From No Faith to Number 1 Prayer App | Alex Jones

Our goal is to just be a small part of your faith journey.

The summit of your prayer life is the mass, and we can’t do that.

So even by definition, we cannot be your prayer life.

We can just be some small part that helps you to build a daily habit, helps you to rediscover your faith and to grow deeper and to relight it on fire.

Hallow is the most popular prayer app in the world, and the most popular Catholic app.

It offers audio-guided meditation sessions to help you grow in faith, peace and a relationship with Christ.

Listen in as I sit down with one of the co-founders and CEO of Hallow, Alex Jones, where we discuss the origins of the idea for the app, Alex’s journey of faith, and the incredible growth since its inception.

Benedictine College is transforming culture in America one conversation at a time.

From our studios in Atchison, Kansas, these are The Benedictine Dialogues.

All right, Alex, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

It’s a blessing.

Yeah, so happy to have you here on campus.

So happy with the partnership with Benedictine and Hallow, and really been looking forward to this conversation.

Just I know a lot about Hallow, but I’ve never really met you.

Yeah, well, it’s great to connect.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful campus.

We got to celebrate Mass here earlier.

Yeah, it’s a blessing.

Terrific.

Is this your first time to campus?

This is my first time to campus.

Okay.

I love it.

Yeah.

It’s awesome.

I thought to kind of get us started, have our viewers and listeners learn a little bit more about you.

You know, what’s your story?

Have you always been a Christian?

And kind of how did you end up in this position where you’ve got the number one prayer app in the world?

Jesus has the number one prayer app in the world, but he lets me work on it for a little bit.

Yeah, no, unfortunately not.

So I was raised Catholic, but fell away from my faith in high school and in college.

Would have considered myself agnostic or atheist for most of that time.

And sadly, but yeah, when I graduated, I got really into meditation.

It was something about the spiritual life or the contemplative life that had always just fascinated me.

But yeah, so I wanted to learn about meditation.

Unfortunately, my mind did not first go to St.

Teresa of Avalon, St.

John of the Cross, but kind of secular meditation.

And I was about to go to India for a couple weeks to try to learn how to meditate.

But Headspace and Calm, which were kind of these secular meditation apps, had just launched.

And they were a lot cheaper than the flight to India.

So I started using them and I loved them.

I thought they were great tools.

It felt like almost technology without technology.

You could pick a session.

It was like a personalized journey, personalized guide.

You plug in your headphones, you press play, you close your eyes, you’re kind of led in this technique of meditation.

Just 10 minutes before work, super simple.

And so I started doing it every day, but something started happening, which is every time I would meditate, my mind was usually so busy with YouTube, Netflix, social media, work, relationships, worries, stresses, whatever that when I started to kind of try to recollect myself, my mind kept feeling pulled towards something spiritual.

So like the name Jesus or an image of the cross or the words Holy Spirit or something, which I thought was very strange because I would have considered myself agnostic.

So I started reaching out to priests I knew, brothers and sisters who were deeper in their faith life, pastors and asking them this question, which I thought was a really interesting question, which was, hey, is there any way there’s some sort of intersection here between this meditation thing and this faith thing?

Pretty much everybody laughed at me and said, yeah, we’ve been doing it for 2,000 years.

You probably should have heard about it.

It’s called prayer.

And I was like, I know about prayer.

Prayer is like, hey, thanks for stuff, sorry for stuff.

Help me with stuff for the things that I memorized as a kid.

And I had a priest say, well, okay, that’s great.

You’re talking to God, but have you ever tried to listen to, listen for him?

And I was like, I don’t know, what does that mean?

He doesn’t speak audibly usually to me, at least.

And I started learning about this whole world of contemplative and meditative prayer within the church that I’d never heard of before.

Things like Ignatian Spirituality, Imaginative Prayer, Carmelite Spirituality, Prayer of Recollection, Chant, all these things.

And so I sat down, I googled how to do Lectio Divina, randomly opened up a Bible to Matthew 6, which is where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, and he gives them the Our Father.

And in Lectio Divina, you pick a word that sticks out to you and you meditate on it.

And the word that stuck out to me was Hallow, and Hallow be thy name.

And it was just 10 minutes in my living room, but it just changed my life.

Brought me back to my faith, it was the most important part of who I am.

Made me do this crazy start-up thing, quit my job, do all this craziness.

But it was just this beautiful combination of this deep sense of peace with, though, this depth of meaning and purpose and like wrestling with something real.

So like, how it means to make holy?

Okay, is God trying to make me holy?

Am I letting him make me holy?

Am I supposed to be helping other people grow in holiness?

And the answer to all those questions for me at the time was no, I wasn’t doing any of those things.

I was doing my own career for my own career’s sake, trying to get ahead.

And so it was really stressful questions, because it was like you’re doing the wrong thing with your life.

But it was in this place of deep peace.

And so I knew I needed to do that for the rest of my life.

And I wanted the app.

I like the structure of the app.

And so we built the first version really just for me, but God did some crazy things with it.

But yeah, so that’s short answer to, no, I was not always a Catholic.

Yeah.

I’m always interested in people who are raised Catholic, who spend time away.

Was it an intellectual thing?

Was it, you know, you just didn’t like it or it was boring?

