UNREACHED
In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb.
Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world.
For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining.
Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work through the men and women he has called to reach the UNREACHED.
UNREACHED
A Fresh Wind in the Sails - Tech on Mission with Eric Long
We trace Eric Long’s path from American Dream career to a redemptive tech mission that brings thoughtful connectivity to remote workers reaching the unreached. A field-tested pilot in Papua New Guinea shows how mesh networks can lift isolation, support families, and enable care.
• vision of all nations and the task remaining
• college friendship becomes a faith-fueled partnership
• ritual faith challenged by loss and rebuilt as relationship
• leaving IBM to pursue a calling grounded in Ephesians 2:10
• forming a three-legged company with a redemptive core
• why “Pleroo” and the wind-in-the-sail metaphor
• mesh networking explained in simple terms
• guardrails against harmful, unfettered internet access
• Papua New Guinea pilot outcomes and daily impact
• telehealth, Bible access, and offline-first tools
• cost, kits, and a nonprofit model that lowers barriers
• design for needs, not ego or one-size-fits-all
• plug-and-play deployment and remote support
• discipleship ripple effects and practical next steps
Go check out pleroo.world
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In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people, and language standing in the throne room before the land. Yet today, there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world. For the last six years, my family and friends have been on the journey to find, vet, and fund the task remaining. Come the journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work to the minimum he has called to reach the unreached great. Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Unreach Podcast. Dustin Elliott here today. Your host and I have a friend of mine. We've been friends for the last 24-5 years here today. Our friendship started in a very secular way. It took a very sacred turn later in life. And you're going to hear stories today. This is going to pull on several threads we've talked about recently. This is part of the rising tide that lifts all boats. This is this is when tech meets missions and supports missions. This is a lessons today in how local discipleship can have global impact and how loving your neighbor well and checking in on old friends can become incredibly redemptive through the Holy Spirit and through God's power to reach the unreached. And so I'm so excited to welcome my old fraternity brother and my longtime friend, Mr. Eric Long. Eric, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_03:Dustin, thank you so much for having me here, man. It is such a what a change 24 years, 25 years makes.
SPEAKER_00:No kidding. No kidding. Eric rushed me into the fraternity. He's a year older than me in college for context. And uh I'd say the only time we were praying uh at that point in our lives was was when we needed to pass a final. Um a lot has changed.
SPEAKER_03:Maybe not to do some some after some partying the mornings after, but maybe yeah, maybe some. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know if that's I think that's applicable. I think that's applicable. We're gonna talk a little bit about Eric's story because Eric's story has some really major um meat in his testimony of stuff that he's walked through in his life and that God's used to wire him for, and I use that term wire kind of pun intended, right? Because we got a tech guy, wire him for where he is and what he's doing today. So part of his story is going to be tough. It's gonna be hard to hear, but if you'll stay with us to the point where we get to where this technology is enabling connectivity in the missions world, uh particularly in really hard-to-reach places where there's not great, you know, internet access or electricity, uh, this tech that they've created and then found out a kind of figured out a way through the Lord to enable it into this nonprofit side is game-changing. So if you are in missions, if you know anyone in missions, if you know anyone running businesses in parts of the world that it would help their business if they could be more connected to their workers in the field, this is something you need to hear. This is a technology you could implement and use, and and it would dramatically enhance your ability to do your jobs well in the field. So stay with us today. Hear this tech, and then you're probably gonna want to call Eric when we get done. All right.
SPEAKER_03:Man, for not being a techie, you're you're nailing the outcomes of what we're doing, which is which is fun. And we'll get to that.
SPEAKER_00:I'm a tech investor. I got a little bit of it. Okay, so so let's go back to uh let's start back at the beginning, right? So before I knew you, um you grew up in Houston.
SPEAKER_01:That's right.
SPEAKER_00:Give us a little talk about kind of you you had you had some religion and some kind of repetition early in your life. Take us through that.
SPEAKER_03:Grew up in Katie, Texas, right outside of Houston for the better part of my I call I call it childhood. I wasn't born there. I was actually born in Kansas, migrated south to Oklahoma for a little stint. Thank goodness that was short, right? Can't be in Sooner Country too long. Um, and then got to Katie when I was in about fourth grade. And some of my uh my past with and my relationship with Jesus started real early. God was never not a part of of the family. I still remember my baptism story, my parents tell me over and over. Um I got sprinkled with with water, as we'd call it now, back in the day when I was a baby, and I'm a twin. And so there's the pastor had two of us up there, and I grabbed his microphone while they were baptizing my twin brother, grabbed the microphone and decided to just swallow it with my mouth. And so that was how I I guess my first relationship when I got sprinkled and baptized, decided to swallow a uh what do you the land of lavalier mics? Is that what they're called?
