Search Us with Ken Powers

What I really want folks to know from this episode is the fact that this is a resource. Let's start church. That I want you to think about two different ways one start using it. Start searching for things when you make this your go-to.

To search when you want to go and research something to see of you're gonna get a wide variety of views. Surely because of the number of channels that are represented there.

Technology, Search, and the Value of Searchable Transcripts

Welcome to the rap report with your host Andrew Rappaport where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church Go to striving for eternity org.

Welcome to another edition of the rap report. I'm your host Andrew Rappaport here to discuss all things of well We usually talk about Harmoneutics how to interpret the Bible theology today. We're gonna go totally off script.

We've done this a couple times before and we're gonna talk Technology, don't worry folks. It will have a way of working into Christianity because it is well a Christian software developer who wrote software for Christian ministries and We're gonna be talking about it because as we go through this you are gonna see the value especially those of you who listen to these episodes regularly and go.

Sometime ago Andrew had this great point and it's very very hard to find that one time that I had a great point, but you remembered it and want to go find that and We are gonna give you the power to do that today with none other than Ken powers.

Ken welcome to the rap report. Thank you for having me. You got some superpowers, right? Because that's your last name.

Yeah, that's generally the idea. Yeah.

Okay for the record I'm not gonna give out your phone number. But I wish I could just so that everybody could call your phone to get your voicemail because your voicemail is epic. The first Time I heard your voicemail.

You got some guy with the superhero type voice of Ken powers.

So the story there is in the early days of Fiverr. I did pay a voice actor for it to record my voicemail and he did a very good job. Oh, it's epic.

You can't ever get rid of that with the last name like powers this your superpowers it's great, but we're gonna talk about different power that you have and for folks to know you and I first met at the Open-air theology conference that was held last year.

It's coming up again soon in February. We'll talk about that in a moment so that we can encourage people to join that you don't want to miss it. I'm just saying it was one of the better more epic Conferences that I've been to as far as good theology not just in the preaching but also in all of the side discussion.

During the breaks after the conference we had great but you and I met there and the history of this is. You had walked up to me and you said I was listening to James White and he said wouldn't it be nice if there's some? way to sort all of the back issues or Episodes of the dividing line so you could find things and he realized that would be a really really difficult task.

And it's something I thought of myself saying How do I go back to previous episodes to find what I have out there and you came up and said?

Oh, I did that.

I've been working on it for a little while and while I was working on the project I was listening to backups as the divine line and he says man. Could you imagine the divine line archives of fully searchable transcripts?

And I was literally like looking at code that would do that same thing. My wife Laura. She says, you know, he's coming to a conference near here in a few months. Why don't you go show him? And so went there.

That's where I met you. I actually demoed to James White using your phone. If you remember, that's right. Yeah, my phone would not get reception. You flagged down James White for me. You said hey James is a this guy has something cool to show you.

You had shown it to me and I was like, this is amazing. And so when he got there, I like pulled him over. You're right. We have to use my phone. Okay, I love this. I asked you for a little bit of a bio on you and I Completely get this other people in the audience are not going to because I've always said that I my first language is not English.

It was basic Pascal C C++ Java JavaScript. If something I'm going what. Well, I love that the very first thing on your profile your resume is, you know languages. Proficient in JavaScript typescript HTML fives.

Familiar with rust C sharp net framework. I was expecting to see like English French.

That's the resume of an engineer right. That's right.

Developers are a little bit of a different breed and we have a little bit of a different sense of humor. So let's talk about let's church now folks. I'm gonna tell you right now if you're not driving if you're sitting at your computer desk do this for right now.

We're gonna have this on striving for eternity. It's one of the things on our task to do. I don't think our webmasters done it yet. But if you go to let's dot church, let's l ETS dot church. That gets you to the let's church website from there.

You can click on channels and you are gonna see a plethora of channels that you can search. This is the power that Ken powers has given us of this tool. You can find the rap report interoperate rap report rap report daily apologetics live.

You can go through all of our striving fraternity videos, but there's more alpha and Omega ministries. There's apology, Utah. There's 80 Robles Bethlehem Bible Church dead man walking podcast is on there revealed apologetics is on there you have Wutt most recent edition is fighting for the faith fighting for the faith.