Or I’m always kind of interested because then when you come back, it’s interesting how your path led through a desire for peace, a desire for a contemplative life.

I’m sure there was intellectual arguments along the way as well that you had to kind of wrestle with too.

But I’m always kind of interested.

And John Henry Newman talks about people coming into the faith or assenting to a truth.

It’s all these combinations of like relationships and conversations and moments of prayer or moments of insight and stuff.

So what were some of those moments in both your exit or, if you will, just your agnostic years or your comeback?

Yeah, I mean, the real, that was a very simplified version of my journey.

The actual version would take a book probably to, and it’s a bunch of parallel things happening at once and God working through a bunch of different people at once.

And I don’t have a great answer to why did I fall away?

It wasn’t like a conscious decision.

I grew up, I went to a public school, most of my friends didn’t take their faith seriously.

And it was kind of just the assumption of this, like that I’ve now, whatever, after having been exposed to some philosophy and theology.

But like the scientism, the psycho-science is what’s real and true.

And our parents just did this religious thing because they’re silly.

And their parents did it.

And it’s the traditional stuff and that’s old.

And there’s no old man in the sky judging you or whatever.

There’s no evidence for that and all that stuff.

That kind of the Dawkins, the simplified new atheism view.

And that was just kind of the environment with which I was in, my friend group, my school.

And that’s just kind of the philosophy I adopted.

Despite my mom would take us to mass every week and my mom took her faith very seriously.

And despite that, it was kind of just this rejection of that, which kind of happens naturally as a teenager, right?

You try to rebel against your parents anyway.

But yeah, there was a really important, I took a couple of classes at Notre Dame in undergrad.

There was a philosophy of science class, which was actually really helpful, that kind of looked at the underpinnings of the philosophy of science.

And then there was a couple of theology classes too.

And CS.

Lewis was super helpful.

There’s this book called Doing the Truth and Love by Michael Himes, which is just kind of basic theology one-on-one, but like not, you know, like really what the church teaches.

And is, was just helpful to understand.

So a bunch of those things, I had a bunch of friends who were much deeper in their faith, much more intellectually advanced in their faith.

So, you know, a bunch of conversations throughout college.

And I do think God, through a good chunk of those books and courses, kind of cracked open the idea that like, okay, well, maybe it’s not just this stupid thing.

You know, maybe there’s actually people a lot smarter than me who believe this thing and have thought through it really intentionally.

And Bishop Baron was a big chunk of that.

I watched a bunch of old school YouTube debates with priests and all this stuff.

But the funny, the thing for me was, and this is again kind of like a parallel intellectual path to the spiritual path, but the funny thing for me was I would be convinced, like I would read mere Christianity and I’d be like, okay, I’m a Christian, like for sure.

Or I’d watch a sermon and I’d be like, yeah, okay, I 100% believe.

And then I’d listen to like Sam Harris give a talk or an argument.

And I’d be like, okay, okay, maybe I’m an atheist now.

And so I just keep, you know, people were just better logical debaters than I am.

And so I just kept waffling between these two things.

And I was like, man, it’s got to be a better way to figure out this fundamental reality of life, the most important part of your life, other than just whoever is the most eloquent, you know, whoever’s the most convincing, like whichever person happened to be the most compelling.

And to me, and I was really struggling with that.

And so, yeah, for, and that kind of happened towards the end of my college career into my professional career.

And prayer was kind of the one thing that was like, okay, of all the things within Christianity, you know, there’s the historical arguments, there’s the theological arguments, there’s all that stuff.

But the, like, what can you actually test out for yourself?

And prayer is that thing where it’s like, well, if you could actually talk to the guy we’re all debating, whether they exist, like if you could pick up the phone and call him and he would answer, or you could have a conversation with him or whatever, that would feel like a pretty compelling, you know, that would, that would probably do it.

And so prayer to me, in parallel to discovering kind of this meditation thing, had become this interesting piece of like, well, maybe prayer is a potential answer, but I just never had anything that was beyond what felt like talking to myself in my own head.

So yeah, there was certainly a bunch of kind of a parallel intellectual path, which was super important to me.

But for me, the real conversion happens when I actually had an interaction with Jesus, like a personal conversation with him, you know?

And I think the intellectual side, like Bishop Barron will say, the five ways is what compelled him to such a strong faith.

But I do think, and there’s a beauty in that, and there’s a beauty in the truth.

And I think the church is doing a great job of leading with the truth of the faith and how it’s not just this dumbed down religion thing.

There’s actually this rich tradition of philosophy and theology behind it.

That’s way beyond what a simple guy like me could understand.

But at the same time, there’s this beautiful spirituality, this beautiful peace, this beautiful relationship with God.

And so now to me, if you ask me, okay, hey, does God exist?

Before, it would have been like, well, okay, I have these five arguments or whatever.

Now it’s like, yeah, for sure.

It’s like, well, are you sure?

Are you totally sure?

And it’s like, well, I mean, proving God doesn’t exist to me now would be equivalent to proving my wife doesn’t exist.

I think maybe you could do it.

Maybe we’re all just little brains in a bowl or whatever, but we’re all in a simulation or whatever.

But it’s like, I don’t, my wife is real.

She’s the most real human relationship I have.

