Make sure I'm situated properly. I'm here inside Bob Jones University. This is the construction site for the vault. You all know that Sermon Audio has been running for 20 years, and we've been doing what we've been doing. We all work from home. We all work very remotely. Whenever we try to onboard new help, It's a very difficult, very complicated process because there's a lot, there's a big learning curve. As we've been going along here, it's been getting more and more complicated to get the help that we need and to train the people that we need. Another problem that I've been advertising quite a bit is we have over two million sermons that are sitting in the cloud platform right now and we don't have physical access to them and that bothers us. This project that we're calling The Vault and we call it The Vault because the doomsday vault there in Norway, it houses all of the world's seeds. It's meant to be there securely in the event of a of a global catastrophe. So that's what they have there. But we also want to have a place where we can protect the seed, the seed of God's preached word. And so we're calling this The Vault just to have an easy way for us to communicate what it is that we're trying to do. Steven, I've got a question about, I think I know the answer, but is the goal then to be completely disconnected from third party cloud platforms and it will be solely here at The Vault at Bob Jones? Right. That is not the goal. The goal is to just protect ourselves. The goal is to provide enough redundancy where if we ever did lose all of the cloud platforms, catastrophically, we would still have the sermons in hand and we can still operate to some degree. But what this does is it just protects us so that if we lose everything out there, Technically, everything will be runnable from this space. That's the goal. So this vault is here on the campus of Bob Jones. There's a strategic reason why we have it here at Bob Jones University. We're thinking about the future. We're thinking about five, 10 years down the road, trying to imagine a scenario that works and that sustains, even if you have your own infrastructure. And the only way that I can think of to do that sustainably and economically, and that benefits other parties, is to align yourself with an educational institution. Bob Jones University is the obvious choice for us because they're here, local, in Greenville, South Carolina. This is my own alma mater. I graduated in 95 with computer science. They have a very strong computer science degree program here, and the students that can help us or we can train them and they can participate and brainstorm with us and just mix with us all the time, you're providing valuable experience for them. And it would be extremely useful for, just purely from an academic standpoint, for students to be exposed to this sort of thing and to have on their resume that they participated in the development of a television app for streaming video, for example. What I'll do is I'll just take a quick walk around. So this is the second floor. This is the second floor of the library. And as you can see, it's that's the outside there. It's a really attractive building. But The library part is over there and you can see it says Mack Library and this is really where the entrance starts. Along this hallway, this is a very important hallway for us because we're going to have displays and things set up on these walls to communicate what's important to us. I mean we'll have the people and the churches and the organizations that have given will creatively honor them on this wall here. Over on this wall over here is we want to have something to honor the life and work of John Rogers. The reason why that's so important to us is because John Rogers gave us the Matthews Bible, which is the printed word, and so he was in the business of preserving and propagating the printed word and because of the generosity of his descendant we are able to continue that tradition of preserving and propagating not the printed word per se but the preached word. So here we're walking into the space and this glassed area here is where the servers will be. A portion of them, not all of them. This is more of a showcase. It will have real servers in here But not all the servers will be sitting in here. There's another location elsewhere on campus that will house the overflow servers. There will be enough machinery here to just show screens and you'll be able to see some status and different things. And on this big wall here, what we're planning on doing is We actually want to have on this wall where people are listening to sermons in real time, presently all over the world. That's something that is important for us to do because everything that we've been doing on Sermon Audio, I'll just flip this around so you can see me. Everything that we've been doing on Sermon Audio is done behind a screen on servers and people can't really appreciate the word going out and having an impact, but it is having an impact and it's having an impact all over the world and we want to be able to to visualize that we want we want people to be able to see it we have here a conference room this is going to be an important room for us because this is where we're finally going to be able to do all of our collaboration and as we scoot down here This is the co-work space. This space is just an open space right now. There'll be desk set up, a long table set up along the walls. And