The Tucker Carlson Show - Fasting, Prayer, Meditation, & the Global Persecution of Christians (With Hallow CEO Alex Jones)

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Alex Jones is the creator of Hallow, the biggest Christian prayer app of all time. He’s changing the world more profoundly than any politician. Hallow: X: https://x.com/HallowApp Alex ("Alex at Hallow"): X: https://x.com/alexathallow (00:00) The Biggest Prayer App Ever (07:44) Alex’s Spiritual Journey (10:27) The Importance of Silence (18:15) How God Uses Technology (28:39) Mark Wahlberg’s Role in Hallow (44:30) The Growing Hunger for God (59:19) What is Prayer? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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come to me for investments, but I think if someone had, 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. Um, but I, hallow seems really big to me. What, tell us how big hallow is. It's all glory to God. Um, but he's done. Yeah. Had you told me like a thousand people would use this thing, I would have been mind blown. I built it initially just for me. But like 10,000 people, a million people, I think we're at 22 million downloads now, like 600 million prayers prayed. There was, 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 him. Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And 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. Really an amazing story and unexpected.

So why did you build it for you? What does that mean? Yeah, 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. And when I graduated, I got really into meditation. And, you know, 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, close your eyes, plugged in your headphones and then we're just led in this meditation. And it was really the first time that I'd sat in silence. And 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 and so 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 sort of 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 like, 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 Lectio Divina, Ignatian spirituality, imaginations of prayer, sitting in silence, chant, all this stuff that I'd honestly never heard of before. And I sat down, Lectio Divina is a way of meditating on scripture, you pick a word that sticks out to you.

And so I googled how to do that, 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 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 i it was this beautiful combination of this deep sense of peace like deeper than anything i'd experienced before but combined with this depth of meaning and purpose so like hallow 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 holiness and the answers 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. You know, it was a good job. It taught me how to work, but yeah, certainly wasn't working for Jesus. And so I had to quit my job, drain my 401k at 25 years old or whatever it is, max out my credit cards, do this stupid startup thing, which isn't stupid, it's God's thing. So the, but yeah, so it was crazy. It was this, these really stressful questions, but wrestling with them in this place of deep peace. And so I knew from then that I wanted this app. I liked the structure of these apps and I knew how to code a little bit. So we started building it, But we had about like 20 to 30 people start using it just because they heard what I was building.

And one of them was my aunt. I know this is one of my favorite early stories, so I love to tell it. But 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, yeah, 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, like 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 like December of 2018. And she says, Hey, I just wanted to let you know, you 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 a hundred thousand, but there was just 10 minute little meditations on the thing.

And she said, I just wanted to let you know, like Christmas is always a really stressful time for me. I got to figure out how to visit. She has grandkids. I got to figure out how 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. And 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 like, 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. Like maybe it's not just an app for me. Maybe other people are gonna use this. And at the same time, like 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'd do it a hundred times over. Of course I would for that one note. And like the really cool part about Hallow is 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, it was 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 owe 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 believe growing up. Pray me i'm sure a lot but had you asked my mom like of the people in the country who would do anything religious i would be the last on the list by far um why why did if we just rewind for a second why did you lose your faith it sounds like you grew up in a religious family yeah um i don't know i mean so i mean, so I went to a public school in Ohio. And like everybody was, like people would go to church, but nobody really, at least the kids, my friends,

nobody believed. There was no real believers. And it's just like the way of the world, I think is naturally destruction and naturally away from God. You have to like really take this step into faith to believe. But for me, I just kind of followed the way of the world. I just followed the way that what all my friends believed, which was kind of 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. It's, there's no real evidence behind it. Although I never really thought about it. Like it was never a conscious thought. I just kind of 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 to, it's the story of way too many people in today's world. But I, at the core, I think for me- It sounds like you were led away from your faith. Yeah, I think so. Probably, you know, the society I was in, the friends, the school I was in, certainly was very secular.

But, you know, for me, the thing that gets me excited about Hallow and the work that we're doing is like at the core, what I didn't have was a relationship with Jesus. Like what I didn't have was a relationship with God. I would like, I knew the beliefs, I would go to church. I went to CCD and church school and all this stuff. But I didn't, I never had an actual encounter with Christ. And if you do, like if you

actually have a relationship with Jesus, it's really hard to pull you away from it. Like 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, you know, 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 like 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 like 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 prayer, souls of great silence. You know, 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. Like it's 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 just, I was just busy and noisy. Like that's

my whole life was noise. And 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. And I was just thinking all the time and just talking to people all the time and just listening to noise all the time. And 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, Screwtape 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 yeah, for me, it was just that. It was so much noise. And as soon as you like take 10 minutes in silence away from the noise, you just, you find God. I mean, so 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 about six months ago. And she was married with three young girls um she worked in the city and uh she would like go to church but she had this overwhelming sense of shame all the time she could never really connect with god and she her life was full of noise she could never really find silence or peace and she developed uh an addiction to alcohol and opioids, to drugs, and became involved in a longstanding 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, like 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. She was scrolling on Instagram, just stuck in the noise of life. 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 five, 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. I started going to these retreats and 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 like, man, glory to God.