So fight for truth. I mean, there's a number of them and it's a grown list because last time I actually went in here. There were no rhythm that weren't here. What is on there from when we understand the text?

And so you have all of these and so the neat thing is. What you can do with this is You could get a transcript a searchable transcript of even videos of the video in the audio. So that you could put something in saw let me give the example.

Can I told you about this when you set this up for us? I am preparing a debate with dr Michael Brown on the issue of Miracles and spiritual gifts. I quickly went into each of the channels Apologetics live Andrew apports rap report in the daily and our videos at striving fraternity.

I went through them and just put in miracles or gifts and I was able to pull up all the places. That may be on apologetics live. We had someone that just came in and asked a question and we answered it and I'm able to give him.

Not just the link to the video which you have on let's church. But you have also the transcript that he could read and he can look so all of that's available folks. That you could do on all the stuff that we're producing here at striving fraternity.

Karm is up there now folks here familiar with karm Christian apologetics research ministry my friend Matt slick. Put Ken in touch with him. I got some other people that I told Ken we're gonna be put you in touch with because I think this is such a valuable resource because not only can you go just to apologetics live and Search there.

So if you were to go to let's dot church under channels, you can go to apologetics live and what you could do is you could actually decide if you so choose to search something by typing it in the search bar and When you do only those episodes of apologetics live will come up that have things so for example, I just went in into apologetics live and I typed gifts and Four videos pop up have spiritual gifts ceased.

Can charismatic gifts and Benny Hinn be defended. Andrew and Matt slick and Matt disagree on charismatic gifts and a Asian Hebrew Israelite. That was a long episode long time ago. There's a fun one and then continue a cessationism versus continuationism.

Those are the four episodes that we covered specifically gifts, but if you were to hit it a second time. Now you have oh, I didn't notice you have no compromised radios on there. You have everywhere now you have 90 different medias and Three thousand eight hundred and sixteen Transcripts that deal with gifts and clearly our friends.

They're up at no compromise radio. Mike Gabendroth has done a lot on it because I see spiritual gifts 101 and he's got a 101 that's part one part two.

Part three.

My go-to search demos. If you type in grape juice and actually Mike Gabendroth comes up as the first result there grape juice.

So you could go to let's thought church and or let's sure shot calm it'll go there. Oh, okay, and you could just go to the search bar front that gives you a search of everything. So I'm gonna give you guys a pro tip here if you're looking for you want everything but just realize everything gives you a ton and it's constantly growing because like can you have pulled in from my RSS feeds for the podcast and you're pulling that in so that we're able to get that constantly updated.

So it's it's an ever-growing list and. The thing here though is a pro tip is if you are specific you want to go to a specific Say podcast you heard it on the rap report you go to the channels. Then Andrew reports rap report from there.

You will be able to search just that podcast. But the thing I'm letting you know type in what you want. It automatically pulls up the search list if you hit the return button a second time. We're actually the first time you're gonna get everything so if you're looking for just a specific one go into the channel type what your Keyword and you can get it pulled up that way if you want everything.

That let's church has just go to the main page hit search and go for it.

And then while you're on that main search there actually are filters. So you can like hit that channels filter right there and filter down to just specific channels. You're interested in. You can filter down by the date something was published.

So if you remember vaguely when it was so like there are 150 results for grape juice, actually. Content that's been uploaded. Yeah. Yeah. Grape juice is a popular topic.

Interesting.

But so like I see a hundred fifty results for grape juice, right? But then if I go to channels and I'm like, oh I want fighting for the faith. So I checked that. There's only one result now. So in all of 10 15 years, however long Chris Roseboro has been doing his thing he's only mentioned grape juice one time and.

The result is here. Have a cracker and some grape juice to remember that.

Okay, so once we start tight once we do the search on grape juice, we could then choose under advance. Is the search phrases. You can choose different channels right next to advanced if you if you press channels, okay.

So this is really neat so I can actually choose to search just if I wanted to search apologetics live striving for eternity videos Andrew reports rap report and Andrew reports daily rap report. I can search all of those in one search.

