EP355 Live Recording: Can AI Share Jesus? A Digital Mission Conversation with Apologist.ai

Jeff Reed: All right. Hey, we got episode 356 live recording here. Episode 356 of the Church Digital Podcast. Jeff here. Excited. You know what? I have been wanting to have this conversation today. And if I were to say for months, like that's not an exaggeration. It just seems like. Every time I try to schedule a conversation and the majority of time was my fault. Like I'm not I'm not throwing Jake under the under the bus here. Like just stuff always seemed to pop up. And even today, you know, some stuff came up and I was like, no. I am not canceling on Jake again. We're going to make this work. And so I'm excited to bring Jake Carlson into the conversation from Apologist Project here in a minute. But before I get there, everybody, quick heads up. And this is not a quick heads up. You may have heard of this small little thing we're doing called the Digital Missionary Conference. And so we did a conference back in April, 1,500 people from around the country, around the world. came in. 85 countries registered to attend this thing. It was incredible. 1,100 people showed up day of. We had so much success and so much interest and so much excitement in this thing. We did it another time. We're doing it coming up here in September and October. As a matter of fact, maybe we went a little crazy. We're doing four conferences in four subsequent weeks. Yeah, okay, it is a little crazy. But the good news is you get plenty of insight coming up in September, October. Here's the deal. We're doing four conferences. The first one, September 17th, Digital Neighborhoods. Digital Discipleship. digital church planting, digital cultures in these platforms. This is what we're going to get talking about in the September 17th Digital Neighborhoods Conference. September 24th is going to be Control-R-Recover. What does recovery look like in digital and virtual spaces? October 1st is all about our European friends, the European Digital Missionary Summit. And then October 8th is going to be the Gaming Summit. And so everything centered around church inside video games, church in Discord, being missional in digital, excuse me, in gaming spaces and using gaming tools inside gaming culture. some really fascinating opportunities coming up listen with the first conference conference we went really big and we tried to do something for everybody and here with uh with these conferences coming up with these summits we're making it much more niched much more nuanced to be very specific for individuals so if you're someone that's that's interested in understanding how to be a digital missionary. That's the September 17th, One Neighborhoods. If you're curious how recovery looks like and how to do ministry with people that are struggling with addiction in digital spaces, well, that's Control-Alt-Recover. If you're on the 24th, if you're in Europe and are curious what God is doing, digitally in europe well you got to come to the october first one and then if you're interested at all in reaching people in gaming spaces come to the october 8th more information on all of this is going to be on the website missionary.digital www.missionary.digital so if you haven't registered yet Go register. And then the next thing I need you to do, real quick, go to the website share, S-H-A-R-E, .missionary.digital. We need your help to get the word out on these conferences, and we would love you to grab some graphics. Post them on social media. Post them in the digital communities. Post them in the places where you hang out digitally and virtually. And invite people to join you for these conferences. What we're discovering more and more is that the type of people that we're training to be digital missionaries are not seminary trained. They're just normal people. And so how many normal people do you know that might be interested in being a digital missionary and sharing Jesus online? What a great concept. Maybe you can invite someone to these conferences so that they can maybe discover a digital calling and start to help you even doing ministry as God has called you to as well. So more information at the website www.missionary.digital. for the conferences and the media kits where you can share all the graphics at the website share, S-H-A-R-E.missionary.digital. Well, you know what? I always hate the announcement part of this because I gotta talk really fast to get all the info in because I really don't wanna disrespect the guests and what's coming up here in the conversation. And so I'm excited here. to push a button and bring on Jake Carlson, who is the founder of Apologist Project. And so Jake, once again, thank you for jumping on the show.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. It's great to be here, Jeff.

Jeff Reed: I gotta tell you, just right off the bat, I was talking to Jake off air, and seeing the drum kit right behind him is like, that is just an awesome reveal. It's an awesome backdrop. My son, last night, he was playing his bass guitar through the bass amp. It was kind of reverberating the windows here. And I was happy. I love me a subwoofer. Like, that's my happy place. I'm so happy, my son. chose on his own to play bass guitar because it's my favorite instrument by far. But if he would have brought home a drum kit and said, Daddy, I want to play this, I think he'd be sleeping somewhere else. So is this your drum kit or is this someone else's? Like, what's the story?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, so this is my kit. It's actually not to get too geeky on it, but it's it's basically it's an electronic kit, but it's meant to look like an acoustic kit. So it's got, you know, full volume, you know, drums and everything like that in the heads and all the rest. But it's it's fully digital and I can I can play like rhythm games with it and stuff like that. So it's actually awesome.

Jeff Reed: yeah i said now that i look i see the brain for the electric drum kit over right over your shoulder right there so very cool i i it looks so um authentic i guess is the right word it didn't even occur to me was a digital and i like i work with that stuff for like a living and so congratulations you faked me out there a little bit you know i do see some of the cables coming off like underneath the the um the yeah so okay all right you you you uh you pulled it over on me very cool well hey jake let's let's let's dig in here uh you know we do want to get into apologist apologist ai is doing some uh incredible work sharing jesus online artificial intelligence like we're gonna get into this here in a little bit but jake maybe back up a little bit apologist project like how did you get here founding this organization what's the calling what's the story like like give us some background