SPEAKER_00:Um I don't know, Clint's not on the mic today, I'm sure he would know the answer.
SPEAKER_03:So that was kind of my intro into the world, yeah, into the relationship. Take it all in, yeah. That's right. Yeah, uh so grew up Methodist, God was always around, but it was really more routine and I'd call it religion as opposed to relationships. So, you know, checkboxy uh relationship with the Lord. And then one of the really defining moments was a missions trip. So yeah, United Methodist Church um had something back in the day called UM Army, and we went to border towns um in Texas on the Mexico border, and we got to work and we were there and you'd spend a week involved in this, and I still remember the impact like seemingly small things had on these on these folks that just brought Jesus into them. They could see Jesus through the work that was being done and some of the outcomes, and then that man, that sticks today. Past that, it became more routine getting to the college years, which you alluded to earlier. What was to the typical American dream? You know, we were in college because we wanted to socialize, we wanted to make sure that we were armed to crush the business world. That was the goal, that was the dream, that was what we what we were chasing. Of course. So started dating a wonderful woman in uh high school, went through dating on and off through college, but mostly on, and ended up marrying marrying her. She was a Catholic, and so by the time college finished that and graduated, right after graduating, I think Stacy and I, my uh my girlfriend at the time, had got married and were kind of again living that American dream. Um, I started working for IBM as everything from a developer, architect, executive, so on, and traveled the world, which was awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_03:Again, chasing and living that American dream. We right out of school, we bought a house, started thinking about kids, got another house. All the goals we had were really around that next title, that next, you know, lot or a house, or what's the next car look like? And it wasn't necessarily that we were, you know, those were the only things we cared about, but it certainly wasn't rooted in, you know, my relationship with the Lord is gonna direct my next move at all, right? Right. Started having children, we had two wonderful girls. Four months after Addison, our youngest, was born. I'm traveling the world at that time for IBM, and we get hit with just a big doozy of a hey, you're not in control from the Lord situation. I'm uh, I'll never forget, I'm in Brazil. I am teaching a uh a group, uh a room full of developers and architects, and maybe even some executives at that time, how to how IBM's technology competes with a competitor. And I get this buzz in my pocket while I'm on stage, you know, the no-no of you're on stage presenting in front of people, don't don't have your phone on, mind's going off, um vibrating, and I'm like, all right, that's kind of weird. It's going off for a while. So at the next break, I check it, and it's a message from my wife who says she's discovered a they've discovered a five centimeter mass in her liver.
SPEAKER_00:Boom.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Right? One of those boom moments of holy cow, you know, I'm living what I thought was the dream, up on stage, traveling the world. I'm in Brazil, beautiful building. Like we had a view of the city, and then just whammy, you know, what happened? Turns out she has a uh or had a super rare cancer. It's in your bile ducts, in your liver. It's called intrahepatic calangiocarcinoma. It just rattles off the tongue, right? It's a cancer of the liver, super rare again, like one out of every 200,000 people gets it. And it had grown fairly large um at that point. Yeah. So had to pump the brakes on quite a few things to really just focus in on that. The first prognosis we got was you need to make amends. You've got three to six months. Hearing that, we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You got this all wrong. I'm in control here. That that's not right. This can't be this can't be right. So we went to many, many doctors, lots of prayer at that time, and we'll I'll kind of get to that. Like, that was kind of again going back to prayer and the lack of relationship really affected things there because it was almost I call it now jokingly, even though it wasn't a joke, like almost Santa Jesus. Like, Lord, fix this. Like instead of what can we do with this? What are we supposed to do with this? It was largely how do we fix it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, what's your will for this? What's your purpose in this? What are you teaching us? And it wasn't that. Yeah, it was just fixing it.
SPEAKER_03:Just make her better. Right. We get to uh there's a prognosis of three to six months. She fought, you knew you knew Stacy very well. She was a fighter. No doubt. She was not gonna stop with that show.
SPEAKER_00:She she won poker night at the house more than anybody else did.