But even more real than that is my relationship with God.

I talk to him every day.

He talks back to me.

It’s this ongoing conversation, not just every day, literally every moment of every day.

And so, yeah, I don’t know, the spirituality to me just really radically changed things.

And it was a blessing that I got to experience that.

That’s awesome.

I think it’s interesting too, because especially during a time where there’s just a lot of noise and to your point, there’s a lot of talking heads, arguing both sides of a lot of different points that you can get kind of lost in the melee of all of that, that we’re going on with with social media and stuff.

That sort of like a path of the peace of soul as a route of introducing people to these ideas.

I think that’s just a fascinating kind of new kind of third way of like, you know, the anxiety riddle world you live in, there’s a way to deal with that.

There’s a way to release that from your soul.

It’s called prayer, it’s called meditation.

And I find it very interesting, especially that in the secular world, you have like things like headspace and these others, that the idea of meditation is growing everywhere.

I mean, even when I was in college 20 years ago, I mean, they were talking about it in kinesiology, getting your athletes to meditate before games because they have to quiet the outside noise.

So there’s this culture kind of coming up of, and it’s been happening for a while, I would imagine, but of a desire for just a peace of soul.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it’s a really exciting opportunity for evangelization and for the church.

You know, again, I think like truth is a really awesome, like we need people who are preaching and teaching the truth of the church, is teaching the truth of the gospel.

You know, beauty is another one.

Beauty and art and music and all these things can really attract people.

But I do think peace and the offer that Christ has of peace, come to me all you who are weary and I will give you rest.

It’s this, I think it’s really attractive, especially to young people.

I mean, like my little sister just graduated college and she gets, I don’t know, 50 notifications to her phone every minute.

I mean, it’s just kind of like a Snapchat streak, a TikTok comment, whatever it is.

And it’s constant.

And it’s, I hold her phone for like 30 seconds and I’m stressed.

Like I physically feel my heart like I’m stressed.

And I’m like, man, I couldn’t imagine living a life like that all the time.

Like that, and to grow up with that, like that’s exhausting and so stressful.

And I do think there’s this fascinating thing with, with prayer and with peace and with spirituality, which is, I was in Silicon Valley for a few years, which is not the hotbed of Christianity or Catholicism in the world.

And you go around and you ask anybody like, hey, are you religious?

No, nobody’s religious anymore.

Are you kidding me, man?

What are you, 1960?

And so no one’s religious.

No one would call themselves religious.

You say, are you spiritual?

And they all say, yeah, of course, I’m spiritual.

It’s really important to me.

And maybe some people meditate and you’ll say, okay, you meditate and you’re sitting.

There’s no other people in the room with you while you’re meditating and you get into your meditation.

Are you alone in that room?

And no one says, yeah, I’m alone.

They all say, yeah, there’s something else there.

It’s like, okay, well, shouldn’t that be the most important thing in the world?

Like as soon as you still calm your like, as soon as you focus your mind, you realize there’s some invisible force among you.

Like, that’s crazy.

Shouldn’t that be your whole life is dedicated to figuring out what that is?

But I do think the spirituality thing, you can attack it.

Maybe it attacks the wrong word.

You can approach it from two different things.

One could be like, okay, I’m spiritual, but not religious.

And the one argument which Bishop Baron or Father Mike or anybody would do a lot better than me is, well, does it really make sense to be, can you really separate those two words?

What does it mean to be spiritual?

You’re having a relationship with something else.

You just aren’t defining it.

And religion defines that.

It gives you a community.

It gives you practices to grow deeper and all these things.

So you can’t really pull out, so you can argue.

And then you can argue about like, well, here’s the church teaching on this, and this is why we believe this and all these things, which is super important to have.

But the other angle is to say, okay, you’re interested in spirituality, not religion.

We’ll put that aside for a minute.

I have this really cool spirituality I’d love to share with you.

Yeah, it happens to be associated with the church, but it’s really cool.

It’s this incredible, life-changing, contemplative and meditative practice.

Can I share it with you?

And then you get them just to sit for 10 minutes, and you don’t talk, God does.

You structure it in the right way, scripture and all those things, but God does a lot better job of evangelizing than we do.

And so we get countless stories from people, I mean, stories from people who haven’t been to church in 30 years, who pray for the first time on the app, spend like five, 10 minutes in silence, and they hear God speak directly to them, and they go back to confession to mass the next day.

And it’s just like, man, like, if we just, I think God gives us a lot of tools to reach out to people, but I do think this offer of spirituality and prayer and peace is, you know, for us really exciting as a way to reach out to folks who have fallen away.

Yeah.

We talk a lot about on this show kind of the fact that a lot of our culture has gotten flattened.

And so in the sense that we aren’t prepared for a transcendent experience very much, because we’re so blasted visually, we’re blasted audibly.

But then in moments like that, it kind of forces you to calm.

And I think it opens you up to a transcendent moment.

It opens you up to something beyond yourself.

And they’re experiencing it, whether they want to call it God or whatever they want to call it.

But there’s something there that you’re responding with.

Right.

And so I just love that that’s a unique way to evangelize today.

Let’s just talk to people about contemplation, about meditation.

I mean, it’s funny to me that the church has been doing it for 2000 years.

