But anyway, for him, he's just... I don't know. It takes a bravery for a bunch of folks. But then through it, I think God actually does these really cool things. And you're starting to see, actually, in Hollywood now, I was just talking to somebody. I was in LA this week, and they were saying, this is the first time in 30 years that someone has come asking for faith-based scripts, asking for faith-based material. And they're like, it's not... Obviously, it's not because the studios are suddenly trying to share Christ. It's because you see things like Hallowe, or you see things like Bible in a Year, or the Chosen, or whatever it is, and you see these things working, you see people are actually really hungry for it.

And it's... I mean, scripture, again, is pretty clear. If you seek first the Kingdom of God, all the other things will be given unto you. It's like, now it's scary, and you go through a dip. I mean, for me, certainly. But God then brings you these incredible blessings on the other side of it. So I don't know. I mean, Father Stud did really well. His obviously Hallows blown any of our expectations or anything that we expected out of this water. So, yeah, for him, I think it's been a pretty cool ride. It's just awesome to see somebody who has this incredible platform and talent and gift use it for the greater glory of the Kingdom. So it's a blessing.

And be rewarded for it. I mean, it sounds like you think things are changing. There's something going on.

I mean, I think we're in a very dark place. But I have this... Yeah, and Hallowe, I have this tremendous hope. I mean, it's just we just get to see it all the time. In the darkest places, God reaching out to people. Chesterton has this quote that's like, There's been many times in history that... G. K. Chesterton. There's been many times in history where people thought the church was dead. The church is not this straight line. It's this time of many times people thought it was over, the rise of Islam, the death of Jesus, the death of his Apostles, the fall of Rome, all these different times when people thought Christianity should just peter out and die. But Christianity can't die because as soon as it gets close to the grave, when everyone expects it to be in the grave, it resurrects because it has a God that knows its way out of the grave. And I don't know, for us, we just see it. And I think you can see it. You're starting to see a little bit of it in some of these broader things, like Hallowe or Bible in a Year, or the Chosen, or anything.

But for us, it's just in these stories, and especially in the places when things are really tough and really dark. We live in a culture of death in a sad, secular world that's falling away even more rapidly from Jesus. But still in that, he's there. We had this other woman right into us and share her story, which was She had become pregnant. She had just graduated. She was unmarried. She was dating somebody, very young, and had become pregnant and was just petrified, just so scared, because all the world does is tell you that if you're pregnant as a woman, your life's over, and it's the worst thing that can happen to you, and all these terrible, sad messages. She's petrified. She's like, Oh, I wanted a career. I'm scared out of my mind. There's no options. What are my options? She said she fell down on her knees. She had the app, and she opened up halo, fell down on her knees, and she said, God, I just don't know what you want from me here. But I surrender it to you, which is, man, it's just an incredible witness of faith. But I surrender it to you.

I surrender it to you completely, whatever you want. She hears audibly in the silence, His name is Luke, which if you're going to say one word to save a child's life in the womb, hearing his name from God's voice, hearing God has a name for him already, it's like, well, termination is no option. No. Because God has named him. His name is Luke. Yeah. And so she goes through this journey. She's like, all right, well, I'm not going to terminate him. So what am I going to do? And she starts exploring. And she shares this story. And she's like, I'd never even thought about adoption. I started thinking about it. I started exploring it. I was like, well, if I could find a family that maybe would make sense, that's faithful, that's Christian, I could still be a part of my child's life, somebody that could raise my kid better than I could. Maybe that's an option for me. And so she finds this couple who takes their faith very seriously. And she's like, Okay, this is perfect. This is the couple that I would choose. She says, Hey, I just... One last question before we proceed.

It's your kid. Do you know what name you'll name him? They said, Oh, yeah, we've known for a while now. His name is Luke. And she's just like, glory to God. And the crazy part is then during her birth, the doctors found she was sick. She had an illness. I forget exactly what it was, but it was something that needed surgery that they never would have found otherwise, and she would have died from it. And they found it during her birth. They never would have found it otherwise. And so the child, who now is the best part of her life, she gets to be a part of this child's life and this family's life. For her, it's the peak of her life is the best thing that happened to her is this kid. It also literally physically saved her life. But it's just like, even in this world that is so tough, that is so dark, that is going through so much, God is still there, and he's still able. If we just give him just a crack, we just crack the door open of our hearts, he can do the rest. He takes the rest.

And so, yeah, I have tremendous hope.

Does it feel to you that people who haven't considered anything beyond their five senses are suddenly asking questions about what else there might be or people have a heightened spiritual awareness? Do you notice that?

I think so. Yeah. I mean, we see it, obviously, with the app. That's all we do is try to open people to Christian spirituality in a relationship with the Lord. But I think there's a bunch of things for it. I mean, the one is, like I was saying with technology, it's just so much noise. It's just so much busyness, so much stress, so much anxiety in this phone. That especially young people, you go to them and it's just like, Hey, did you know there's real peace, real rest, real peace? And that, I think, has this tremendous pull, which is the offer. Christ offers a lot. Christianity offers a lot. Truth, beauty, joy, fearlessness, courage, all these things, but also this deep sense of peace. And especially in today's world, I just think people are hungry for it. Everything feels terrible. Everything feels like you're stressed and worried. The world's about to end. But real peace, I think people are really hungry for. And that's what we get really excited about. I was in Silicon Valley for three years with my wife, and I would talk to people all the time and you'd be like, Are you religious?

They'd be like, no, of course, I'm not religious. Nobody's religious anymore. But then you ask them what they are. They would say, which is this relatively new invention, which is spiritual but not religious. I'm spiritual but not religious. It's like, are you spiritual? They would all say, yes, of course, I'm spiritual. I'm interested in spirituality. There's two ways to go about that. The one is, well, can you really be spiritual without being religious? Okay, you're spiritual, so you're having a relationship with something outside you. What is that thing? Don't you want to try to figure out what that thing is? It's funny. I'll talk to people who meditate, and you'll be like, okay, you sit there, you meditate, you're alone in your room. These are secular people who don't. But is there something else there with you when you meditate? Everyone will be like, Yeah, of course, there is. Absolutely. There's something else there. There's something invisible there. I was like, Okay, well, that's the craziest thing in the world. Yes, I totally agree. You're saying when you stop watching Netflix and scrolling on TikTok and you just sit in silence, there's an invisible force there.

Shouldn't your be focused on, Well, what is that thing? Figuring out what that thing is and what it wants from you? The good news is what it wants from you is to tell you that you're loved, to love you infinitely, and then to call you to this life of love and service for other people. It's this force of tremendous goodness, but don't you want to really figure that out? I do think we see- Well, and also there are non-good forces out there, too. Exactly, yeah. Now, that's for me, actually, when I was coming from secular meditation, which is mostly has its roots in Buddhist meditation, meditation or Eastern meditation, to Christian meditation. To Christian meditation, obviously, the core of the difference in Christian meditation is a relationship with Jesus. It's not about whatever, your breath or trying to de-stress. It's not about any of that. It's about trying to let Jesus to listen to your heart and transform your heart, let him love you, and then to go and share that love with others. So at the core, it's a totally different thing. But the other big piece of it that was different for me that I found really powerful from a Christian perspective is in Eastern traditions of meditation, the fundamental belief is, Hey, there's suffering, there's a way to escape suffering.

