An Army of Normal Folks - They Call Us The Catholic Hippies (Pt 1)

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Do you ever wrestle with how our country’s extraordinary wealth and problems co-exist? Or yearn for a deeper sense of community where we have each other’s backs? Then you’re going to cherish this episode with Jordan Schiele, the co-founder of a Catholic intentional community called Jerusalem Farm. These Catholic hippies, as their neighbors in Kansas City originally called them, live together without salaries and have completed over 300 home repair projects in the last 5 years alone!  Learn more: jerusalemfarm.orgSupport the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The story of the rich young man, I don't know if you're familiar with that Bible story at all. Rich young man walks up to Jesus and he says he's followed all these commandments, right? Which to me are like they're the, I'm a good person sort of thing. Like I'm living a moral life. I'm checking the boxes. But then Jesus says, well, you need to give up everything and follow me. And to me that really hits because I struggle with that all the time. I mean, I read St. Basil often, and he's a really radical early father that talks about.

He has this, I will tear down my barns essay, where he's talking about wealth should not be stored up. It should be kept in the bellies of the poor, and that money should always be in movement. And I think those things in our wealthy country are hard to wrestle with, you know, where we have so much inherent privilege. Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm a football coach in inner city Memphis. And that last part, it somehow led to an Oscar for a film about one of my teams. That movie's called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems are never going to be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits talking big words that nobody ever uses on CNN. and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks, guys, that's us. Just you and me deciding, hey, you know what, maybe I can help. That's what Jordan Shealy, the voice you just heard, has done. Jordan is the co-founder of Jerusalem Farm, a Catholic intentional community, which is something I've never heard of before, and you probably haven't either. It's a group of people

who decide to live together, sharing resources, and without salaries, pray together, and serve their community together full time. These Catholic hippies, as their neighbors in Kansas City originally called them, have completed over 300 home repair projects in the last five years alone. I cannot wait for you to meet Jordan right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet.

My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan.

you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Jordan Shealy was somewhat lost in his early years. He left college after parting too much his first three semesters. And he left his Catholic faith after seeing the disconnect between the teaching and how many people actually practiced it. He was trying to figure out his life, and so he joined AmeriCorps, where he found his calling of service, his wife, Jesse, and a renewed faith and a worldview.

When I worked at the EPA, for instance, I remember having my lunch break at Caesar Chavez Park in downtown Sacramento, and a lot of homeless folks living there and getting to know some of them and a lot of them were veterans or had different stories, you know, and I'm just struggling. Like, I think most of us do where you're realizing, like, there's all this suffering happening around us. How's that happening? And I had one moment during that time also when I started my window cleaning business where I was downtown with my mom getting my business license.

She was teaching me how to do that to make it legitimate. And we went to lunch afterwards, and it was Ash Wednesday. day. We were going to go to church and get brunched together. And we were downtown at this restaurant that my mom liked. And I was sitting on the patio while she went to go order some food. And someone came up to me and said, excuse me, you can't be here right now. And I was just confused. It wasn't someone that worked there. It was just one of the patrons. And I was confused. I didn't understand what she said. And she repeated herself, like, you need to leave. And my mom at that time walked up and she was like, is there a problem? She could sense that something was

happening with her mom since. And the lady's like, oh, is he with you? And she's like, yeah, that's my son. She was like, oh, and she got red and immediately apologized and said, well, there are some younger homeless folks that were begging people for food earlier and just thought that you might have been with them. Well, were you dressed like hell or something? I mean, I was just wearing a, I had longer hair and I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. And I don't, I didn't think that I looked like that, but apparently I did. So to me, though, that was an experience, you know, like we talked about I grew up in a privileged middle to upper, I never really experienced exclusion like that or someone speaking to me like, you don't belong here. It's always assumed that I do

belong here, that this is my space. And so that, that was an eye-opening experience for me that I think was a catalyst for a lot of questioning the things around me and who belongs, who doesn't belong and so forth. I mean, in today's world, that would have been a Karen, I guess. Sure. Yes. Uh-huh. Yeah.

But so that and all these other experiences sent you on this kind of personal discovery world, what's interesting is it returns you back to where you began, which I think is really interesting. Because there's a lot of people that claim a faith because they were brought up in that faith, and that's the way they were taught. and they just roll into that faith, you discovered that that's where you wanted to be legitimately through your own self-discovery, not because your parents said so, it sounds like. Right, yeah, and it was a long journey.