But what he can do when we give him just like five, 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. And 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. So last fall I was out in Las Vegas and I ran into Theo Vaughn, who's hilarious. And I wind up doing a podcast with Theo Vaughn and I have a tin of Zen on the set with me. And he says, what's that? And I started joking about product nicotine pouches. And I say, in effect, this is a cure for erectile dysfunction. Totally joking, of course. Not serious. Not a doctor. Never even think about making medical claims. I have no idea if that's true. I'm totally kidding. It's what we call a joke in the business. It's a joke. It's

not serious. So I get home, and there is a letter from the general counsel of Zinn written in the most supercilious, nasty, to whom it may concern, Mr. Carlson, or representatives thereof. It has come to our attention that on a broadcast with a nationally known comedian, you made an inaccurate health claim about our product. I'm like, what is this? What did I do? You should know that there's no medical study that suggests that our product is an effective ED cure. and i'm like are you kidding i made a boner joke and you're sending me a nasty lawyer letter it was the dumbest most humorless thing i've ever seen and it was instantly recognizable to me as someone

who has worked at big companies most of my life it was the product of hr lawyer culture only like a pronoun company could issue a letter like this. And it was like, somewhere on this planet, somebody is laughing. We must make them stop, call the general counsel, issue a nasty letter. And I thought to myself, I cannot believe I'm buying their product. I have nothing in common with these people. They can take a joke. They're stupid and they hate me and they hate humor and they hate joy. And I thought to myself, I'm going to create an alternative because there's no way I'm going to spend another dollar on a product made by people like this. And so we created an alternative.

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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. And we've had a lot of people, you know, 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. And 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 Halo, 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. Like, 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. It's 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 just a, it's a, it's a beautiful thing for us to get to be a part of. And we have this, 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. And it's just, I'm going to go on forever about these stories. Please do.

But we had this other young woman, actually, I was just talking to a guy yesterday in Ireland who had a very similar story to me, had fallen away. And in Ireland, it's like in his friend group, apparently very unpopular to actually be Catholic, like to really believe it. And 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, social media for young kids,

especially young women, like just reading comments about yourself or like people insulting you, it's just, gosh, it's so hard. Like I have a little sister who's much younger than me and I hold her phone for like two minutes and she gets like 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 just so hard. But anyway, this woman, this young woman was a teenager. Her mom was worried about her. She made her download Halo onto her phone and created an account. And 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. So, and 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. 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 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. And 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 like 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. Like 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. And so 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 Schmitz? Father Mike Schmitz is incredible. 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 kind of 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'd you find him? How'd 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 watching and 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. And yeah, I loved them. And so, 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 hundred people at that point. And 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, we'd love to do something. And the first thing he did for us was we have these sleep Bible stories where at night you kind of 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, yeah,

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 been, he's one of the most incredible people I know. He, you know, 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 Wahlberg. Also to get to share his message with people and he's changed more lives than I could possibly imagine.

Mark Wahlberg. I find everything about that amazing. How did Mark Wahlberg 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 taken his faith seriously he's always been a very public

witness of his faith which is hard to do in Hollywood and 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's yeah it's it takes a tremendous amount of courage like people will tell you your career will be over everyone will hate you okay maybe you can talk about faith but like talk about it broadly Don't talk about Jesus specifically. You certainly can't talk about Jesus. And, um, you know, I have these conversations all the time and Mark, yeah, uh, has this incredible courage.

Um, but anyway, he felt like, I don't really see the upside for him. Oh no, there's almost, 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 like ramming it down your throat or anything. He's just like, hey, this is, 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. And so it's this, 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 starred in it um and it was this beautiful film and we worked uh initially hallow 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 he he's like god he thought he was making a deal with god where he'd do this one thing he'd like do this one film and that would be his thing that would be his God thing. And what's happened since is God just like, was just cracking the door and now he's like slamming it wide open. So now he does all this stuff with Hallow and with a bunch of things with the faith,

but especially with Hallow, he does these incredible fasting challenges where like he has many talents obviously, but one of them is this incredible discipline. Like, you know, you see him all the time, wakes up at four, does his cold plunge, does a workout like twice, does prayer every day. And so like 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 to get to work with. Um, I remember the first time he, uh, he FaceTimed me at like 8 PM on like a

Friday night or something. And it was one of the first times I'd talked to him. And, uh, I don't, you know, I don't often talk to super famous people. And so I was a little nervous, you know, is that that is FaceTime for Mark Wahlberg. I was like, this is really cool. My wife's sitting here next to me. It was, you know, just the middle of the night and we just talked and it was like a 30 second conversation.

It was just like, hey, I'm really excited about Father Stu. 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 Hallow, Hallow's going to be incredible.

