Aug. 16, 2026
Spiritual Sunday: Finding Peace and Purpose with Hallow CEO Alex Jones
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RSS Feed Hallow CEO and co-founder Alex Jones joins Amy for Spiritual Sunday to share the personal faith journey that changed the course of his life. After drifting away from the Catholic faith he was raised in, an interest in meditation unexpectedly led Alex back to prayer and Christianity, ultimately inspiring him to create Hallow. He and Amy talk about the power of prayer and silence, finding peace in an increasingly noisy world, and what he would say to anyone questioning their faith or searching for something more.
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00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey there, everybody, and welcome to your spiritual Sunday. I'm Amy roboch here TJ is with us in spirit. But we have got a very exciting guest. His name is Alex Jones. He's the CEO and co founder of Hello, and I bet a lot of you know exactly what I'm talking about because this is the world's largest Catholic prayer and meditation app And Alex, I was reading the background of how you even got to where you are now, and it's remarkable your story, and I think it will be relatable for a lot of people, or at least for anyone who's questioned their faith or anyone who is lost their way and is trying to find their way back to some sort of religion, some sort of spiritual path. And you have taken your personal experience and created a remarkable organization that is helping so many people find their way as well.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: So welcome Alex to the podcast.
00:01:00
Speaker 3: Well, thanks so much for having me.
00:01:01
Speaker 4: All praise to God. I appreciate the kind words he does. God does really cool things. I just screw it up all the time and then he fixes it for us. But it's been really cool to watch him work he's done absolutely phenomenal things.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: So it's been a blessing.
00:01:14
Speaker 1: Well, it's a blessing to have you here on the program because I just think your story is probably so familiar to a lot of people. I too was raised Catholic as well, so I come from that background and had my daughters go to Catholic school. My daughter actually went, my little one went from pre K all the way until she graduated from high school here in the city at Catholic school. So very familiar with that specific religion. But tell me a little bit about your journey and your faith because you two were raised Catholic and then you drifted away as a teenager, So can you explain a little bit about that part of your life.
00:01:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the one thing that I'd say, we certainly I'm Catholic and I love being Catholic.
00:01:54
Speaker 3: It's changed my life.
00:01:55
Speaker 4: And I'll tell a little bit of the journey to me coming back to my faith. But Hallo is Hell is just about trying to grow deeper in a relationship with Jesus.
00:02:03
Speaker 3: We don't do any other religions. It's just Jesus.
00:02:05
Speaker 4: But anybody who's interested in a relationship with Jesus is uh is well meant hollow. We started very focused in the in the Catholic world, and we're always authentically Catholic. It's we never hide who we are, but we've always tried to build something for anybody of any Christian background. So at this point we probably have about half the people on the app who are Catholic and half the.
00:02:23
Speaker 3: People who are who are Protestant. Brothers and sisters are people interested in broader Christian spirituality. But yeah, my.
00:02:29
Speaker 4: Journey, so I was, like you said, I was raised Catholic by my mom, dragged me through all the Catholic sacraments in religious education, all that Jazz is a saint of a woman. But when I was a teenager, high school, college, fell away from my faith. Would have considered myself agnostic or atheist for that time. And when I graduated, I got really I started working, you know as stressful, working life, busyness, anxiety, all that stuff. But even more so than that, I was fascinated with this idea of whatever a spiritual and contemplative life was, of like trying to find real peace. And so I started meditating. I started trying to figure out how to meditate, and this was maybe seven eight years ago, and so I was about my mind first went to kind of India and Eastern Buddhist meditation, and so I was about to hop on a flight to go to India, and the flight was like two grand and there was these two apps that had just launched, had Space and Calm that kind of walked you through secular Eastern Buddhist meditation mindfulness meditation, and they were like seventy bucks. So I was like, all right, I'll give the apps to try. That's a lot cheaper than the flights. And I loved them. I started using them. I started using them every day, and I thought they were great. Like really it was almost like technology without technology, Like you could piss a pick, pick a session, press play, close your eyes, plug in your headphones, and be led through this meditation.
00:03:49
Speaker 3: You didn't have to go to a studio. It was just ten minutes.
00:03:51
Speaker 4: Before you went to work. It like was personalized. It was with some of the best guides in the world. And so I really liked the structure of this app. But every time I would meditate and mindfulness meditation and mostly is just you're focusing on your breath for a while and then you let your mind go at the end, and you build up longer times as you advance. And there's a bunch of different ways to meditate, but that's kind of the core way. And every time I would meditate, my mind kept feeling this weird pull towards something spiritual, like an image of the cross, or the name Jesus or the words Holy Spirit. Which I was agnostic, so I thought that was very strange, and I started reaching out to people because it kept happening. I started reaching out to people, you know, whether it was a priest or, a pastor, or a friend who took their faith more seriously than I wasn't. Just asking this question, Hey, is there any way there's some sort of intersection here between this meditation thing and this Jesus thing. And they all laughed at me and said, yeah, it's we've been doing it for two thousand years.
00:04:42
Speaker 3: You probably should have heard about. It's called prayer. And I was like, no, no, I know about prayer. Prayers.
00:04:47
Speaker 4: They're like, hey, thanks for stuff, sorry for stuff. Helped me with stuff or maybe the things that I memorized as a kid. But I had this one pastor who was like, yeah, those are great ways to talk to God, but have you ever tried to listen for him? And I was like, what is that even mean? How do you listen for God? It's not like he calls you in the morning, it's And I started discovering this whole world of contemplative and meditative prayer within Christianity that I just never heard of before. There's dozens and dozens of different techniques, and it makes sense. There's hundreds of thousands of different monks all praying contemplatively within the Christian tradition, and things like suit to be in ignation, spirituality, all these really beautiful caramelize spirituality, recollection chant, all these really beautiful ways to pray. And one of them's like you to vino, which is a way to meditate on scripture. You pick a short passage of Scripture and you pick a word that sticks out to you from it. And so I randomly opened up a Bible, I think it was my wife's that was laying around to Luke a levin where the disciples asked Jesus to teach him how to pray, and he gives them the our Father, our Father, who are and haaven hallowed be thy name, and the word that stuck out to me in that passage was Hallow and it was just ten minutes and I just sat with that word. But it just completely and radically changed my life. Brought me back to my faith, brought me back to the church, brought me back to his most important part of who I am. Let me to quit my job during my four one K like twenty six years old, and did this crazy idea for an app But it was just this beautiful combination of this deep sense of peace, deeper than any secular meditation or any workout or any breathing exercise or anything I'd ever done, but combined with real like hallo means to make holy. So was God trying to make me holy? Was I letting him make me holy? Was I supposed to be helping other people grow in holiness? And the answer was no. I was just doing my own career, trying to get ahead, trying to do whatever the world literally just following the ways of the world as best as I could.
00:06:30
Speaker 3: And so it was really stressful.
00:06:31
Speaker 4: It was like these big life questions, but it felt like I was wrestling with something real, something on the other side. So I wouldn't do that for the rest of my life and that's what started Hallow certainly not my idea, just got beat me over the head with it till I did something about it.
00:06:44
Speaker 1: But that's so fascinating Hallo obviously the name of your app and it was it really just like in that one moment with that one word that resonated with you and it changed the course of your life.
00:07:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean yeah, is the short answer. I guess the longer answer. You know, there's a bunch of pieces to a spiritual journey you can't fit in a fifteen minute you know, conversation or story and so things get simplified down and you know, so there's an intellectual side to it too, which for me, I'm not the brightest intellectual theological philosophy ball, but I get lost in a handful of the different arguments or whatever. But for me, it was important to have really smart people arguing for Christianity.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: There was a piece of it.
00:07:26
Speaker 4: Like I grew up, Christianity was just dumb. It wasn't thought through, it was just some old man in the sky and actually hearing really smart people argue about it like crack something open, like well, I don't really understand this, but there are really smart people who have thought through this, and they're pretty compelling arguments. I'd say another really big one, and especially looking back, I mean, men mostly just follow what my wife was a saint is a saint and took her faith very seriously. And so I'm sure like ninety nine percent of it is I just wanted to be like my wife and grow close to my wife, so that that's like, that's I'm sure a vast majority of it.
00:07:55
Speaker 3: The prayers of a mother.
00:07:56
Speaker 4: I mean, you can't underestimate the power of the prayers of a mother. So my mom is certainly a massive part of it.