I just learned something new here folks. So there I can't I talk about grape juice eight times. Huh? I didn't know I even spoke about it. Maybe one time.

Well make that nine times now because this episode will be up there.

Good point.

Okay, so this is kind of interesting. I talked about grape juice when discussing creation with Paul Taylor. So now here's the thing let folks know there's a difference with this between media and transcripts.

What's that difference?

So when you're searching media all that's going to be searching is titles and descriptions. Versus the transcript results are I built it as its own function. So it's like if you're trying to really narrow in on transcript and one big difference there is that like word order won't matter.

By default when you're searching media, but word order will matter in the transcripts. But it'll compensate for like missing words and stuff like that. I'm working on some various schemes to make search simpler and maybe even combine Media and transcript search into one interface so you don't need to switch between the two.

But that's the basic difference is titles and descriptions versus what was actually said in the actual video.

Why Searchable Transcripts Matter for Research

And so we're gonna end up at least at striving fraternity org. We're gonna have this where you're gonna be able to search Everything be able to go through and find not just what's on the website. But now all of the podcasts that we do at striving fraternity the videos that we've uploaded.

And so that's gonna all be available to you. So the thing can I wanted you to come in because I want others to not only know this is available I mean we could stick it on our website and people go. Oh, that's kind of neat.

But I want folks know this is available said a they will start using it and be start Finding other ministries churches that could use this resource and then see I'm gonna talk about this a bit later on as well.

But you have a donate button and I want it. I want it because you have a very different model and I want to give time for us to explain it. So we're gonna hold off on that. I know we're not very Christian.

We're holding off on asking for money till we after we talk about the important stuff. Okay?

Yeah.

But I do want you guys as listeners to see the value of this tool. If you've already gone if you followed my instructions earlier, and you were already at the let's dot Church web page you already are playing with it and see the value of this because you've probably put in some other things and we're gonna have a whole lot more that we're gonna see here growing because I have a feeling that Ken and I are gonna do some work together with maybe the Christian podcast community and I'm gonna be reaching out to see if we can pull everybody in to that from there.

I think it's gonna really with over 50 podcasts In the community that really does kind of blow it up. So that would add quite a bit more content to this, but it is a really helpful tool Ken I've been using it.

Like I said when people ask me when I talked about things I can't remember. I had to go find something that somebody I was teaching at a Christian school just recently one of the students Decided he's really want to start listening to my podcast.

In the beginning of the podcast I mentioned a guy that came into the show a long time ago that was teaching sinless perfectionism and this guy Wanted to hear that episode as if like I know. Exactly, which one that was someone that comes in randomly on apologetics live I thought it was gonna take me a really long time to figure out where that was and I told him I said look.

It's gonna take me a while and I was in the airport on my way home. No, it's not I went to let's dot church. I typed in sinless perfectionism. In that just I went to channels apologetics live typed sinless perfectionism and it came up in about 30 seconds.

It took me and I was able to send a text to that boy's father to say this is the episode.

He was looking for and and here's the timestamp where it was said exactly.

So yeah. If he wants to watch that's true if the media is there in that case It was he can quickly just grab that look at the media and know exactly what spot to go to. So in a show like apologetics live Matt's like live which is under karm.

So when Matt started the mats like live when I was on the board of directors at karm. We ended up having the issue that we did this podcast and we needed somebody to type in. What are the questions that he got asked.

We realized we need to at least put that in the show notes. But I was at back at that time. I said look we need to keep a list of these and say, okay. Here's the question. Here's the episode. Here's the timestamp.

And so that was like I mean years ago five six years ago. There may be more that we were trying to do that. And now it's like oh, okay. We do it for the show notes, but now just just search here.

That's really the motivation is like speaking for myself. I'll be listening to something like doing the dishes or something and it'll plant a seed of an idea. I'm like, hey, when was that said? I'll be talking to my wife a few days later.

When was that said and that now I'm actually able to find it for the six hundred forty five days of content That is currently on the platform.

Well.