We're going to change the world together. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. And he was like, yeah, Hallow's going to be great. We're going to pray incredible. We're going to change the world together. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. And he's like, yeah, hallow 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 like how you stay humble. And my wife looks at me and instead of saying like, oh man, that's cool. You got to talk to Mark Wahlberg or like, you know,

whatever that he just FaceTimed you or any of that stuff. She was like, um, you know, you said awesome a lot. Like, that's all you said. And 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, he's been, he's been really honestly incredible. It's, yeah, like 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 Show or any of that stuff. And I remember we did, there's 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 kind of this Lent series, which our biggest launches are,

well, we have one coming up about the election, One Nation Under God, and then we have kind of 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 kind of our biggest launches are. But it was Ash Wednesday, which is the day that our Lent challenge kicks off. And 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 like four or five of us. And it was funny because the reading was like how you're supposed to fast in private, which is true. You're supposed to fast

and pray, not like show off like, hey, I'm, you know, I'm this great person, I'm fasting. And 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 like 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. And the funny thing about that is I had woken up and the app was, 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. Um, I think one was open AI and the other was, uh, 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, um, 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. So do you trust your internet service provider? Do you even know what it does? Well, there are a lot of reasons not to trust your ISP. Many internet service providers are required to keep logs of everything you do online, just in case the government wants to take a look at what you're doing. Can you believe that's legal? It is in the United States.

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And one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit specsavers.ca for details. Conditions apply. How many Superbowl 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 last year they had done one. And a national Super Bowl commercial is like five to six times the cost of the thing that we did. And so I'm watching the Super Bowl and I see the first Temuad come on and I was like, shoot, man. And 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. And I was just like, this is insanity. There's no, it's absolutely impossible that we would ever. So like maybe number two, but anyway, I wake up and we're number three and I'm like, wow, this is incredible. That's high. Nobody's ever cracked the top 10 before. That's, that's a glory to God. That's, that's insane. I go to open the app and it's completely crashed. It's totally white. Nobody, it's, you can't do anything. It's not like, it's not like it loads slowly. I mean, this is the biggest day in Halo history. And so it's,

it's, 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, uh, 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 mass. 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 like right in the middle of our biggest spike. And I was just sitting there in mass and I was just like, God, what? Like, I surrender this to you. Yes, like this is yours, but like, why are you doing this? There's so many people trying to pray. Like, can you please just fix this app?

Like, and I'm just like 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. And our customer support thing's blowing off and everything's going terribly. And then Mark is about to go on the Today Show and Fox and all these national TV shows. And what's he supposed to do? Be like, hey, download the app, but in like a couple hours, maybe? And 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? And 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. Like there's something about you. It just feels like you're upset. And I was like, well, to be honest, yeah, the app has been crashing for the last like 30, 40 minutes. It's just been down. Nobody can use it.

It makes me sad. It's like, this is, we're hoping to, especially to people who have fallen away or people like that young girl who are in a really tough time. Like 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, 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 there for a second. Then 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 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 be, 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's just that it was this crazy story of Halo getting to number one over Temu, which was, which was fun. But, but yeah, it's just this, it's just God showing us like, hey, I'm the one who's, I'm the one who's doing this. Just make sure you always remember I'm the one who's doing this, which hopefully, hopefully I do.

Amazing. Has it, has it hurt Wahlberg's career since you said that it might, you know, Mark is an interesting place because, you know, he produces most of his own stuff now and can fund a lot of it. And he's trying to build, you know, what he does really is he tries to focus on a handful of things that he really tries to build. So he has like a health company, a clothing company, Halo, and a handful of other things he's really focused on building. But honestly, there's a lot of... He'll post about, just stay prayed up.

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. And he had a friend of his come up to him and say like, hey, haven't you seen that everyone, like, haven't you read your comments? Like everyone hates you for these posts. And he's like, comments? Dude, I haven't read comments in like 30 years. You can't read comments on social media.

That'll destroy you. And he's like, what I Dude, I haven't read comments in like 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 like 10 times the number of views than 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, you know, my face isn't really going to get them to stop, but Mark's face will be like, well, that's weird enough. Like the guy from the bear movies talking about Jesus. Like that's a, that's a weird thing. I'm just going to, it's, it's just weird enough that I'm going to try it. But, um, but anyway, for him, he's just, I don't know. He just, it, it, it takes a bravery. I mean, 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 like 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 people are, the studios are suddenly trying to share Christ. It's because, you know, you see things like Hallow

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, you know, I mean, scripture again is pretty clear. It's if you seek first the kingdom of God, all the other things will be given unto you. It's like, and now it's scary and you go through like 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, Mark's, you know, Father Stu did,

Father Stu 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 I have this tremendous hope. I mean, it's just, we just get to see it all the time. Like in the darkest places, God reaching out to people. And like Chesterton has this quote that's like, there've been many times in history that, GK Chesterton, there's been many times in history

where people thought the church was dead. The church is not this like 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 Hallow 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. And like, you know, we live in a culture of death and a sad secular world that's falling away even more rapidly from Jesus. But still in that, he's there. And like we had this other woman write 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. And 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? And 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, I 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. And she hears audibly in the silence, his name is Luke. Which like, if you're going to say one word to save a child's life in the womb, like hearing his name from God's voice, like hearing God has a name for him already is like, well,

there's termination is no option. Cause God has named him. His name is Luke. 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's like, and she shares this story and she's, she's like, I'd never even thought about adoption. And I started thinking about it. I started exploring it. And I was like,

well, if I could find a family that maybe would make sense, that's faithful, that's Christian, you know, and I could still be a part of my child's life, somebody that could raise my kid better than I could with, you know, maybe, 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, this is, this is the couple that, that I would choose. And she says, hey, I just, one last

question before we proceed. Like, do you, it's your kid. Do you know what name you'll name him? And they said, oh yeah, yeah, 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 after during her birth they the doctors found she was sick she had an illness um i forget exactly what it was but it was some 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 like the best part of her life, she gets to be a part of this child's life and this family's life.