And meditation is one of those techniques. But there's no good and evil fight. There's no good versus evil. In Christianity, if you sit in silence and you just focus on your breath or something, there's two things that can come into your mind. Yes. There's a good thing, which is great. It's Jesus. He loves you. And there's a very bad thing. And the very bad thing does not love you and does not want you're good. He wants your destruction. And there's this blog on one of these secular meditation.

That's just so obviously true, though.

Look around. Yeah. I mean, to deny evil. The other thing I was saying when you said it feels like people are more aware is evil just feels a lot more on its face than it ever was. It used to feel, I don't know, I've only been around for a bit, but under the surface, and now it just feels a lot more like it's right there. It's staring at you.

Sorry, I interrupted you. You were about to say so. No, no, no. But you said, so there's a book?

No, on one of these secular meditation websites, It's somebody, they write in questions or whatever, and the meditation person, the secular meditation person answers them. A woman wrote in and said, Hey, I was meditating, and I had a thought come across my mind about harming my child. What do I do with that? And the person just responded like, well, okay, just treat that like any other thought. Just acknowledge it and let it go and keep trying to focus on your breath. And for me, I was like, man, that doesn't feel right. And the Christian teaching is so much deeper. There's this spirituality called Ignatian spirituality, where it's literally all just about, okay, you're sitting there in silence, you're sitting there in prayer, or at any moment in your day, how do you discern between what is good and what is bad. It's called a discernment of spirits. And so it's like, well, how do you figure out if something's talking to you, is it the good guy or is it the bad guy? Because that's it. Our job is, hey, if it's the bad guy, get the bad guy out of there. Fortify yourself against your temptations, against your weaknesses.

Is, ignore him as much as possible. And if it's the good guy, try to let him in and let him transform your life. And the good guy wins. The good guy is infinitely more powerful than the bad guy. We don't have to build up the bad guy into being more powerful than Jesus. Jesus already won. But we have to continue the fight. Our job is primarily within our own hearts to discern this good versus evil and to get the evil out. I don't know.

But it's a big deal. The core Christian prayer says, and deliver us from the evil one.

Certainly.

Yeah. So that suggests we should be afraid of that.

It's a war. That's the story of scripture.

But it's not like something, you just let it go and hope it doesn't come back. It's like, wow, that's really scary. That can destroy you and everyone you love.

Yeah. No. The The thing is, I don't know, for me, it's... In my own experience, if I go back pre-Jesus in my life, it didn't feel like I was actively trying to do evil. It didn't But I was. I was a terrible guy. I was a bad friend. I was bad in relationships. I was a terrible son. I was involved in many things I shouldn't. And I believed many things that were truly evil, that were wrong, truly evil. And it was only after letting God into my heart that I started seeing all these things. And I had this priest did this homily, I think it was a week ago. And he said, Life is like you're driving in a car with with a cracked and dirty windshield. When you're driving away from the sun, you don't see any of the cracks, you don't see any of the fog, you don't see any of the defects in the windshield. But as soon as you turn around and you start driving towards the sun, as soon as you start journeying towards God, you start seeing all these cracks and all these defects That's smart. And it's with Christ, you start seeing, oh my gosh, how evil all this was.

But that's the way of the world. The way of the world is destruction. The road is wide, the way is easy that leads to destruction. And there are many who follow it, and the road is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and there are a few who find it. But once you find it, it's hard. Yeah, because you have to fight against evil. It's not like you just get to disconnect and meditate and do whatever you want and just find peace. It's like, no, there's a war going on. We need to fight it. But at the same time, it's this tremendously freeing and light and easy way, which is a contradiction, but it's a beautiful one.

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I think there's a bunch of different really beautiful definitions of prayer. But for me, at the heart, it's It's just the way you have a relationship with God. It's the way you talk to him. It's the way you listen. For me, primarily it's listening. I mean, if you believe what I believe, which is there's a God up there, he can talk to you and he knows what he wants for you, for your perfect good in every moment. All you'd want to do is listen. All you'd want to do is pick up your phone every morning and be like, Hey, God, what should I do? Yes. But it's not just in the morning, which is an important time to spend time in prayer, but it's every moment. He's here with us now, and he knows what he wants. And what he wants is for your good. And he wants to enter your heart and transform it and turn it radically on fire with his love to then go love others. And so prayer is the way we have a relationship with the Lord. There's a quote that says, prayer is lifting up your heart to God.

It's the medium through which you have a relationship with the Lord. It's taking time to sit in silence, to be alone with the one who loves you. There's all these beautiful definitions. But for me, it's primarily, yeah, it's sharing. It's helpful to share what's on your heart and to ask for stuff. God answers those things. Prayer is real. Prayer can change things. I've seen it change things. There was a user who was at Hallow and was driving to work, and he heard in prayer, Hey, park in a different spot, which doesn't make any sense. He was a teacher. It was like, Park in a different spot of the parking lot. And he's driving, he's praying. He hears God say, Park in a different spot. He goes to a back corner that he never would have parked in, and he parks in it. And the school he went to was Uvaldi, the school that got shot up.Oh, my gosh. And that day, it got shot up. And had he been parked in the normal spot he would have parked in, the shooter would have gone directly through his car, but he stayed in the parking lot and the shooter went around a different way.

It was just like, so prayer works. People call me crazy, whatever. Thoughts and prayers. Prayer works. Prayer can change lives. I've seen it literally actively save people's lives. There was a woman who was coding out and her friend was sitting next to her. So she was dying. They were trying to resuscitate her. And her friend was sitting next to her and they said, I'm going to pray a rosary on the app. And she opened up the app and prayed a rosary. And the doctors say, Okay, I'm sorry. We've been trying to resuscitate, but she's not with us anymore. She's dead. And the woman said, Don't leave yet. We'll finish the rosary, and then you can leave. And the doctor said, Okay, I don't know why. And they called time of death. And two, three minutes go by. And then Jonathan, who's the guy who does the rosary on the out, Jonathan Rooney, who plays Jesus in the Chosen, is phenomenal. But he closes the rosary, says, In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy spirit, in a beep. And the heart just comes back. The woman just comes back to life. So, I mean, prayer works.

You can ask God for things, and he does them. He doesn't always answer them, answer your prayers in the way that you expect. True. He often leads you to pain suffering, which is the way of the cross. It's the way he promises. It's the way of his Apostles. I have a lot easier life than the Apostles had, that's for sure. But he'll lead us all to pain and suffering, and that's how he leads us closer to him. But prayer at the core is talking to him, asking him for things, yes, all the stuff that we know prayer is, but then it's also listening. And for me, that's what really changed my life, was learning to listen. And that's mostly learning to sit in silence. There's a bunch of different ways to listen, but mostly learning to sit in silence, meditating on scripture, reflecting on where God is in our life, all these different ways. That's why we built the app, because there's a thousand different ways to grow closer to God, to learn how to listen. And it can be scary for people who don't know what that means, but to really try to spend time each day listening for God and exploring whatever works for you in whatever time.

I think a lot of us would like to listen more carefully. Yeah. And prayer can't just be a litany of complaints and desires or something really ugly about that. I'm very narcissistic about it. But listening into the void comes, well, in my case, like fly fishing or worrying about dumb stuff. What is the process you use to listen to God?