You think about it this way like if I was just to take all of the content you have that it's only two years of. It would take me to get through everything. But when I'm preparing for this debate with Michael Brown, what am I gonna plan to do.

Well like I just did. I'm gonna search spiritual gifts Miracles different words that I think will pop up Prophecy and I'm gonna be able to listen to content that's gonna be specific to what I want. But I will note specifically where it's discussed and if I prefer reading I can do that.

AI, Search, and the Limits of Machine Intelligence

So let's I wanted to start before we say hey, why did you create this? I want people to understand what it does and the power of this. Because I really think that this is a very valuable tool for people to use.

I want you now if you could explain your motivation for doing it a bit. What got you doing this? What's your background other than computers which we share in common?

But what brought this about really just wanting a solution to this issue? Like hey, when did I hear that? Wait, who said that I want to go back and hear it again. And so I started working on this really before I had like a Theology nailed down for like the business model and stuff which we'll talk about later.

But that's really all it is is just like being able to make this stuff accessible. So we were talking with James White at the conference, right? He told me we have 2 ,000 episodes of the dividing line and they are completely inaccessible because there's no index and Here we are probably about it's nine months or so later and it not only is all the divine line index.

But so are 28 other channels. It's amazing to see what you've done with it. This is where God gives people different skills. Your skills with computer programming and. For others they were like when I'm mentioning all those programming languages.

You are probably laughing because you're like you started with basic and you probably don't even know what Pascal is.

Because they don't probably teach that anymore. I am well versed with basic and Pascal. I'm not that young. For the nerds in the audience, I use neovim which is a new take on a 30 year old text editor.

Wow, okay for the nerds out there. I learned C that's a programming language, but I taught myself C by going through the source code of the corn shell and VI. VI is a Visual editor that is really not visual at the time.

It was considered visual and so that's how I learned C. And nobody uses Pascal. It's taught in schools. I actually fought at my university to get C taught as a programming language. I was like the thorn in the side of my Teachers because I was arguing that we should teach C and not Pascal and they didn't want to do that.

And their argument was that they don't teach computer languages at the school. They teach concepts and I said, okay. So I would do all my assignments in C because that's what I was gonna get a job with when I graduated.

Programs in Pascal that's still very typical of computer science programs today. You're there to learn the science behind computer science and less so like the skills that will get you a job. Now that said there's obviously use cases for the science AI.

Being able to make these large language models and all that. Depending on the program you're in you are very much in theory land rather than a practical application land.

I mean, I don't want to learn a language I'm not gonna be able to use if I want to get the theory but use it in the language that actually will get Me a job. And I still remember we had a class a statistics class.

And I had written the program in C and because we were told any language. So I write this program. We had three programs do. I wrote the first one in C and The professor said there were three of us that did this.

She could tell our programs were different, but she couldn't read C so she had to give us an a assuming that it it was correct and worked and so Next assignment she says you can't you see so what all three of us came up with the idea of doing is we wrote it In C and we pre compiled it down to assembler code.

We hand it in assembly. And she then said okay, you can't you see and you can't use assembly. So it's a statistics class. We all knew Fortran and we wrote it in Fortran. And she goes next year. I'm just gonna have to say it has to be in Pascal because that's the only language that she knew.

These days you can take your code and say hey chat. GPT, can you make this Pascal, please? Yeah.

Let's take a detour. Let's talk AI. Because this will be interesting for a lot of folks. For people like you and I I mean I have been Writing AI since the late 80s. So artificial intelligence is what AI stands for.

Someone could let our vice president know because she had the brilliant statement I don't know if you heard her talk about AI.

You'll have to refresh my memory. She goes AI.

Contains two letters a and I. I get like, okay. Yeah, your your speechwriter could have at least said it stands for artificial intelligence. Maybe she went off script. But artificial intelligence is basically trying to get a computer not to think that.

That's the thing everyone thinks that it is. Human beings have an ability to reason it's something immaterial and it's given to us by God. You're not gonna get a computer to think. It's not gonna have an ability to reason because it's not created in the image of God.

So when we look at this, what is it? Well, it's masking what human thinking is and reason because what it's trying to do is take what? Programmers like Ken will type in to a computer and tell it how to process data.