00:08:02
Speaker 3: But yeah, I don't.
00:08:03
Speaker 4: I mean for us, and it's what we're focused on at Hallow, all those things, you know, whether it's appreciating the intellectual side or even diving deeper into service, all of all of the really beautiful parts of faith. It doesn't mean anything if you don't know Jesus, Like if you haven't met Jesus, and you have to know him, you have to meet the guy. It's not just like a it's not just a political ideology that you subscribe to. It's not just a set of things that you like say out loud. It's like you have to know a person, and for me, I didn't. I'd never met him, and so that was the first encounter I think with something real. And I met him in the silence, like I met him in the silence through his word, which is pretty obvious, you know. It's like, well he wrote us a love letter. You should read it and you should sit in silence with it. And I did, and I met him and I fell in love with him and he's changed my life.
00:08:48
Speaker 2: That's so interesting, Alex.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: You said you met him in that moment, and yet you were raised Catholic, you went to either I know, for those of us who were raised Catholic, yes, you go to church every Sunday. But when you aren't in Catholic school, you go to see you go to a weekly type of meeting with priests, and you're learning about Catholicism, you're learning about the Bible. But what was missed in those years that you didn't connect with any of it. It didn't resonate with you in any way. What did perhaps, and I don't want to say the church got it wrong, but how you were raised as a Catholic, obviously it didn't impact you the way it did later when you sought him out on your own. What was missed or what was wrong or why didn't you connect with that at that time?
00:09:35
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, you know, I think at the core it's it's the hardness of my own heart. So it's and actually, Mother Teresa has a really beautiful quote. She's talking to the missionaries of charity, who are nuns who have dedicated their life to serving Jesus and the poor and the poorest parts of the world.
00:09:50
Speaker 3: And she's talking to them and.
00:09:52
Speaker 4: She goes, I worry some of you have still not really met Jesus one to one in your heart. Have you heard him say how much he loves you. Have you heard him say how much she cares for you, how much he thirsts for you, how much he longs for you when you don't come close.
00:10:04
Speaker 3: Like there's is this beautiful quote.
00:10:06
Speaker 4: But she's speaking to people, and even now, I mean I can in my own prayer I feel myself just talking to myself in my own head, and it's like, wait, I'm not talking to myself. I'm not just like listing through a thing or memorizing a thing or repeating a thing. I'm supposed to be I'm supposed to be with Jesus and then like when you raise your mind to him, then you do you encounter him?
00:10:24
Speaker 3: And I don't know. It's sad because I wish there was.
00:10:27
Speaker 4: There's all these words that we as Christians have tried to use, but they've been so overplayed that they've become cheesy. Whether it's encounter or whatever it is, but that's the word, like encounter, you actually do have to meet the guy.
00:10:38
Speaker 3: For me, I don't know.
00:10:40
Speaker 4: The church I think. I mean my church was a beautiful little parish church. They did a great chold proclaiming the word, went to Mass every week, was my dad was elector my mom taught one of the religious classes.
00:10:50
Speaker 3: I mean it was. I think it was almost entirely the hardness of my own heart. And that's I mean.
00:10:56
Speaker 4: There were people alive when Jesus was physically here on earth who did not, you know, really truly encounter him. But for me, I think we have an opportunity as a church to lead with prayer. And you saw this it was a much bigger thing maybe seven or eight years ago, where the number of people who were calling themselves religious had dropped like ten percentage points in the last decade, which is a crazy precipitous drop.
00:11:18
Speaker 3: But it wasn't replaced by atheists.
00:11:19
Speaker 4: It was replaced by people who would call themselves spiritual but not religious. And so there's a part of that that's like, well, you could argue with that. You could say, well, you can't really be spiritual without being religious. Religious is just to set a belief. So if you're spiritual and you're sitting alone and trying to whatever, prayer, meditate, you're praying with something or you're meditating with something, and whenever you ask anybody who's meditating, they always say, yeah, I sit in the silence. There's something else there, Like, there's definitely something else there. And so religion is just trying to put words to that, in structure to that, and help.
00:11:45
Speaker 3: You to live it out.
00:11:47
Speaker 4: But the other thing you could do, as opposed to arguing with it and as opposed to debating it is lean into it and say, okay, hey, you're interested in spiritual life, you're interested in something finding peace and having a relationship with something on you there is something, There is a great piece that the world can offer you, and there's a great love waiting for you that nothing else can offer you. I've got a way for you to find it, and I've got the guy that I've met through this process that i would love for you to meet, and leading with that, I think we as a as a church, as a Christian church, although different groups within Christianity have done a much better job of it than others, but I think we have a real opportunity to lead with that and to just you know, to stop talking and just be silent and just let God talk. You know, we talk so much and we explain what he's saying, but it's just like, hey, just let people alone with God. And that's most of what Halla does is we talk for a little bit, mostly just to make it less intimidating, and then we just leave you in silence for two three minutes and God does these He tells you exactly what you need to hear in the silence in your own heart.
00:12:44
Speaker 3: And it's just beautiful to get to watch.
00:12:47
Speaker 1: And obviously it's resonated, it's hallow, has been downloaded more than eighteen million times. You've surpassed one billion minutes of prayer, and you're the number one Catholic app in the world. I'm curious and this all began in twenty eighteen, so not that long ago. When you were in that period of being an agnostic or even an atheist and searching but not knowing what was out there, could you, in your wildest dreams have imagined that this is where you would be today, the influence you would have, and what your message is.
00:13:34
Speaker 2: To the world.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, how like reflecting back to that period of not knowing and searching to where you are today, that's a pretty dramatic shift.
00:13:46
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's the craziest possible thing you could imagine. I mean, the uh, and it's only getting crazier. I mean, we I think those numbers are probably we sent you and.
00:13:53
Speaker 2: Oh they're old. You got better numbers, bigger number.
00:13:56
Speaker 4: It's like thirty five million or hump and downloads. It's crazy billion prayers. But it's uh. But God just does incredible things. I mean, And it's funny, like the influence. When you say the influence I have, I don't do anything. I just I just put microphones in front of people that read scripture and then leave people in silence. And God does so it's literally and when we've tried to do things, it's always failed, and it's just us letting God do it. And so the influences and anything that works or anything that impacts souls is just God. But yeah, I mean, had you told me we built the first thing just for me, I liked the structure of this app. I wanted to grow deeper in this practice of prayer. I had never a real contemplative, meditative prayer in silence, and I couldn't find anything. And I knew how to code a little bit. It was kind of fun. So we did it as a project for me. Maybe spend a couple months building something and helps me get into heaven a little bit, and maybe hey, there's a friend or family or something who finds use of it. But had you told me like a thousand people would use this thing, I would have told you were absolutely insane.
00:14:55
Speaker 3: That's a lot. A thousand is a lot of people.
00:14:57
Speaker 4: Like if you look outside and you were if you were given, if I I was given to talk to it a thousand people, I would be pretty nervous. Like you're standing in front of a big room of people, ten thousand people. It's like, okay, that's that's also really big. And then it's like one hundred thousand. It's just I don't, I can't.
00:15:10
Speaker 3: My mind doesn't even doesn't a million, My mind doesn't.
00:15:14
Speaker 1: Even MetLife Stadium is seventy thousand people. But you're it's so much more than that, Like that's that's mind blowing.
00:15:20
Speaker 3: But it speaks to just this.
00:15:22
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just it's God has been very kind to me in that. It's there's absolutely no chance that any of it was what we did. We have an incredible team who does a lot of really beautiful work, but all of it is God, and He just each one of the you know, we got to number one in the App Store, which no faith based app had ever done in the history of the App Store. We did that twice now, and each one of those was just like the app was about to crash. Everything was failing, and then we just surrender it to God and we're like, look, God, this is your thing. If you want it to fail, it'll fail. If you want it to succeed, it'll succeed. The one thing we are not going to do is we're not going to take the credit. And he was like, all right, good, that's what I was waiting for. Now you can watch it go to number one or now you can get whatever number thing that is exciting and fun. And for us it's I don't know that the numbers are fun, but like like like thirty five, if we got to seventy million downloads, I don't, I mean, there's no I don't. I don't have any I don't have any conception of what that is. For us, it's it's mostly watching what God does and people who are really lost.
00:16:22
Speaker 3: And really fallen away.