I mean, Jess and I hitchhiked around the country after AmeriCorps, we lived and worshipped with this Baptist church, Ebenezer Baptist Church down in Haysburg, Mississippi. A Baptist church, and it doesn't get much more Baptist than a Baptist. Baptist Church in Hattisburg, Mississippi. Yeah, and we were living with a gentleman Ray Wimbish and Annie and his wife, Annie. And we met Ray in AmeriCorps working on one of his projects. He was working with rebuilding together. And I contacted him out to the program and say, hey, Jesse and I want to come back and

volunteer in your community. And so he put us up in their house. And we lived there and we volunteered on projects that they still had going on. their church welcomed us in. You know, this is my first time. I grew up Catholic. I'm going to an all-black Baptist church and, you know, the singing, the praise, the pastor preaching and the rest of the congregation responding to that like audibly and verbally while they're there. It just, it's all different form of worship. You know, like it, to me that was also for like foundational to me rediscovering my faith because I saw the spirit alive.

new way. And that was another transformational moment for me is being a part of that church in that community and experiencing their welcome and hospitality there. Okay. So you and Jesse are hitchhiking around the world, discovering who you are and what you're doing. And I think in 2008 or nine, you landed at a thing called Nazareth Farm. It sounds like you guys are really into taking what you learned at AmeriCorps, not only to discover how you feel about society, how you feel about faith, and how you feel about the world, but also how you feel about service and the importance of it. Am I, am I misstating that, or is that? No, yeah, they're hand in hand. I mean, that's why I think service, my faith, to me, it's what we're here for. It sounds like you and Jesse arrived at

the same conclusion. We did. Yeah, and we read this book by Shane Claiborne called the Irresistible Revolution. And that was a big inspiration for what led us on our path together after AmeriCorps, because in there he talks about being an ordinary radical is the term that he uses. And he looks at that word radical. Like just a normal person. Yeah, like a, you know, normal folk, ordinary folk. Interesting. And that word radical, I like it because the root of the word is just that, like getting to the root of something. And so getting to the root of our faith, the story of the rich young man, that's, I don't know if you're familiar with that Bible story at all.

Rich young man walks up to Jesus, and he says he's followed all these commandments, right? Which to me are like they're the, I'm a good person sort of thing, like I'm living a moral life. I'm checking the boxes. Checking the boxes. And then, but then Jesus says, well, you need to give up everything and follow me. and to me that that really hits because i struggle with that all the time i mean i read st basil often and he's a really radical early father that talks about he has this i will tear

down my barns essay where he's talking about wealth should not be stored up it should be kept in the bellies of the poor and that money should always be in movement and i think those things in our wealthy country are hard to wrestle with you know where we have some much inherent privilege. So, with all of this, you land in all places, West Virginia, at something called Nazareth Farms. I'd never heard of it. Tell us what that is.

Yeah, it was started back in the 60s. The story that they say is, for the first time on TV, Americans were learning that there was poverty in their own country, and they were seeing a lot of poor people in Appalachia area on TV. and we had the war on poverty taking place. And at the same time, there is this bishop from, I think it was New York that was at a bishop's conference and was sitting next to another bishop from West Virginia. And they started talking and they concocted a plan where they started bringing volunteers out from New York

to West Virginia to help individuals with their housing needs. What does that mean? Like fix houses or? Yeah, I mean, yeah, people are living in West Virginia. Even when we were there, a lot of people are living. living up in the haulers, and, you know, they have their trailers, their mobile homes. Maybe they have a home that they built, but yeah. Maybe explain the hollers for people who don't know.

Yeah, hauler is, you know, it's windy roads in between hills. So you got a... It's actually a hollow, but when you're from West Virginia or East Tennessee, you call it a holler. Sure, yes. So it's the grooves in between the hills. It's a hollowed out area between the hills, and they call it a holler. Where the sun doesn't come up. till 10 in the morning, and it goes down at three at the end of the day.

Yeah, it's just, yeah. So you're out there fixing people's stuff? Yeah, so we're living in community. We have four cornerstones, prayer, community, service, simplicity, and we're doing home repair. We're hosting retreats, and we're just living in an intentional community out there. So would you guys go out and engage with the community and say, hey, your house looks broke down and you wants to fix it, or would people actually reach out to you for help? No, people apply.