And now the psychologists are saying, this is really good for psychological issues and mental issues.

Well, it’s like everything is sick.

It’s like, oh, cold showers are good for you.

It’s like, okay, the monks have been doing that for 2000 years.

It’s like, oh, well, you should pray.

Yeah, no, it’s fascinating how culture keeps coming around to these.

And same with business too.

Like you’ve got soul cycle, which is pretty much like some mini little religion.

Like you’ve got all these things that are trying to build community and trying to build a belief system and values.

And it’s like, yeah, okay, the core of that is faith.

But yeah, we just get really, I mean, I think we often treat religion when we’re talking to new folks, like politics, where you’re like arguing over certain issues, because our world is so political.

But you’re like, okay, this is why I believe this and these are the three reasons.

But if instead you treated religion like what it is, which is a relationship with someone, it is you have a friend and you are a son of a father.

You have a very good friend, the best friend in the world in God.

How would you introduce someone to your friend?

You want to be like, hey, these are my friend’s political beliefs and these are why the teachings on this, if you disagree, this is…

You’d just be like, hey, you should talk to my friend.

It would be great to introduce you to my friend.

Let’s talk to him together.

Let’s have a dinner together.

Let’s have a conversation.

And I don’t know, for us, it’s…

Yeah, we just see God do incredible things through just introducing people to a conversation with him to like, what does it mean to listen to God?

Try.

Just sit down and try.

Give him 10 minutes.

Just silence.

Just give him 10 minutes.

And he does really pretty incredible things when you do it.

So tell me more about…

Remind me of the year it launched.

Late 2018.

So it’s been about five, six years.

So what was your expectation going into it versus what it is now, right?

Yeah, my expectation…

We built it just for me.

My expectation was I would use it.

I would learn how to code a little bit.

And maybe my aunt would try it or my mom.

And then say like, oh, good try.

My mom hates when I tell this story, but she was like, yeah, no, I would never use that thing.

She’s super Catholic.

She’s like the core faithful rock of our family.

And she was just like, I would never use an app to pray, which to be fair, it’s a weird pitch to someone who takes their faith seriously.

You don’t need an app to pray, certainly.

You don’t need an app to pray.

But you kind of have to give it a try.

It’s hard for me to be like, oh, well, the audio component, you close your eyes, it’s father mic, it’s whatever.

But yeah, you kind of have to just give it a try.

So she does.

Now she uses it all the time and just texts me whenever there’s bugs.

But no, I mean, yeah, I would have never imagined.

I mean, if I looked out in a room and we had 10 people in this room and we were all using the app, that would blow my mind.

That would be crazy.

Then 1,000 is, wow, that’s a lot of people.

10,000, 100,000.

We just crossed 20 million downloads.

It’s like, I don’t, yeah, that’s just beyond my wildest expectations of what God could do with it.

But the thing is the coolest part by far.

So the numbers are fun.

You get like massive spikes.

We were, by the grace of God, the number one app in the app store for Lent, which no faith-based app or meditation app or workout app or wellness app or any of those categories of app had ever cracked the top 10.

You look at all the other nine apps that are in the top 10, they all have 10,000 plus employees.

We have 80, but we have Jesus.

So yeah, the numbers are fun.

And it’s cool because I get excited about trying to help the church and trying to be some little dent that maybe ticks around the West’s trajectory.

But most importantly, they represent people.

And like way cooler than the numbers of 10 million, 20 million.

It’s just these stories we get from these people.

And there was a girl who wrote to us the other day, a young woman who was raised religious but fell away from her faith.

And her mom, she was having a really tough time, was very depressed, very anxious.

Her mom had downloaded the app onto her phone, but she’d never created an account or whatever, but she’d never used it.

She decided one day to end her life tragically.

She climbed into a bathtub, filled it with bubbles, because she said she wanted it to be a pretty death, 15 at the time.

And she looks up at the ceiling and she says, God, I don’t believe in you, but this is your last chance before I do this.

If you’re real, prove it to me.

And she has a little phone next to her on the bathtub, and she presses play on a random session.

And it was a meditation on Christ’s passion and how he died for us so that we didn’t have to.

And she said she didn’t know what happened, but she realized in that moment that Christ was there in the room with her, grabbed her hand, lifted her out of the bathtub, and she dedicated the rest of her life to Christ.

She’s a missionary now serving the inner city for…

I mean, it’s just this incredible story.

And she just wrote to us and said, I just wanted to let you know, I’m pretty confident I would have ended my own life if it wasn’t for your app and the grace that God gave me through it, which is just like, what?

Like, how cool is that?

Like I, that, you know, I would work hard for like some fun numbers, whatever, but I would work for the next 50 years, however long I’m allowed to live here, for the rest of my life, everything blows up, everyone hates me, everything goes up in flames, everything is lost.

And you told me that at the beginning, but that one girl writes in that story, and I get to be some small part of that journey.

It’s like, yeah, I’d do that a hundred times over.

Of course I would.

Who wouldn’t?

You’d have to be crazy not to do that.

And we get those notes literally every day, every week, from people who…

We had a guy who had been addicted to drugs for 30 years, who wrote to us and said, for the first time, I’m sober for 55 days, thank you.