But a lot of people can have fear with AI and you and I haven't talked about this. You have a fear that AI is gonna destroy the world. It's gonna take over all our nuclear systems and create thermonuclear war.

Oh wait, that's a movie from the 80s war games.

I have a computer over there. I can hit it with a 2x4. It's not it's it's not dangerous.

So, where do you see AI going. Chat GPT is when people think of the most this open AI system. It is being used by a lot of folks, but there's a lot of others who are doing AI now not all of them having the Restrictions that chat GPT does.

And folks when I say restrictions there's a nonprofit part of the for-profit business just to appeal understand and the Nonprofit part was people don't have money invested in it. They're not gonna make money off it.

They don't have stock. They're trying to keep it safe. We could dispute whether they are keeping it safe because here's a simple thing I haven't done this in a while. I did this about almost a year ago.

But if you type into jet GPT give me eight reasons to vote for Donald Trump. It will tell you it can't get political. But if you type give me eight reasons to vote for Joe Biden it happily provides them.

So AI is only as good as the developers and will have whatever biases the developers have. So just keep that in mind when we talk about it. But what do you see is the future for AI and is it a good thing?

Is it a bad thing?

Are you even using it? I use it all the time. I always tell people AI heavy emphasis on the a it's artificial. It's a stack of numbers. It's a stack of linear algebra that imitates what you might expect a human to do.

But it's not reasoning per se if we're talking about chat GPT in these large language models. It's predicting. It's a mathematical model for hey What word comes next in the sentence. Run that again and again and again and then you know?

It'll spit out a really nice-looking transcript or something. But it's not like reasoning to get there and even things that look like reasoning. It's not reasoning in the way that like you and I reason with one another you end up with these personifying words, right?

That like give it personality even though it has none. It's making decisions between different functions that it can perform right, but it's not actually making a decision. It's like oh this is statistics say 80 go for that function.

So I'm gonna do that function right that which is not at all how actual intelligence operates.

Yeah, for example Elon Musk who actually was early involved in open AI, but wanted more. He's more concerned and wants more protections on it. He's got his own AI that they're now working. Difference with his is that it'll actually go through all of Twitter to get more updated information and so.

The thing though with his is his quirky humor was programmed in. So you get some of that in there? You're gonna get maybe a little bit more foul language or weird responses. So that's a matter of programming.

So I don't think people need to be so super afraid of AI.

This idea of like AI being an autonomous agent. That's gonna be like a virus that goes to the Internet and take over our nuclear systems. Like sure somebody could probably Make it a model that can take over a nuclear system, but it's not like autonomously gonna get there.

The way something like that would happen is in Warfare concepts that we already have to defend against anyway. AI is just another tool in that arsenal now.

Yeah, and so as we look at it folks, don't be afraid of it I just think through all of the breaks and technology that we've had and there are always the end-of-the-world type folks that think like This is gonna be it.

I mean when smartphones came out people thought by now everyone was gonna be dead by radiation. The fact that the phones would take over our lives I think in some ways we've depended on it, but it's not the way that so many people said it would.

Cars sewing machines trucks the list goes on and every decade. There's a new existential crisis of well.

This is it now we need we need universal basic income and that's the thing that we have to realize. That there's always gonna be folks who they're looking for things that they assume. Oh, this is it. This is the end.

This is horrible. And yet we end up using it as a tool and that's how I think we we should just like we use Let's church as a tool. It's something that helps us to be able to search things. Oh, I just noticed you have conversations that matter our friend John Harris is there and I should mention to give a plug the reason that we decided to do this episode why I reached out to you to do an episode was because you were on with Greg Moore from dead man walking podcast and We met I don't know if that was the first time you met him.

But I met Greg along with Keith Foskey who is conversations with a Calvinist at that same open-air theology conference. He had you on and I was like, you know what I'm using your why don't we plug it more?

You let others know that this is available Like Greg did so that's a shout out to to Greg there at dead man walking podcast for having you on. Brilliant idea that he had and I'm glad he did. So let's talk about.

