Where We Are, Where We're Going

I'm excited to present this first version of the Database! I have a host of features that I'm hoping to roll out in stages.

Current Features of the FREE System

• Impressive and beautifully designed video recommendation system
• Easy-to-browse system featuring 2600 videos organized into very specific conceptual categories using state-of-the-art topic modeling algorithms.
• Full Roman numeral outline summaries with scripture references for every video in the system.
• A plain language query feature that allows you to search for anything I've taught and receive video recommendations.
• I’m in the process of populating Questions and Answers for the videos, you’ll see these in dropdowns under each video.

The current version that you're seeing is the free version that I plan on keeping available to all. One of the main features left to be implemented include the ability to share playlists.

Note about outlines and Q&A

Roman Numeral Outlines and Q&A are created by AI based on my transcripts. Improving this process is a difficult journey. Language Models are advanced databases of information. To generate text, they search the available information. Large Language Models are trained on vast amounts of internet data, including information from different traditions and perspectives. The key to getting an AI to generate text from a specific perspective is to provide it with your own database and prioritize your data over its pretrained data. This can be quite challenging. These summaries accurately focus on my teaching, but the video itself should be considered the main source of information. One interesting discovery was that an AI doesn't recognize that Pastor So and So is "satire" and thus treats his content seriously!

Upcoming Features

The next version, has all of the above-mentioned items structured in a very advanced database, which will allow users to:

• Ask any question and receive full, verbose, plain-language answers to their questions.
• Receive recommendations that include videos and popup chapters from my books relevant to the question.
• Generate full courses on any of these topics for individualized study, tailored to you.
• Download entire playlists of videos that deal with your topic of interest to your device for offline listening.

The next version will really be a cutting edge application. It will be unique not only in terms of the technology but most importantly, materials related to this perspective are very rare.

Again, if you use this free and benefit I hope you'll consider that it has cost me quite a lot of money to produce and host (and I'm thankful to a couple of very generous contributors who made it possible) not to mention literally thousands of hours of time and learning to create. The full featured version will require a monthly subscription with a small fee to use because of the costs. Currently, a monthly subscription fee is $10. Depending on cost of rollout and usage patterns that could increase slightly for full access to the database. However, I'm working on ways to reduce costs.