SPEAKER_03:I think she I think you're right on that. Yeah. Um, so yes, and then uh so that was a long battle for four years, two months. Um, so she passed about ten years ago, and unfortunately did lose that battle, but um was a was a fighter with that. So I'm 34. I just lost my wife. I've got a four-year-old and a six-year-old. What the heck am I gonna do here? Yeah. So it's at that time just dive into what I knew back then. I mean, wasn't unfortunately it wasn't, and I'll just be honest, like it wasn't diving back into the Lord. The Lord helped, and looking back on it, 1000% helped guide a lot of that, and was obviously there through that, but I wasn't leaning into that relationship. What I did was go back to my American dream. Well, I got this, right? I'll pick up my shield instead of his shield, and I'm not putting on his armor, I'm putting on my armor. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And uh it was Eric, Eric six, not Ephesians six.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So exactly right. And so, you know, church every Sunday, visiting the cemetery every every Sunday, and then I decided to just take a year of like just focusing on figuring life back out again. Two years after that, as God would have it, met Julie, current wife. She challenged things that I thought were status quo. I mean, going back to challenging things like routine. She challenged, like, why are you saying the Lord's Prayer? Like at night. I was like, Because you say the Lord's Prayer at night. Yeah, yeah. What do you mean? That's what you do. Yeah. And she's like, Well, wouldn't it be more impactful if you actually talked to him? And I was like, Whoa. Blue, like, you know, these these blinders you have on, right? Just started getting shattered. And this was, again, very impactful in my walk, faith walk. About that same time, or maybe a little bit before that, all this happened intentionally, right? I had lunch with you, and you we hadn't seen each other in at the time, I don't know, six years.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And I didn't know much about you. We hadn't talked regularly. You grabbed my hands and said a prayer at lunch, and I acted like, what the heck's going on here? Who are you? Who's this guy? But you were so convicting in that moment, and it had a huge impact on my faith walk. So thank you for that. So that that happened at the same time as uh new wife with Julie, her relationship, and how she encouraged relationship, all that kind of blended together wonderfully in us kind of finding a new church home that we call uh home here in Austin. We we absolutely love it. We get into the word um daily, and it just uh it's now relationships leading as opposed to routine and and and religion, and it's really changed not only our relationship with the Lord, but our relationship with our family, with each other, and it's been a um uh at this point that's gonna be a great segue into what it what else has changed, which is you then you dove deep, you know, you fell completely off the deep end, and and you met with the missions pastor, and you started taking classes and you started really like figuring this stuff out and what is God calling me to.
SPEAKER_00:I've got this unique testimony, um, I've got this kind of unique skill set where I really uh I've spent 20 years traveling the world in in in tech and developing tech and and taking tech to market. And what do I do with all that? And that that led you then to reconnect with some other of our old fraternity brothers. You start talking to David Pearson, who you and Pearson were always super, super close, and we well, we all were, but but uh y'all were really close, and then you know, he had on his own journey, he had he had started a tech company and and and invented some really fascinating technology that he was focused on use for for the government and the military, as well as potentially some commercial use. And then you come into that with this fresh new set of eyes and ears, and you're like, wait a second, this could actually do something profound in the nonprofit world. So tell us about that journey.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you nailed it. Part of this journey of, and again, going back to the lunch with you, right? Of holy cow, I've got all these relationships of you know, deep relationships. I mean, we're we're friends for a long time in college. We walked, you walked through a lot of stuff together in college, and what does this look like now? How can we re look re reopen these opportunities? So, David Pearson, who's also in Austin, started a tech company, and we like to joke. I was a computer science major, he was an English major, and he ends up with all this crazy cool technology and starts a tech company. It's like, what's going on here? So, again, around this same time frame, I find out about his technology. He's only in the government military space at the time. He's this was uh you know, seven years ago. Um, and I said, dude, this technology, if you can pull it off, is gonna be a game changer. I'll invest in it now. The second you want to take it to the commercial space, I'll leave whatever I'm doing. I feel called to this, you know, I'll do that. And that happened not this May, but the previous May, so about a year and a half ago. Yeah, so so you stepped out of IBM? I stepped out of IBM after 20 years, 20 years, which is absurd.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And was again, it was all around the same calling of okay, Lord, I'm in a better relationship with you. You're gonna start driving. I'm letting go of the wheel a little bit. I'm gonna have a lighter touch on this wheel.
SPEAKER_00:But just so the listener gets this, like you had you had it made at idea. You had a great, you had a great salary, you had a great position, you had leadership, a place that was American dream security, if that's where you're putting your faith, right? If if Mammon is your little G guide, you had that part covered. That's it. Right? You could have taken care of Julie and the kids and private school or whatever and college. I mean, it was all there. And then you said, No, but God. Yeah, God's got more for me and something bigger in my life. And you didn't you didn't necessarily decide I'm gonna uproot and move to another country and be a missionary, right? You said no, this is my set of gifts and my set of skills, and I can actually support the entire mission community if I will lean into this technology and make it available uh to them.