Jake Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. So I actually grew up as a missionary kid in China. So obviously saw my parents, you know, kind of witnessing there through, you know, English camps and various other means. And so I kind of got the bug early on for evangelism. And growing up, I went to actually a private Christian school over in China with American curriculum. and um through that you know had you know world view studies and so forth so got really interested in apologetics specifically and for anyone who's not aware what apologetics is sometimes i have to explain it but basically it's not apologizing for things but it's it's essentially having a reason kind of defense a rational defense for the christian faith right because I'm sure as most of your listeners are aware, we would say Christianity doesn't conflict with reason, right? It actually has a cohesive revelation for a cohesive kind of worldview and everything like that. So anyway, so coming out of high school and early college, I was really interested in apologetics. And way back then in kind of 2001, I'm kind of dating myself a little bit here, but nascent stages of the Internet saw a lot of philosophical discourse, but primarily the early adopters on the Internet, with some exceptions, were kind of more of a naturalistic philosophy. And so I made myself a promise and also a promise to God during that time, 20, 25 years ago, that i would one day rate on some kind of digital platform for apologetics um so way back then got apologist.com and kept it to this day you know and um fast forward a little bit i had a career about 20 25 years in technology working for a bunch of startups and also some big tech companies like oracle and apple And I've been waiting for a chance. I shouldn't say waiting. I should say I've been a little derelict in my promise to the Lord a little bit. But back in 2023, I finally thought, you know, now's the time. I had just left my most recent startup at that point. And ChatGPT was taking over the world by storm with conversational AI. And I thought to myself, this is too big of an opportunity to ignore. We have to use conversational AI to fulfill the Great Commission, or at least help fulfill the Great Commission as a tool. And so in 2023, started up the nonprofit. We did a quick prototype, went to a hackathon that went pretty well. And since then, you know, we've I'll get into kind of the more details of the product and everything like that a little bit later in the program. But suffice it to say, you know, we've been kind of growing and partnering with various ministries and trying to spread the kingdom any way we can by melding kind of my technology background with my, you know, desire to see the Great Commission fulfilled.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I love the line of being derelict, where it's like you had the calling and then it got shuffled under the bed and priorities kind of kicked in. I'm going to be a little aggressive here. Do you mind telling the story or what that was like? What was the wake-up call for you?

Jake Carlson: You know, I don't know if there was a there was a moment in time per se that, you know, I got hit upside the head. It was more like that was during the tech layoffs. And so I think that that timing was God kind of giving me a kick in the butt saying like, OK, like, yeah, you're looking for a new job. But, you know, there's this thing that you've, you know. Every decade I would spin up a new project and try to start it and stuff like that, but something would get in the way. And so I think that exact timing, God's timing is perfect. And so I think that was his little nudge saying like, okay, what's your excuse now?

Jeff Reed: Go do it. I love that, ran out of excuses. Well, let's dig in here a little bit. Talk to us about specifically what Apologist Project, Apologist AI, what are we looking at here?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, so essentially we build conversational AIs for Christian evangelism and discipleship. And what that looks like, I kind of go through the history a little bit, but what it initially looked like is, hey, can we build a conversational AI that, you know, somebody could go to just like ChatGPT to ask a question and get a response from a Christian worldview rather than, you know, secular bias. So that's kind of how we started. Right. And then there's been a bit of an evolution to the point where, you know, somewhere in 2024, kind of a year, year and a half into it. We kind of have an epiphany where it's like, well, you could have one chat bot and that that's great. But that's not how that's not how best to contextualize the gospel. You need you actually need several or, you know, dozens or whatever people. purpose-built conversational AIs that minister to a particular demographic, right? So it is very different. It's a very different thing to minister to a Western atheist than it is to a Middle Eastern Muslim, right? That's a completely different kettle of fish. and so you know you you hearken back to things like you know paul at mars hill right like if you if you under remember that story like in athens like he's he's talking to the greeks right and he's you know he's using kind of philosophical terms and saying and you and playing off of their situation and their kind of um you know their their situation in terms of you know polytheism and so forth and so You know, in the same way, we're able to create kind of bespoke agents that will be programmed in such a way that will minister to a particular people group and kind of use language that they would be more familiar with. Not only when I say language, I'm not just talking about like the spoken language, but also the vocabulary itself. Right. So, for example, for a Muslim seeker, you know, we use the word Isa instead of Jesus. Right. Because that's that's the Muslim term for the prophet Jesus. Right. And then in a similar way, we're able to kind of loop in Quranic verses by saying like, hey, this is what the Quran says about Jesus. Hey, check this out. That actually loops into what the Bible says. And here's a comparison or contrast or whatever. And so that epiphany kind of in mid 2024 kind of set us on a course where we're no longer just a conversational AI that people can go to, but we're actually a platform whereby missional organizations can create their own their own bespoke conversational AIs that minister to the people that they want to. And so we can kind of plug in to their media to movement kind of workflows or any kind of situation that they want to plug into their digital strategy. We can kind of plug in with integrations and so forth as well.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, there's, I mean, there's so much in what you said right there. But let's back up and chew away at some of it. So you are, you've created an AI, a specific multiple AI agents that adapt to different global cultures. You know, you're talking about the Muslim speaking Esau instead of Jesus and using... more language that is more not necessarily um you know dictionary correct but more comfortable in in the modern cultures of that like um how how was that trying to get the ai to adapt to uh different cultures shaping away from just you know a lot of times when i work with ai it's it's mostly general think like from a from a religious standpoint from a practical standpoint from a language standpoint like you know i know you can can tailor to an individual but you're talking all these different cultures and everything what was that experience like to try to get ai to stay focused on on a a specific people group culture