Yeah, I love the question because it's the question I wrestled with, and it is the whole reason we built Hallow. And there's a thousand different techniques of prayer and meditation on the app, a thousand different ways to structure your time in silence. Because one of the real hard parts is distraction. You start thinking about whatever, worries or issues. And there's a bunch of ways-I believe this is addressed in the screwtape letters, as I recall. Certainly. But there's a bunch of ways to... So there's a bunch of different techniques of prayer. And the first thing I'd recommend is I'm not going to do nearly as good a job at teaching this as we do on the app. So folks should try Hallow and download it, find whatever session works for them and give it a shot. But like meditating with scripture as an example. There's a technique called lexia divina, has a handful of different steps to it. You make sure that you notice that you're in God's presence at the beginning, and then you read a short paragraph from scripture. So it's not just total silence, although it's great to also spend time in total silence.

But that can be harder for folks who are newer to it because you get distracted and you start thinking about work, and then you're just like, wait, I just spent 20 minutes just thinking about all the stuff I had to do. Exactly. That was in prayer. But you ask God, Hey, help me. I'm about to try to pray. Can you help me make this time what you want it to be? And then you pick a passage or a few verses from scripture, and you try to see, okay, what word, or maybe there's an image or maybe it's a phrase, is the Holy spirit calling out to me? And for me, it was Hallow in that first one. But it can be anything. And it's funny, actually, the really cool part about scripture when you do this is you can do it in a group of six, seven people. And one sentence, people will be like, seven different words will stick out to them, and seven different meanings for different people at different stages in their life. You are a city built on a hill. It cannot be hid. Like city or hill or light, shine, whatever.

People will meditate on different words, and you try to focus on that word. So as your mind gets distracted, that's fine. That happens. You just Bring your mind gently back to the word, back to the point, back to the focus, what you're trying to meditate on, which is, for me, was hallow in this first meditation. And then you use that to share with God what's on your heart. So it's good to share with God. You open up to him, just like you would want your child to share with you what what's on their heart, what they're worried about, what they want, even if it's not good for them. You want them to tell you. You don't want to keep it secret, so you share with them. And then you try to sit in silence, and you just try to... This is the hard part, but it's also the beautiful part, which is after you get through this, you share what's on your heart, and you spend your time trying to recollect yourself and center yourself on scripture. Then you spend... It can just be like a minute. It can be two, three minutes. And you just let God...

You just sit with God, and you just try to sit with God. And if your mind gets distracted, that's fine. You gently bring it back. Or another technique for distraction, and there's a bunch of these things. It's a whole tradition. There's thousands of years of this, monks and nuns and all this stuff doing this. But you take the distraction and you say, okay, I'm really thinking about this thing at work. I'm really thinking about this relationship that I have. And you use that for prayer. So the devil can use it to distract you away from God, or you can use it to transform it into prayer and say, Hey, God, this thing is happening at work. Is there something you want me to do here? How do you want me to handle this? I'm When you're being distracted, I keep thinking about this. Is there something you're trying to tell me here? And then you listen. And sometimes it'll be obvious, and sometimes it won't be obvious. Sometimes scripture will jump out to you, and sometimes God will speak directly to you. Sometimes you might hear something audibly. But usually, the funny thing is, I've been doing this now for six years, and I spend all my time every day just trying to...

There's a bunch of different stuff, but the core of it is trying to understand and share really deep, really awesome Christian contemplative and meditative spirituality with people. And so I read all these spiritual directors, all these folks, all these saints, all this stuff. And the funny thing is, it's at the core of all of it. There's nothing like... The greatest truths are also the simplest. All God wants in prayer is to show you how much he loves you and to just hold you and to just love you. And that sounds lame as a man, you're like, I want to be strong. I don't need love, whatever it is. But you do. You need this love of Christ, and he loves you so deeply and so infinitely. And it doesn't matter what you... We had this woman right into us who was trapped in this tremendous state of sin. She said she was overwhelmed with shame, sexual sin. She was a terrible person, violence, all this stuff. And she entered into prayer, and it was just silence. And she just heard God say to her, I love you. She goes, You can't love me. I'm a terrible person.

I'm the worst sinner I know. I'm trapped in this cycle of sin. And he says, I love you. She goes, You can't. You can't love me. I'm not worth it. He I love you. I love you, I love you. And he just kept saying it until she said, Okay, fine. And what he does is he loves us so much so that our heart overflows both for love back to him, but also to then go share that love with other people. We had another young girl who had never heard that she was beautiful from anyone in her life. She was 20 years old. She had never heard... It breaks my heart as a father. Had never heard anyone tell her she was just ugly. She had just heard that she was ugly her whole life. And she looked in the mirror, she started a little meditation, not in the audio or And she just heard the words from God, You are beautifully and wonderfully made. Do you think I make mistakes? And it's just like, God will tell you if you give them... And it's not... Don't try it once. Try it a bunch. You have to persevere.

Try it for a year. Don't try it for two weeks. Don't try it for four weeks. Try it for a year. It's just 10, 20 minutes in silence. But what God will do if you give him that little crack is he'll tell you exactly what he wants to tell you, which no one... I can't tell you, but it is at the core that you are loved and that you are called to greatness. You're not called to sit in your sin. You're not called called to be the same. You're called to be transformed, to be perfect. And he brings that out of you. He brings love out of you. And the other unique thing about prayer is prayer is completely useless, a total waste of time, if it does not lead to a life of love. And Christianity is very clear It's not like meditation or working out or anything that makes you feel happy, which it does. It makes you feel all that stuff. But it must lead to a life of radical love and radical service and fighting for the good and fighting for the truth and fighting for those who most need it.

And so, yeah, for prayer, I think the ultimate stage of it, yes, knowing you're loved, but then ultimately what you do after listening is you try to surrender your life completely to him. You try to give up everything to him so that you no longer live, but Christ lives within you and that you pray unceasingly. So the end state is like, I try to talk to God. I try to share what's on my heart. I try to listen for him. It's hard. I get distracted, but I try my best to listen for him. And then what I try to do is let him into my heart to surrender my heart completely and totally to him so that he takes over everything. Anyway, I know that's a long answer, but that to me is what prayers is.

It's not a long answer. It's a great answer. You said earlier that fasting and prayer go together. That's often forgotten. Mark Wauberg has been trying to remind us of that. What is the connection between them? And what do you mean by fasting?

Well, traditionally, what is meant by fasting is food. But it's interesting because fasting used to be a massive part of... It's not even talked about that much in scripture because it was so assumed. People just knew that you were supposed to fast.

And that's how it's referred to, at least in the reference I can think of, it's almost like when you fast, by the way, when you are fasting, assuming you will be.

It's not like, Hey, you're supposed to fast. It's like, Of course, we're supposed to fast. It was just assumed. Whereas in today's world, we don't, and we have all these... So anyway, at the core, fasting is from food.

We have all these what?

We soften fasting, which is true. Some people have eating disorders, or some people have issues with fasting, or some people have issues, health issues, or women are pregnant, or breastfeeding, or whatever it is. And so there's all these reasons. But for me, as a 30-year-old man, I can fast a day. I can go a day without food. I can just drink water. I can go many days without food, actually. But I can certainly go a day without food. It's one of the things about, especially when we talk to young men, it's like, Christianity has been softened, and sadly so. And what it is, is Christianity, really, if you read the Gospels, if you really read what Jesus is saying, it's not soft. It's really hard. It's two things that are both really hard. Radical mercy and radical justice and perfection and avoidance of sin and defeating the devil. It's radical both. And so, yes, there is a radical love, which is like, hey, no matter what you do in your life, I will love you. I will forgive you if you come to me. At the same time, you are called to be perfect. Not like, hey, you're a good person because you go to church on or, hey, you're a good person because you don't yell at people.