We had a guy who said his marriage was falling apart, he was a terrible husband, a terrible father, and he said, for the first time, I’m turning in around someone who hadn’t been to church in 30 years, who goes back to Mass for the first time.

We have moms who have lost their only kids, who haven’t been able to eat or get out of bed because of the grief and the pain, and they’re able to find some sense of hope and peace again.

I mean, it’s just these incredible stories.

For us, that’s what really blows us away, is, whoa, I had no idea that God would be able to do that.

The coolest part is, he makes it so obvious that he’s the one doing it, because we never write a meditation for that.

We never write a meditation for someone about to end their own life.

Even if we did, that wasn’t the one she’d meditated on.

She just meditated on probably just a Lenten meditation on his passion.

It had nothing to do with her particular situation, or like a mom who lost her only son.

We never wrote a meditation on that.

And yet somehow, in that silence, God reaches out and picks her up.

It’s like, yeah, that’s awesome.

So anyway, that’s by far the coolest part of what we get to do.

That’s amazing.

It sounds almost exactly like what John Paul II had in mind when he talked about the new evangelization, taking the newest technologies, taking the newest ways of communicating with people and bringing hope.

I mean, if that’s what you’re doing, that means you’re doing what John Paul’s doing and what Christ wants for the church.

And so praise God for that, man.

That’s awesome.

I also would be interested in, you know, there’s the benefits of a guided meditation versus trying to do it on your own, you know?

And so what would you say to someone who was trying to decide between those two?

I mean, my own life has been an interesting experience personally.

You know, I bounce back and forth.

I use the app every day.

You know, for me, usually, and I’ve been, now it’s been, whatever, six, seven years since I really came back to my faith.

And so I’ve been spending, you know, a lot of time in meditation.

And there’s a lot of, it’s interesting.

It’s hard to pitch.

You really just got to give it a try.

But for a lot of people, it can be a lot of different reasons that they use it.

For me, it can be pretty helpful for a rosary.

If I’m like driving or doing the dishes or something and I don’t have the beads or I can’t count.

So the rosary I do most days, daily mass readings on my way to mass, is helpful for me to enter into the readings once in case I don’t totally hear what the priest is saying or the lector is reading it.

I do the Surrender Novena every day, just nine days on repeat.

It’s life-changingly powerful.

And I don’t really want to carry around the little book that has the Fr.

Delindo Ruotolo passages in there.

And I’m on a walk or I end a call, and I’ve got like five minutes before the next call or meeting or whatever it is.

And so I just plop in a little Surrender Novena or the Divine Mercy Chaplet.

About half the time I do a Divine Mercy Chaplet, I do it with the beads and half the time I do it with the app.

But then people really seem that we have a lot of content on the app.

And so a lot of, it’s like reading a book but in audio.

And I don’t know, there’s something about audio to me that allows you to enter into prayer and meditation pretty easily because you’re not looking at a screen, you’re not looking at anything.

Usually you’re closing your eyes or you’re on a walk, you’re looking at nature or whatever it is.

And so you can listen, it’s like a friend is walking alongside you.

And it’s kind of just like you get to go on a retreat with Father Mike every day, or a retreat with Jonathan Rumi from The Chosen every day, or a little retreat with Bishop Barron every day.

And it’s just like, you know, most people pay a good chunk of money to go on a retreat maybe once a year, maybe once every three, four years with one of those guys, or Sister Miriam or Sister Bernice.

These like incredible meditative leaders, Father Gallagher, who leads the Ignatian spirituality, like training for a bunch of the new seminarians in the country.

So they’re just these incredible retreat leaders who can lead you in both deep spiritual reflection, but then from that, a deep contemplative and meditative and spiritual session.

And it’s just like you get to go on like a little mini retreat with them each day.

And so I do think the power of technology in that sense is like is incredible.

It’s awesome.

It’s like I get to pray with Sister Miriam every day.

And for me to go do that in person, I’d have to go.

I go to where she is, which is not my home.

And she’s pretty busy.

So she’s not really going to lead me in an imaginative prayer every day.

And, you know, Jonathan Rumi like brings the scriptures to life for me in like a really cool and interesting and fun way.

And then we do these seasonal challenges that.

There’s also this daily reflection with Jeff Cavins, where he kind of like opens up scripture in this really powerful way.

But these seasonal challenges, I like the best.

And they’re probably one of the more popular ones, which is, you know, it’s just kind of a way to keep your faith.

It can get stale, you know, and you can fall into a routine.

And so it’s a way to kind of keep your faith life kind of like punched up and on fire.

So we just did a big St.

John Paul the Second Witness to Hope Challenge for like 21 days, where we journeyed through his life.

We’re doing a Saints in Seven Days series now for Advent.

We do this whole kind of meditative journey for Lent.

We do this whole meditative journey.

And so, you know, it’s kind of just this way for you to spice up your faith life and keep it, you know, keep yourself pushing to grow deeper in a relationship with God, because we all have so much of an opportunity to grow deeper.

But yeah, and a lot of people actually, you know, loneliness is a big thing, too.

And, you know, we weren’t a personal prayer life is a big thing.

Like you should pray alone for sure.

You should spend time in silence.

And we have unguided sessions where it’s just like a timer.