Jake Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll take I'll take our first example that, you know, when in mid 2024, we kind of had that realization. Our first stab at things was, in fact, that that Muslim serving chatbot. And so what we did essentially was we partnered with several different ministries that already had content that ministered to the Muslim population. and then we um and then we coupled that with a partnership with several individuals who are more familiar than i was about ministering to that people group right because i grew up in you know east coast of china not a whole lot of muslim activity there right so so that's not my area of expertise but what we'll do is we'll bring in other ministries or even you know just you know people who are familiar with it to help us frame the prompt engineering for those of you who aren't aware, prompt engineering is basically crafting the instructions for a chatbot so that it will kind of respond the way you want it to. And so there's two key things that I kind of mentioned there. One is what we call a corpus, which is a knowledge base of information by which the chatbot can draw on that information. And the second part is the prompt engineering, and that's the instruction set. How do you use that information? How do you respond? What vocabulary do you use? And that kind of thing. And so what we have now is kind of a really broad ranging corpus that's backing our agents. And our agents can then refer to that content. The way I explain it a lot is, you know, nowadays, most folks have at least dabbled with, you know, some form of chat GPT. And if you haven't, you should definitely try, right? But they're very comfortable with giving, say, a chat GPT a bunch of information and just saying, summarize this for me. I'm too lazy. I don't want to read the whole thing, right? And even though, you know, these commercial models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or, you know, Anthropocene's Clot or whatever, they're trained to be kind of religiously pluralistic, right? So they don't want to, you know, stain anybody's, you know, religion or anything like that. Even though that's the case, they don't really inject their worldview when they're just doing a straightforward task like summarizing text, right? And so what the corpus allows us to do is we have that text for it to summarize. Somebody asks a question like, who is Jesus? Right. Well, we're not just going to go and say, you know, a religiously pluralistic answer, which is like, oh, he's one among many gods or whatever. Right. We're going to be. grab the corpus, some really good content from apologetics and evangelistic organizations, and we're going to essentially tell the AI, hey, we don't care what you think, right? Just tell us what, summarize this content that we already have, right? And so that's how we're able to ground the models in biblical truth is because we're curating these sources and giving the context to these models and simply giving them a straightforward task. Just synthesize and summarize this content that we already have for you.

Jeff Reed: And that's where some of the organization partnerships, which we're talking about with platforms, where now you're allowing other organizations to contribute to the source material to refine and better align in different contexts, right?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, exactly. And so in the, in the case that I mentioned with the Muslim serving chat bot, you know, we partnered with, you know, some of the authors of answering islam.org in case, in case the audience is familiar with that. There's a really good ministry out of Columbia university actually called the Zwemer center. Samuel Zwemer was kind of like the father of you know, mid, mid Eastern Muslim missions kind of thing. So there's organizations that, and then a couple other organizations that kind of had some, some great content online. We kind of, got their permission. And by the way, just a really sidebar on that. Like we know that there's, it's kind of a hot topic with regards to kind of like copyright law and everything like that. We get permission from the authors for everything we use in the corpus. It's, it's kind of gray area in the, in the courts right now, you know, anthropics had some pretty good victories recently, but nonetheless, we want to, especially given the, You know, the manner in which we're trying to promote this ministry, we're trying to be ethically absolutely above board. And so we never put anything we don't have permission to use into the corpus.

Jeff Reed: No, I appreciate that. And we've had conversations about some of the legality and stuff in previous episodes, but that's good. So you're pulling material from other places and getting it into the AI as source material that it can then regurgitate and feedback and be a conversation prompts and things with...

Jake Carlson: with people in different different contexts by the way how many like i mean we're talking about muslim a lot which is fine but like how many different contexts are we looking at globally yeah so um during you know that that pivotal point in 2024 we you know the initial plan was like hey as a first party vendor let's let's actually create all these worldview specific chat bots ourselves right and so that that was kind of pivot point where we're like you know what we're not the the experts in all this, what we really need to do is come alongside other ministries that have these use cases and use their expertise and content to produce these chatbots, right? So now at this point, like we have one for Muslim seekers, we have one for kind of naturalist scientists. We have lots of material from like the Discovery Institute, Reasons to Believe, those kinds of folks. And we have, you know, ones that are more using a more like Socratic method. You know, it's actually pretty interesting because there's a lot of opinions out there about like what's OK and what's not OK. We might get into that later. But but but the Socratic one is more like ask questions, nudge, don't don't just give an answer. Right. Whereas some of our smaller ones just kind of give you an answer. So we have, you know, to date on our platform, I think the count is up to like 120 or so different agents.

Jeff Reed: And that's.

Jake Carlson: Some of them are demos, but a lot of them are other ministries either playing around with it or in production.

Jeff Reed: Even things like implementing a Socratic method, that's more the tone of the conversation and the posture of the AI even adjusts based on the agent. I didn't realize that. That's interesting. So and I'm going to show some ignorance, but like, you know, I know some languages are right to left versus left to right. And some of that like you're you're adapting for that. How do you I'm curious, how do you like for a Jewish someone that's maybe a Jew that's asking some questions? How how how would the A.I. handle something like that?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. So we actually support right now 192 languages. And that's basically like the base models, the frontier, newest frontier base models like ChatGPT-5, for example, just got released, support anywhere in the neighborhood of like 50 to 80 languages natively. But then on top of that, right, we also have a real-time translation module. And so that opens up, you know, some of those less spoken languages, right? And I can show a demo of that a little bit later. And so Hebrew is one of the languages that actually is more well supported by a lot of these. And so the native capabilities handle it pretty well. We actually have a partner ministry. I'll give a shout out since he gave a shout out to me on a separate podcast, Humble Burger Ministries, where this guy with, you know, a Jewish guy or Messianic Jew, I should say, is currently actively engaged in ministry to the Jewish people with his chatbot. He's using our platform to do so as well.

Jeff Reed: interesting so is this are you finding that people i do want to get into the demo here in a little bit are you finding that people are open to the idea of ai speaking that they're terrified of this idea that they're angry at this idea i'm sure you're all over the gamut what what what are you kind of seeing here

Jake Carlson: Exactly. All of the above. Right. So so, you know, attitudes have changed quite a bit just in the last two years that we've been doing this. You know, at the beginning of it, I was kind of scared to bring it up. I kind of use, you know, different verbiage to kind of like ease into the conversation with folks, because I know there is a lot more opposition, especially in Christian circles. Right. And it's a very kind of theological, theologically heavy topic. But in the last, you know, I'd say year or so, it's really the exception to the rule now where somebody says, oh, like you're doing AI. I want to have nothing to do with you. In general, I think ministries are starting to kind of wake up to the opportunity and realize and realize, starting to realize at least that that, you know, this is just another technology within. its own unique characteristics, but still a technology. It didn't surprise God. He knew exactly what was going to happen. Um, and he's sovereign over it and we can use it to help fulfill the great commission.