you have a couple of offices there. There you have a storage room there. Another office behind this pillar over there. Again, The main motivations here is to have a secure location for us to house machines, as well as to communicate what we're doing here to the students or to anybody who walks into this space. We started with Sermon Audio back when COVID hit. You know, the governor here in the state of Washington ordered our church and all churches closed, which was a first since the founding of the country. And we started with Zoom for Sunday School and Sermon Audio to get our messages out. And we're a small church, but it really has increased our footprint. We got into a couple of closed countries, which is pretty interesting. On the technical side, I'm curious about these servers. We live in server country here in central Washington. What's actually involved in these servers? What do they do and how do they do it? As far as the actual equipment goes, The beauty of what's going on here today, living in 2022, technologically, is that things have become a lot more, I'm not going to say simplified, they haven't become simplified, but they have become more elegant as far as the hardware solutions. If you've heard of something called clustered computing, That's just a concept where you can take any number of physical machines and they operate in a cluster. It doesn't matter if you pull one of the machines out or you put two more in, it just seems to be able to operate and it knows. what resources it has and so what we need to do in this space back here is we just need to get as many CPUs as possible in racks and these are just going to be enterprise grade servers that sit in racks. Over time we can add more and as servers go down we just take them out of commission but they're all operating in one gigantic cluster. And we use technology called Kubernetes. It's something that all the major cloud providers use. It's open source. It's actually quite beautiful. It works really, really well. Every sermon that gets uploaded to Sermon Audio, it goes through what we call a pipeline on our side. It goes through a chain of events. So that one video or that one audio file that you send up, it's gone through multiple iterations of encoding and moving from place to place. and copying from one platform to another for redundancy. That whole process, which we call the pipeline internally, that will be running in this cluster computing. And the more servers that we have, the more we can process. We process about 5,000 sermons a week, and it just takes a lot of horsepower to do that, especially with video. And that's never minding the live streaming stuff. Live streaming is a completely separate thing, but it still works on the whole cluster principle, it just would require even more hardware. It all is a funding issue. It's completely a funding issue. It's not a know-how issue because we know how to do this. In fact, we are doing it ourselves. But over time, we trust we will be able to acquire more and more. One other point, too, was I was somewhat skeptical because I thought, well, where would my one sermon be found in the midst of two million sermons? I thought of putting a grain of sand on the beach. But we were findable. And how do you do that? How is it that we can be discovered in the midst of a lot of sermons? That has to do with the fact that our platform is designed for sermons, whereas other platforms are just designed for media generally. We care about like the Bible reference attached to a sermon, or we care about the fact that it's a funeral, or that it's a Sunday school. The more information that the church provides per sermon, the easier it is for people to find you. And so what we found is that one of the most popular ways that people look for material, they look up a Bible reference. They look up a text that they're studying or about to preach on, and they want to see how other people handle that. We make it very easy for you to do that, obviously, because we're all about sermons. And discoverability is going to be, I think, a little bit easier for people who want sermons on Sermon Audio. Any of you that don't use, and Steven didn't pay me to say this, but to any of you who don't use a Sermon Audio for your live stream, it's fantastic. We use, you know, Steven alluded to people using multiple streams. We use Facebook, YouTube, and Sermon Audio, and they all have their place. I mean, it really does. You know, Facebook has a lot of great features that notify people that you're live. That's terrific. And some people like their Facebook feeds. but embedding a Facebook stream on a website is not helpful generally. It doesn't work so well. So we use Sermon Audio as our primary live stream on our website that we embed and it's fantastic. But we also stream to YouTube as well. But to Steven's point with the whole vault project, there may come a day when YouTube says, no, you can't stream services on our platform. Facebook may do the same thing. And so, I'm really excited about what Steven and the Sermon Audio guys are doing with this fall project. I think it'll be fantastic. We've been on Sermon Audio, I don't know how many years, but a long time. Back to, I think one of you guys were talking about just getting started. Just an encouragement to you as well. When we got started, it was bad as far as not Sermon Audio, our own internal processes. And, you know, over time you just make it a better, a