So if you just have 20 minutes, it’s like instead of just your really annoying iPhone timer or whatever, it’s like a softer bells or whatever it is.

So I do those for like 20 minutes in silence, which is really powerful.

It can be a bit intimidating, like if you’re just if you’re new to sitting in silence for 20 or 30 minutes, which is why we have a good chunk of the of the guided sessions.

But the loneliness thing, yeah, a lot of people just find it helpful to be like, I feel like I have a friend who I get to pray with every day.

And it’s not like I get to journey with the global church through this.

And so, yeah, for us, I don’t know, a lot of people find that find that pretty powerful.

But I think it’s about like, Hallow is just our goal is to just be a small part of your faith journey.

Like we obviously can’t.

We’re Catholic.

The summit of your prayer life is the mass.

And we can’t do that.

So, you know, even like by definition, we cannot be your prayer life.

We can just be some small part that helps you to build a daily habit, that helps you to kind of rediscover your faith and to grow deeper and to relight it on fire.

And so it should be a balance between like you sit in silence for 20 minutes and then you do a rosary and one day you do a rosary with the apple, one day you do a rosary with the beads.

And, you know, it should be this small part of people’s faith life.

And so that’s what we found.

But it’s been, you know, awesome to watch what God does with it in people’s lives.

That’s awesome.

Reminds me, in a previous episode I talked about Dante with a guest and we both said you have to have your Virgil.

You have to have someone guiding you through these, especially in difficult moments, because sometimes you don’t know the right questions to ask.

Sometimes you don’t know where the right things to say.

It’s often very hard to really self-examine by yourself.

It’s better if someone else is asking you these questions and kind of going through it with you.

So the guide to me is a very valuable resource.

Yeah, I mean, it’s almost like why do we have spiritual books?

Like, why did the saints write writing?

Like, yeah, the gospel is awesome.

Like, you should read the gospels.

But the saints bring it to life in such a beautiful, powerful way that we just for a long time did this Father Chisick journey.

And like, man, I’ve never seen anyone articulate surrender in such a beautiful way.

And it just brought the idea of surrender to me, to life in such a more powerful way than it had before.

So, yeah, it’s just like getting to dive deeper into these incredible spiritual leaders, dive deeper into scripture.

But you said something that I forgot to mention, which is we actually hear this all the time, especially with people who are in really tough places, like people who just lost a kid.

I was just talking to a woman the other day, and she had just lost her kid.

And she was like, I honestly, I just didn’t, I couldn’t pray, I didn’t know what to do.

I couldn’t, like I was so in shock.

I was so heartbroken that I like forgot how to pray the rosary.

Like I was just, I needed someone to lead me.

Like I needed to be led.

And so we just prayed on the app all day, like just rosary after rosary, Bible after Bible reading.

And yeah, it was this new, it’s like yeah, when you’re in those really tough times, it can, like everything falls away.

And so you do, it is really helpful to have somebody leading you.

But I don’t know, it’s funny because we never, you know, we didn’t like come up with any of these things.

God just does them.

Like so he’ll just, you know, use it as a tool, however he needs to hopefully for the building up of his kingdom.

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And now, back to the show.

So I’m kind of interested in the denominational demographics that you have.

What kind of demographics are downloading the app?

Yeah, at the beginning, it was almost all Catholics.

It’s pretty spread evenly across age ranges and genders, though, which was interesting for us.

It started for us, and so the people that were using it were like our friends.

So it was like 25 to 35 year old does the spike, but it’s become pretty spread out.

And you see a lot of people who, you know, they’re students.

We have a lot of college students using the app, a lot of young adults using the app, a lot of people who are just getting married or starting a family.

Their kids start growing up, they become atheists, you know, worry, start praying for them.

You know, you enter into retirement, you’re nearing the end of your life, you have a lot more time, you go on a lot more retreats, you can dedicate a lot more time to growing deeper in your spiritual life.

So it’s been pretty fascinating journey with like a really broad range of folks.

And then over the last two years, it’s been really interesting to see a lot of non-Catholic Christians start to download and check out the app, which is awesome.

I’m authentically Catholic, we don’t hide it, there’s a Rosary on the app, there’s Father Mike, there’s all that stuff.

But hopefully, Hallow can be a place, and I think prayer has this power, but hopefully, Hallow can be a place where people can come from any background really, but certainly any Christian background and find something where they can grow deeper in their relationship with God.

Our first power user, funnily enough, power user is like people who use the app all the time.

And we had a woman who used it.

This was really early days.

We had a woman who used it like 300 times in like 30 days.

And so that’s 10 times a day.

And so we called her and we’re like, what?

How are you doing this?

What are you doing?

And she was an evangelical Christian, and she had insomnia, so she would wake up a couple of times at night, and so she’d pray each time she woke up or whatever.

And then she’d use it like four or five times throughout the day and four or five times throughout the night.

So we’re like, does the rosary stuff, like does it bother you at all?

And she’s like, no, the rosary thing doesn’t bother me.

I mean, the vast majority of the stuff on the apps just meditations with scripture, which I would argue that the rosary is also scriptural.

But she’s like, so I just don’t do the rosary yet.

And I was like, you should try the rosary.

But okay, that’s awesome.

And so we’ve just found this.