And for her, it's the peak of her life is the best thing that happened to her as this kid. And 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, like God is still there and he's still able, if we just like give him just a crack, like 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, I, I mean, we see it obviously with the app. It's, 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, I mean, it's just so much noise. Like it's just so much busyness, so much stress,

so much anxiety in this phone that especially young people, like you go to them and it's just like, hey, did you know there's like real peace, like real rest, real peace? And that I think has this tremendous pull, which is like the offer, you know, 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. Like it's, everything feels terrible. Everything feels like you're stressed and worried the world's about to,

the world's about to end. Um, but real peace, I think people are really hungry for, and that's what we get really excited about. I mean, I was in Silicon Valley for, um, for three years with my wife and I would ask, I would talk to people all the time and be like, are you religious? And they'd be like, no, of course I'm not religious. Nobody's religious anymore. Um, but then you ask them what they are and they would say, which is this relatively new invention, which is spiritual, but not religious. I'm spiritual, but not religious. And it's like, are you spiritual? And they would all say, yes, of course I'm spiritual. I'm interested in spirituality. And there's two kinds of ways to go about that. The one is, you know, like, well, can you really be spiritual without being religious?

Like, 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? And 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. And these are secular people who don't. And, but is there something else there with you when you meditate? And everyone will be like, yeah,

of course there is. Absolutely. There's something else there. There's something invisible there. And I was like, okay, well, that's the craziest thing in the world. So you're saying like when you stop watching Netflix and scrolling on TikTok and you just sit in silence, there's an invisible force there. Shouldn't your whole life be like focused on, well, what is that thing? Figuring out what that thing is and what it wants from you. And the good news is like, what it wants from you is to tell you that you're loved, like to love you infinitely, and then to call you to this life of love and service for other people. So, it's this force of tremendous goodness, but like, don't you want to really figure that out? And I do think we see-

Well, and also there are non-good forces out there too. Exactly. Yeah. Well, now that's for me, actually, when I was coming from secular meditation, which is mostly has its roots in Buddhist meditation or Eastern meditation to Christian meditation. Obviously the core of the difference in Christian meditation is a relationship with Jesus. It's not about whatever, like your breath or trying to like de-stress. It's not about any of that. It's about trying to let Jesus into 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, you know, the fundamental belief is, hey, there's suffering, there's a way to escape suffering. And you know, meditation is one of those techniques, but there's no good and evil fight. There's no good versus evil. In Christianity, like 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 your good. He wants your destruction. And, you know, like there's, there's this blog and one of these secular meditation. That's just so obviously true though. Look around. Yeah. I mean, to deny evil, it's, it's the other thing I was saying when you said, you know, it feels like people are more aware is evil just feels a lot more on its face than it ever was like it used to feel i don't know i've only been around for a bit but like under the surface and now it just feels a lot more like it's right there it's staring at you which sorry i interrupted you you're about to say so i'm

no no no but you said so there's a book uh no No, there's this, on one of these secular meditation websites, you know, somebody, they write in questions or whatever, and the meditation person, the secular meditation person answers them. And a woman wrote in and said, hey, I was meditating, and I had a thought come across my mind about harming my child. You know, what do I do with that? And the person just responded like, well, okay, just treat that like any other thought, just like acknowledge it and let it go. And, you know,

keep trying to focus on your breath. And for me, I just, I was like, man, that, that doesn't feel right. Like that doesn't, and the Christian teaching is so much, so much deeper. Like all of, 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. And our job is, hey, if it's the bad guy, get the bad guy out of there, you know, fortify yourself against your temptations,

against your weaknesses, ignore him as much as possible. And if it's the good guy, get the bad guy out of there. You know, fortify yourself against your temptations, against your weaknesses, ignore him as much as possible. And if it's the good guy, like 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. And our job is primarily within our own hearts to discern this good versus evil and to get the evil out. And I don't know, I mean, it's- But it's a big deal. I mean, the core Christian prayer says,

and deliver us from the evil one. Certainly. Yeah. So, I mean, that suggests like we should be afraid of that. Well, it's a war. I mean, that's the story of scripture. But it's not like something you just sort of 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, it's, and the thing is, it's, I don't know, for me, it's like 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. Like it didn't, but I was, like 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. I mean, and I believed many things that were truly evil, that were wrong, truly evil. And, you know, it was only after letting God into my heart that like I started seeing all these things. And this priest of this homily, I think it was like a week ago. And he said, life is like you're driving in a car

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, like you start seeing like, oh my gosh, like how evil all this was. But that's the way of the world. The way of the world is destruction. Like 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 like, once you find it, it's hard. Yeah. Cause you have to fight against evil. It's not, 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, you know, it's a contradiction, but it's a beautiful one. Now, we've told you before about a staff favorite here at TCN, the 8 Sleep Pod. What is it?