Yeah, we would never go. Yeah, you have to, we promote, they promote, and they've been around for so long, people know of their work. But, yeah, someone like you would apply for a project. We would send out a project director, project manager, and walk through what the needs are. And then the labor's all free, and then the homeowner pays just for the cost of the materials. And they can make monthly payments. So you will even buy the materials and they'll reimburse you.

Correct. Yeah. Yep. And yeah, you know, a roof could be expensive, but if someone can make $20 month, $100 month payments, it becomes more attainable that way. So the whole idea is to help the poor in these areas to be able to just keep up their properties when they couldn't afford to. Yeah, everyone deserves safe, healthy, dignified housing is the core belief. And so it's trying to make sure that, you know, it can be expensive to maintain. your house so we're just trying to make that easier for people all right so you did that for about three three years or so then i got a call one day out of the blue this gentleman dave armstrong from avila university catholic university in kansas city we knew him because he would bring his family out every year to west virginia to nazareth farm and he would bring avala university students for retreats he called and said hey would you want to start a new community similar to nazareth farm in

Kansas City, and I said, no. Why would I do that? Nah, not really. And now, a few messages from our generous sponsors, but first, I hope you'll consider signing up to join the Army at normalfolks. By signing up, you'll receive a weekly email with short episode summaries in case you happen to miss an episode, or if you prefer reading about our incredible guests. We'll be right back. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a

Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year

that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company

with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shellgame on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I told Jess about it, and we had decided, you know, one of our policies in life is not to fully say no until you further. explore things, give everything, you know, some discernment and thought. So we flew out to Kansas City and we met some individuals there that Dave had brought together around the idea. We walked into this building where we're currently at. We call it the farmhouse now. And when we walked into that building, Jesse kind of turned and was like, this is what we're going to be doing with our life.

She just kind of had this feeling. What was the building? It's an old convent. So it's an old convent in downtown Kansas City. And at the time, it was being used by a service agency of the Don Bosco Center. But they were closing a number of their programs. And so the building was empty for about six months prior to us going there. So what are you going to do with those buildings? It's going to be your home? Yeah. So it was, you know, it was an old convent. It had nine bedrooms upstairs. It had a little chapel built on as it had a bunch of, you know, the main floor had a bunch of split up rooms. What we were evaluating is that was going to be our retreat center. So that was where we would live, where we would host these volunteer groups because they're

essential to our mission is the volunteers that come. That was going to be our main hub of operations. And the idea then is you're going to call this thing now Jerusalem Farm. Yeah, Jerusalem Farm. So, you know, we're thinking of all the different names. But we're We had Nazareth farm. There's a Bethlehem farm. And Jerusalem farm, you know, we thought was appropriate. We're in a city. The other two were rural.

Jerusalem means city of peace. Also, we knew that the neighborhood we were in is really diverse and has a... Is it diverse or is it... It is diverse. It's some everybody. Yeah. And Jerusalem, you know, is the home of three major religions. And so we thought that it would speak to not just Christians, but the Muslims that live in our community.

And, you know, the Jewish people is. well. And so that's kind of what we're thinking about Jerusalem Farm. So the idea then is move here, call this thing Jerusalem Farms, which it is still today. Yeah. Convert this convent into a home and a hosting center for volunteers and then just go do bloody good work all over Kansas City. Is that good idea? Yeah, it's our intentional community and our goal would just be... I read that. Explain intentional community. Yeah, so intentional community is just people that we're choosing to live with, but in an intentional way, not just like roommates. So sharing meals together, sharing prayer together, sharing mission and work together. We don't make

any salary or anything. Our room and boards provided for. We get a small living stipend, just like AmeriCorps. And... You today do not make a salary. No, yeah. We live in a house with 10 other people in our community. And then we all get, everyone in our community gets a living stipend. So it's around $800 a month from the nonprofit. And that's our stipend. It sounds like a bunch of hippies. People in the neighborhood first knew us as the Catholic hippies. So, yeah, we were the Catholic hippies. That's hilarious. The Catholic hippies. So who are the other people besides just and your three children that live in this community? Over the years, it's changed.

So, you know, people stay three to four years. Right now we have 10 other people living with us. And that's similar to when you guys went to Nazar Forums to live with, I guess, whoever was in charge over there. Yeah, you make a year of service commitment. So we get people right out of college, maybe in between careers that they want a year. But, yeah, it's just a year of service is what you can commit to, and then you can renew that, you know, as long as you'd like to do that. These folks come in and they lead up volunteer projects across your city.