It's like, no, you're called to never be angry with somebody again. And fasting is one of those things that... For me, there's a bunch of my team makes fun of me because I love all these crazy Christian stories. But there was this old group of monks called the Stylites that were just in the desert. They would just climb on top of a Roman column in the middle of the desert, and they would just die. They would just starve to on the column for Christ, to sacrifice their bodies for Christ, which is certainly probably not what most people are called to. But fasting, I mean, at the core was food or at the basic is food. For anybody where that is acceptable is, I think, something that we're all called to, but it can be anything. Fasting is anything you want, which I like food. I like bad food. Fasting from food is hard, but it can be fasting from your phone. It can be fasting from a social media scroll. It can be fasting from anything that you want. It's just giving it up. Any addiction that you have that's of this world that isn't something that is helping you grow closer to the Lord, just giving it up.

And it doesn't have to be bad. It doesn't have to be bad in nature. Like chocolate, Jesus isn't against chocolate, but you can give up like, Hey, I'm not going to have that extra cookie, just as a small little sacrifice for God. And Jesus is really clear in scripture, which is there's a story of this man who's possessed. And his apostles, men of great faith, try to cast it out, and they're able to cast out many demons, and they can't cast it out. And Jesus comes and says, Okay, I'll cast it out. Fine. And cast it out, of course. And his apostle said, well, why couldn't we do that? And he says, some things can only be accomplished through prayer and fasting. And so it's like the power of fasting is, I think, that's really untapped. And you see it actually in today's culture, too. We've tried to pick all these different things where it's people like fasting, but not cold showers or cold plunges. Now we're like, Oh, you should do it. It's hard. It helps you grow in discipline. It's all this stuff for intermittent fasting, all these different things. And it's like, yeah, Christianity has been doing that for 2000 years.

Cold showers are another great way to fast. But for me, I don't know, whenever I fast, which traditionally it's like Wednesdays or Thursdays, and again, you can have a meal or something, but you should eat dramatically less food than you do otherwise, or maybe it's from coffee or maybe it's from whatever. But whenever I fast from food. It's this interesting... I just feel like... It's the same thing, by the way, whenever I sit in front of the Eucharist. But for me, whenever I fast, I just feel like, it's not radical, but it's 20% easier for me to enter into prayer. And so you'll sit in prayer for 20 minutes, and your mind will get distracted for a while, and you share everything that's on your heart, and you're trying to meditate with scripture. But then at the end, you'll have two or three minutes once you get really into it. And it's just a little bit at the beginning, but two or three minutes where It just feels like, the saints describe this as union with God, but it feels like you're really close to God. You feel very connected spiritually, and there's something good.

And it takes a while, and it's really hard. But when I fast, I can do it. It doesn't take 18 minutes of me sharing or trying to not... It takes 30 seconds. I could just be here and I could just be like, Man, yeah, I feel like God is right here.

What do you think that is?

I don't know. I think it's the further... I'm certainly not a theologian, so I don't know. But for me, it's the further I get from this world, the closer I get to God. We're called to live in the world and work in the world, and we're called to take care of our bodies and to serve as best as we can within the world. But God is not... We are called to not be of this world, to be in the world, but not of the world. And I think as we disconnect from the things that most tether us to the world, we get closer to the spiritual realm, which to me is a relationship with the Lord.

How often do you fast?

I try to Everybody has their own journey, but I try to fast Wednesdays and Fridays. During lent, I try to- Wednesdays and Fridays? Yeah. Now, sometimes I'll do a half fast where I'll still eat, but probably about half of what I would eat in a normal day. But during lent, I try to do full fasts. And then I try to do a full fast from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and sometimes longer. But honestly, at the beginning- You only eat five days a week, ideally? Yeah, during lent, yeah. And during regular times, I will eat on Wednesdays and Fridays, but usually it's about a third to a half of the calories or amount of food that I would eat on a regular day.

And then you fast three days on Easter weekend?

Yeah, I fast Good Friday, Saturday, and then to Mass. And then there was a year I fasted all of Holy Week.

What was that like?

My was a saint through it. I was coming back to my faith. There's something special about folks who are new back to their faith. You've got this fire that is important for us who have been taking faith seriously to try to rekindle, which we have a lot of folks on. I've talked a lot about people who have come back to their faith on Hallow, but it's an honor to get to pray with everybody. I take my faith seriously, and I usually have three times a day. But yeah, that was a seven-day fast, which was pretty intense. You start getting... I would say the first two days suck because you're just really hungry. But then after the second day, I'm not hungry. I don't feel the sensation of hunger, really. Maybe it comes every once in a while, but I'm not really hungry. And so it is just like living a whole day like what I was saying, just where within a minute, any time you think about God, you can just enter into this prayer space. And the other thing it does is, Jesus describes himself as meek and humble of heart. And whenever you have a lot of food, I don't know, there's something that puffs you up, like when you have all the energy.

And when When you're hungry, you're just like, you're so much more humble and so much meeker. That's true. And so you feel like, man, this is probably how I should be all the time. But then, yeah, certainly towards the end of it, you start getting slow and you lose energy, and it's hard to walk, and it's hard to do. It's hard to have enough energy for it. And then you're supposed to eat bone broth or something when you come back to your faith. And so after Sunday, Easter, after Sunday Vigil Mass, or Saturday Vigil Mass for Easter, I had my wife get me some bone broth or something, and I was just like, this is I need some McDonald's. Which was not... I would certainly not recommend eating McDonald's after a long fast. Did you? I did, and I felt pretty bad.

What did you get? Filet of fish or did you go all the way?

No, it was Easter, so it was a feast day, so I could celebrate. So I had a couple of burgers or something. I don't eat McDonald's anymore, but I did that.

No, I don't either. But what was that like going from empty tank to filling it with McDonald's?

Yeah, it was not recommended. You feel like crap. The other The funny thing about the spiritual life is actually how many analogies there are for it. This year, I've tried to do a lot better job of eating healthier and cleaner and more protein and all the stuff you're supposed to do. It's this funny sensation where then the bad food... It's really hard at the beginning because you're addicted to all these things, all these foods that are terrible for you. You're addicted to them, so you got to break it, and that's really hard. It's like, Oh, I want sweets or I want processed foods or chips or whatever it is. And so it's really hard at the beginning. But then once you get through it, you start to realize, well, actually clean food, good natural food tastes way better, is way better. And the fast food, it starts to be disgusting. It starts to be like,. And so I haven't had McDonald's, which is... I'm a big fan of McDonald's, but I haven't had McDonald's in a long time. And now it's just like... My wife and I were saying the same thing. It's like, I don't even...