SPEAKER_03:Right, you you're yes, um thousand percent. And it wasn't quite that easy. I was sure. It was that easy. Yeah, of course it was. I am a very stubborn guy, and uh so the Lord laid it on my heart probably five years ago, and it took me until a year and a half to actually get my my rear in gear. But yes, that's it. And it was all around, you know, Ephesians 2.10, like for we are God's masterpiece created in his own image to do good works, and so it is. Well, what do I know? And so looking back at a 20-year career at IBM, it's like, well, I know emerging technology, you know, I can talk tech, I've got the glasses, I can, you know, I'm a nerd, I'm I'm a nerd at heart, believe it or not. So I can nerd out on some technology. So that's I was like, how do I take that? And then going back to that 13-year-old Eric, right? Of man, this missions thing with Jesus was alive in that. I mean, bringing people talking about the gospel through good works, where does that mean?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And again, this is one of the we mentioned, you know, why are you saying the Lord's Prayer at night? This is one of those the scales fall out from your eyes, right? It's well, there's not a church Eric and a business eric and a family Eric. There should be one Eric grounded in a relationship with Christ. And it was all of these things, just like, oh my gosh, what we've been I say we, I've been doing this all wrong, and it's gotta change. And so again, that was that is exactly what happened. It's like, well, I know emerging technology, I love the mission field. I don't feel called to the mission field, but I I love our mission pastor at uh at our church here and had some good conversations with him. We were talking about you know some entry points, and they were like, Well, connectivity stinks with our missions teams. Like, I know I know connectivity, I got some things that might be able to work here, so let's what if we get tech and just get it on mission? So tech on mission. And that that's how Playrow was birthed, yeah, and that's the the nonprofit. So, and we'll get a little bit back to David Pearson. So his technology, Krius Technology Group, had been crushing it. Now they have like teens of patents um that are around this technology that really improve connectivity. And so we walked David and I through how we're gonna take his for-profit company and make it redemptive, and then what does the future look like for Krius? So, again, uh just to do it quickly, they were a government military, still are based company looking to go into the commercial market. And we said, that's great. It could be a two-legged company, it can have a commercial arm and a government military arm. Awesome. Then we really took a look back and said, well, hold on, there's there's an element missing here that we need to make this redemptive. So how is this going to be a redemptive company? And we said, well, it probably needs to do things like get tech into the mission field or give some type of redemptive quality there. So it's now a three-legged company, we call it government military, commercial, and redemptive. But really, it's redemptive from the core and it filters through all of those. That redemptive piece then became the nonprofit uh play row.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, what's playrow mean?
SPEAKER_03:Playrow, yes, glad you mentioned it. So in in part of the study with this, uh I went through a class on Ephesians 2.10 where uh faith and calling meet your business workplace. And in doing that class, it wasn't even related to the assignments, but I was just reading Mark, and it's the first thing Jesus says in Mark, and it you have those moments when Jesus just smacks you on the back of the head. I don't get the crazy like dreams or like visions or whatever, but words just pop out on the page in this instance. Yeah, and it was Mark 1:15. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. He laid that on my heart so hard, and I got, again, nerd, nerded out, went to Logos and Blue Letter Bible to understand what this word uh fulfilled is because it is popping off the page for me. So look under the covers and at the it's a verb, the verb version of this word to fulfill, to complete is play row. Technically it's playroo, but that doesn't roll off the top. Yeah, yeah. It's easy. And I was like, I love this word. I've got it like this this Lord, what do I do with this? I love it, I'm in it. Let's go. I think this is what I'm supposed to do with it. If you look at further definitions, so the the word means to complete or to fulfill, and in this case it was to fulfill spreading the gospel. There's and it's littered throughout the New Testament. But one of the coolest definitions is you mentioned rising tide lifts all boat, as you often do in this podcast, which is awesome. So keeping with that nautical analogy here, one of the definitions of Playrow is the wind filling a sail of a ship. And I was like, whoa, that's there's something here. I'm not a mission or I'm not on mission, I'm not in the bush, in the jungle doing mission work, but they are. There are mission teams in the bush doing all around the world. Yeah, those are our ships, right? They're they're sailing around, they're crushing it, they are spreading the gospel. I mean, they are the great commission, right? Playrow just wants to give a little boost to their sale so that they can communicate with their sending organizations, their sending churches, and just help them out, you know, whatever it may be. So, highest level, Play Row brings tech to the mission field, period. Emerging technology to the mission field. But by virtue of having a deep relationship with this connectivity company in Creus, that's where we're starting. And again, trying to keep a light touch on where it goes.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna bring this down to a fifth grader level. Yeah. Does this does this mean that I can use my phone where I couldn't use my phone?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, it means a lot more than that.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, okay. It means I can it means I can get more electric electricity and access through my phone, computer, et cetera. So it's not just like Starlink and Wi-Fi.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_00:So let's tell tell it to the fifth grader level of me what it can do so that if I'm thinking about deploying this or engaging and deploying this tech for my mission workers, what does it do?