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Be prepared. Go to AmmoSquared.com to learn more. So I should have asked you this at the outset. Of course, I conduct all interviews backwards. So my apologies. What is prayer? Yeah. I think there's a bunch of different, really beautiful definitions of prayer.

But for me, at the heart, 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. Like, all you'd want to do is listen. All you'd want to do is, you know, pick up your phone every morning and be like, hey, God, what should I do? But it's not just in the morning, which is an important time to spend time in prayer, but it's every moment. Like 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. Like it's helpful to share what's on your heart and to ask for stuff. And God answers those things. Prayer is real. Prayer can change things. I've seen it change things.

We, 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. He said it was like 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 Uvalde, the school that got shot up. 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 gonna 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 app, Jonathan Rumi, 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. Like, 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. And he often leads you to pain and suffering, which is, you know, the way of the cross. It's the way he promises.

It's the way of his apostles. I mean, 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 at whatever time.

I mean, I think a lot of us would like to listen more carefully. And prayer can't just be like a litany of complaints and desires or something really ugly about that. Very narcissistic about it. But listening, you know, into the void comes, well, in my case, like fly fishing, you know, or worrying about dumb stuff. How, 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's the, it is the whole reason we built Halo.

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 screw tape 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 Halo and download it, find whatever session works for them and give it a shot. But, you know, like meditating with scripture, as an example, there's a technique called Lectio 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 like a short paragraph from scripture. So it's not just total silence. Although, you know, 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. that wasn't prayer and um but you you ask god hey help me i'm about to try to pray

uh can you help me make this time what you want it to be and then you pick a passage or you know 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 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 like six, seven people. And like 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. Like 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, you know, 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'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 know, 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 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, you know, 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 you got 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? Is there something, how do you want me to handle this? I'm getting 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 all, 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 like 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 like 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 it's like, that sounds lame as like a man, like you're like, oh, I want to be strong. I don't need love, whatever it is, but you do like, 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, 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. And 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 says, 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 just breaks my heart as a father, had never heard

anyone tell her she was beautiful, 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 anything. 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, you, God will tell you if you give them, and it's not, you know, don't try it once, try it a bunch. You have to persevere. You have to try it for a year. Don't try it for two weeks. Don't try it for four weeks. Try it for a year, 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. I don't, 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 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 and so anyway i know that's a long answer but that to me is what prayers it's It's not a long answer. It's a great answer. How does, you said earlier that fasting and prayer go together. That's often forgotten. Mark Wahlberg's 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. Like people just knew that you were supposed to fast. Right. And that's how it's referred to, at least in the reference I can think of. It's almost like, you know, 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 uh like we soften we soften fasting

which is true like some people have eating disorders or some people have issues with fasting or some people have issues like health issues or women are pregnant or breastfeeding or whatever it is and so there's all these reasons but like for me as a whatever 30 year old man, I can fast a day. Like 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. And it's all, it's, 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, you know, Christianity really, if you read the gospels, like if you really read what Jesus is saying,

it's not soft, it's really hard. And it's two things that are both really hard, radical mercy and radical justice and perfection and avoidance of sin and defeating the devil. Like it's radical both's, it's radical both. Uh, 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, 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. Cause you go to church on Sundays or,

Hey, you're a good person. Cause 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, so I don't know, for me, I mean, there's like this, there's a bunch of, my team makes fun of me because I love all these like kind of crazy Christian stories, but there was like these old group of monks called the Stylites that would just, in the desert, they would just climb on top of a column um so roman column in the middle of the desert and they would just die they would just starve to death on the column for christ to to sacrifice their bodies for christ which is you know certainly probably not what most people are called to but fasting i mean at the core was food

or at the at the basic is food for anybody anybody where that is acceptable is, I think, something that we're all called to, but it can be anything. So really, fasting is anything you want, which I like food. I like bad food. I like, so 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, you know, bad. It doesn't have to be bad in nature. Like chocolate, Jesus isn't against chocolate, but you can give up like, Hey, you know, 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, you know, 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 apostles say, well, why couldn't we do that? And he says, okay, I'll cast it out. Fine. And he casts it out, of course. And his apostles say, 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. Like, we've tried to pick all these different things where it's kind of like fasting, but not like cold showers or cold plunges. Now we're like, oh, you should do it. It's like, it's hard. It makes you, it helps you grow in discipline. It's all this stuff or, you know, intermittent fasting, all these different things. And it's like, yeah, Christianity has been doing that for 2000 years. Like 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 like a meal

or something, but it's, 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, you know, it's not radical, but it's like 20% easier for me to enter into prayer. And so like, you'll sit in prayer for like 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 like two or three minutes once you get really into it. And it's just a little bit at the beginning,

but like two or three minutes where it just feels like the saints describe this as like union with God, but it just, it feels like you're really close to God. Like 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. And like, it doesn't take like 18 minutes of me sharing or trying to not to, it takes like 30 seconds. Like I could just be here and I could just be like, man, like, yeah, I feel like God is right 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 like the further i get from this world the closer i get to god and the world you know we're called to live in the world and work in the world and we're called to take care of our bodies and um 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, you know, to me is a relationship with the Lord. How often do you fast? I try to, everybody has their own journey. So I try to fast Wednesdays and Fridays. During L, but I try to fast Wednesdays and Fridays during