00:16:24
Speaker 4: I mean, we've had moms who have lost children, who haven't been able to eat and months, who are able to get out of bed for the first time. We've had dads who are alcoholics who haven't been able to be there for their kids, who are able to be sober for the first time. We've had young people who are really really wrestling with depression and suicide who are able to find some sense of hope. It's some sense of peace again. And I mean, it's just like the coolest possible things you could imagine. We get to watch God do in people's lives, and so it's just the greatest blessing of a lifetime to get to watch them do it.
00:16:50
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: And you've enlisted some pretty high profile folks or I don't know how this all if they've come to you, if you've gone to them.
00:16:56
Speaker 2: But when I started seeing names like.
00:17:00
Speaker 1: Gwen Stefani, Chris Pratt, Mark Wahlberg, just to name Liam Nice and Kevin James, I mean, just all of Hollywood's A listers being a part of this in terms of the meditations and leading folks down a certain path. How does that collaboration even take place? Because look, a lot of a lot of celebrities don't want to attach themselves to certain either political beliefs or religious beliefs. They don't want to alienate themselves from their potential fans. I just I think it's remarkable to have such big names be a part of something like this.
00:17:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, and people, especially people that don't live in you know, like in Chicago, even it's it's where I live, you'd be surprised, it's hard to relate to. But certainly in the middle of the country and most of the country, but in LA and parts of New York, in you know, San Francisco, but especially Hollywood, like it takes an actual it takes a tremendous amount of courage to step out and speak publicly about your faith people. The number of voices that will come out and say, you know your career is going to be over. You know you're never going to be on Netflix again. You know, whatever it is that the world holds up as something that you're going to achieve is something that you have to sacrifice. And so for each of these people, it does take a tremendous amount of courage. Now they all actually, I mean, and they're the nicest people. It's funny that they're They're all hilarious, super humble, very nice, and have gotten to a point where they're just like, look, God gave me these things. I just want to use the gifts that God has given me to bring other people to the Lord and share what He's done for me in a way that's relatable and not like I'm shoving anything down anybody's throat. But I'm just inviting you to the thing that's changed my life. And you know, I'm going to get a lot of hate for it, and that's fine. I get a lot of hate for a lot of things, and if I get hate for Jesus, then that's great. I mean, each one of them has been a story of God working in people's lives. And us getting the great benefit of that. I mean, Mark Jonathan Rumy from The Chosen Mark Wahlberg were probably the two earliest ones. So Hala was really very not well known at all when they started working together. And Mark had just had this call from the Lord to work on Father Steu. And so we got to partner a little bit because we were kind of a niche religious app at that time, and so we got to help kind of promote that movie or work together on content surrounding that movie a little bit, and then we just got to know each other and started trying to do more work together. And Mark's line was like, I felt like Father Stu was the God asked me to do one thing, and it was like, Okay, I'm just going to do this Father stew thing and then I'll be done and I can go back to my normal life. And it's like I cracked the door open and he just took the whole He took the whole thing, and so now it's all and both him and Chris, and Chris has been phenomenal.
00:19:40
Speaker 3: Chris like posted.
00:19:41
Speaker 4: About praying with the app, and so we reached out to him and started working together because he had been using the app separately, but both him and Mark had said that, you know, they they get people coming up to them now more so than any other movie that they've done or any show that they've done, and just saying, hey, I just wanted to let you know I pray with you. You know, you know you helped me grow closer to Jesus, So thank you. When is like the most humble, incredible person I've met. She's and she started she posted about using the app to something publicly, and then we started working together. Kevin is like the most faithful guy, one of the closest people to Jesus, and absolutely hilarious. Obviously, well it's funny because you meet a comedian and you're like, eh, you know, they're probably I mean, I've seen their stand up. They're probably not actually that funny, and they are actually mostly hilarious. But for them too, it's it's funny. The vast majority on the content is of the content on the app is led by kind of spiritual guides, so people that you probably wouldn't know the names of who are very deep, prayerful people, very deep scripture experts or theologians or whatever it is. But our goal really is to reach out to the people that have fallen away, that don't walk into churches often, or who haven't tried praying in a while. And unfortunately, my face does not get you to stop scrolling for half a second, but Marx does and Chriss does, and we have just countless, countless people who are like, wait, is that the guy from the Bear movies? Or is that the guy from Perks and rech telling me about Jesus?
00:21:01
Speaker 3: Like what is this?
00:21:02
Speaker 4: And it's just weird enough that I'm going to give it a try, or I'm going to at least see what it's about. And that's just enough. That's all God needs. And then he hooks you for one minute of prayer, two minutes of silence, and then tells you the thing that's been on your heart forever. So it's really cool to watch those guys step out, be courageous and invite other people into a relationship with Jesus.
00:21:21
Speaker 2: It's very cool.
00:21:22
Speaker 1: And for the skeptics out there, because look, anyone who's listening to this isn't necessarily we don't all think or believe the same things, but I think we all want the same things out of life and peace and security and to know love is all a part of it. What would you say, what is the power of prayer? Where does the power lie like when you meditate, when you pray, when you use hallow, what do you hope people receive from it?
00:21:51
Speaker 3: You know? I mean most people say.
00:21:56
Speaker 4: Most people say peace when they think about hollow you want peace. Our lives are full of noise and busyness and stress, and your mind is just racing in a thousand different places. And so when you sit down for two seconds, and it's hard actually, like at the beginning, it's really hard.
00:22:12
Speaker 3: It's like going for a run the first time.
00:22:13
Speaker 4: It becomes therapeutic after a while, but for the first time, it's really hard to go for a run. For the first time, it's really hard to sit in silence because you got all this crap in your head, like all this Twitter feed and all this Instagram reels and all this whatever it is, the stress about the news or your job or all the things that are just percolating in your mind.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: That I had a.
00:22:31
Speaker 4: Spiritual director who said, like, it's like a snow globe that just constantly is being shaken around. You're constantly being shaken around. And then when you sit in silence. You just like let the snow just kind of all and drift, and there's like this tremendous sense of peace and recollection. It's like you're coming back to yourself. It's this really beautiful experience of finding real peace. Not like you know, where do you turn when you're really stressed. It's usually a Netflix show or scrolling or alcohol or whatever it is it's and those never give real peace, Like you never end with like, oh I feel now after scrolling for thirty minutes, I now feel like I am ready to take on something else. You're just distracted, You're more dissociated. But I so that's I think what most people would say is peace. I think for me, though, I mean there's something deeper than peace, which is certainly you collect yourself, but then you get to like really deep, really difficult places, really really quick. We all have places in our life that are really tough. And what God pours into it is just love. He just pours in love and he just well And it's so funny because I'm I like to consider myself a young man still, and as a young man, you like, don't that doesn't it doesn't appeal as much like if you if I heard it saying, if I heard someone saying that, like, hey, you're gonna sit down and somebody's going to pour love into you.
00:23:55
Speaker 3: But you just don't know how much you need it. It's just it's it's it.
00:23:58
Speaker 4: Is the only thing you need, and it's like you sit. It's like me, I have four little kid as, like the real tiny little kid as, a four year old and a two year old boy, and like, if I had one thing, if I'm just sitting with them and I had silence with them, and I just want them to know one thing, it would just be how much and how profoundly I love them.
00:24:13
Speaker 3: That's it.
00:24:14
Speaker 4: If they get nothing else from me for the rest of their life, that's the only thing I want. And that's the same thing God wants infinitely more. Is he just wants to sit in silence and let you know how profoundly and deeply you are loved. And then that love sets you on fire to go serve the poor, to go do good in the world, to go be a better person, all the different things that the Christian life calls you too. But it starts with this tremendous outpouring of love and It's just the best thing in the world for anybody who's ever been in love or ever felt love or the love of like something truly pure, to be loved that profoundly, and it's infinitely more than that, and it just changes everything. It brings you peace, certainly, but courage and purpose and meaning and everything that you are searching for, answers to your difficult questions, what you're going to do with your life, trust, surrender, The anxiety goes away. It's like you still have all these difficulties, but you face them with someone. It's like, well, I have the God of the universe who loves me and is right here, right next to me right now, So what could go wrong. There's nothing that could go wrong. Nothing matters.
00:25:10
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
00:25:10
Speaker 4: For me. It's if I had one thing from Hallow, it would just be for especially people who haven't heard it, but even for people who have just that they know how profoundly and how deeply.