The Dorian Principle and a Free Ministry Model

Your business model. Well, so before the business model actually did have one more a I thought so there are concerns out there like Oh, I don't want to use these AI models because I'm just training them and I'm like training my replacement or something like that.

There has been a lot of progress made in the last year to make these things easy to run on your own hardware on your own computer on your own phone and without having to reach out to any cloud services without having to send training data off anywhere and It's still very developer centric right now.

But the time is coming when you will be able to download a simple model and run it completely locally without any internet connection Whatsoever and you won't need to upload any data to you don't need to contribute to the training of these things.

Yeah, I mean they are only as good as the training but people should be as a warning don't rely on Chat GBT for its answers. It lies to you often. It's only as good as the data. Well, so they call it hallucinating.

I asked it early on who is Andrew? And it had a totally different University I went to and it doesn't know the difference between me. Andrew rapper. Andrew are Rappaport and Andrew s Rappaport the venture capitalist.

I don't have his kind of money though. Funny true story. Dennis Kaminich who is running for Democrat for president during the primaries. He didn't know the difference either and he actually contacted me or someone in his staff, too.

He wanted to take me to dinner. Now. Here's the funny thing. He contacted me at my lucent .com address. Well, I worked for lucent when Bell Laboratories got outsourced. You know got spun off to lucent.

Okay. You don't realize this is not like the venture capitalist company name, right? So, of course my response to the email was I decided I'm voting for Bush this year.

You know, well and that word you used also it doesn't know the difference right. That's that personifying language I'm talking about like the the idea that these models have so-called like knowledge even is.

It's really it's not what they are. It's like I said, it's a stack of numbers. It's projecting words so like what it knows per se like so to speak is What word should come next in the sentence and sometimes that's a good word and sometimes it's a bad word.

So let's talk about how your business model is. Because this is some different and I know that I'll let you explain the book. That this is based off of. I know of the book. I know he has been on several of our other Christian podcast me podcasts.

I haven't had him on myself because I haven't had time to read the book though. You are gonna make that available where I can listen to it. So. So I want you to explain your model. But also mention the Durian principle what it is how P others could find out about this early on working on this.

I got connected with Conley Owens author of the Durian principle and he basically provided a theology for something that I had been Thinking about in my head for a long time. Like hey, why are churches?

Charging other churches to play their songs. Why do we have all these restrictions on English translations of the Bible? You can't take more than 500 verses you can't share more than however many consecutive verses and it can't be more than half a book and you can't you can't you can't.

And going like isn't this the Word of God, right? Like what's going on here is shouldn't this be free to share if I want to print out the letter of 1st John and give it to someone in an evangelistic effort, you can't do that with most modern translations of the Bible and It's a misconception like oh, I'll just use a King James.

The King James is also subject to a perpetual copyright from the crown. They restrict you to 500 verses and all the rest as well the English Standard Version ESV very popular. They actually take it to an even greater degree.

You cannot quote the ESV in Any work that is available to the public with a creative commons license so Meaning like if I write a paper or if I write a sermon and I want that sermon to be available to the public Basically for free unencumbered that I want people to share my sermon.

I cannot use the ESV. I cannot quote the ESV translation in my sermon because their license specifically restricts that. So the Dorian principle is taking a look at like hey what does scripture actually say about how we should do ministry finance and And all that kind of stuff and like the the basic concept if I could boil it down to a few words is ministry should Be supported not paid for and so I'm considering this a ministry.

It should be supported not paid for so everything is available 100 for free with no ads. You don't need to sign up. You can sign up you can donate but that's what it is donations.

Welcome, but you absolutely are under no obligation. Yeah, I mean, this is how when we used to do our conferences. We did our conferences. It's a sad thing because if people don't pay they're less likely to show up.

Which is really sad because we'd be paying for really good speakers to come in and speak and people would kind of decide Oh, the weather's not so nice. So I decided not to go like really? Okay, and so I get the fact that people say oh, but you should you should charge for it.

And but when we do the conferences, we don't want money to be an issue. Our conferences were free people just attended and we would do a love offering people can put whatever they want. And we would lose money each year, but we were giving great resources to the hundreds of people that would show up, right?