Lent. I try to Wednesdays and Fridays. Yeah. Um, now, you know, sometimes I'll do kind of like a half fast where I'll still eat, but probably about half of what I would eat in a normal day. And, 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- So you only eat five days a week, ideally? Yeah, during Lent, yeah. And during regular times, I'll 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 usually fast. 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 wife 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. Like you start getting, I would say the first two days suck because you're just really hungry. But then you don't, 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, like just where within a minute, anytime you think about God, you can just enter into this prayer space, which is, and the other thing it does is, you know, 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 kind of puffs you up, like when you have all the energy.

And when you're just, 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 energy. And when you're hungry, you're just like, you're so much more humble and so much meeker. 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 disgusting. I need

some McDonald's. And so, 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'd you get? Filet-O-Fish or did you go all the way? Oh no, it was Easter. So it was a feast day. So I could celebrate. So I had a, I had a couple of burgers or something. Yeah yeah i don't eat mcdonald's anymore but i did that no i don't either but how how did how what was that like going from you know empty tank to filling it with mcdonald's uh yeah it was not not recommended yeah not recommended you feel like crap i mean and the other, this is the funny thing about the spiritual life is actually how, how, how many analogies there are for it. But like I've, I, so I, and this year I've,

I've tried to do a lot better job of eating healthier, um, and like cleaner and more protein and all that stuff you're supposed to do. And it's this, it's this funny sensation where like, then the bad food, it's, 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 like, well, actually clean food, like good natural food tastes way better,

like is way better. And the fast food is, it starts to be disgusting. Like it starts to be like, ah. And so like, 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, and my wife and I were saying the same thing.

It's like, I don't even, not only do you not want it, like for a while there, you just don't want it. And that's nice. But then you start to ultimately like actively dislike it, like the stuff that's bad for you. And I think it's very similar in the spiritual life. It's like this journey of, like 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, I don't, you know, 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. Like I can see what it was doing to my soul. And anytime I get anywhere close to it, you like feel like, no, this is bad. This is terrible for you, which is kind of this funny analogy with food. But yeah, so anyway, I wouldn't, 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, I can share it, but he did have 40, 41 day fast or something crazy,

which was insane. And I had dinner with him when he, during his fast, like 20 days into his fast or something crazy. And he was, you know, he, I was like, are you okay if I eat? And he was like, yeah, I like to look at food. Like I need to look at it. So I still have a relationship with it, but I'm fasting. And he did it for his family, which is beautiful. But Kevin James, the actor. Yeah. Incredible. Incredible man of faith. Awesome. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

You should talk to him. He's, he's, 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 there's, we've got some,

I can't, I can't share everything now, but we've got, there's, there's a lot more people, celebrities or whoever, who are faithful folks who are just, you know, haven't really had the opportunity or the culture or the platform to share their faith. And it's cool to get to meet these people and to get to talk to them about what God has done in their life. And it's way more people than you would imagine, so.

Really? Yeah, it's cool. I think there's something cool happening in the world. I think that too. I don't think you can 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 that's 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 good. And like, I think God is doing something really cool and I'm excited for it. So we'll see what the good Lord wills. We are proud at TCN to offer quality long formform programming. Films, documentaries, short series, and we've got a new one rolling it out. It's a six-part documentary series called All the President's Men, The Conspiracy Against Trump. It's made by our friend, the documentary filmmaker

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We enjoy them. You will too. 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 sort of productive, least threatening, nicest. Like why, you know, if you're running a country,

why would you be mad? You'd want more Christians because they actually pay their taxes and like have obedient children. And they're just- Have children, yeah. Yeah, have children. They're easier to deal with.

So I'm sort of baffled by it. And then I look at it, I'm like, well, no, that is a, 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 2,000 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, you know, 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. Do you find that kind of hilarious? well you know at the beginning it stressed me out but certainly actually funnily enough there were two Vice and Buzzfeed both wrote hit pieces and within

like 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 kind of person who celebrates, you know, people suffering, and the people who work there suffered. But it didn't wreck my day, I'll be honest.

Yeah. And we got the app got kicked out of China, the Chinese cyber security administration or something deemed our content illegal and seriously

removed it from the app store yeah 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 yeah Gorbachev credits him with being one of the major forces

to destroy the soviet union and or communism at least and yeah they didn't like that so they sent a note to apple and apple removed our app from the app store in china but there's so there's been a bunch of stuff um and whatever you just have to look at twitter to find anybody who hates jesus or any of mark's posts or anything but um but i don't know the thing that bothers me most or the thing that makes me the most sad is like there's the on the face persecution where it's like, hey, you're not allowed in China, which is sad. Like 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, you know, the sadder thing for me is honestly just like the, it's like the undercurrent of like trying to get away from Jesus.