Jeff Reed: Well, I tell you, even at a personal level, I can remember using ChatGPT early on and doing the, you know, is which God of all the religions, which God is real and having it answer the, you know, a pluralistic or a general or a PC politically correct answer. And, you know, and that was always the... the hesitancy for me and not that i'm i'm not by far i'm not an ai expert but it was always the the difficulty of really utilizing this because i didn't know how to to get it down and to aim it but it sounds like you've you've really developed an incredible method uh to keep it focused um in in such a way to be useful do you mind maybe taking a minute here and maybe showing us a little bit how it works

Jake Carlson: Yeah, absolutely love to. So what I'm going to show you first is this is kind of our flagship. So everything that we produce, you know, first party, we kind of consider more of like a demo. Now there are quite a few people using this just to be fair, right? And also to be fair, a lot of them are in North America, but given our language capabilities and so forth, we actually have pretty high usage in other parts of the world. But anyway, so this is at apologist.ai. And so if you want to just give it a try, you're welcome to come here and kind of hit it. Recently, we passed a threshold where one person is using one of our AI agents every minute of the day for every day. wow so that's that's thousands yeah thousands of people using it every single day and so we're we're really excited about kind of the growth there so you'll see you know in this case this this particular demo has been instructed to give kind of like a one-page essay kind of style so it's a little bit longer than than say you would want like on a phone or something like that but that's kind of the use case in this in this one But it kind of goes through an argument. I'm not going to kind of belabor it. And then also it'll show some some media. So we in addition to our text content, we also have content partners that have, you know, YouTube videos and all kinds of different media podcasts, you know, all that all that kind of stuff. And then we can expose related media to the to the prompt. Right. So that's actually what's happening here is prompt gets asked. And then behind the scenes, our eyes are. our platform is going out and getting that related content and then mingling that content as a reference point for the AI to answer the question. And then at the same time, it's also searching our corpus for related media to that question and kind of exposing that down there. And then you can kind of look here and kind of get some more media as well. um importantly as well we cite all of our sources right so not only are we trying to stay ethically above board but actually there's something in it for in addition to the general you know um good of the kingdom and so forth there's there's actually something in it for these ministries that give us content as well as they get some exposure right so we've got all about god got questions and something from ligonier here right so um so they and then that link can link off to their you know uh place to either either you know url to read the full article or or you know purchase a book or what have you right So that's kind of how it works in a general sense. Again, this one is programmed specifically to give kind of one of those lengthier answers, but that's not always what we do. We also have, let me go over to actually, let's see. Yeah, so I'm going to show you an example in Arabic, and I'm just going to highlight another kind of feature that we have. So while this is going, so I don't speak Arabic, by the way, so I've been told that it does well.

Jeff Reed: I'll leave it at that.

Jake Carlson: This one is actually, we actually support several different models under the hood. This one actually is using the DeepSeek model, right? So a reasoning model. And that one happens to kind of perform a little better in Arabic. But you mentioned kind of the right to left, Jeff. So that's an example of that going on right here. And the other thing I wanted to highlight here as well is, you know, it's one thing to get somebody who's curious about, you know, Christianity or just has like a faith-based question to engage with a chatbot. But most of the time, what we would say is we really want them to get in conversation with a human being, right? So that's where the digital missionaries come in, right? And so yes, AI can be used to kind of start the conversation, knock out some really good answers to questions and stuff like that. But the handoff to a human being is very important to us, right? And it's very important to our partner ministries. And so what we have is a capability of not only letting the AI answer, but then also an area kind of below the answer that we call the kind of a call to action, right? So this can be pretty much anything. For anybody technical, it's arbitrary HTML, basically. So it can be you know full bleed banner like this is an example of you know um a banner ad to to send people over to watch the chosen tv program in arabic it could just as well be just about anything right so that's that's completely customizable and actually uh recently we released a change so that you can have multiple different calls to action that kind of spring up at different points in the users

Jeff Reed: How many of the people that are using this or the organizations that are using this are implementing physical where it's traffic hopping to some sort of a physical person or a call center? Do you have any idea on that?

Jake Carlson: I don't have numbers for you offhand, but I will say that just this past week, we're pretty deep in discussions with... with an organization. I don't know if I should, for the sake of the organization, reveal who they are, but a major organization operating in East Asia and Southeast Asia. And what they're doing is they're using these calls to action to, we have like a share link here. So if you wanna, so if you click on this icon here, it'll share essentially this output. and then you can send it to somebody so we're piping that share link through that call to action in the link and then it's going off to facebook messenger where a human chat operator can then um have that link and know what the ai was you know what the conversation was up to that point and then carry it start to carry on the conversation from there right So we're really focused right now on partnering with ministries to facilitate those kinds of integrations and interactions where we can allow them to hand off to another human being. Or sometimes, especially in more sensitive areas, sometimes it's not directly handing off to a human being, but maybe it's like scan this QR code or contact this person, something like that. So it's really pretty wide open and we've seen a lot of use cases.

Jeff Reed: interesting what is um that that's that's cool uh talk to me a little bit more about the software what what else are we looking at here

Jake Carlson: Sure, so maybe I'll just show another, this is, I don't wanna geek out too much, but I know at least part of your audience- We're a bunch of geeks here.

Jeff Reed: You can feel free to geek, it's okay. I give you permission.