SPEAKER_03:A great way to and I'll correct a little bit on the electricity part because there's they got a really cool application. It doesn't bring electricity, but what this technology does, one of the core components of the technology is anywhere there is electricity or existing infrastructure, so power lines, coax, or anything, um, even rail lines, which is an interesting application, it can build expansive mesh networks on top of it. I think we know what mesh networks are, right? Like leader house, you can usually kind of go outside and then you start losing your connection. Yeah. With this technology, the government wants to use it for a coast-to-coast mesh network. So the scale gets blown up there, right? It's it's a lot different. It's not just bringing like internet like a Starlink to disparate places, because with a Starlink, you can go and populate a house really easily. But what happens about the next house? Well, you need another Starlink for that. Yeah. What happens if you want to go on a hike? Oh, there's a mobile Starlink for that. And those are all great, those are good solutions. This technology could take a Starlink and distribute it across an island, or a Starlink, or an internet feed, or not even having internet, you could still have communication with these devices across an island.
SPEAKER_00:So going back to like analog or like like older school than Wi-Fi.
SPEAKER_03:Right. Well, I mean it it's still technically a network, yeah, like Wi-Fi. Like so the way to think about it, you still get on your phone and connect any device to it, so I could then WhatsApp you or message you, and so we could still do that. Yeah. Um, but you just wouldn't necessarily need even need the internet. Because there's been some mixed results, I'll call it, with people just, hey, there's a tribal village, let's go throw some internet on it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um think about what they're gonna find pretty quickly on the internet.
SPEAKER_03:And they do. It's so sad. And it's it's just how strong the devil has hold of this place, right? I mean, Elon Musk did this, he brought Starlink to a remote tribe in, I believe it was Africa. Within six months, the primary users of that technology were addicted to social media and porn.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's that fast. When you just go and say ungated access to the internet, go have at it, what are we gonna do? We're gonna go back to our vices and it it's gonna take hold.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So one of the goals of Playro is to empower the mission teams first so that they can help steward the technology.
SPEAKER_02:There you go.
SPEAKER_03:But also to have the mission teams use the technology to impact their goals, right? So that you know, it's not just having Wi-Fi so they can unplug and watch some Netflix, right? Yeah, it's so they can video chat with, you know, their organizations, their support teams. Man, we just we just uh had some mission folks here for for an event, and I was just in Greece doing a missions conference, and they are so isolated at times. It's real easy to get isolated for years at a time when they don't have access to their support teams. So if we can do things to bring connectivity to help them feel better supported, awesome.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:There are more long-term plays that I think are even more impactful.
SPEAKER_00:Well, just think about just think about practical life, right? So you're you're raising your kids, you know, they're young. You you have just normal life issues of being a married couple raising kids. Now you're you're working in a tribe or in an unreached people group. There's issues where you need to reach back out to your support, and you can't do it from where you are, so you've got to leave. You've got to hike days sometimes, or get on a helicopter and go back to a town somewhere where you can reconnect with everybody and get your newsletter out and do those things. And now she's back alone. She can't communicate with you because she has no ability from there. You're not sure how that sick kid's doing, you're not sure how that pregnant woman in the tribe's doing, you're not sure how all these things.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Right. And and so the practical use case for this is very easy to see if you'll just kind of let yourself explore it. And I can think of any any missionaries or heads of mission orgs that listen to our pod, like they're gonna get this quickly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And my next question, if I was one of them, is what does it cost? Yeah. Can I afford this? Yep. Right.
SPEAKER_03:This is part of the model we're working through right now, right? So let me real quickly go back to how it can impact. And so using some of the even the terms you you played on to make it real for the listeners, right? The pilot project was just done earlier this year. That pilot project was for a couple with a family that has raised them in Papua New Guinea, and they had the exact problem you mentioned, which was they have to walk half a mile up a hill to hold their phone up, maybe just write they get some reception, and they can send out a barely a uh a text. Right. To get internet, they had to go into town, which is a five-hour car ride, or an hour and a half boat ride. Yep. And in the the exact example, as you mentioned, where now family's away or whoever's trying to get connectivity is away from the family. So we designed a solution, sent it to them, and I can they live in a house with barely any electricity, had no service, and now I can WhatsApp the guy and the wife from their house. Changes the game for them. He even mentioned that when the it's a little spottier there because when the weather's right, they get better reception. But he even mentioned one time he was in town and was able to WhatsApp video call his wife.