And this certainly isn't everybody, but it's a lot. And it's like, hey, you know, you can share about faith and you can share about prayer, but like, let's not talk about Jesus specifically. Let's just not do the Jesus thing. Let's just talk about like religion more broadly. Or like, Alex, you should build a Buddhist version of this and a Hindu version of this and a Muslim version of this. And, you know, we'd invest if you were broader spirituality, but not, you know, just the Jesus thing. And I'm like, yeah, sorry. It's just going to be Jesus. Or like, you know, a TV thing and 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 like don't show a picture of Jesus in it and it's like that's going to be a picture of Jesus and don't you find it so revealing that Jesus 2000 years later is controversial yeah but he's always been but on what grounds?

I mean, it doesn't, it's, it's, it's so irrational that again, it's proof of its reality, but like what, the guy who told his followers to pray for their persecutors and turn the other cheek,

like that guy is controversial. Like why? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, I have from a Christian perspective, it's because it's not,

it's not just people who are, it's not people who are cranky at Jesus. I'm exactly right. No, it's a spiritual war. And because it's not, it's not just people who are, it's not people who are cranky at Jesus. Oh, I'm exactly right. You know, 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, uh, you know, why are you so against life? It's like, well, if I was Satan, what would I do? That's what I would do. Uh, 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, like, even if you go back to any of the founding fathers, you know, they talk about the importance of prayer and how God is building this country, now 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's 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 the heart and 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, it's 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. And Christianity is this crazy thing. Like it used to be normal societally. And so we kind of forget about it. But it's this insane thing. It's a crazy thing. Like it used to be normal societally. And so we kind of 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, like 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 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. Like that's a crazy thing to believe, but that's what we believe. And so, but when you really enter into it and you're like, ah, it's crazy, but yeah, you have the words of everlasting life to whom else shall we go? And everything becomes just a lot clearer, but it also, it takes a bit of the weight off of it. Like I used to get so worried about all these world events. And it's like, well, you know, God's in charge of this thing. He's already promised us that he won it.

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 government check the coin which is you know had just killed like you know 30 years earlier had just killed all the firstborn children in this

area to try to kill jesus like that's a 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 and they say caesar's and he says okay well then render unto ca what is Caesar's. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. And then that's what we focus on usually. That's usually the, 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.

There are important things. There are 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 is 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 is 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 and our country and 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 like personal routines, which I love. But like 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. And I try to spend like 20 minutes in silence. There's an unguided structured silence session. Um, so you don't have to like set an alarm or anything that takes you out of it. It's kind of a peaceful way to in and out. It just kind of structures the silence for you. And so I try to do 20 minutes in silence each day. And then when, um, 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, awful for you. If, you know, for your second business, if you could invent a reliable alarm clock. Yeah. Yeah, just reinvent the alarm clock. I think that would get phones out of people's rooms. Yeah, you need them out of your rooms.

It's, it's- But everyone uses the alarm. I know, it's heartbreaking. But there's, there's good, I have a good alarm clock. We've figured out alarm clocks, you need them out of your rooms. But 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 her 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 a series of humility prayers, which is like, man, if you want something to put you in your place, this will be like, you know, what people think they're humble and you're not, you're not even close.

So give me an example. Give me, I 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 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 it Well, what you pray for is more 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 pure, 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. Jesus grant me the grace to desire it. So certainly I don't, you know, like 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. Like God has, I have a four-year-old, two-year-old, two-month-old.

And God is just, 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 like 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 exactly right. I don't feel like jealousy. No, it's like, no, please, like 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. And 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, you know, whatever worldly success God wants from you. I want you to have it. Like, I want you to have such a better life than I do. And it's not, there's no, like, 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. Right. That your children would be better off than you. No,

for real. Yeah. That is what every parent wants for his children. But what you're supposed to, 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 it's, and the other great piece of it, of fatherhood is like, I don't know, as a 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. You know, 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. And it's like, I don't really buy that. That's pretty intense. Like 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, like if my son did something terrible, like 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. Like I, I certainly aren't, aren't, am not going to lie to him about something bad. Like if he's doing something bad, I'll be like, hey, you should stop doing that. It's bad for your soul. But it's not, it has nothing to do with like 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 natural. I didn't have to work out. 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 yeah, people will be like, oh, I'm humble. And it's like, no, you are not. If you're humble, you believe some crazy stuff. And I'm not anywhere close to it. But the, anyway, that's one, I do a chaplet, 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. And 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. And everything else in your life will come from that. And 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 like, 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 like gradually over time, you just notice how much it does in you. And for me, like 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 just am like, it's like 10, 20, I'm a pretty terrible guy naturally. And it's like 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. And it's just like 10, 20% easier for me to be a better person and I need the help. And so I try to get it as much as I can. It is just so striking. 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. I mean, it's, yeah.