Jake Carlson: So I'm gonna give a shout out for our language translation capabilities. So like I mentioned, the base models, depending on which one you pick, and we do support, I think about two or three dozen now. But all the latest models, we have ChatGPT 5, or sorry, excuse me, ChatGPT 5, and the kind of the recent ones from Claude and a lot of open source ones as well. But when we layer real-time translation on top of that, that widens it out to almost 200 languages. And so this is an example of Amharic, which is the national language of Ethiopia. So one of the less internationally spoken languages. And so I'll just give an example. And I do have somebody who, checked this and said it's actually pretty good. But what's actually happening here, it's going pretty fast considering the fact that basically we're doing that whole reference to the corpus coming back and then generating a response. But then we layer on top of that, this real-time translation. We have this technical problem where like, you know the the ai is outputting content in english right but then we have to while it's streaming we're chunking it up and paragraph by paragraph sending it out to a translation service to get back and so that's all happening kind of transparently and so you you saw is a little bit slower than maybe english but it's still pretty fast you're seeing it kind of come down paragraph by paragraph so the user doesn't have to wait for the whole thing before it gets translated

Jeff Reed: yeah what what is the the global um usage of this compared to the us you know i i know us is somewhat more technologically advanced uh but smartphones are all over the place globally and it seems like a lot of your organizations are more globally based i'm just curious what uh what's up what's happening yeah absolutely um and do you mind i'm gonna i'm gonna switch the share to another tab here are you seeing this okay yeah i'm seeing that country's reached

Jake Carlson: Yeah, perfect. Yeah. So this is kind of, and I can show some statistics here, but basically this is purposely excluding kind of the US and Canada because the truth is right now, most of our usage is in North America, to be fair. But probably, I haven't looked at it recently, but probably like at least 25% is international as well. And the more interesting thing about that though is where is happening in the world relative to other spots. you'll see indonesia here so that's that's actually a heavy usage area for us right now and especially singapore in fact singapore is just absolutely blowing up um and that makes sense too because if you look at the languages other than english that are that are in use almost almost half of the non-english usage is in chinese And so, of course, you got basically Mandarin, Chinese and English are kind of the two main languages there. And so, you know, overall, we're pretty pleased with that. But, you know, we definitely have a lot of growth to do kind of about in like last six months or so. Up until six months, we've been more focused on generating the corpus and, you know, product development, stuff like that. And about six months ago, we finally said, like, OK, like this is this is we're good enough. We need to we need to focus, pivot a little bit and focus on partnering with ministries, getting it out into the field.

Jeff Reed: and so we're hoping that you know growth will will definitely increase abroad as well is there any like talking about china um mandarin chinese is there any security concerns like can they access this um safely or do they have to go through any back channels like what does that look like

Jake Carlson: yeah you know it's interesting uh last fall um because of my you know having grown up in china i was invited to like a you know a china missions kind of conference and there was a lot of discussion about that obviously you know the great you know the great firewall of china they call it right um and so um there's a lot of ways you can mitigate that through using vpns in some cases but the most foolproof way um and is, is to just smuggle, you know, offline devices basically. And so we're kind of exploring that a little bit as well, because if you think about it, like, you know, the stats show that like, you know, probably about 75%, probably about three quarters of the, of the world has, is, is connected online through some mechanism, but that still leaves a lot of people in, you know, regions where there just, you know, isn't, isn't access or to your point, Jeff, like, you know, closed countries, not only China or North Korea, but also, you know, Middle East where, There's not as much religious tolerance as well. And so the idea I've been kind of experimenting with a little bit and talking with a few folks about is can we train a small language model, which is just basically an AI, a language AI, but that's smaller, right, in a footprint. And can we then embed that onto a device and then just smuggle it in on the device? And to do that, you know, we would probably use some sort of like higher powered reasoning model to fine tune a smaller language model and then find a way to kind of package at least portions of the corpus that could be representative and then allow the AI to function in an offline capacity.

Jeff Reed: That is fascinating. I did not even know you could do that, but that's crazy. Even like, you know, I hear like the AI wearables and some of that. And so it's almost a precursor to that with the gospel. Like how do you get, a smaller version of the AI that you can smuggle across. I can remember my parents actually, my mom was smuggling Bibles into Romania and things like this back in the day. And the church I was a part of was smuggling Bibles into Russia. And so now it's, hey, let's smuggle artificial intelligence. I don't want to get lost in this because I will, but What is a small device that will have artificial intelligence on it? Are we talking like a smartphone?

Jake Carlson: Yeah. In fact, I've already in fact, a couple of weeks ago, I talked to a guy who has a nonprofit who's building Android based phones. And we talked about a potential partnership for that for this exact use case.

Jeff Reed: Again, I don't know anybody on.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, just generally speaking. But there's there's a lot of thought around, you know, been put around this is like, how do you how do you reach, you know, unreached countries or at least countries that are closed up and get get kind of these materials into them?

Jeff Reed: yeah you know i know a lot of our people are um you know obviously in china wechat's a a popular platform but wechat is run by communist china and so probably not a good idea to uh to you know embed this in in wechat but you know a lot of our people globally utilize whatsapp a lot here in america are utilizing discord as well for some asynchronous Have you guys looked at embedding or creating bots or tools or somehow integrating this into some of those platforms?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a working WhatsApp integration right now, and actually one of the volunteers on our team just finished up a Telegram integration as well. Oh, cool. Most importantly, with regards to that, is we have kind of the, I don't want to get too technical, but we have kind of like the framework to quickly spin these kind of integrations up. In fact, the individual who finished up the Telegram one spent, you know, I wrote 99% of the code of what you see, right? And so another person came in and within a week was able to spin up a whole integration with Telegram. And so we're pretty hopeful that as we meet ministries with particular use cases, we can spin up different integrations in the future very rapidly.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I'm curious, just as you're talking about this, how many people are on your team? At least dev-wise, how many devs do you have working on this?

Jake Carlson: So it's an interesting question. So we're all volunteer right now, right? So we're actively fundraising and trying to get full-time onto it. And so... I do most of the programming, but then we also have kind of a kind of misfit band of other volunteers who are kind of helping out. And, you know, people will come and go as they have time and everything like that. But probably on the engineering side, you know, at any given point in time, we probably have like three or four ish. um and then you know of course it's not all just product development it's also marketing everything like that so i we do have a leadership team again all volunteer um of about uh seven people right now and um who help with kind of marketing and positioning and business development all that kind of stuff this incredible product you're looking at with uh that's 100 100 volunteer based or majority volunteer based that's that's that's great what's your what's your day job So I lead a product team for a social media management company.