SPEAKER_00:Video call. Right? Wow.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, when the when the conditions were right. But still, but still, right. And so take that a step further.
SPEAKER_00:Just think about how encouraging that is just in that moment for her and the kids and their family. Just in that moment.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's so, so good, man.
SPEAKER_03:And then what's so take this a step further. Our big hairy ambitious goals, writer bags, are if we had this across the island, this the wife is a nurse. And what if we had the nurse be able to telehealth with people on the island who have zero access to good or not zero access, but very little access to quality health care. Take that a step further, and now we could even connect them with doctors perhaps in Australia, New Zealand on the same time zone, wherever that uh they are, and be able to assist her in even maybe more complicated things. So the the the we're just getting started on this and really excited on where that the this year and a half, three years, five years could look like with the with you know better connectivity connectivity.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna answer my own question a little bit for the mission world. It's not expensive. Oh, yeah. Because you're doing it as a nonprofit arm of a for-profit entity, and because of everyone's heart for this, the for-profit entity is supporting it. You're raising private funds as well to support it. Uh, and so the cost to deploy this tech for the missions org for the missionaries is not high.
SPEAKER_03:Right. That it's not high. We're still, like I said, our pilot project was just finished. We have a kit that we think will fit a lot of needs that we can get down to around the$5,000 mark.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's amazing.
SPEAKER_03:But yeah, not expensive in the in the grand scheme of things for for those.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and pretty much everybody I mean uh uh has somebody that would that would foot that bill for them to get that connectivity out there and and provide them with that kind of quality of life, opportunity for missional excellence, right? And um and just think about how your witness grows in that community. Yep. Uh if you're able to telehealth in a doctor and save someone's life in a childbirth situation.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right. I mean, I mean, really, it it it comes down to the very practical hands and feet of Christ and the actual work uh with widows and orphans. I mean, it it's it enhances your ability to do all those things without giving the whole group the internet.
SPEAKER_03:Right, unfettered access to the internet.
SPEAKER_00:Unfettered access to whatever they're gonna find on. on the internet, um, which may get them chasing all sorts of rabbits that candidly we want to protect them from and protect their innocence from until they've had more time to grow and develop and you know in the Lord and in world culture that they're not completely aware of at all.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Right. And so and then we get into like the nerd talk goes into now we're talking about well what's the compute we should or can bring there. And so that compute could be, you know, most people think of you know the internet as the end all be all, but when I say compute, I'm talking about what can we bring like realistically, maybe think of an app. Like you could bring the Bible app as a as a thing on our network that could be interconnected that wouldn't require the internet. Or I think you just had Apologist AI on uh as well, right? Like what if they were part of like an integral part of all these devices on the network. So instead of just hey opening up a browser, no, you open up Apologist AI and the Bible app, right? You're there. And so you're bringing technology to the folks as opposed to just bringing the I say the big bad internet, but you know it's not it's it's not an internet for all play. Not to say that that's necessarily bad, but we know some of the outcomes for folks that um have received that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well and I think so let's look at the use cases right because I think if I'm listening to this and I'm being a devil's advocate here, I would say like, well who are you to say what they should and should not have access to right?
SPEAKER_03:Oh 100% big bag sensor.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah but it but but this isn't a big brother thing. This is more of a like think about how a missionary family shares the gospel with an unreached people group, right? So you learn the majority language, you learn the minority language that's four or five years worth of getting to a level of excellence in their language before you can even really share the gospel because you've had to learn that they don't have words for forgiveness and love and righteousness and and really key terms that you need to effectively share the gospel. You've had to figure out how to convey all those things it's taken years to do that. You don't just show up and tell them day one, this is what I'm doing here because you couldn't answer their questions. Right. This is the same concept it's just deploying with excellence in a series of steps that guards your heart and their heart as you build community and and establish that relationship right so I think if you look at it in that context it's it's not big brothering it's just being responsible with what they would have access to like like you want to be responsible with what your kids have access to.
SPEAKER_03:Right. That's it.