Yeah, so we just work in six neighborhoods, what's what we call the historic Northeast. So it's about 30,000 people in those six neighborhoods. And, yeah, we focus predominantly on affordable housing, dignified housing. that people have a sense of belonging and sustainable living are our three primary goals. All right. So year one is 2009 or 10? 2012 is when we started, yeah. 2012.

Well, it's not like in West Virginia where people know you exist. No, yeah. So now you got these Catholic hippies that took over some nuns houses sitting in their community. I mean, people got to be looking in going, what's up with these folks? Yeah. What's up with there? Exactly. You didn't know money either. Yeah, we didn't have much.

The sisters of St. Joseph of Cronolet and the diocese gave us two small grants that we started with. And the way our mom- What's a small grant? The diocese gave us like $5,000 and the sisters gave us $20, which I say small now because we have a much larger budget. That is small. But that was huge for us when we started. You got $25,000. Yeah. And you're living in a groovy little hippie pad over in Kansas City.

and nobody even knows who you are. I'm trying to understand why would anybody call up this group of people and say, hey, my roof has a hole in it. Yeah, well, so we started with our church. So we went to our church and we let them know, like, hey, we're here. If you need assistance with anything around your house, let us know. And we just started getting calls. And once you do one project, things spread like wildfire, you know, people here.

But the big part of our model is the volunteers. not only do the volunteers come and do service. The ones that live with you are all the ones as well. Both, but the retreats that we host because those volunteers, we bring in about 300 volunteers a year from around the country. They have a week-long retreat. They help us with our projects physically, but then also they pay a fee to come for the week. Oh, so they pay you to work.

They pay to work. We make a lot of jokes about that. And work on other people's places. Again, mission trip type stuff. Exactly, exactly. So this thing, I see, I get it now. So this thing has 12 teenagers or college students that show up for a week at a time or two weeks at a time on a mission. And they pay you to show up.

And then you have projects lined up and you take them out and say, let's get it done. Yeah. And then so the fee that they pay goes towards the materials on the projects they're working. on. And so then that's how we're able to do that work. What do you also, I love how you talk about the fees. How do you describe it? I do think a lot of our work, I do think of it as wealth redistribution because, you know, we're drawn schools, private Catholic schools, right? And you're paying $20,000 a year. You're going to, it's from higher income families. And so, yeah, I think that's when we're

fundraising and all that is we need to redistribute this wealth into our community. There's a difference in wealth redistribution about people who volunteer to do it and then forced by the government. So your version of wealth redistribution, I'm all for. Okay, great. I love that. Yeah. Arbitrarily putting money in bureaucrats hands to quote redistribute wealth, I think, is also fraught with issues. Yes.

But the way you're saying it and doing it makes all the sense of the world. yeah you know in our in our catholic world we have this language called rights and responsibilities so we all have rights that are due to us because we're human the right to life being first and foremost right but that also entails having housing having food having water shelter work health care but with those rights you also have responsibilities so if i have the right to work then i have the responsibility to work as well if i can but on top of securing those rights for myself, I also have the duty and the responsibility to secure those rights for others. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a Catholic thing? Yeah, so that Catholic social teaching. I agree with it. I'm not Catholic.

So I think in general that makes sense. But I think we need to, I want to dive into this a little bit. So the idea is every human being, because they're a child of God, I would assume because of the faith, because they're human, because they're created. in the image of God. They are our brothers and our sisters. They have a right to life. They have a right to food, health care, the basics. A human being has a right to those basics.

But co-joined with those rights, this School of Thought says, the rights come with responsibility. I'm trying to repeat what you said to me. I want to make sure I got it. And so if you're able to work, certainly you have a right to all these things, but you also have a responsibility to engage in your community and work and do the things you're supposed to do.

Correct. Yeah. And then there was a third thing you said. Yeah. So a lot of people ended there where you say, well, the responsibility falls on me to work or to do these things, right? But in this principle, we also add that I also have the responsibility for you, that you also have the rights that you're entitled to as well. So you have the responsibility to ensure my rights? To care for my brothers and my sisters around me. It's my responsibility. I am responsible for my brother and my sister that live around me. We'll be right back.

Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI. now will happen.

I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so I have a right to these things, Alex has a right to these things, Cassius has a right, and you have a right.