00:25:19
Speaker 3: They are loved.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: Ah, that's absolutely beautiful. I want to ask on behalf of.
00:25:34
Speaker 1: Folks who might say, how can I feel love from something I can't see? How can I receive love from something I don't know?
00:25:45
Speaker 2: Whether or not it or they or he exists.
00:25:49
Speaker 1: Because you were in that camp, you were admittedly exploring it, being an agnostic, being an atheist, and so you know profoundly, maybe even more than most, what it's like to to question or to just not believe in the supernatural, not believe in a higher power.
00:26:05
Speaker 2: How did you I'm just so curious how you.
00:26:08
Speaker 1: Went from that to feeling this love, to believing in this love, to having the faith that it requires to receive all of what Hallo and the connection you're able to make. But do you have to suspend judgment? Do you have to have a belief system in place? Can you sit down and listen to your app and just see where it takes you. I'm curious how you think folks should potentially use this or approach this if they're in that place, whether they're not sure or they kind of think they know nothing exists outside of this world.
00:26:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think there's any argument I could there's certainly no argument I could have said to me that would have convinced me of what I just said and that what I just said is true.
00:26:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of like, I don't know.
00:27:01
Speaker 4: When you have kids, you just enter this new state of reality that you love something more than you ever could have imagined. It's like I would cut off my leg to make you smile, like it's it's a crazy love in it. And to explain that to someone else or to rationalize that to someone else, it's like, yeah, I get it, you have like a natural biological whatever. But it's like, no, you don't. You don't get it. It's not you can't. You can't explain it. There's no words that come with it. It just you have to you have to feel it. I don't know for me, And this was the thing that resonated most with me. It was like, I can promise you it's real. You can't see him, you can't, you can't, you don't always even feel him. But I can promise you he's real, And so why not just try it, Like, just give it a try.
00:27:45
Speaker 3: And maybe maybe maybe I'm a.
00:27:48
Speaker 4: Total psychopath and I've just lost my complete mind and I'm just living in a completely external reality. And but you know, fine, but I don't think so. And I like my life even if I have lost my mind. I like it a lot better than it was before. So I'm happy with the mind that I've lost, but you've tried everything else. I mean, you've tried everything to try to find peace, You've tried everything to try to find love, You've tried everything to try to find meaning.
00:28:10
Speaker 3: And it doesn't fulfill.
00:28:11
Speaker 4: Money doesn't fulfill, status doesn't fulfill, Achievement doesn't fulfill. Not even people can fulfill, not even real relationships. They always let you down.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: Everything.
00:28:18
Speaker 4: Everybody always lets you down. That's fine, that's people, that's life. But there's one that doesn't. And you should just give it a try. But you got to give it a try for like a real period of time. You can't be like, Okay, I'm gonna sit down for like five minutes and if I don't feel anything, fine, you got to give like two years. Now that's kind of crazy, but whatever, you got to do like two years something real where you're like, you know what, I'm going to try this thing and so what then you prove God doesn't exist after two years, so fine, And then just try to listen for him. Don't try to talk to him, although you can share with him what's on your heart, but just try to actually listen to him, not just in your head, actually listen. And the thing is it's in silence. So you have to learn to sit in silence. And if you learn to sit in silence, it's Elijah goes up to the mountain, Old Testament. Great win comes by God's not in the wind, great earthquake comes by God's not in the earthquake, a great fire comes by God's not in the fire. And in the silence, a still small voice comes by. And so the question is is there a still small voice? Try to learn to sit in the silence and to listen. And that's I mean, you can do that in a bunch of different ways. There's God's Word, there's learning how to sit in silence, there's courses, there's a bunch of stuff online, there's an app that literally only does that. We have thousands of thousands of different ways to try to pray. So I would highly recommend it. But it doesn't have to be at Hallow.
00:29:25
Speaker 3: I don't care. Just get to know Jesus. But just give it a try.
00:29:28
Speaker 4: And if you my guess is you're going to meet them because he always, he always reveals himself and it's not maybe it's in a feeling, maybe it's in something that happens to you in your life. Maybe it's in his word, maybe it's him speaking to you directly through scripture. Maybe it's in a song, maybe it's I don't know. He does it a thousand different ways to a thousand different people, but I can promise you he's real.
00:29:46
Speaker 3: So why not just give it a shot? Is what do you have to lose? That's my pitch to myself.
00:29:51
Speaker 2: I love that, and you know what I loved.
00:29:53
Speaker 1: I love the pitch and I love the analogy you made to running. I'm a runner, And that totally landed for me because, yeah, it's not fun at first, and you're going against maybe even what you want to be doing. But if you do it enough and you keep you keep at it, all of a sudden you get the beauty of it and you become like, for me, that's just a huge part of my life.
00:30:17
Speaker 2: But yeah, it's not fun.
00:30:19
Speaker 1: It's hard, and sometimes you resist it, but once you learn the value of it and what you get from it, and yeah, most things that are worth it, that are valuable, that are meaningful, require work, require patience, require dedication, and so that that really landed for me. I think people can understand it from something that you said, but I thought you were amazing in the pitch you just made.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: I mean, what have you got to lose?
00:30:46
Speaker 4: Well, it is true, like with most good things that actually follows a similar pattern, like eating healthy is very similar. Like the bad things have this huge appeal and it's you know, that's not good for you, even even secularly, like like ignore God. It's like I know tomorrow I'm not gonna be happy that I did this thing. Whatever it is, food or whatever it is, whatever it's sin or bad habit, you're caught in and you give into it because it pulls you right away, and it's easy right away, but then long term is destructive.
00:31:15
Speaker 3: The good stuff, though, is really hard right away. Eating healthy sucks for a while, Like I used to eat McDonald's every day and I loved it, and I tried to stop eating it for like and it was the worst thing, Like you crave it.
00:31:24
Speaker 4: It's like the worst possible thing, breaking any addiction. Going for a run, same thing, Like your.
00:31:28
Speaker 3: Knees hurt, you're out of shape. It's terrible.
00:31:30
Speaker 4: But then there's this thing at the end and you only get to it if you persevere through it, and for running it. Running is such a beautiful example, because it's so hard for so long, but then once you do it, it becomes like a prayer, It becomes very spiritual, it becomes very meditative. You just get in this habit it's and things start to like your your stresses start to clear out, like your mind starts to clear out. It starts to become this place of peace for you. And then it's not that you like crave it. It's like you it's almost like you need it a because it's like, man, if I don't go for a run, like.
00:31:58
Speaker 3: I just feel like crap.
00:32:00
Speaker 4: But it's also like you know the promise that's waiting for you. And it's the same thing with eating healthy. It's like, well, I know how I'm going to feel after this meal, Like I'm gonna feel great and I'm going to feel like my life is clear.
00:32:09
Speaker 3: I'm not lethargic.
00:32:10
Speaker 4: And there's another piece that like when I if you eat decent for like a month or something and then you eat like crap, You're like, wait, I feel awful now. Or you don't go for a run and you rent for a run every day, You're like, wait, I feel terrible. Is this how I used to feel all the time? Like I just I feel like absolutely, like I can't do anything. I'm sluggish, I'm lethargic, I can't I feel bloated.
00:32:31
Speaker 3: It's awful, and prayer is like it. It's very hard at.
00:32:34
Speaker 4: The beginning, but once you get into it, it is this tremendous I don't know, it's this life, it's this life giving thing in your life that then if you don't do it in the morning, you're like or at night or whenever you do it, if you don't do it, you're like, man, I just don't have the thing. I don't have it, And then you feel like crap. You feel scatter brained, You feel like you can't connect with the one thing that matters most to you, and you miss the you miss the beauty of life, which is yeah, heartbreaking.
00:33:00
Speaker 1: I was so inspired by everything you just said, so I can see why Hallo has had this success it's had and I know you wouldn't take credit for it fully, but certainly it's a beautiful gift you have given the world and you're sharing it with everyone with the purest of intentions, and I applaud you for a lot of people will focus on what's going to make them rich or what's gonna they think make them feel good at the end of the day. But you are in service and for that I applaud you, Alex Jones.
00:33:31
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
00:33:32
Speaker 1: I hope everyone listening was inspired to at least check it out. And who doesn't want peace, who doesn't want love in their life? And yes, it comes with a little bit of commitment, but you've made it very easy for folks with using technology. It's you really don't have an excuse not to give it a shot, not to see what it's all about.