SPEAKER_00:And it's actually another way of even spinning that would be you know we will bring some connectivity but what are you wanting right like to that end like what that's the scatter that's Andrew Scott and Dana Tucker Decent and those guys right there they go in there and say what do you need? Yes not here's what I have but what do you need?
SPEAKER_03:And that's why even going back to your the your question why I didn't answer it of like well what's the kit look like we have kits that might work for certain applications but really it is a listen to mission partner needs to design solutions for what's missing right and then going back to that couple after their sending organization it's a Bible translation organization called Wycliffe they heard about it. They want some of the technology and a different implementation for their translation office on the island. There you go great that's going to require some a little different scenario but we want to make sure that we're just not throwing widgets you know I think of the well situation in Africa where there's a lot of well intentioned but a boom there it is there's a lot of well-intentioned companies that would go out and do these dig wells but what they ended up with was they'd go dig them then leave them and then there's a ton of unmaintained shutdown wells that aren't there. So like we don't we don't just want to go dig wells and not have them be maintained and serviceable.
SPEAKER_00:And so that's something it was a heartbreaking moment for me when we had dug 21 wells and raised a bunch of money and we felt great about it to find out that the average shelf life of what of a hand pump well is a year and a half.
SPEAKER_03:Oh gosh so you're living oh man. Yeah that was pouring salt on a wound sorry about that.
SPEAKER_00:No that was that was uh 2018-19 kind of context of us learning through bless what we were what we were doing and and not doing well and and gratefully God showed us several things we weren't doing well and we were able to pivot right but so like even even the scatter conference right so we had this conference and we had we had some people in uh from several other parts of the world and and some of what they shared um that was shocking okay so I'll I'm not gonna give exact locations but let's just a guy from Uganda came over and he was raised in the slums and he he worked his way out through technology and and there's it's a beautiful story and we may have him on someday to tell it. But but when USAID shut down if you looked at the news here it was it was a horrible thing right oh how could we do that USAID shut down and and it it was terrible and and he literally is over here saying we're celebrating that thank you for doing that because all you've really done is give a man a fish give a man a fish give a man a fish and he's waiting for you to give him another fish. He's like we need the resources to teach our people not only how to fish but we need a resources to teach our people how to control the ponds. Oh that's it that it just like it gives you goosebumps right getting the goosebumps because because we were we thought we were doing good and we thought we thought we were doing good looking back at the orphan crisis right we were like oh we should fund these orphanages and this is better for kids. Well then families are putting getting rid of their kids to send them to the orphanages and the real truth was it was no it was we needed to we needed to talk to the family about what they needed to keep their kids. Yeah right it wasn't we we just miswired it with this whole kind of intent of doing good but we don't look deep enough we we're too shallow in our giving like we invest with excellence but we give to check a box and we have got to give with excellence too. That's what you're doing you're like I didn't just build a widget and throw it at the world and say here. What I did was we developed tech that could be curated and could be put together in a certain way depending on the need of that people group in that part of the world and it's not always going to look the same. So we need to slowly methodically ask questions about what do you need and what's the level of engagement you want at this stage depending on where you are.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:So if you hear that and I I can he I can hear friends of mine that listen to this smiling because I know how much they're going to appreciate that posture.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:What can we do to help?
SPEAKER_03:That's it. And it goes back to even I mean I'll parallel this with Faithwalks right it's like it's not just routine check mark throw money at the problem it's it's breaking these trends of routine and check mark and getting into what the relationship because that's where it is that's where you're gonna provide the most value. And so that's it that is right at the heart of PlayRow is you know keeping that light touch. We're not just pushing widgets we're pushing relationships and we're looking for folks with relationships that have big ideas so that we can help solve them. You know we've got uh right now it's very lean and mean with Playrolow it's myself at at the the head right now but I've got a slew of engineers and contacts that help with design work. They want to volunteer time and technology to solve some of these problems. And so it really is who are the what are the relationships that can yield some low-hanging fruit you know we've got a good kit quote unquote that we talked about earlier that can solve some needs but there's more here that we can that we can do with with proper relationships understanding what they are and then designing some really we hope and so let's let's play this out somebody calls you they say hey I've got an opportunity you've at it it makes sense what happens does somebody fly over with the tech and set it all up we didn't even do that for the previous one. We don't even necessarily have to fly over a lot of it is plug and play wow like plug this in and now granted our Papa New Guinea pig in this previous one this is the all time pun episode. Yeah I mean who do you think you're I mean I haven't changed from college you're still gonna get those dad jokes um so our guinea pig there man he had a 14 foot bamboo pole with one of the antennas to get better connectivity to a cell tower. So he's he was experimental and willing to work with us but a lot of this stuff is we shoot it to you you plug in and sometimes that's even hard so we even send generators and solar powered stuff with them as well but you plug in you're done there's no like let me reset my router or go and unplug my open your phone and you go to the settings and you look for the thing and you connect and you're going you're done. Actually and for some of them you don't even have to do that it just grabs a signal boost your cell signal. Yeah so uh yeah so there's that there's some cool stuff there um and then we'll take that cell signal turn into a network and then we can shoot that out a a variety of ways too so that's we try to make it as plug and play as possible because we know you know not everyone's techie and especially those in the mission field they might not have any background in in technology.