Not only do you not want it, for a while there, you just don't want it. And that's nice. But then you start to ultimately actively dislike it, the stuff that's bad for you. And I think it's very similar in the spiritual life. It's like this journey of... At the beginning, when you try to break a habit of sin, it's really hard to break because you're really attached to it. And then you get to a point where it's like, okay, well, by the Grace of God, I don't really want this thing anymore. And then you get to this point where it's like, I actively hate that thing. That thing is evil. That thing was destroying me. I see it now. I can see what it was doing to my soul. And anytime I get anywhere close to it, you feel like, no, this is bad. This is terrible for you, which is this funny analogy with food. But yeah, so anyway, I wouldn't fast. I wouldn't fast and then eat McDonald's. Certainly would not be the recommendation. Although Kevin James, he shared this on Rogan, so I can share it, but he did a 40, 41 day fast or something crazy.

Which was insane. I had dinner with him during his fast, like 20 days into his fast or something crazy. I was like, Are you okay if I eat? And he was like, Yeah, I like to look at food. I need to look at it, so I still have a relationship with it, but I'm fasting. He did it for his family, which is beautiful.

Kevin James, the actor?

Yeah. Incredible man of faith. Awesome. Really? Yeah. You should talk to him. I haven't seen him.

He's inspirational. I went on a sitcom he had once years ago, many years, 20 years ago, anyway. Haven't seen him since. I had no idea.

I'll tell you, we've got some... I can't share everything now, but there's a lot more people, celebrities or whoever, who are faithful folks, who just haven't really had the opportunity or the culture or the platform to share their faith. It's cool to get to meet these people and to get to talk to them about what God has done in their life. It's way more people than you would imagine. Really? Yeah, it's cool. I think there's something cool happening in the world. So we'll see.

I think that, too. I don't think you could have this much evil without a counterbalance.

Well, in the darkest night, that's where the light, the darkness cannot overcome the light. And it's like, yeah, it's, I don't know, the night is darkest before the dawn. There's all this stuff, all this traditional wisdom that you say, but you don't really realize. And I think we're in this time where, I don't know, evil feels a lot more on its face than it ever was, but so does I think God is doing something really cool, and I'm excited for it. We'll see what the good Lord wills.

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Com. I'm really struck by the persecution of Christians, which I never thought I would see in the modern era in this country. On two levels, one, it just doesn't make any sense because Christians are the most productive, least threatening, nicest. If you're running a country, why would you be mad? You'd want more Christians because they actually pay their taxes and have obedient children, and they're just easier- Have children, yeah. Yeah, have children. They're easier to deal with. So I'm baffled by it. And then I look at it, I'm like, Well, no, there's something so offensive to the world about the word Jesus, unless it's used as an epithet. That that phenomenon itself is evidence of God's existence, I think. That word has power despite 2000 years of misuse.

Yeah. I mean, we have seen a lot of different backlash from the app.

I should have asked you that. Have you really?

Yeah. I mean, there's whatever. Attack articles about we're radical because we're pro-life or any other.

There have actually been pieces attacking Hello?

Oh, yeah, certainly.

What? You find that hilarious?

At the beginning, it stressed me out, but certainly, actually, funnily enough, there were two, Vice and BuzzFeed both wrote hit pieces. Oh, really? Within a month or two, both were bankrupt. Yeah.

I never celebrate anyone's bankruptcy, and I didn't allow myself to celebrate either one of those because I don't want to be the person who celebrates. People suffering, and the people work there suffered. But it didn't wreck my day, I'll be honest.

Yeah. The app got kicked out of China. The Chinese Cyber Security Administration or something deemed our content illegal and-What, seriously? Removed it from the app store. We launched a challenge on, apparently, they're not huge fans of John Paul II, and we did a meditation on how he led, did a lot of work on defeating communism globally. Gorbachev credits him with being one of the major forces to destroy the Soviet Union, or communism, at least. They didn't like that. They sent a note to Apple, and Apple removed our app from the app store in China. But there's been a bunch of stuff. And whatever, you just have to look at Twitter to find anybody who hates Jesus or any of Mark's posts or anything. But I don't know, the thing that bothers me the most or the thing that makes me the most sad is there's the on the face persecution where it's like, Hey, you're not allowed in China, which is sad. We pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ in China, and it's a tough environment, certainly, to try to share the gospel and to try to live the gospel. But the sadder thing for me is honestly, it's the undercurrent of trying to get away from Jesus.

This certainly isn't everybody, but it's a lot. It's like, Hey, you can share about faith and you can share about prayer, but let's not talk about Jesus, specifically. Let's just not do the Jesus thing. Let's just talk about religion more broadly. Or Alex, you should build a A Buddhist version of this and a Hindu version of this and a Muslim version of this. We'd invest if you were broader spirituality, but not just the Jesus thing. I'm like, Yeah, sorry. It's just going to be Jesus. Or like a TV commercial where somebody's like, Oh, okay, we can talk about prayer, and it's a prayer app, but don't show a picture of Jesus in it. It's like, That's going to be a picture of Jesus.

Don't you find it so revealing that Jesus, 2,000 years later, is controversial?

Yeah, but he's always been. But on what grounds?

I mean, it's so irrational that, again, it's proof of its reality. But the guy who told his followers to pray for their persecutors and turn the other cheek, that guy is controversial. Why?

Yeah. Well, I mean, from a Christian perspective, it's because it's not just people who are... It's not people who are cranky at Jesus. I'm exactly right. It's a spiritual war. And so it's like it almost makes it so much more obvious when you're like- I totally agree. Okay, well, why are you so against Why are you so against life? It's like, well, if I was Satan, what would I do? That's what I would do. And I would try to destroy Jesus. I would try to get Jesus out of everywhere. I'd try to secularize society and make it and remove Jesus. And I think our country was... I don't know, we've done... You've talked about this before, where it's like the last, whatever, 40, 50 years of trying to build a secular society. But that's not what our country is. Our country is a Christian country. And we're doing this One Nation Under God series on the app as we go through the election. But it just focuses on... Even if you go back to any of the founding fathers, they talk about the importance of prayer and how God is building this country, and how we have to trust him with it.

And Abraham Lincoln has this beautiful quote where he's like, Hey, in the midst of the Civil War, he's like, Hey, guys, we have really screwed up. We have tricked ourselves into thinking that our own success, that our success was the result of our own hard work and virtue and wisdom, when in reality, we know it God leading us. But we have forgotten to pray for him. We have become too proud to pray to the God that made us. This is his last quote, which is just beautiful. But it's like, yeah, we've forgotten prayer. Like, prayer should be... Politics is important. We should engage in politics, but it comes at the end. Like, the beginning is It's right. It's in his heart, in the beginning is prayer. And whenever you think of like, well, this world is going down the wrong path. Yeah, that's the way of the world. The way of the world is not... The C. S. Lewis describes the world as enemy occupied territory. And Christianity is the story of how the rifle king has landed and invited all of us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. And it's like, yeah, that's what it is.

The world is enemy occupied territory. The world is Satan's. The world is evil. The way of the world is destruction. The way of the world is death. Christianity is this crazy thing. It used to be normal societally, and so we forget about it. But it's this insane thing. It's a crazy thing to believe that God sent his only son so that we all shall have life in heaven with him. It's this crazy thing in that he's here with us now. An invisible person is right here who loves us both, who's trying to help us both, and he's in our hearts. He's trying to transform our hearts. And there's this giant war going on all around us, invisible war with angels and demons and whatever, trying to convince our hearts, trying to win our hearts. That's a crazy thing to believe, but that's what we believe. But when you really enter into it and you're like, It's crazy, but yeah, you have the words of everlasting life. To whom else shall we go? Everything becomes just a lot clearer. But it also takes a bit of the weight off of it. I used to get so worried about all these world events, and it's like, well, God's in charge of this thing.