I mean, in terms of happiness, I mean, I can just speak for myself, but I'm just so, like, 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, like, building a startup is a really stressful

thing. Like it's a very, it's a very, uh, 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 that we were doing our first fundraise for Hallow. It just 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 had these stories about my aunt and all this stuff. And we're like, oh, 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 we had to go back and get regular jobs, we would have, Halo probably would have died. So I go and I do this fundraise thing. And in the startup world, it was the first time we raised any real money. I go and pitch everybody. And it was like a period of two weeks. I pitched maybe 80 people over the course of two weeks. So that's a lot of meetings, like 10 meetings a day. And, um, 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? And my story is just my relationship with Jesus.

And, uh, so it's like as personal as it could possibly be. And then is the story any good and my story is just my relationship with jesus and uh so it's like as personal as it could possibly be and then is the idea any good which most people thought it was a stupid idea um and if you're lucky like five might say yes of those 80. uh but that means like 75 say no and the no's come really quick and the yeses take a while and so you just you have meaning 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, 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. Uh, and nobody prays anymore. This is an old thing, like a hundred years ago. This is, um, especially Jesus, like the Jesus thing,

that's way over. And, uh, so it's just no, no, no, no, no. This is never going to work from like, honestly, the most intelligent startup people, like the best startup investors in the world are telling you no. Like the people who know way better than I do know 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 like four or five knots in my back. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. It was just like 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,

depending on it. And if this didn't work out, then it was done. It was never going to exist. And 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 like having it. My chest was physically tight. Like my, my, 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 trick myself into thinking I'm some successful entrepreneur who figured this out. And I'm some smart guy or

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. Like 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. So you want it, 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.'s yours it's yours whether it works or whether it doesn't work and i just felt this like enormous weight from my shoulders and the next day

we went um 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 like three, four people left. There's no, everybody's going to say, no, this is, 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, you know, 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 just this journey of radical surrender, but it's, yeah, God has done some really, really cool stuff with it. So 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? You know, 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's hot, AI's hot. When Bitcoin's hot, Bitcoin's 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, yeah. But the funny thing for us is, like, Halo is an obvious idea to 80% of the country. If you go to 80% of the country and you say, Hey, do you want an app to help you pray, help you grow closer to Jesus? They'll be like, yeah, of course. 80% of the world still prays every 80% of our country. It's much higher in the world, but 80% of our country still prays 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, well, I 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. But so it's a contrarian idea, but only in Silicon Valley, which is great because most of the obvious ideas are taken. Like, you know, 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? And it's interesting because it's either like a very close family member, like your mom or somebody

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. 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. And, 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? You know, it kind of feels like I'm, and like many, like whatever, there are many religions who are not, certainly not the Catholic church, who are invested in these funds, you know, their endowments or whatever universities. And so to go and invest in a specifically Jesus thing is, you know, especially

for a Christian, it feels like, oh, well, am I using my secular career, which I usually like separate from my faith thing as some sort of faith tool. And that can be scary for many. We had several investors who early on were like, I just, 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 and 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 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 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 thing or whatever he wants it all he wants your whole thing and so it takes like a real courage for some of these people and so we had many of them who said no at the in the early days who have now jumped on later because they were like, you know, I was just scared and, you know, I'm not, which it still takes courage. It still takes courage to invest or be a part of Hallow. It's, you know, the way of the world, although Hallow has been, you know, way more successful than I ever could imagine, glory to God. But, you know, it still takes courage to do that. And so these people, you know, sometimes it takes time, but yeah, this guy has, he's been, I mean, he's a phenomenal investor. He's really helpful, but also just like, Hey man, look, I trust you. Like you do it. Some people like try to tell you how to do stuff or, um, you know, cause they've,

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 yeah. Trust and mission. He's, you know, 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'd been working in Silicon Valley for like 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 $7 billion 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 like seven, eight years ago so that I could make this investment. And I was like, really? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, why?

And he was like, Goodwater is the name of our fund, right? And I was like, yeah. And he's 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.

It's like 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 like if I had to start at the 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 like the whole world is stacked against you. And there's something fun about that actually. Like. There's something fun about having the world stacked against you. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's sad, but it's, it's like, I was in, like, I grew up in Ohio and, you know, like 30% of the people are Catholic. The rest of the folks were Protestant and it, you know, people would go to church. That's just what happened. But nobody, you know, 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 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. And so you almost felt like you were part of this rebel church.

And so it was like, you were up against the world. And so you really had to you were part of this rebel church. And so it was like, you were like up against the world. Like, and so you really had to be on fire for your faith because like people thought you were the weirdest thing. Like it was the weirdest thing they'd ever seen. Like what an actual Catholic or an actual Christian, like this, that's crazy. That's insane. And you're like, yeah, no, Jesus changed my life.

And what you found is this community of people who were really, really on fire. And actually Pope Benedict talked about this. It was 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 smaller, 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.

And 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, 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 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 it's, you know, 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, it's why we get so excited about seeing what God is doing with Hallows. We see this tremendous resurgence, not just in like people being like, oh, I want to be a good person or people being 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 hopeful 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. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library.