Jeff Reed: Okay.

Jake Carlson: So yeah, I'm still in the startup world and I bring that ethos to the nonprofit. So it's kind of a weird thing to treat a nonprofit like a startup, but that's pretty much how we operate.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I mean, we are right there with you 100%. And so it's a fun road working with volunteers and remote and startup, like all that put together. It's challenging, but it certainly is fun. um so let's let me ask this question with with the ai oftentimes you'll get into a situation when you're having a conversation with someone and it's like okay let's just agree to disagree um Like, you know, I can no longer have this conversation without shouting at you. And I feel that you're about to do the same thing with me. How do you handle that in an artificial intelligence situation? Does the AI just keep going? Or like, what's the deal?

Jake Carlson: I mean, it depends on the prompt engineering, but one thing I will say is that, you know, and I didn't really cover this before, but one of the advantages to AI is that it doesn't get mad, right? Like, so there's not, like, this dynamic where, like, you're going to feel judged, like, talking to it. And so what we found, and, you know, frankly, all of our usage is anonymous, and so we don't know who's using it, right? But we know what they're saying, right? And we're logging all of that. And so we have all kinds of, you know, interesting conversations come across, right? where people are being vulnerable with the AI about things that they would never talk to another human being about, or certainly not a Christian, right? Or somebody that just is an acquaintance. And so actually the anonymous aspect of AI interaction actually lets people become more vulnerable and get kind of into some weighty topics. For example, we have a really interesting conversation that we saw from a female in Saudi Arabia questioning her sexuality and stuff like that. Who would she have talked to in the middle of Saudi Arabia? You know what I mean? And so having those kinds of conversations without any fear of having judgment laid on her or anything like that is a pretty big factor. But going back to your question, you know, it really just depends on the prompt engineering. Like the use case that you just mentioned, like, you know, when should the AI end the conversation? It's frankly something we haven't really heavily considered, but there's no reason why we couldn't do that. You know, just in the same way that you can instruct it to, you know, use a more Socratic method, you can easily say like, hey, if the conversation has gone on long and the person seems angry, just disengage, you know, you could definitely program that in, no problem.

Jeff Reed: But the default right now is the AI is just going to keep AI in until the person hangs up. That's fascinating. What is there, if someone does have a conversion, if someone does want to take a next step, then that's based on the organization that's running the agent. At that point, it gets connected to the ministry, whatever that looks like.

Jake Carlson: Yeah. So, for example, one of our one of our big partners is GotQuestions.org and then also AllAboutGod.com. And I'll actually use AllAboutGod.com because I think this is still the case. But both of those organizations have at the end of every one of it's basically a question and answer format right on their Web pages. And at the bottom, it's like, hey, here's a couple of buttons. You know, you want to find out more information. you want to contact us yes i've accepted jesus you know that kind of thing and so we could use what we did actually for all about god is we implemented their exact call to action that they have on their website um in the footer and so and then they go to the same places so so you know someone clicks on yes i've accepted jesus they go to the same intake form as they do on the website that's great do you have any idea uh on on your side what

Jeff Reed: Conversion rate meaning marketing, not salvation, but maybe I do mean salvation. What's the conversion rate of this stuff?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, it's a funny topic, right? Because we have all these ministries who are kind of indicated, what is it called? Indicated conversion or whatever is kind of the term, right? Or indicated choice or whatever. Right. only god knows people's hearts right so we all know that but um but yes we are tracking um one of the nice things about our platform is irrespective of um you know where you send the user in your call to action you can do all the tracking you want on your site but we're also tracking it as well so we know every time somebody clicks on any part of your call to action we are tracking that and we will know kind of you know what chat conversation they had that led up to that and all that kind of good stuff. And then we're going to allow the ministries to download those conversations and hook them into whatever systems they want.

Jeff Reed: So if somebody wanted to get involved or utilize this product, what are the different ways somebody could take a step in and get involved with Apologist Project?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, great question. Thanks for that. So, you know, we are always looking for more people to volunteer. So if you're interested in helping us in any capacity, and again, we need help in all kinds of areas, not just technical, like we'd love somebody to help with our social media, etc. If you're a ministry or involved with a ministry or want to recommend us to a ministry, the first next step is just go ahead and book a demo on our website. So there's that you'll see that button kind of plastered all over the place. Because we like to get into a conversation with the ministry and really understand their use case. And that's also kind of a mechanism to make sure that they're doing it for the right reasons or aligned reasons for us as well. And then what we do is we spin up a demo conversational AI that they can then just go and play around with for free. And then once the usage starts going or once they go into production with it, then only then would they start having any kind of fees.

Jeff Reed: Yeah. And what are, if you don't mind me asking here on air, like what are loose fees for something like this?

Jake Carlson: Yeah. So really low usage. We do have a free tier. So we have like a credit based system essentially to kind of abstract the whole token economy. Right. So we basically say one credit in our system is one half of one US dollar cent. And so something like a model like ChatGPT 4.0 costs five credits. So that equates to 2.5 cents. So every response from ChatGPT 4.0 model would cost 2.5 cents. And so we charge basically like a platform fee that is determined by the functionality you have. So if it's like fully white labelable, then you might be on a higher tier. And then we have usage-based pricing on top of that. If anybody's interested in learning more about that, you can go to apologistproject.org slash pricing and see all the different and so forth.

Jeff Reed: I'm guessing somehow they can grab a meeting with you and maybe get that translated into English. I followed most of it, but at some point I was like, I hope it reads easier than what I just heard.

Jake Carlson: I might have to use an AI to help explain it, but yes.

Jeff Reed: Very good. I'm sure you can figure that part out. So, and then that would be embedding on the website or partnering with you at some level to create an agent. Like if somebody didn't want to go through the level of creating an agent, but just wanted to get your AI out there as a chatbot somehow, what would that look like?