He's already promised us that he wanted. And it's just our job to try to be as good a people as we can, to try to be saints, and to try to let God into our hearts to transform them.

Is that the message of One Nation Under God?

Yeah. I mean, the message of One Nation Under God is, politics is important. We should engage in it. Well, actually, here's the message of One Nation Under God is just in scripture itself. But it's the passage of when they ask Jesus, should they pay the census tax to Rome, this evil government. Evil, evil government. Check the coin. Which is, had just killed, like 30 years earlier, had just killed all the first born children in this area to try to kill Jesus. That's terrible. And they're saying, okay, well, should we pay the tax to this oppressive government that's suppressing us? And Jesus says, okay, show me the coin. And he says, okay, whose face and whose inscription is on this coin? They say Caesar's. And he says, Okay, well, then render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. And then that's what we focus on, usually. And then everybody talks about, which is true, what that means, which is that it's important to engage in the politics of this world. They're important things. They're important fights to be had. We need to engage in them. We need to take them seriously. We need to be God's hands and feet in the world.

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar. Engage in politics, do your civic duty. But then the second half of that line is, but give unto God what is God's. And we usually throw that part away, and it's like, okay, yeah, obviously we give unto God what God's. But it's like, okay, but give unto God what is God's. Okay, well, the coin had Caesar's face and Caesar's inscription. And I'm stealing this from a homily I heard from a priest. But the coin had Caesar's face and Caesar's inscription. Okay, where is God's face? You are God's face. You were made in the image and likeness of God. And where are God's words imprinted? Where is his inscription? It's on your heart. His words are imprinted on your heart from the beginning of time. His words, his law, his love is imprinted on your heart. So give unto God's what is God's. Where's his face? Where's his inscription? It's in you. You are his face. You are his inscription. And so your job, yes, is to give unto Caesar what is Caesar. Sure, pay the coin back to Caesar. But give unto God what is God's, which is your whole life.

You should give your whole life to him. You have to give everything, your heart, your life, your soul, everything to God. And so when we get wrapped up in politics, It's important. Again, we should engage in it. It's not diminishing politics or the importance of politics in any way. But the first thing is, do we give unto God what is God's? And it's the one thing that I still think has a chance at cutting across political boundaries or whatever it in this country and saying, Man, if we just let Christ into our hearts, if we just let Jesus come, he can fix it. He can fix it all. And so we just need to pray for Christ's will to be done in our world, primarily first within our hearts, and then for all of us to build up our communities, in our country, in our society, in the way that the good Lord intends so that we can build up the Kingdom of God.

How do you use the Hello app?

Me? I use it a lot. But I have this little I have a routine on my app. We have these little things where you can set up personal routines, which I love. But my routine is this, which is there's daily readings. So there's a signed reading from the Old Testament, a psalm, and then the gospel reading. So I do those in the morning. I try to spend 20 minutes in silence. There's an unguided, structured silence session, so you don't have to set an alarm or anything that takes you out of it. It's a peaceful way in and out. It just structures the silence for you. And so I try to do 20 minutes in silence each day. And then-When? Right when I wake up, first thing, certainly. I try not to look at my phone. I've tried to get my phone out of my room. It's terrible to have your phone when you first wake up. It's awful for you.

For your second business, if you could invent a reliable alarm clock.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just reinvent the alarm clock. I think it would get phones out of people's rooms.

Yeah, you need them out of your rooms.

It's everyone uses the alarm.

I know. It's heartbreaking. But I have a good alarm clock. We've figured out alarm clocks. My wife and I actually both have a good alarm clock. She still has her phone in the room, but we have a two month old, so she has to wake up in the middle of the night and feed the kitten. So she's got to do something while she's feeding the kitten, or else she'll fall asleep. But there's this surrender novena that I do in the middle of the day. There's a litany of humility that I do in the middle of the day, which is this series of humility prayers, which is like, man, if you want something to put you in your place, this will be like, what people think they're humble, and you're not. You're not even close. So give me an example.

You love this. Humility being the key to wisdom, by the way. So I think it's worth pursuing. How does this put you in your place?

The litany of humility is the most intense part. We start every lent with it. But it's this series of prayers where you ask God to give you humility, but tactically, like what it actually means for you. And it's asking for these crazy things where you ask God that others may be loved more than I, that in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, that others may be more successful than I, that others may be chosen and I set aside. Oh, come on now. All these crazy things that are- You're supposed to mean that? Yeah. Well, what you pray for is, or from the fear of embarrassment, or from the fear of everyone hating you, or from the fear of people lying about you and besmirching your name, or whatever it is, from the fear of everything bad that could happen to you. Deliver me, Jesus. And so you pray this, Hey, deliver me, Jesus, from these fears of the world hating you, essentially. And the prayer here is, God, grant me the grace to desire it. Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. So certainly, if I just walk down the street and I see somebody, I don't naturally want them to be more successful than I am.

And so what you pray for is like, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. Now, the interesting thing about that, though, is with kids, it's different. I have a four-year-old, two-year-old, two-month-old. Kids are the greatest theology lesson that you could ever possibly receive. And one of them for me is humility, Which is like when I look at someone random, I don't naturally want them to have a higher opinion from the world than I do. But when I look at my kids, or to have a better life than I do. But when I look at my kids, if I look at my daughter, my son, and it's like, yeah, of course I want you to have a better life than I do. That's right. That's exactly right. I don't feel like a jealousy. You're on competition. No. It's like, no, please. I want you to be... And the last thing you pray, actually, is that others may be holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should. It's like, I want you to be closer to God than I am. I want you to be holier than I am. I want you to be happier, more joyful, whatever worldly success God wants from you.

I want you to have it. I want you to have such a better life than I do. I feel no, there's no jealousy. There's no comparison.

Just the opposite. That's the deepest desire of your heart. We used to call that, in fact, the American dream, that your children would be better off than you. No, for real. That is what every parent wants for his children.

But what you're supposed to, I I mean, the crazy thing in Christianity is that's how God feels about all his children, and that's how we're called to feel about our brothers and sisters in Christ, is how I feel about my daughter. And the other great piece of it, of fatherhood, is like, I don't know, as person, as an adult, you're like, well, I'm going to do something bad. And if I screw somebody over, they're not going to like me anymore. They have no reason to forgive me. They have no reason to do any of that. That's not the natural way of things. The natural way of things isn't forgiveness. But you look at your daughter, and then in the Christian teaching, it's like, well, but God forgives you no matter what. It's like, I don't really buy that. That's pretty intense. No matter what, really, even the really evil ones, even the ones we all hate, he forgives them no matter what if they come to him. And it's like, well, just think about your own. If my son did something terrible, the worst possible thing I could imagine, and he comes to me and he says, Dad, I'm sorry.

I forgive him instantly. Instantly? Not even a question. Not even like anything I would hold over. It's just like, I love you so much. Yes, I'm glad you're back. I'm glad you're happy. I certainly am not going to lie to him about something bad. If he's doing something bad, I'll be like, Hey, you should stop doing that. It's bad for your soul. But it has nothing to do with me trying to make him smaller or berate him or anything. It's just concern for him. And as Christians, it's like, Okay, well, yeah, that's the lesson you're given, which is you feel that naturally for your kids. Some people certainly, there are terrible parents out there, but I feel that naturally. I didn't have to work out it.