00:33:53
Speaker 4: Well, I appreciate it. This has been such a fun conversation. I appreciate you having me on. It's been a blessing. And please pray for me. I'll be praying for you.
00:34:00
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you Alex Jones. Everybody, we appreciate you. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Hey there, everybody, and welcome to your spiritual Sunday. I'm Amy roboch here TJ is with us in spirit. But we have got a very exciting guest. His name is Alex Jones. He's the CEO and co founder of Hello, and I bet a lot of you know exactly what I'm talking about because this is the world's largest Catholic prayer and meditation app And Alex, I was reading the background of how you even got to where you are now, and it's remarkable your story, and I think it will be relatable for a lot of people, or at least for anyone who's questioned their faith or anyone who is lost their way and is trying to find their way back to some sort of religion, some sort of spiritual path. And you have taken your personal experience and created a remarkable organization that is helping so many people find their way as well.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: So welcome Alex to the podcast.
00:01:00
Speaker 3: Well, thanks so much for having me.
00:01:01
Speaker 4: All praise to God. I appreciate the kind words he does. God does really cool things. I just screw it up all the time and then he fixes it for us. But it's been really cool to watch him work he's done absolutely phenomenal things.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: So it's been a blessing.
00:01:14
Speaker 1: Well, it's a blessing to have you here on the program because I just think your story is probably so familiar to a lot of people. I too was raised Catholic as well, so I come from that background and had my daughters go to Catholic school. My daughter actually went, my little one went from pre K all the way until she graduated from high school here in the city at Catholic school. So very familiar with that specific religion. But tell me a little bit about your journey and your faith because you two were raised Catholic and then you drifted away as a teenager, So can you explain a little bit about that part of your life.
00:01:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the one thing that I'd say, we certainly I'm Catholic and I love being Catholic.
00:01:54
Speaker 3: It's changed my life.
00:01:55
Speaker 4: And I'll tell a little bit of the journey to me coming back to my faith. But Hallo is Hell is just about trying to grow deeper in a relationship with Jesus.
00:02:03
Speaker 3: We don't do any other religions. It's just Jesus.
00:02:05
Speaker 4: But anybody who's interested in a relationship with Jesus is uh is well meant hollow. We started very focused in the in the Catholic world, and we're always authentically Catholic. It's we never hide who we are, but we've always tried to build something for anybody of any Christian background. So at this point we probably have about half the people on the app who are Catholic and half the.
00:02:23
Speaker 3: People who are who are Protestant. Brothers and sisters are people interested in broader Christian spirituality. But yeah, my.
00:02:29
Speaker 4: Journey, so I was, like you said, I was raised Catholic by my mom, dragged me through all the Catholic sacraments in religious education, all that Jazz is a saint of a woman. But when I was a teenager, high school, college, fell away from my faith. Would have considered myself agnostic or atheist for that time. And when I graduated, I got really I started working, you know as stressful, working life, busyness, anxiety, all that stuff. But even more so than that, I was fascinated with this idea of whatever a spiritual and contemplative life was, of like trying to find real peace. And so I started meditating. I started trying to figure out how to meditate, and this was maybe seven eight years ago, and so I was about my mind first went to kind of India and Eastern Buddhist meditation, and so I was about to hop on a flight to go to India, and the flight was like two grand and there was these two apps that had just launched, had Space and Calm that kind of walked you through secular Eastern Buddhist meditation mindfulness meditation, and they were like seventy bucks. So I was like, all right, I'll give the apps to try. That's a lot cheaper than the flights. And I loved them. I started using them. I started using them every day, and I thought they were great. Like really it was almost like technology without technology, Like you could piss a pick, pick a session, press play, close your eyes, plug in your headphones, and be led through this meditation.
00:03:49
Speaker 3: You didn't have to go to a studio. It was just ten minutes.
00:03:51
Speaker 4: Before you went to work. It like was personalized. It was with some of the best guides in the world. And so I really liked the structure of this app. But every time I would meditate and mindfulness meditation and mostly is just you're focusing on your breath for a while and then you let your mind go at the end, and you build up longer times as you advance. And there's a bunch of different ways to meditate, but that's kind of the core way. And every time I would meditate, my mind kept feeling this weird pull towards something spiritual, like an image of the cross, or the name Jesus or the words Holy Spirit. Which I was agnostic, so I thought that was very strange, and I started reaching out to people because it kept happening. I started reaching out to people, you know, whether it was a priest or, a pastor, or a friend who took their faith more seriously than I wasn't. Just asking this question, Hey, is there any way there's some sort of intersection here between this meditation thing and this Jesus thing. And they all laughed at me and said, yeah, it's we've been doing it for two thousand years.
00:04:42
Speaker 3: You probably should have heard about. It's called prayer. And I was like, no, no, I know about prayer. Prayers.
00:04:47
Speaker 4: They're like, hey, thanks for stuff, sorry for stuff. Helped me with stuff or maybe the things that I memorized as a kid. But I had this one pastor who was like, yeah, those are great ways to talk to God, but have you ever tried to listen for him? And I was like, what is that even mean? How do you listen for God? It's not like he calls you in the morning, it's And I started discovering this whole world of contemplative and meditative prayer within Christianity that I just never heard of before. There's dozens and dozens of different techniques, and it makes sense. There's hundreds of thousands of different monks all praying contemplatively within the Christian tradition, and things like suit to be in ignation, spirituality, all these really beautiful caramelize spirituality, recollection chant, all these really beautiful ways to pray. And one of them's like you to vino, which is a way to meditate on scripture. You pick a short passage of Scripture and you pick a word that sticks out to you from it. And so I randomly opened up a Bible, I think it was my wife's that was laying around to Luke a levin where the disciples asked Jesus to teach him how to pray, and he gives them the our Father, our Father, who are and haaven hallowed be thy name, and the word that stuck out to me in that passage was Hallow and it was just ten minutes and I just sat with that word. But it just completely and radically changed my life. Brought me back to my faith, brought me back to the church, brought me back to his most important part of who I am. Let me to quit my job during my four one K like twenty six years old, and did this crazy idea for an app But it was just this beautiful combination of this deep sense of peace, deeper than any secular meditation or any workout or any breathing exercise or anything I'd ever done, but combined with real like hallo means to make holy. So was God trying to make me holy? Was I letting him make me holy? Was I supposed to be helping other people grow in holiness? And the answer was no. I was just doing my own career, trying to get ahead, trying to do whatever the world literally just following the ways of the world as best as I could.
00:06:30
Speaker 3: And so it was really stressful.
00:06:31
Speaker 4: It was like these big life questions, but it felt like I was wrestling with something real, something on the other side. So I wouldn't do that for the rest of my life and that's what started Hallow certainly not my idea, just got beat me over the head with it till I did something about it.
00:06:44
Speaker 1: But that's so fascinating Hallo obviously the name of your app and it was it really just like in that one moment with that one word that resonated with you and it changed the course of your life.
00:07:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean yeah, is the short answer. I guess the longer answer. You know, there's a bunch of pieces to a spiritual journey you can't fit in a fifteen minute you know, conversation or story and so things get simplified down and you know, so there's an intellectual side to it too, which for me, I'm not the brightest intellectual theological philosophy ball, but I get lost in a handful of the different arguments or whatever. But for me, it was important to have really smart people arguing for Christianity.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: There was a piece of it.
00:07:26
Speaker 4: Like I grew up, Christianity was just dumb. It wasn't thought through, it was just some old man in the sky and actually hearing really smart people argue about it like crack something open, like well, I don't really understand this, but there are really smart people who have thought through this, and they're pretty compelling arguments. I'd say another really big one, and especially looking back, I mean, men mostly just follow what my wife was a saint is a saint and took her faith very seriously. And so I'm sure like ninety nine percent of it is I just wanted to be like my wife and grow close to my wife, so that that's like, that's I'm sure a vast majority of it.
00:07:55
Speaker 3: The prayers of a mother.
00:07:56
Speaker 4: I mean, you can't underestimate the power of the prayers of a mother. So my mom is certainly a massive part of it.
00:08:02
Speaker 3: But yeah, I don't.
