About
Greg Loucks
Building ideas that connect people, knowledge, technology, creativity and faith.
I'm a builder, creator, technologist, entrepreneur, musician, filmmaker and ministry-minded innovator. I'm fascinated by technology, artificial intelligence, languages, cultures, geography, history, music, film, media, business, creativity and ministry — and I don't simply want to use technology. I want to build things with it.
I like taking ideas that don't exist yet and figuring out how to build them.
Greg in 30 seconds
- I'm a builder.
- I'm a creator.
- I'm a technologist.
- I'm a musician.
- I'm a filmmaker.
- I'm an entrepreneur.
- I'm passionate about ministry and prayer.
- I'm fascinated by the world's languages, cultures, people, geography, history and knowledge.
- And I like taking ideas that don't exist yet and figuring out how to build them.
My story
My journey is easiest to describe through the things I kept coming back to.
Technology, because it let me make things rather than only read about them. Creativity, because a thing that works is not the same as a thing worth using. Ministry, because the point of any of it is people. Music, because it was the first thing I ever built with my hands that other people could feel.
Business came later, and from the same instinct: if a tool helps one organisation, it will help another. Knowledge came last and swallowed the rest — once I started connecting languages to peoples and peoples to places, I could not stop seeing the connections.
None of that happened in a straight line. It happened the way most real things do: one idea at a time, most of them half-finished, a few of them turning into something.
My calling
A lot of my projects look unrelated. A prayer site. A language dictionary. A music studio. A business building websites. A film.
They are not unrelated. There is one thread running through all of it: technology, knowledge, creativity, communication, faith, service, people — and I see those as connected rather than separate.
These aren't random websites. They're pieces of one much larger thing, built in whatever order I could manage.
The watchman
A watchman watches. That is the whole job — pay attention, notice what is coming, and say so.
It is the idea behind Watchman Productions and behind a good deal of the ministry work too. Most of what I build starts with noticing something: a connection nobody has made, a problem everybody has quietly accepted, a piece of information sitting where no one can reach it. Watching is the easy part. Communicating what you see is harder. Being willing to build something around it is harder still.
Why I build
Not because technology is interesting. It is, but that is not the reason.
I build because I see problems that could be solved. Information that could be connected. Systems that could be simplified. People who could be better served. Ideas that could become useful tools instead of staying ideas.
Technology is the tool. People are the reason.
My biggest vision — a knowledge brain for the world
The largest thing I am building is an interconnected knowledge ecosystem.
Languages and language families. Translation and comparative dictionaries. Countries, territories, cities and administrative divisions. Geography, cultures, people groups and history. Businesses, news, weather, time and astronomy. Media, radio, television, video and maps. Artificial intelligence, data and interactive experiences.
Most of that information already exists somewhere. It sits in separate databases that know nothing about each other. You can look up a country, and separately look up a language, and separately look up a city — and nothing joins them.
What I want is not another database. It's a knowledge brain for the world — where the pieces know about each other.
By that I mean a system where exploring a country immediately shows you its languages, its peoples, its geography, its history, its businesses, its news, its weather, its time of day, its sky tonight, and how it connects to everywhere else. Not thousands of disconnected pieces. One connected thing.
The world is connected
This is the idea underneath all of it.
Languages are connected to people. People are connected to cultures. Cultures are connected to geography. Geography is connected to history. History is connected to cities and countries. Businesses are connected to communities. Media is connected to people.
All of that information can be connected through technology. Almost none of it currently is. That gap is most of my work.
What I've founded and what I'm building
Parts of one ecosystem rather than a list of separate ventures.
Worldwide Prayer
A global prayer and ministry platform — a nation to pray for every day, a prayer chain, a prayer library, and prayers drawn from Scripture.
worldwideprayer.org →CrossHome Ministries
The ministry home — teaching, media, Bible study tools and the work that holds the rest together.
crosshome.com →Greg Loucks Ministries
Teaching and writing: Scripture, prayer, discipleship, and what the Church is for.
gregloucks.org →Universal Brain
The knowledge engine behind everything — languages, places, peoples and a dated history of the world, read live by every site rather than copied into each one.
universalbrain.net →Meridian
The software suite I write to put that knowledge on a page: calendars and almanacs, publishing, geography, page building and music. Built in-house so the sites own their software rather than renting it.
See one of them →Watchman Productions
The business side: websites, artificial intelligence, automation, communication systems, customer tools and digital management platforms for organisations that could not otherwise build them.
watchmanproductions.co →Comparative Languages
Languages, language families, translation, comparative dictionaries and the relationships between them.
comparative-languages.com →Universal Human Knowledge
The wider project: knowledge gathered, connected and kept where people can actually reach it.
universalhumanknowledge.org →Greg Loucks Blogs
Where the writing lives — Kingdom Nations, Cultural Survival, Colour Revolution, Bible teaching and the rest.
gregloucks.blog →Music & creative technology
Interactive music: a playable piano and guitar, chords, notation and songs in the browser. Creative tools you use rather than watch.