I think most parents know exactly what you're talking about.

And so then Christianity is like, Okay, well, then you got to do that for everybody. And so the litany of humility is this like, okay, yeah, I can pray the litany of humility for my kids. And maybe now I can pray for my wife and some of my close friends and some of my family. And it's like, okay, yeah, just keep. You have to keep pushing yourself. And so then people will be like, oh, I'm humble. It's like, no, you are not. If you're humble, you believe some crazy stuff. I'm not anywhere close to it. But anyway, that's one. I do a chapelet, which is a divine mercy thing, which is just Lord, please have mercy on us. And then a rosary at the end of the day. Then I try to go to Mass when I can, but hopefully most days. But yeah, so that's- Most days. Yeah, daily Mass, which is intense. As a Catholic, you're called on Sundays to go to Mass. But I don't know, for me, I have a spiritual director who's phenomenal, and he just said, Look, Alex, there's three things every day. Sit in silence for 20 minutes, go to Mass every day, and do a rosary every day.

Everything else in your life will come from that. It's an interesting one. It's like it doesn't change it. Nothing in Christianity is like this. It's like eating good food. It's not going to make you feel infinitely good immediately the next moment unless you're really aware of how your body acts. But gradually over time, you just notice how much it does in you. For me, if I go to Mass or I spend time in adoration or I do a rosary or I do the things I'm trying to do, I'm a pretty terrible guy naturally. It's 10, 20% better for me to be more patient or more loving or more humble or more oriented towards others and less worried about myself. It's just 10, 20% easier for me to be a better person, and I need the help. I try to get it as much as I can.

It is just so striking, and I think any honest person will admit this, if you think of all the people you know in your life, who are the happiest, who are the most content, who are the kindest to others? It is sincere Christians, actually.

Yeah. I mean, in terms of happiness, I can just speak for myself, but I'm just so... I am so much more joyful, so much more fulfilled, so much less worried than I ever could have imagined. And I... Like, Hallow is Building a startup is a really stressful thing. It's a very... Building a company is a really hard thing. It's a very stressful thing. Most people burn out. And I am just more at peace and more joyful than I've ever been. I've got too many stories for you, but we were doing our first fundraise for Halal. It goes back to everybody saying no. And we were running out of money. It was just our own credit cards, our own whatever. And so we were about to have to go back and get regular jobs. And we're like, well, I really think God wants us to do this thing. We'd have these stories about my aunt and all this stuff. And we're like, okay, well, let's just go try to raise some actual money so we can actually work on this full-time and not have to go back and get regular jobs. And had to go back and get regular jobs, Hallow probably would have died.

So I go and I do this fundraise thing. In the startup world, it was the first time we raised any real money. I go and pitch everybody. And it was a period of two weeks. I pitch maybe 80 people over the course of two weeks. So that's a lot of meetings, 10 meetings a day. And this is pre-COVID, so you're flying all around, you're driving back and forth around the Silicon Valley Bay Area, whatever, trying to make these meetings. And everybody's judging you. You have no numbers, you have nothing to show. So they're just like, do I want to bet on this guy? Are you sitting up straight enough? Are you making enough eye contact? Are you answering questions well enough? Is your story any good? My story is just my relationship with Jesus. It's as personal as it could possibly be. Then is the idea any good? Which most people thought it was a stupid idea. If you're lucky, five might say yes of those 80. But that means 75 say no. And the nos come really quick and the yeses take a while. And so you have meeting after meeting after meeting. You're exhausted.

You're constantly analyzing yourself like, Are you doing this right? And you just get, No, that's stupid. Nobody's going to do it. You're stupid. You've never done this before. You've never built a business before. You have no idea what you're doing. And nobody pray anymore. This is an old thing, like 100 years ago. Especially Jesus, the Jesus thing that's way over. So it's just no, no, no, no, no, no. This is never going to work. From, honestly, the most intelligent startup people, the best startup investors in the world are telling you no. The people who know way better than I do, no, this is a terrible idea. And I remember I came back to my little studio apartment, and I sat down, and I was 25, and I had four or five knots in my back. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. It was just this crazy stress, which was weird. It's like I'm not at war or anything. Nobody's trying to kill me. But it was just this crazy stress. It was like this dream I had that I felt so wrapped up in. We had people working for it. There were families, whatever, dependent on it.

And if this didn't work out, then it was done. It was never going to exist. I sat down and I prayed and I was like, God, I think you chose the wrong guy for this. I don't think I'm the right guy. I don't know why. I don't know why you chose me. This is too much stress. It's too much weight. I can't handle this. I can't do it. I'm too young to be having it. My chest was physically tight. My My heart felt tight, which was like, I don't think that's good for you. And I was like, I can't do this. And then I was like, God, here's the only thing I know how to do. I'm going to make a deal with you. I promise you, if this thing works, I will always give you credit. I will never I'm never going to trick myself into thinking I'm some successful entrepreneur who figured this out, and I'm some smart guy, whatever, blah, blah, blah, knows how to do startup stuff. I'm never going to trick myself into thinking that I know it's you doing this. I promise you, I will always give you credit.

At the same time, if this thing doesn't work out, that's on you. That's not on me. I can't take the weight of it. I can't take it. It's too heavy. And that's fine. You want it to humble me. You want it to teach me some lesson. You want it to reach out to somebody or inspire somebody else to do something else. Whatever your plan is, that's fine. It's your thing. You can do with it what you want. Maybe you want it to be massive and then to come crashing down and everybody hates me in the world and everybody thinks I'm terrible, whatever it is. Fine. It's your thing. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to do the best I can, but I can't take the weight of whether it doesn't work or not. That's yours. It's yours, whether it works or whether it doesn't work. And I just felt this enormous weight from my shoulders. And the next day, we went to meet with our favorite investor. And it was at a coffee shop, and I was late, and I opened up the Daily Gospel. And it was a story of Peter trying to fish.

And he's been fishing all day, and there's no fish. He can't catch any fish. And Jesus says, Let down your net. And Peter says, What are you talking about? There's no fish. I've been fishing all day. For me, it was like, well, I've been pitching everybody. Everybody has said no. The list is just... Now there's three, four people left. Everybody's going to say, no, this is never going to work. What are you talking about? And Jesus just says, let down your net. And Peter catches more fish than the net can carry. And two seconds later, that guy gives us an offer to fund the whole thing. And then over the week, over the next three, four days, we get three, four more offers more than the net can carry, more than we can take. And it was just this hilarious example of God, exactly what I talked about at the beginning, which is just like everything with Hallow is just us trying to do something and then letting God take it. And us working as hard as we can, but letting God take it and own it. And if you do, he just does these incredible things with it.

And so it's just this journey of radical surrender. But it's... Yeah, God has done some really cool stuff with it. It's a blessing to get to be a part of.

Did you take money from that investor?

Yeah, we did. He's one of my favorite investors of all time. I love that guy.

And what's his view of it now?