SPEAKER_00:So all right this may sound silly um but God just prompted me to say it so I'm gonna say it the first person that reaches out to Eric that vets a project that he decides to do the Unreach podcast will fund that one.
SPEAKER_03:There you go.
SPEAKER_00:All right let's go so let's get this going let's get this moving let's do it. Clint and I would love to be a part of that team um so we'll we'll support that we'll pray with you on that. And man just thank you for for for giving everyone an example today of what it can look like right to to chase the American dream and secular success and all those things and then and then get to a point where God breaks you you look back you see where he was working the whole time right but then you see this massive pivot point where it's not about me getting up every day and asking God to help me accomplish what I want to do. It's about me getting up every day and asking God what does he want to do? So it's your day you've made it you've made me you've made me for something what is that something what do we want to do with this today right and you've pivoted that in such a beautiful way and you're bringing people with you. Right? So we we we talked the other day and you shared that you've got five or six of our other fraternity brothers and y'all are doing a D group right now. And and I'm telling you if you're listening to this and you knew the guys I was talking about, you wouldn't believe it. You would not believe it. I mean I don't believe it but when you meet a man like Eric Long who has such conviction and such passion and such love for the Lord it's just contagious and you just want to be around it and you want to know why do you have such joy and they want to know and look at the change that's happening just because you're out authentically showing him off.
SPEAKER_03:Oh man that you you nailed it it's authentic being authentically you being and him shining through you man that's that's you brother that's uh well that is you that's that's going back to a lunch that's you reaching the unreached on this podcast.
SPEAKER_00:I appreciate that that's very kind and very humbling to hear my very clear life mission is to make disciples locally and reach the unreached globally. And when you get to make a disciple locally or be a part of that and then that disciple's reaching the unreached globally I mean that's like the ultimate wow. Disciples making disciples it is at 2 Timothy 2 2.
SPEAKER_01:That's right.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for being on thanks for doing what you're doing stay in touch obviously we we want to do we want to do a follow-up when we get this project that we've just put out into the ether out into the world. That's right. So I did a podcast recently where I said I was going to write a book and you know Travis Roby he texted me after Travis was like you put that out there and I was like yeah I know I've got accountability now. Now you're stuck and we're already working on it. Jack and I are already working on the book. So we'll we'll do that too and then we'll do a follow up and we'll maybe we'll even have on the people group that we don't even know yet that's going to get this tech.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And hit and hear their story of how they deployed it.
SPEAKER_03:Well I think it's might be a whole continent now if we do it right and really have you on the hook for this.
SPEAKER_00:All right well you know it's all God's money right that's not ours. Yeah yeah okay so for those listeners that hear this and they want to engage they want to find out more they want to see if this is something that could be a a a solution for them or someone they know what do they do next?
SPEAKER_03:Yep so right now we are like I said we're lean and mean but we do have our website's the easiest place to go. We've done a lot of the plumbing I'll call it so there are places to donate at playro playrow.world so it's P-L-E-R-O-O.World and that's where you find us.
SPEAKER_00:Okay so go check out playrow.world and Eric you know we always ask our guest to pray for the listeners at the end of the episode so would uh would you please close us in prayer?
SPEAKER_03:Be honored. Heavenly Father Lord my goodness so grateful for you filling up this room just having conversation to glorify you. It's not it's not why we do this it's what we do with the gifts that you've given us we're so grateful for that grateful for the conversations and just excited to see the joy you bring the gospel you spread to the different parts of the world that haven't even experienced your joy let us fulfill and complete that mission. We love you. In your name we pray amen.
SPEAKER_00:Amen thank you for listening to Unreached our sincere desire is that what you've heard today will cause you to see the mission of God differently and your role in it more clearly if this adds value for you and we hope it does would you please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen also share with your family, your friends, your church, your life group, small group, D group wherever you do life and if you want to connect with us find us on Instagram at unreached podcast or email us at unreached podcast at gmail dot com