I don’t know, because what we’re leading with is just a relationship with Jesus.

And so we found this, a lot of folks who are Christian, but not Catholic, Protestants or evangelicals or whatever it is, non-denominational, find like an enormous amount of healing and spiritual growth through it too.

So it’s been a blessing to get to journey with brothers and sisters in Christ all around the world.

That’s awesome.

Well, I did have to ask how the relationship with Mark Wahlberg started off.

Mark’s a great guy.

He’s phenomenal to work with, takes his faith super seriously, has been really passionate about trying to do this work.

We originally partnered with him on Father Stu.

He said he felt like God was asking him to use this chapter of his life, to use the gifts that God had given him and the platform that God had given him to do God’s, to help build up God’s kingdom on earth.

So we partnered together a little bit with Father Stu.

Then he wanted to do a lot more work, helping people grow deeper in a relationship with God, and it’s awesome.

I mean, he has this really great way of…

I don’t know, it’s very authentic, and especially for folks who have fallen away from their faith.

He can reach out in a way that doesn’t feel preachy.

And we’ve had a lot of stories of people who had not prayed for decades or had fallen away from the church forever.

And they’re like, you’re just trying to get somebody to stop scrolling for half a second on a thing.

And so they see Mark’s face and they’re like, right, that’s the guy from the bear movies, right?

And they’re like, he’s telling me to pray a rosary.

What?

That’s just the weirdest thing.

And just because it’s so weird, they’re like, okay, I might as well down.

I mean, I might as well see what the thing is.

And then they do.

And then God builds this incredible relationship with them through it.

And so it’s been this, yeah, it’s been an honor to get to work with him.

He’s been incredible.

And the funny story about Mark is, so he facetimes.

And he’s traveling all over the place and shooting whatever he’s shooting.

And so he’ll facetime at pretty random times.

And I didn’t really know this.

And so the first time we started working together, he just facetimes at like, he facetimes me when I’m sitting with my wife.

It’s like 8 p.m.

on a Friday.

And he just facetimes.

We’re talking about Father Stu and the work that we’re going to do together.

And this is kind of the first time I was talking to him really.

And he was like, oh, we’re going to do Father Stu.

We’re going to help so many people grow closer to Jesus.

The Lord is going to be awesome.

And I was like, oh, that’s awesome.

Oh, yeah.

And he’s like, Father Stu is going incredible.

And I was like, oh, that’s awesome.

And he’s like, oh, we’re going to help so many people pray.

It’s going to be incredible.

I was like, that’s awesome.

That’s awesome.

And then he hands like a 30 second call.

He hangs up.

And my wife just sits there.

It’s like the most famous person I’ve spoken to in my life so far.

I was pretty nervous, you know, and she just looks at me instead of being like, oh, honey, that’s really cool that you got to talk to Mark Wahlberg.

She was just like, you said awesome a lot.

And I was like, oh, thanks, honey.

I’ve been thinking about that for the next three years of my life.

How many times I said awesome on a call with Mark Wahlberg.

But anyway, no, he’s great to work with.

So yeah, he does a really quick rosary on the app.

So if you ever need a 12-minute rosary or something crazy, yeah.

So but he’s a quick guy.

He does everything pretty quick pace.

So it’s awesome.

I think also because people know him, know of his life, he has a little bit of a checkered past that he’s open about, but also that he’s had this conversion in life and wants to change that.

I think it inspires people like if Mark Wahlberg is doing it, you know, maybe I can too.

The type of thing.

So it’s kind of all the father’s do like the father’s do story.

You know, the core of that father’s do story is some of the greatest saints or some of the, I forget exactly the line, something about Augustine, but the most difficult sinners or whatever, some of the greatest saints that come from some of the most difficult sinners, and they like wouldn’t let father’s do into seminary because of his past.

And yeah, it’s just, I don’t know, that’s all of our stories.

My story is a terrible story.

I would, you know, everything pre-Jesus and even, you know, still very much a sinner today, but it’s, you know, God does these incredible things and he chooses sinners to do them, you know, so.

Absolutely.

I also wanted to ask about the Super Bowl ad.

Yeah.

How that went and what kind of numbers you guys saw based off of that.

Yeah, that was a crazy one for us.

There was no way in the world we were going to do it.

But once every 12 years, the Super Bowl falls on the Sunday immediately before Ash Wednesday.

And like Ash Wednesday is a massive spike for us.

So we kick off our 40 days of Lent challenge, prayer challenge, and it’s by far the biggest day of the year.

And yeah, once every 10 to 12 years, the Super Bowl falls on the Sunday immediately before it.

So we’re like, oh man, if there was a time to do it, this would be the time.

And so we prayed about it and the national spots had sold out.

So we ended up doing a regional spot.

And yeah, Mark, we had already partnered with and Jonathan, and so we ended up shooting something together.

And it was crazy.

We probably did.

I mean, we probably pulled that whole thing together in like six weeks, which it usually takes six months at least plus to do one of those.

And yeah, it was a wild ride.

But it was, yeah, it ended up working out incredibly.

We, the Sunday was a massive spike, and we got a bunch of people kind of aware of it for Wednesday, which was another really, which was the big kind of launch.

And yeah, we jumped up to the number one app, and at least the country, if not the world on that day.