Open the music studio →Film & storytelling
Film concepts, video and production — including No Brains For Dinner, which is what happens when creativity, humour, storytelling and production get pointed at the same idea.
nobrainsfordinner.com →Food & everyday things
Cooking, recipes and the ordinary knowledge people actually use every day.
gregloucks.food →Things that fascinate me
Curiosity is most of the engine. Nearly every project started as something I simply wanted to understand.
Technology as a tool for people
Technology should make complicated things understandable, disconnected things connected, and difficult things possible.
That is the whole philosophy. I'm interested in AI, automation, websites, data systems, communication platforms, business tools and interactive experiences — but a system nobody can use is not a system, it is a demonstration.
My vision for AI
I don't see artificial intelligence as a chatbot. I see it as a new interface between people and information.
Used well, it helps people find information, understand it, communicate, translate, automate repetitive work, answer questions, manage a business, connect systems, navigate more data than anyone could read, create things and get real support when they are stuck.
What I want from it is unglamorous: useful, personable, understandable and genuinely helpful.
Ministry and prayer
My technology work and my faith are not two separate things.
Through Worldwide Prayer I'm building a prayer-centred platform meant to help people connect through prayer, encouragement, communication and ministry resources — a nation to pray for each day, requests that real people actually bring, and a chain that keeps going when you are asleep.
Technology does not have to be cold. It can carry something personal a very long way. What I want is the reach of modern technology with the character of ministry: tools that serve people wherever they happen to be.
Music and creativity
Technology is only one part of this.
Piano, keyboards, guitar, music, film, storytelling, visual design, web design, interactive experiences, multimedia — I have always had a creative side, and it shapes what I build more than the technical side does.
What I enjoy most is making things people can interact with rather than simply look at. A page you read is fine. An instrument you can play is better.
Film and storytelling
Through Watchman Productions I work on film concepts, video, media production and creative projects. No Brains For Dinner is a good example of where that goes when creativity, humour, storytelling, film and production all get pointed at the same idea.
Storytelling is not separate from the rest of this either. A knowledge system that cannot tell you why something matters is just a lookup table.
Entrepreneurship
I like building businesses around technology that people can actually use.
Websites, AI, automation, communication, digital services and creative production — through Watchman Productions I build these for organisations and businesses, and I am especially interested in the ones who would never otherwise have access to this kind of technology. Sophisticated tools should not only belong to people with a technical department.
Inside the workshop
A look at the bench rather than the shop window.
There is always more half-built than finished. Prototypes, databases, importers that run overnight, AI experiments, a page that works everywhere except one browser, an idea sketched out at two in the morning that will either be something or be deleted.
That is not a confession, it is the method. Most of what eventually works started as something that did not.
Building
- The knowledge engine and the sites that read from it
- Interactive music — piano, guitar, chords, notation
- Publishing and syndication across the network
Experimenting
- AI as an interface to large bodies of knowledge
- Automation for small organisations
- Interactive ways to show data
Researching
- Languages, families and how they relate
- Peoples, cultures and places
- History, dated and connected to where it happened
Creating
- Writing — nations, cultures, Scripture
- Film and media concepts
- Music and creative tools
Planning
- More of the knowledge brain joined up
- Ministry tools that reach further
- Business tools worth paying for
My philosophy
- Build what doesn't exist yet.Most of these projects began because I went looking for the tool and it wasn't there.
- Connect what is disconnected.Languages, peoples, places and history already relate to each other. The databases just don't.
- Make complicated things understandable.If a page needs explaining, the page is the problem.
- Use technology to serve people.The database is not the point. The person reading it is.
- Stay curious.Nearly everything here started as something I simply wanted to know.
- Keep creating.Writing, music, film and software are the same instinct in different materials.
- Think globally.Every country, every language, every people — not just the ones that are easy to find data for.
- Don't be afraid of big ideas."That's too big to build" is usually "nobody has started yet".
- Turn ideas into reality.An idea that stays an idea helps nobody.
- Build for the future.Build it so the next thing can be plugged into it.
People first
Behind every database, API, website and AI system there is a person.
Someone trying to understand where their family came from. Someone praying for a country they will never visit. Someone running a small organisation with no technical help. Someone learning an instrument. Someone who just wants a straight answer.
Every piece of this is only worth building if it reaches one of them.
What I believe about the future
I believe we're moving toward a world where information won't simply be searched for — it will be experienced, connected, translated, visualised, compared and understood.
Search gives you ten links. What I want is a system that shows you the thing itself, in its own context, connected to everything it relates to, in a language you read, at a depth you choose. My projects are an attempt to explore that future rather than wait for it.
What I'm still learning
I don't have this figured out.
Building large systems means constantly learning new technologies, finding better approaches, discovering that something I was sure about was wrong, and fixing it. A good deal of my time goes on mistakes — mine, usually, and usually the interesting kind, where the thing worked and was still wrong.
I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. Anyone who builds things knows it already.
What's next?
There is still a lot to build. The vision keeps growing — more technology, more knowledge, more creative projects, more ministry tools, more AI, more connections, more experiments.
I don't expect every idea to be built overnight. But some of the most meaningful things begin with someone willing to imagine something that doesn't exist yet, and then start building it.
I have a lot more ideas.
This website is where I'm building them.
I'm Greg Loucks. And I'm still building.
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