00:08:03
Speaker 4: I mean for us, and it's what we're focused on at Hallow, all those things, you know, whether it's appreciating the intellectual side or even diving deeper into service, all of all of the really beautiful parts of faith. It doesn't mean anything if you don't know Jesus, Like if you haven't met Jesus, and you have to know him, you have to meet the guy. It's not just like a it's not just a political ideology that you subscribe to. It's not just a set of things that you like say out loud. It's like you have to know a person, and for me, I didn't. I'd never met him, and so that was the first encounter I think with something real. And I met him in the silence, like I met him in the silence through his word, which is pretty obvious, you know. It's like, well he wrote us a love letter. You should read it and you should sit in silence with it. And I did, and I met him and I fell in love with him and he's changed my life.
00:08:48
Speaker 2: That's so interesting, Alex.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: You said you met him in that moment, and yet you were raised Catholic, you went to either I know, for those of us who were raised Catholic, yes, you go to church every Sunday. But when you aren't in Catholic school, you go to see you go to a weekly type of meeting with priests, and you're learning about Catholicism, you're learning about the Bible. But what was missed in those years that you didn't connect with any of it. It didn't resonate with you in any way. What did perhaps, and I don't want to say the church got it wrong, but how you were raised as a Catholic, obviously it didn't impact you the way it did later when you sought him out on your own. What was missed or what was wrong or why didn't you connect with that at that time?
00:09:35
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, you know, I think at the core it's it's the hardness of my own heart. So it's and actually, Mother Teresa has a really beautiful quote. She's talking to the missionaries of charity, who are nuns who have dedicated their life to serving Jesus and the poor and the poorest parts of the world.
00:09:50
Speaker 3: And she's talking to them and.
00:09:52
Speaker 4: She goes, I worry some of you have still not really met Jesus one to one in your heart. Have you heard him say how much he loves you. Have you heard him say how much she cares for you, how much he thirsts for you, how much he longs for you when you don't come close.
00:10:04
Speaker 3: Like there's is this beautiful quote.
00:10:06
Speaker 4: But she's speaking to people, and even now, I mean I can in my own prayer I feel myself just talking to myself in my own head, and it's like, wait, I'm not talking to myself. I'm not just like listing through a thing or memorizing a thing or repeating a thing. I'm supposed to be I'm supposed to be with Jesus and then like when you raise your mind to him, then you do you encounter him?
00:10:24
Speaker 3: And I don't know. It's sad because I wish there was.
00:10:27
Speaker 4: There's all these words that we as Christians have tried to use, but they've been so overplayed that they've become cheesy. Whether it's encounter or whatever it is, but that's the word, like encounter, you actually do have to meet the guy.
00:10:38
Speaker 3: For me, I don't know.
00:10:40
Speaker 4: The church I think. I mean my church was a beautiful little parish church. They did a great chold proclaiming the word, went to Mass every week, was my dad was elector my mom taught one of the religious classes.
00:10:50
Speaker 3: I mean it was. I think it was almost entirely the hardness of my own heart. And that's I mean.
00:10:56
Speaker 4: There were people alive when Jesus was physically here on earth who did not, you know, really truly encounter him. But for me, I think we have an opportunity as a church to lead with prayer. And you saw this it was a much bigger thing maybe seven or eight years ago, where the number of people who were calling themselves religious had dropped like ten percentage points in the last decade, which is a crazy precipitous drop.
00:11:18
Speaker 3: But it wasn't replaced by atheists.
00:11:19
Speaker 4: It was replaced by people who would call themselves spiritual but not religious. And so there's a part of that that's like, well, you could argue with that. You could say, well, you can't really be spiritual without being religious. Religious is just to set a belief. So if you're spiritual and you're sitting alone and trying to whatever, prayer, meditate, you're praying with something or you're meditating with something, and whenever you ask anybody who's meditating, they always say, yeah, I sit in the silence. There's something else there, Like, there's definitely something else there. And so religion is just trying to put words to that, in structure to that, and help.
00:11:45
Speaker 3: You to live it out.
00:11:47
Speaker 4: But the other thing you could do, as opposed to arguing with it and as opposed to debating it is lean into it and say, okay, hey, you're interested in spiritual life, you're interested in something finding peace and having a relationship with something on you there is something, There is a great piece that the world can offer you, and there's a great love waiting for you that nothing else can offer you. I've got a way for you to find it, and I've got the guy that I've met through this process that i would love for you to meet, and leading with that, I think we as a as a church, as a Christian church, although different groups within Christianity have done a much better job of it than others, but I think we have a real opportunity to lead with that and to just you know, to stop talking and just be silent and just let God talk. You know, we talk so much and we explain what he's saying, but it's just like, hey, just let people alone with God. And that's most of what Halla does is we talk for a little bit, mostly just to make it less intimidating, and then we just leave you in silence for two three minutes and God does these He tells you exactly what you need to hear in the silence in your own heart.
00:12:44
Speaker 3: And it's just beautiful to get to watch.
00:12:47
Speaker 1: And obviously it's resonated, it's hallow, has been downloaded more than eighteen million times. You've surpassed one billion minutes of prayer, and you're the number one Catholic app in the world. I'm curious and this all began in twenty eighteen, so not that long ago. When you were in that period of being an agnostic or even an atheist and searching but not knowing what was out there, could you, in your wildest dreams have imagined that this is where you would be today, the influence you would have, and what your message is.
00:13:34
Speaker 2: To the world.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, how like reflecting back to that period of not knowing and searching to where you are today, that's a pretty dramatic shift.
00:13:46
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's the craziest possible thing you could imagine. I mean, the uh, and it's only getting crazier. I mean, we I think those numbers are probably we sent you and.
00:13:53
Speaker 2: Oh they're old. You got better numbers, bigger number.
00:13:56
Speaker 4: It's like thirty five million or hump and downloads. It's crazy billion prayers. But it's uh. But God just does incredible things. I mean, And it's funny, like the influence. When you say the influence I have, I don't do anything. I just I just put microphones in front of people that read scripture and then leave people in silence. And God does so it's literally and when we've tried to do things, it's always failed, and it's just us letting God do it. And so the influences and anything that works or anything that impacts souls is just God. But yeah, I mean, had you told me we built the first thing just for me, I liked the structure of this app. I wanted to grow deeper in this practice of prayer. I had never a real contemplative, meditative prayer in silence, and I couldn't find anything. And I knew how to code a little bit. It was kind of fun. So we did it as a project for me. Maybe spend a couple months building something and helps me get into heaven a little bit, and maybe hey, there's a friend or family or something who finds use of it. But had you told me like a thousand people would use this thing, I would have told you were absolutely insane.
00:14:55
Speaker 3: That's a lot. A thousand is a lot of people.
00:14:57
Speaker 4: Like if you look outside and you were if you were given, if I I was given to talk to it a thousand people, I would be pretty nervous. Like you're standing in front of a big room of people, ten thousand people. It's like, okay, that's that's also really big. And then it's like one hundred thousand. It's just I don't, I can't.
00:15:10
Speaker 3: My mind doesn't even doesn't a million, My mind doesn't.
00:15:14
Speaker 1: Even MetLife Stadium is seventy thousand people. But you're it's so much more than that, Like that's that's mind blowing.
00:15:20
Speaker 3: But it speaks to just this.
00:15:22
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just it's God has been very kind to me in that. It's there's absolutely no chance that any of it was what we did. We have an incredible team who does a lot of really beautiful work, but all of it is God, and He just each one of the you know, we got to number one in the App Store, which no faith based app had ever done in the history of the App Store. We did that twice now, and each one of those was just like the app was about to crash. Everything was failing, and then we just surrender it to God and we're like, look, God, this is your thing. If you want it to fail, it'll fail. If you want it to succeed, it'll succeed. The one thing we are not going to do is we're not going to take the credit. And he was like, all right, good, that's what I was waiting for. Now you can watch it go to number one or now you can get whatever number thing that is exciting and fun. And for us it's I don't know that the numbers are fun, but like like like thirty five, if we got to seventy million downloads, I don't, I mean, there's no I don't. I don't have any I don't have any conception of what that is. For us, it's it's mostly watching what God does and people who are really lost.
00:16:22
Speaker 3: And really fallen away.
00:16:24
Speaker 4: I mean, we've had moms who have lost children, who haven't been able to eat and months, who are able to get out of bed for the first time. We've had dads who are alcoholics who haven't been able to be there for their kids, who are able to be sober for the first time. We've had young people who are really really wrestling with depression and suicide who are able to find some sense of hope. It's some sense of peace again. And I mean, it's just like the coolest possible things you could imagine. We get to watch God do in people's lives, and so it's just the greatest blessing of a lifetime to get to watch them do it.