little bit better, a little bit better. You can justify spending more money on it. And it's fantastic. And the outreach we have to our own members here in the church, whether they've just had a baby, they're sick, their grandparents or around the world. I can't thank Sermon Audio and Stephen Lee enough for the work and the time and effort they've put into this platform. It is a goldmine and I really appreciate it, Stephen. Oh, I appreciate that, Nate. Absolutely. Yeah, they've been with us for one of the longest churches with us. Yeah, we hope to be around for a long time because we really do hope to serve the church for a long, long time. You know, if we're not around, then you're stuck with the social platforms. There are other services out there, but there's no library of sermons. And I feel like there needs to be that. And it would be a tremendous shame if that ever went away, like it really would. There's so much on the site by way of gold, resources, some of the old sermons. I mean, they're there and they're going to be there, God willing, until the very end. We just want to set up ourselves physically here as well as with manpower going into the future so that we can be long-term. We really want this to be as long-term as possible. I do encourage you to just remember to pray for us. I mean, this is hard work. This is above and beyond what we're doing as far as just normal development. This is a great big distraction for us, but it just feels like we have no other choice. We either do this now or later on, we run out of time. and we just are scrambling and we don't know what to do. I think this is now the time for us to be preparing for the future, which might be a lot more difficult. And even if that day doesn't come, it's always good for us to have the sermons in hand. I just feel like that's something we just have to do. It's too important to not have it in hand. Steven, I have another question related that I think you've said in your incident newsletters, you've got all the construction process paid for, you've got a donor for that, but you're still needing funds for equipment to go in it, is that right? Yeah, that's right. So the donor has committed himself to pay for the construction, but that is just the brick and mortar and the drywall and the physical shell. It has nothing to do with the actual equipment. That is a completely separate thing that has to be raised. Equipment is not cheap. Just looking at one firewall, one piece of equipment, a firewall that can handle the kind of traffic we're talking about. It's a firewall plus load balancer. It's a piece of equipment. It's $40,000. for one piece of equipment. A switch, a normal switch that you would put in your house, you know, to connect your wireless and modem and all that, a switch that needs to be capable for the kind of traffic we have here is $20,000 and we need two of them. I mean, this is, we're just talking about stuff that just costs, I don't even know why it costs so much money, to be honest, but it's expensive. The money has been coming in as the Lord touches people and churches and ministries and we're just praying that the Lord will Bring the right people along to help us in this. This is obviously much heavier than we can carry ourselves. But over time, I think we'll do what we can. Based on what you said earlier about how it's going to process and work, it sounds like once this gets up and going, the idea is to do all of your pipeline, all of your processing and new sermons there at Bob Jones. And then your two cloud providers and your vault will act as kind of a three-way load balancing for all of your distribution of live stream and content that people go download on demand. Is that accurate or a fair statement? That would be accurate. Mike, do you have something to say to that? Well, I just say that we wouldn't necessarily relegate the pipeline to only Bob Jones, who would like to see all of our data centers perform some portion of the pipeline actively. So they're not in standby mode. That way, we know they're always doing some part of it, and they're we're working then. So if one of them goes down, we know that the other ones are actually working because they're contributing. So it's more of an active-active than an active-standby type scenario. There are some pieces, and we wouldn't necessarily share the load equally, we would, you know, a certain percentage would be at Bob Jones and maybe a greater percentage in the cloud, or it all depends on how we allocate. But the goal would be that all of the pieces of Sermon Audio would be runnable everywhere. So we have true data center redundancy. So we just finished up a zoom call with some of our broadcasters and interested parties. I hope that this has been helpful for you. And I hope that you have a little bit of a better understanding of what we're trying to achieve here. Just three things to keep in mind. Number one, the sermons, we want to protect the sermons to do that. We need to have our own equipment, our own hardware. And to do that, number two, we need to have more help. We need to have developer help, but we also need to have trained help to maintain the equipment. Number three, we want to be able to encourage and inspire the next generation, elevate their sights on things related to the kingdom. We want to use this space to communicate and to achieve all three of those objectives. And we trust and pray that God will give us the desires of our heart.