Jake Carlson: Yeah. So, you know, you know, we do support embedding on websites and, you know, there are two common ways we do that. People are far familiar with kind of like the customer support little chat bubble. So we do support a mechanism like that where it's like a little chat bubble and you click on it and opens up a little, you know, a little tiny little, you know. thing in the corner where they can kind of chat with it right there. Or a lot of our ministries opt to embed it straight onto their page. For example, we recently did an implementation for Apologetics Canada where they embedded it kind of on their page. So it looks like integrated with their website more. And then we also do have an API, by the way, which I probably should have mentioned before, which means, you know, if you're a you know, if you're a larger organization that has an app, you know, several developers have kind of contacted us and some major organizations I probably should mention have contacted us about just using our API because they already have the interface. They don't want our interface. They just want our answers. Right. Or our.

Jeff Reed: um agent capabilities yeah that's incredible like i i hadn't even gotten to the place of api and integrating this into like a platform or an app or something that's already existing that's beautiful but i guess if you're if you're doing the work to get it into like whatsapp and telegram then you're already having some level of an api level uh able for that so that's really cool show me i'd love to maybe show one or two more uh samples or examples on the ai of some conversations do you maybe have one or two things you could show in that space sure yeah i'll pull up um i'll pull up the integration with got questions.org because again like their their corpus like if for those of you who aren't aren't familiar their their whole website is essentially question and answer format so it's like

Jake Carlson: match made in heaven, right? For training in AI, right? So it's exactly kind of what you want.

Jeff Reed: Don't forget to share the right tab. You're on the languages used tab right now.

Jake Carlson: Thank you for catching me. So this is one at gotquestions.chat, right? So this is, again, this is kind of a similar thing to Apologetics Canada, what they did. So they kind of embedded on there. So they have their own kind of website frame and they have, you know, their little about thing that says, you know, all that kind of stuff, right? So I don't know, let's say, you know, how can a good God allow so much evil in the world, right? That's theodicy stuff. So that's how it works, right? And so you can see all this, the entirety of this is completely white labeled. They've got, you know, their own custom footer. They didn't put a call to action down here, but they could. They've got their logo up here. They got custom information about their logo, about their organization. And then obviously, you know, for any language that the chatbot supports, you can also have all of that information. We have a, you know, translation module on kind of our backend. where you can get all of the English copy, your custom copy to be translated into all the languages that you support as well. And then I should mention as well, kind of just coming up, we're kind of, you know, I already mentioned we're exploring kind of small language models, offline models. We're also getting into voice recently as well. um because if you think about it not only you know not only is it convenient to kind of be able to you know just kind of converse with with an ai back and forth right if you don't you know hands-free operation but also you know i was reminded recently from from um a brother um who i met about there are quite a few languages that don't actually have a written you know a written form, right? So they're oral only. And so the idea, it kind of fascinates me of how can we use just oral transmission with explaining these things, these theological in those languages so that's kind of an area that i'd like to expand in as well so we're kind of you know we're we're kind of going where god leads but also where the minister our ministry partners lead as well so you know we're very open to kind of novel use cases for using ai and and kind of spreading spreading the gospel in kind of innovative ways

Jeff Reed: Very cool. I've got a question here from Methos. Are you at all concerned about people, especially new people, getting confused and mistaking AI for the voice of God?

Jake Carlson: That's a great question. So there's a lot of theology there to unpack, right? And so one thing I'll just make a plug for, we wrote a white paper kind of about kind of that theology aspect of all this. It's on our website. If you go to apologistproject.org, it should be like at a banner at the top and you kind of click through it. It's an extremely important question, right? So there are lines which we do not cross, right? We will not cross the line of having the AI pretend like it's a person, right? So that means we will not have the AI pray for you, right? We will give you information through the AI, right? But we will not have it pray for you or in any way, hopefully, kind of imply that it's a human being, right? And so... um now that being said you know you know that's that's our kind of theology right but we we are very ecumenical in the sense we do let you know other you know any pretty much any lowercase orthodox um christian denomination uh to to use the chat bot and we'll facilitate that we go back to the nicene creed for that right so all the three branches of Christendom support that. And so we are, you know, in spite of my own theology, which if you're wondering is Protestant evangelical, but that doesn't mean we will disallow, you know, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox folks from using the chat bot and so forth. And so my caveat there is like I have very specific lines that I won't cross personally for my theology, but we leave it open to, you know, the denominational preferences of the folks who are kind of using it. But I think most people would agree like we don't want an AI Jesus, right? We probably don't want an AI Mary. We probably don't want anything that could be construed as, you know, an idol or some kind of, you know, representation of a deity or anything like that. We really want to, we may, you know, we may have personas, right? But we're not going to, but those personas would be more like a helpful teacher, not like a representation of, you know, a deity or anything like that. In fact, this has come up recently because I have to guard myself against this quite a bit because the rate of innovation in AI is staggering right now. Recently, for example, since we do have an API and it's actually compatible with the OpenAI spec, we can now integrate with anywhere that open ai can integrate right and so one of those places was like you know there was a company that had like uh you know a video avatar right and you could hook up our llm to that avatar and so and then and so like i did a i did like a prototype of like you know somebody asking a question we hooked it up to our muslim serving chatbot somebody asking a question about you know is isa really a god or is he a prophet right and you had this very you know middle eastern looking man like on video speaking our our the output of our ai right And it's like, at that point, it's like, okay, is that taking it a step too far, right? Because that's like representing a real human being. And so I kind of pull it back and be like, you know what, that might be a little bit too far that we're willing to go, you know, never say never, but that seemed a little off to me. Whereas like voice, you can see that like, yes, it's kind of in the same vein, but you're not trying to represent some kind of image or anything like that. That's just more of a convenience factor, right? And so there's a lot of theology to unpack, but the short answer is, We try to put guardrails in place that satisfy our conscience about this representing our AI as either human being or some kind of deity and try to prevent it wherever we can.