00:16:50
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: And you've enlisted some pretty high profile folks or I don't know how this all if they've come to you, if you've gone to them.
00:16:56
Speaker 2: But when I started seeing names like.
00:17:00
Speaker 1: Gwen Stefani, Chris Pratt, Mark Wahlberg, just to name Liam Nice and Kevin James, I mean, just all of Hollywood's A listers being a part of this in terms of the meditations and leading folks down a certain path. How does that collaboration even take place? Because look, a lot of a lot of celebrities don't want to attach themselves to certain either political beliefs or religious beliefs. They don't want to alienate themselves from their potential fans. I just I think it's remarkable to have such big names be a part of something like this.
00:17:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, and people, especially people that don't live in you know, like in Chicago, even it's it's where I live, you'd be surprised, it's hard to relate to. But certainly in the middle of the country and most of the country, but in LA and parts of New York, in you know, San Francisco, but especially Hollywood, like it takes an actual it takes a tremendous amount of courage to step out and speak publicly about your faith people. The number of voices that will come out and say, you know your career is going to be over. You know you're never going to be on Netflix again. You know, whatever it is that the world holds up as something that you're going to achieve is something that you have to sacrifice. And so for each of these people, it does take a tremendous amount of courage. Now they all actually, I mean, and they're the nicest people. It's funny that they're They're all hilarious, super humble, very nice, and have gotten to a point where they're just like, look, God gave me these things. I just want to use the gifts that God has given me to bring other people to the Lord and share what He's done for me in a way that's relatable and not like I'm shoving anything down anybody's throat. But I'm just inviting you to the thing that's changed my life. And you know, I'm going to get a lot of hate for it, and that's fine. I get a lot of hate for a lot of things, and if I get hate for Jesus, then that's great. I mean, each one of them has been a story of God working in people's lives. And us getting the great benefit of that. I mean, Mark Jonathan Rumy from The Chosen Mark Wahlberg were probably the two earliest ones. So Hala was really very not well known at all when they started working together. And Mark had just had this call from the Lord to work on Father Steu. And so we got to partner a little bit because we were kind of a niche religious app at that time, and so we got to help kind of promote that movie or work together on content surrounding that movie a little bit, and then we just got to know each other and started trying to do more work together. And Mark's line was like, I felt like Father Stu was the God asked me to do one thing, and it was like, Okay, I'm just going to do this Father stew thing and then I'll be done and I can go back to my normal life. And it's like I cracked the door open and he just took the whole He took the whole thing, and so now it's all and both him and Chris, and Chris has been phenomenal.
00:19:40
Speaker 3: Chris like posted.
00:19:41
Speaker 4: About praying with the app, and so we reached out to him and started working together because he had been using the app separately, but both him and Mark had said that, you know, they they get people coming up to them now more so than any other movie that they've done or any show that they've done, and just saying, hey, I just wanted to let you know I pray with you. You know, you know you helped me grow closer to Jesus, So thank you. When is like the most humble, incredible person I've met. She's and she started she posted about using the app to something publicly, and then we started working together. Kevin is like the most faithful guy, one of the closest people to Jesus, and absolutely hilarious. Obviously, well it's funny because you meet a comedian and you're like, eh, you know, they're probably I mean, I've seen their stand up. They're probably not actually that funny, and they are actually mostly hilarious. But for them too, it's it's funny. The vast majority on the content is of the content on the app is led by kind of spiritual guides, so people that you probably wouldn't know the names of who are very deep, prayerful people, very deep scripture experts or theologians or whatever it is. But our goal really is to reach out to the people that have fallen away, that don't walk into churches often, or who haven't tried praying in a while. And unfortunately, my face does not get you to stop scrolling for half a second, but Marx does and Chriss does, and we have just countless, countless people who are like, wait, is that the guy from the Bear movies? Or is that the guy from Perks and rech telling me about Jesus?
00:21:01
Speaker 3: Like what is this?
00:21:02
Speaker 4: And it's just weird enough that I'm going to give it a try, or I'm going to at least see what it's about. And that's just enough. That's all God needs. And then he hooks you for one minute of prayer, two minutes of silence, and then tells you the thing that's been on your heart forever. So it's really cool to watch those guys step out, be courageous and invite other people into a relationship with Jesus.
00:21:21
Speaker 2: It's very cool.
00:21:22
Speaker 1: And for the skeptics out there, because look, anyone who's listening to this isn't necessarily we don't all think or believe the same things, but I think we all want the same things out of life and peace and security and to know love is all a part of it. What would you say, what is the power of prayer? Where does the power lie like when you meditate, when you pray, when you use hallow, what do you hope people receive from it?
00:21:51
Speaker 3: You know? I mean most people say.
00:21:56
Speaker 4: Most people say peace when they think about hollow you want peace. Our lives are full of noise and busyness and stress, and your mind is just racing in a thousand different places. And so when you sit down for two seconds, and it's hard actually, like at the beginning, it's really hard.
00:22:12
Speaker 3: It's like going for a run the first time.
00:22:13
Speaker 4: It becomes therapeutic after a while, but for the first time, it's really hard to go for a run. For the first time, it's really hard to sit in silence because you got all this crap in your head, like all this Twitter feed and all this Instagram reels and all this whatever it is, the stress about the news or your job or all the things that are just percolating in your mind.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: That I had a.
00:22:31
Speaker 4: Spiritual director who said, like, it's like a snow globe that just constantly is being shaken around. You're constantly being shaken around. And then when you sit in silence. You just like let the snow just kind of all and drift, and there's like this tremendous sense of peace and recollection. It's like you're coming back to yourself. It's this really beautiful experience of finding real peace. Not like you know, where do you turn when you're really stressed. It's usually a Netflix show or scrolling or alcohol or whatever it is it's and those never give real peace, Like you never end with like, oh I feel now after scrolling for thirty minutes, I now feel like I am ready to take on something else. You're just distracted, You're more dissociated. But I so that's I think what most people would say is peace. I think for me, though, I mean there's something deeper than peace, which is certainly you collect yourself, but then you get to like really deep, really difficult places, really really quick. We all have places in our life that are really tough. And what God pours into it is just love. He just pours in love and he just well And it's so funny because I'm I like to consider myself a young man still, and as a young man, you like, don't that doesn't it doesn't appeal as much like if you if I heard it saying, if I heard someone saying that, like, hey, you're gonna sit down and somebody's going to pour love into you.
00:23:55
Speaker 3: But you just don't know how much you need it. It's just it's it's it.
00:23:58
Speaker 4: Is the only thing you need, and it's like you sit. It's like me, I have four little kid as, like the real tiny little kid as, a four year old and a two year old boy, and like, if I had one thing, if I'm just sitting with them and I had silence with them, and I just want them to know one thing, it would just be how much and how profoundly I love them.
00:24:13
Speaker 3: That's it.
00:24:14
Speaker 4: If they get nothing else from me for the rest of their life, that's the only thing I want. And that's the same thing God wants infinitely more. Is he just wants to sit in silence and let you know how profoundly and deeply you are loved. And then that love sets you on fire to go serve the poor, to go do good in the world, to go be a better person, all the different things that the Christian life calls you too. But it starts with this tremendous outpouring of love and It's just the best thing in the world for anybody who's ever been in love or ever felt love or the love of like something truly pure, to be loved that profoundly, and it's infinitely more than that, and it just changes everything. It brings you peace, certainly, but courage and purpose and meaning and everything that you are searching for, answers to your difficult questions, what you're going to do with your life, trust, surrender, The anxiety goes away. It's like you still have all these difficulties, but you face them with someone. It's like, well, I have the God of the universe who loves me and is right here, right next to me right now, So what could go wrong. There's nothing that could go wrong. Nothing matters.
00:25:10
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
00:25:10
Speaker 4: For me. It's if I had one thing from Hallow, it would just be for especially people who haven't heard it, but even for people who have just that they know how profoundly and how deeply.
00:25:19
Speaker 3: They are loved.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: Ah, that's absolutely beautiful. I want to ask on behalf of.
00:25:34
Speaker 1: Folks who might say, how can I feel love from something I can't see? How can I receive love from something I don't know?
00:25:45
Speaker 2: Whether or not it or they or he exists.