But yeah, it was, I think probably like in the week around with that, it was probably like maybe a couple weeks, but around like 4 million downloads or something crazy during just that very short period of time.

Yeah, so it was a crazy spike, but it was fun.

It was cool to, and you know, we, actually the funny part was we didn’t, we really didn’t know if we were gonna do it still.

And I was like, well, you’ve gotta have a good, it’s gotta be a good ad.

So what would we do?

What would be a good ad?

And we’re thinking of all these different options, like there was a funny idea, there was some pretty funny ideas, but maybe we’ll save those for the future.

Or like, you know, hey, somebody sharing their story, a bunch of different ideas.

And then I was like, you know what?

We are a prayer app, so why don’t we just pray?

And that’s what it was, the Super Bowl commercial was just a prayer, and this beautiful church.

And that to me was like, man, if we could just pray, then, you know, there’s going to be millions and millions of people watching the Super Bowl.

Even if you don’t download it, we just get somebody to turn their minds to Jesus for like the first time in the decade or something.

Somebody who hadn’t really thought of it.

Maybe you’d never try Hallow or whatever, but if you just spend like a minute in prayer during the Super Bowl, at your little Super Bowl party or whatever, it’s probably worth it.

And probably not financially, but yeah, so it ended up working out phenomenally.

So it was a crazy ride, but a fun one to be a part of.

That’s awesome.

I do have to say, Benedictine College is one of the partners that’s working with Hallow.

Yeah, blessed to be.

We have all of our students, faculty, staff, all have access to Hallow.

I believe our numbers are pretty good.

Yeah, you guys are great.

Yeah, so very happy about that.

You’re not going to put Franciscan there.

It’s not a competition, but we want to win.

Yeah, you know, you have a lot of people praying.

Exactly.

So one of the things I ask all of our guests at the end, one of our big goals here, our big desire is to transform culture in America.

And so what I would ask is, how do you see meditation and an increase in prayer, transforming culture in America?

You know, I was thinking about this this weekend, and I was thinking about how entrenched our society is and how polarized.

And so obviously, it’s an election year.

It’s going to be super political.

Everybody’s going to be getting in political fights.

And, you know, especially on the pro-life issue, but really on everything, it’s just like this incredible entrenchment to your side.

And technology, social media usually doesn’t help.

It just like entrenches you more and more and more.

And the communities you’re a part of and the people you interact with.

And it just feels like even within families, it’s like people are just becoming so divided.

And some of these issues, like the pro-life issues is an incredibly important issue.

And so the question is, like how do you change hearts and minds really?

And how do you bring people together really?

And it’s not like, oh, I convinced you.

Although it’s an important part, like you should have the strong arguments for why you believe what you believe.

But it’s usually not that.

And I’ve like tried a bunch of arguments a bunch of times, and they don’t usually work.

And the question really is like, well, the answer is you have to transform hearts, like you have to.

There’s no, it’s usually not beating somebody over the head with some better argument that’s going to get them because they just, they just feel like they lost an argument.

They don’t feel like their hearts changed.

And so then the question is, okay, well, how do you transform hearts?

If you’re going to transform the culture, all the culture is just a representation of a bunch of people.

And those people are so stuck.

We’re all so stuck in our ways.

And so then, yeah, how do you transform hearts?

And I think the answer is the love of Christ, and the love of Christ that it gives you through prayer.

And like if you just sit, and it’s funny because I’ve gotten over the last whatever, six years, all I do is kind of dive deep and get to talk and get to pray with all these incredible spiritual leaders and all this phenomenal spiritual direction and contemplative life and meditative life.

And it’s all just like you spend your whole life in prayer.

It’s like, okay, well, what are you supposed to take away from that?

And what you take away from that is Christ’s love for you.

And it’s it’s overwhelming and like you don’t even understand a fraction of it.

And it sounds so simple because it’s like, oh, yeah, of course.

And everybody kind of whatever throws it away.

Yeah, God loves me and whatever.

But it’s such a like immense pool of love for you that you can’t help but love.

It can’t help but overflow into your life because you are loved so deeply despite your sin that you then have to go love everybody else.

And so then, yeah, I don’t know for us, it’s just how can we reach out to help people.

All they have to do is just crack the door open just a little.

And if you just crack the door open a little, the love of Christ just like prize it open the rest of the way.

And if we can just help people to crack it open a little bit, let God soften all of our hearts because we all need it.

I think that’s how you transform the world.

But certainly how you can transform culture.

But I don’t know if that’s what we’re trying at least.

Well, this has been a fantastic conversation.

Yeah, likewise.

I’m sure we could talk for hours.

I’m sure.

Yeah, this has been really great.

Again, thank you so much for coming to campus.

Thank you so much for your work with the app and helping people increase their prayer life.

I really think it’s going to help transform the culture.

So I really appreciate that.

I appreciate it.

Yeah.

It was a blessing.

All right.

Well, thanks to all of our viewers.

Be sure to check out the Hallow app yourself.

If you’re not currently using it, I know you will get so much out of it.

And thanks again for watching.

If you enjoyed The Benedictine Dialogues today, I want to invite you to visit our website, media.benedictine.edu.

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Thanks again for watching.

God bless.