Jeff Reed: Yeah, I mean, you keep opening up issues and challenges and things that we weren't even talking about five years ago at a large scale. We tried some like Heijin stuff where it's like video translation, and there's actual videos of me speaking in Mandarin Chinese. And I speak really good Mandarin Chinese. Like, I have a friend that speaks Mandarin Chinese, and she was mad at me because she couldn't believe AI did it because she thought I learned Mandarin Chinese and didn't tell her. But, you know, it's just some ethical, like, is this right? Is this the right thing? And so I think it's good to question on that. You know, it's... I don't know it's the right answer, but often I feel like culturally that may change over time as there's more cultural acceptance of what AI is and isn't and what fake video or AI agents video is and is not, what's accepted and not accepted. you know i don't i don't i don't know that jesus has an opinion whether or not it's right but there's like a cult and you can at me if i'm wrong but i i just i think it's more of a cultural acceptance like are we okay using that method or not but asking questions and pausing to to evaluate is good I would say, and it's interesting, Methos, the guy who asked the question, actually says good answer. So you got his you got him happy. But, you know, for me, it was the hey, does this actually feed into like a conversation at some point? And, you know, your platform putting onus on the on the. on the organizations with the call to actions and feed into their process. Like, I don't know that I would expect your organization to actually be responsible for as much as making sure there's opportunities for the organizations to do what they're doing. And you're just a... the gateway to get them more connectivity. Methos goes on to say there will undoubtedly be AI cults soon if there aren't already. Yeah, I don't know that I want to get pulled into that conversation today, but you're probably not right. You know, it was funny. We just rolled out a couple days ago as a part of our town hall. We rolled out our AI agent. We've done some stuff with ChatGPT. And then we were working with an organization called Tapos that basically encoded all like 1,000 blogs, 800 blogs, almost 1,000 hours of video, like just encoded it all on this thing. And so we're experimenting with them on it. But jokingly, we're calling it Lex. Now, I know you said you're not going to put a name on it. We put a name on it. um well just to be fair i don't i don't think it's wrong to have a persona right i just think that if if asked right like an ai should admit that it's an ai kind of thing yeah no that that that i do agree with but we um we we named it lex uh because after lex luther because at the end of the world this ai thing is going to try to take over the world somebody's going to try to do something with it But let's have fun and use it while we can. That's all I'm saying. And so, you know, the conversations about weaponizing and who does what and let the ethics and legality, whatever. I am always more bull in that situation than bear. Let's be aggressive and do whatever we can for the kingdom until we can't do it for the kingdom anymore. And so I...

Jake Carlson: I do agree. Sorry to interrupt. No, no, please go. I want to pull on that thread a little bit because I think there is like this, you know, risk aversion, right? Over the top risk aversion in ministry. And I just want to call out, you know, that I agree with you on this, Jeff. Like, you know, the early church was not conservative in their, you know, risk assessment. Like they, you know, martyrs, right?

Jeff Reed: Like they were dying for what...

Jake Carlson: You know, and I'm not saying that we ought to be, you know, cavalier or anything like that. But it's also I think the opposite extreme is extremely harmful, right? Like we, you know, Jesus does not call us to be, you know, risk averse. Like the parable of the talents comes to mind, right? Like the servant who buries his treasure in the ground. Right. that that was not rewarded by christ right it was it was or the master in that in that parable right like what was rewarded was like somebody take a measured you know investment and in in you know in that case financial but but also like i want to encourage everyone like like take risks for the gospel right like that's that's how the kingdom grows right not just by keeping it you know to ourselves or or or you know always being so risk averse but but i think we do need to to within reason take take risks for spreading the gospel i think that's that's how the kingdom grows

Jeff Reed: Yeah, and that surprises me a little bit, like if I can just poke that bear a little bit. It surprises me that you have more success in the US, maybe it's based on your exposure, than you do globally. At a personal level, I have found the global audience far more aggressive um than the u.s audience mostly based because globally we're working with more missionaries and global missions organizations and and in the us we're working with more churches and as near as i can tell uh missiology is far more aggressive than ecclesiology uh and and as a result of that like the missions organizations globally are like let's go let's go let's go u.s or u.s churches are like much more um cautious is the safe word to use there. But anyway, for what it's worth, my opinions from the side. And once again, if you have hate mail on that, you can add Andy at The Church Digital. Andy would love to hear from you on that. Hey, this has been a blast, man. Jake, I am so glad we got to do that. And I was wanting to crack a joke at the beginning where I would call you Jake from State Farm. And I'm proud that I made it all the way to the end. without making that inappropriate joke.

Jake Carlson: I'm not wearing khakis, just in case you're wondering.

Jeff Reed: No khakis. Is it a red shirt that he always wears? A red shirt. That's funny. Awesome. Well, hey, this has been a blast. As we're landing the plane here, Jake, any closing thoughts?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, I just want to encourage you all. I think the work that Jeff's doing at the Church of Digital is just fabulous, right? So I think, you know, Um, you know, if, if I could leave you with anything, um, it's kind of our, our motto, which is meet them where they are and, you know, meeting them where they are, you know, traditionally would mean, you know, where they are in their spiritual journey. And then sometimes it's taken to mean, you know, kind of where they are geographically, but let's not forget. Um, I think that the, the, the primary frontier right now is digital and, um, you know, we're working hard to meet them where they are through wherever they hang out, you know, in the digital space. So I just want to encourage all of you to continue to think through that and find innovative ways to minister to folks in digital spaces.

Jeff Reed: I love that. Thank you for that. Jake, you can find apologistproject.org and apologist.ai to interact directly with the artificial intelligence. Jake Carlson, founder of apologist.org. Jake, thanks for coming on, man. This has been a blast, but we're going to land the plane. For Jake, this is Jeff at The Church Digital. Thanks for hanging out with us today on the show. We'll see you next time on the stream. Have a good one.