00:25:49
Speaker 1: Because you were in that camp, you were admittedly exploring it, being an agnostic, being an atheist, and so you know profoundly, maybe even more than most, what it's like to to question or to just not believe in the supernatural, not believe in a higher power.
00:26:05
Speaker 2: How did you I'm just so curious how you.
00:26:08
Speaker 1: Went from that to feeling this love, to believing in this love, to having the faith that it requires to receive all of what Hallo and the connection you're able to make. But do you have to suspend judgment? Do you have to have a belief system in place? Can you sit down and listen to your app and just see where it takes you. I'm curious how you think folks should potentially use this or approach this if they're in that place, whether they're not sure or they kind of think they know nothing exists outside of this world.
00:26:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think there's any argument I could there's certainly no argument I could have said to me that would have convinced me of what I just said and that what I just said is true.
00:26:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of like, I don't know.
00:27:01
Speaker 4: When you have kids, you just enter this new state of reality that you love something more than you ever could have imagined. It's like I would cut off my leg to make you smile, like it's it's a crazy love in it. And to explain that to someone else or to rationalize that to someone else, it's like, yeah, I get it, you have like a natural biological whatever. But it's like, no, you don't. You don't get it. It's not you can't. You can't explain it. There's no words that come with it. It just you have to you have to feel it. I don't know for me, And this was the thing that resonated most with me. It was like, I can promise you it's real. You can't see him, you can't, you can't, you don't always even feel him. But I can promise you he's real, And so why not just try it, Like, just give it a try.
00:27:45
Speaker 3: And maybe maybe maybe I'm a.
00:27:48
Speaker 4: Total psychopath and I've just lost my complete mind and I'm just living in a completely external reality. And but you know, fine, but I don't think so. And I like my life even if I have lost my mind. I like it a lot better than it was before. So I'm happy with the mind that I've lost, but you've tried everything else. I mean, you've tried everything to try to find peace, You've tried everything to try to find love, You've tried everything to try to find meaning.
00:28:10
Speaker 3: And it doesn't fulfill.
00:28:11
Speaker 4: Money doesn't fulfill, status doesn't fulfill, Achievement doesn't fulfill. Not even people can fulfill, not even real relationships. They always let you down.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: Everything.
00:28:18
Speaker 4: Everybody always lets you down. That's fine, that's people, that's life. But there's one that doesn't. And you should just give it a try. But you got to give it a try for like a real period of time. You can't be like, Okay, I'm gonna sit down for like five minutes and if I don't feel anything, fine, you got to give like two years. Now that's kind of crazy, but whatever, you got to do like two years something real where you're like, you know what, I'm going to try this thing and so what then you prove God doesn't exist after two years, so fine, And then just try to listen for him. Don't try to talk to him, although you can share with him what's on your heart, but just try to actually listen to him, not just in your head, actually listen. And the thing is it's in silence. So you have to learn to sit in silence. And if you learn to sit in silence, it's Elijah goes up to the mountain, Old Testament. Great win comes by God's not in the wind, great earthquake comes by God's not in the earthquake, a great fire comes by God's not in the fire. And in the silence, a still small voice comes by. And so the question is is there a still small voice? Try to learn to sit in the silence and to listen. And that's I mean, you can do that in a bunch of different ways. There's God's Word, there's learning how to sit in silence, there's courses, there's a bunch of stuff online, there's an app that literally only does that. We have thousands of thousands of different ways to try to pray. So I would highly recommend it. But it doesn't have to be at Hallow.
00:29:25
Speaker 3: I don't care. Just get to know Jesus. But just give it a try.
00:29:28
Speaker 4: And if you my guess is you're going to meet them because he always, he always reveals himself and it's not maybe it's in a feeling, maybe it's in something that happens to you in your life. Maybe it's in his word, maybe it's him speaking to you directly through scripture. Maybe it's in a song, maybe it's I don't know. He does it a thousand different ways to a thousand different people, but I can promise you he's real.
00:29:46
Speaker 3: So why not just give it a shot? Is what do you have to lose? That's my pitch to myself.
00:29:51
Speaker 2: I love that, and you know what I loved.
00:29:53
Speaker 1: I love the pitch and I love the analogy you made to running. I'm a runner, And that totally landed for me because, yeah, it's not fun at first, and you're going against maybe even what you want to be doing. But if you do it enough and you keep you keep at it, all of a sudden you get the beauty of it and you become like, for me, that's just a huge part of my life.
00:30:17
Speaker 2: But yeah, it's not fun.
00:30:19
Speaker 1: It's hard, and sometimes you resist it, but once you learn the value of it and what you get from it, and yeah, most things that are worth it, that are valuable, that are meaningful, require work, require patience, require dedication, and so that that really landed for me. I think people can understand it from something that you said, but I thought you were amazing in the pitch you just made.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: I mean, what have you got to lose?
00:30:46
Speaker 4: Well, it is true, like with most good things that actually follows a similar pattern, like eating healthy is very similar. Like the bad things have this huge appeal and it's you know, that's not good for you, even even secularly, like like ignore God. It's like I know tomorrow I'm not gonna be happy that I did this thing. Whatever it is, food or whatever it is, whatever it's sin or bad habit, you're caught in and you give into it because it pulls you right away, and it's easy right away, but then long term is destructive.
00:31:15
Speaker 3: The good stuff, though, is really hard right away. Eating healthy sucks for a while, Like I used to eat McDonald's every day and I loved it, and I tried to stop eating it for like and it was the worst thing, Like you crave it.
00:31:24
Speaker 4: It's like the worst possible thing, breaking any addiction. Going for a run, same thing, Like your.
00:31:28
Speaker 3: Knees hurt, you're out of shape. It's terrible.
00:31:30
Speaker 4: But then there's this thing at the end and you only get to it if you persevere through it, and for running it. Running is such a beautiful example, because it's so hard for so long, but then once you do it, it becomes like a prayer, It becomes very spiritual, it becomes very meditative. You just get in this habit it's and things start to like your your stresses start to clear out, like your mind starts to clear out. It starts to become this place of peace for you. And then it's not that you like crave it. It's like you it's almost like you need it a because it's like, man, if I don't go for a run, like.
00:31:58
Speaker 3: I just feel like crap.
00:32:00
Speaker 4: But it's also like you know the promise that's waiting for you. And it's the same thing with eating healthy. It's like, well, I know how I'm going to feel after this meal, Like I'm gonna feel great and I'm going to feel like my life is clear.
00:32:09
Speaker 3: I'm not lethargic.
00:32:10
Speaker 4: And there's another piece that like when I if you eat decent for like a month or something and then you eat like crap, You're like, wait, I feel awful now. Or you don't go for a run and you rent for a run every day, You're like, wait, I feel terrible. Is this how I used to feel all the time? Like I just I feel like absolutely, like I can't do anything. I'm sluggish, I'm lethargic, I can't I feel bloated.
00:32:31
Speaker 3: It's awful, and prayer is like it. It's very hard at.
00:32:34
Speaker 4: The beginning, but once you get into it, it is this tremendous I don't know, it's this life, it's this life giving thing in your life that then if you don't do it in the morning, you're like or at night or whenever you do it, if you don't do it, you're like, man, I just don't have the thing. I don't have it, And then you feel like crap. You feel scatter brained, You feel like you can't connect with the one thing that matters most to you, and you miss the you miss the beauty of life, which is yeah, heartbreaking.
00:33:00
Speaker 1: I was so inspired by everything you just said, so I can see why Hallo has had this success it's had and I know you wouldn't take credit for it fully, but certainly it's a beautiful gift you have given the world and you're sharing it with everyone with the purest of intentions, and I applaud you for a lot of people will focus on what's going to make them rich or what's gonna they think make them feel good at the end of the day. But you are in service and for that I applaud you, Alex Jones.
00:33:31
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
00:33:32
Speaker 1: I hope everyone listening was inspired to at least check it out. And who doesn't want peace, who doesn't want love in their life? And yes, it comes with a little bit of commitment, but you've made it very easy for folks with using technology. It's you really don't have an excuse not to give it a shot, not to see what it's all about.
00:33:53
Speaker 4: Well, I appreciate it. This has been such a fun conversation. I appreciate you having me on. It's been a blessing. And please pray for me. I'll be praying for you.
00:34:00
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you Alex Jones. Everybody, we appreciate you. Thanks for being on the podcast.