It's funny because as an investor, Silicon Valley is a funny thing because everyone says they want to be contrarian thinkers. And there are some. There are some out there. A few, maybe. But no one really is. No, of course not. So it's like, oh, when AI is hot, AI is hot. When Bitcoin is hot, Bitcoin is hot. It's whatever it is. Everyone's like, oh, I'm a contrarian thinker, but no one's really a contrarian thinker. It's just the tide of whatever people are investing in. It's the biggest herd in American business. But the funny thing for us is, like Hallow is an obvious idea to 80% in the country. If you go to 80% in the country and you say, Hey, do you want an app to help you grow closer to Jesus? They'll be like, Yeah, of course. 80% of our country, it's much higher in the world, but 80% of our country still pray every week. And whereas if you went and said, Hey, do you want an app to help you meditate? Or something, they'd be like, What are you talking about? But in Silicon Valley, it's exactly the opposite, and in LA, and in New York, and in parts of Chicago, and Seattle, whatever.

So it's a contrarian idea, but only in Silicon Valley, which is great because most of the obvious ideas are taken, whatever. They're mostly already built. And so we have this contrarian idea where the vast majority of people will say no. What it really takes, honestly, is someone has to have an exposure to faith. Yes. Does this investor have an exposure to faith? Yeah. It's interesting because it's either a very close family member, like your mom or somebody, or took their faith really seriously, and maybe you do or maybe you don't. But you have to have someone in your really close orbit who takes their faith really seriously or you take your faith really seriously. Now, there's tough parts about you taking your faith really seriously, which is if I'm a real Christian, do I want to go out and tell my... Because they're investors who represent other investors, whatever, so they're LPs, whatever, people who invest in them. Do I want to go tell the people who invested in my fund that I'm evangelizing on behalf of my specific religion? It feels like I'm And like many, like whatever, there are many religions who are certainly not the Catholic Church who are invested in these funds, their endowments or whatever, universities.

And so to go and invest in a specifically Jesus thing is, especially for a Christian, it feels like, oh, well, am I using my secular career, which I usually separate from my faith thing, as some faith tool? And that can be scary for many. We had several investors who early on were like, I It's too scary for me. I just don't think I can do it. I don't think I can jump. And what it really means is most of us have our career, and we have our faith. If we take our faith seriously, we have our career, our secular stuff, and then we have our faith, which maybe goes into our family and stuff. In our personal lives, but it usually doesn't go into our career. And what it takes is this real courage to be like, well, it should all be one. God wants it all. God doesn't stop having a relationship with you when you go to work. He doesn't stop trying to change your heart when you're at work or in a secular or corporate a thing or whatever. He wants it all. He wants your whole thing. And so it takes a real courage for some of these people.

And so we had many of them who said no in the early days, who have now jumped on later because they were like, I was just scared. And I'm not... Which it still takes courage. It still takes courage to invest or be a part of Hallow. The way the world, although Hallow has been way more successful than I ever could imagine, glory to God. But it still takes courage to do that. And so these people, sometimes it takes time. But yeah, this guy, he's I mean, he's a phenomenal investor. He's really helpful. But also just like, Hey, man, look, I trust you. Some people try to tell you how to do stuff because they know a lot. They've seen a lot. They've been around the corner. They've been around the block a handful of times. But this guy is just a tremendous man of trust and mission. He's very passionate about the work that we're doing and the mission that we're working on and trying to help people find love and peace in a relationship with the Lord. So, yeah, he's been great. And a handful of the folks that we had really early on in the early days were phenomenal.

But, yeah, it's all the good Lord just finding people and putting them in our path. We did a most recent fundraise with a guy, flew out to meet us. And I thought I knew everything about Silicon Valley. I had been working in Silicon Valley for four years. So I thought I knew every fund. I thought I knew every organization. And this guy, I'd never heard of before, runs a fund called Goodwater Capital. It's like a seven billion dollar fund that invests in startups. And he comes to me and he goes, Hey, man, I just wanted to let you know, I think God had me start this fund. He was the founder of the fund seven, eight years ago, so that I could make this investment. And I was like, really? And he was like, yeah. I was like, why? And he was like, Goodwater is the name of our fund, right? And I was like, yeah. He was like, that's the combination of good news and living water. The goal of the fund is to be a voice for Christ in technology, which there is none. And I was like, I didn't even know. That's crazy.

I had no idea. I had never heard of this thing before this guy came to us. But it's just this great story of God putting really cool people in our lives and then doing the rest.

Last question, are you hopeful for the future of the country?

Yeah, I'm hopeful for us. I'm hopeful first for the Kingdom of God. If I had to start at the core, I have no doubt, no matter how strong evil is, I have no doubt that God will win, even when it seems like the whole world is stacked against you. And there's something fun about that, actually.

There's something fun about having the world stacked against you. Yeah.

I mean, it's sad. I grew up in Ohio, and 30% of the people are Catholic, the rest of the folks were Protestant, and people would go to church. That's just what happened. But nobody... There were a few people. My mom really believed. There was a few people that really believed, but most didn't. You just went to church because everybody went to church. And when I was in Silicon Valley, there were four other Christians that I knew. You almost felt like you were part of this rebel church. It was like you were up against the world. You really had to be on fire for your faith. Because people thought you were the weirdest thing. It was the weirdest thing they'd ever seen. An actual Catholic or an actual Christian, that's crazy. That's insane. And you were like, yeah, no, Jesus has changed my life. And what you found is this community of people who were really, really on fire. Actually, Pope Benedict talks about this. This is like 20, 30 years ago, where he had this vision of the church, and he was like, I see the church, and it will get much smaller. It will lose all the places it had in society.

It will lose this expectation that people would become Christian or would become Catholic. But from that, you would have this much smaller group of people who didn't join just because their parents told them or whatever it was, but because they're on fire for a relationship with the Lord. And from that smaller group of people, the church would be renewed in a new way in the one thing that really matters, which is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And I don't know. So that was exciting for me in Silicon Valley. It really strengthened my faith. Now, I'm glad I don't live there anymore because it can certainly take a toll on you. But there's something fun about living in that rebel church. It's hard. Obviously, there's tremendous suffering, but that is holy, as God says. It brings us closer to him. But there's something fun about living in that rebel church. So from a Kingdom of God, I am very hopeful. Now, if God wants the country to collapse, which would be sad. I love our country. I pray for our country every day. But if he wants it to collapse, saints can be made. I can grow closer to God in a falling empire, and I can grow closer to God in a rising empire.

Arguably, more saints are made in a falling empire than a rising one. But I certainly have hope for our country. I don't think We get to talk with a lot of people, and we get to see what God is doing in a lot of people's lives. And if you believe that there's a religious revival or a revival of faith, which I do believe, then maybe it doesn't happen the next four years. Maybe it doesn't happen the next 10, 20 years. But I don't think our problems are primarily political. I think politics comes at the end. I think our problems are problems of the heart. And the only one who can solve the problems of the heart is a real relationship with the Lord. And so that's at Hallow. I mean, that's why we get so excited about seeing what God is doing with Hallows. We see this tremendous resurgence, not just in people being like, Oh, I want to be a good person, or people believing in the values of our country, but people being on fire with a relationship with the Lord, which then leads to all those things, leads to all that goodness, leads to all that truth and justice and wisdom.

And so, yeah, I get for our country, whether it's in the next 10, 20, 30 years. I surrender it to the Lord. The good Lord will do what he wants us to do. And for me, it's just my job to let him into my heart as best as I can to try to love and serve people as best as he wants me to.

Alex Jones.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

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