The four of us in this room have these basic rights. This is the fundamental school of thought and principle. But we have the responsibility because of those rights to do what we can to secure those rights for ourselves. Correct. In addition, I also have the responsibility that if your rights are being quashed by something systematic, governmental, societal, to stick up for your rights. Correct. And so that's where I also, we got on to this around the wealth redistribution because, yes, it's not forced, but it is a responsibility as an obligation or you can think of it as a due. or liturgy has the word rooted in that language duty. For our non-Christian listeners, or maybe our fence-sitting listeners, one of the things that I think,

especially in today's modern times, freak people out about the Christian faith is the guilt part. That whole principle you just said, by the way, personally, love it. Honestly, absolutely, I'm going to think about that probably all week as I think about the third leg to that stool, which is probably the most interesting to me. Are you doing the things you're supposed to do because you're motivated to do by the right things or are you doing those out of guilt or do you use guilt to motivate others to do things? And people, there's a large group of people in today's world who recoil from the Christian faith because of that thought. Right. I'd love to give you a chance to kind of address that one. Yeah, it depends on the day on what your motivation is.

That's an honest answer. Yeah, we're human, right? Yeah, you know, there's Father Dan Berrigan, have you heard of him? No. He was a radical, a Catholic priest during the Vietnam War. He was arrested multiple times for burning draft cards and was a big believer in Christian nonviolence. But he was once asked one time, where does your faith reside? And his response was, in your ass.

In your eyes. And explain that. Well, it's what he's talking about, it's where you show up at day and where you see. sit and where you are. So some days, you know, I might think my faith is in my heart, right? Or my faith might be in my brain. But some days I might not be feeling it in my heart or my brain might not be able to reconcile it, right? But what he talks about is even in that just showing up consistently and who you're with and where you are and what your commitments are. That's really what displays where your faith is. And so I just say that about this obligation or duty or recoiling

from that of like yeah some days i might do things because i feel guilty i see someone and i was like oh man i i really should do something or some days i might do it just because i'm feeling great and motivated and like i wake up and i just want to go out in the world and serve and and all that to say i was like i don't think any of that's wrong but it's for me it's like well i'm to show up every day and challenge myself just to be in those spaces that I need to be to serve. And so I like that response from Father Dan Berg, and I think about that a lot. That's hilarious. Okay.

So you show up. You've got the thing. I assume you have to do a little work on the former convent to make it appropriate. And you go through your church and people start calling. Give us an idea of what that work looks like. Yeah. Initially. Most of our, you know, we were initially, one of our first clients was a member from our church.

I don't really expect you to remember. You can't even remember when you met your wife. So go ahead. Just give us the best. It was a roof that we did. But yeah, most of our clients that we serve, our seniors fixed income, $800 a month is what their social security is. And they own their house. Or we also serve a lot of immigrants and refugees in our neighborhood that bought houses,

probably really cheap, but wouldn't be considered livable by most people. And so they're working on them as they're living in them and improving their situation. So that makes up predominantly who we work with with our home repair program in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood in the Northeast is the median income is like $30,000 a year, and it's a working class neighborhood. What's the demographics in race, age, and faith? curious. I don't know the faith question. There's a lot of churches around the Northeast that you see. Let's be clear. He's not talking about the Northeast of Kansas City. North East Kansas City, correct. Yeah, I called Northeast. About third Hispanic, a third black, third white.

Is it really that diverse? It is. Yeah. That's really interesting. We did this listening project in 2022 and then 2024, where we surveyed around 600 people around the Northeast. And we had 40 different languages reportedly spoken in the household in those surveys that we did with people. 40 different languages. How are these people getting to Kansas City? Resettlement. City's a great town. Yeah. Their barbecue sucks. But the town's a wonderful place. I shot it. I got it in. You got your shot. I just you heard it. I got that in. Right. All right. But the, the, uh... He's not even contestant. I didn't get it. They're barbecue. You know, I was a

vegetarian when I moved to Kansas City, but the taco trucks and barbecue may be changed. That was overstated. Kansas City's barbecue does not suck. I've eaten it plenty of times. It's just fine and tasty for a minor league fair. That's all. So anyway, I would expect that in places like southern Texas, the Northeast, maybe Chicago, the eastern seaboard, certainly L.A. but Kansas cities like the heartland. It's the Midwest, Middle City. How in the world do 40 different languages, refugees, as you call them, get to Kansas City? Yeah, I mean, we have resettlement agencies through the refugee program and then immigrants.

But, you know, I think because of that, because Kansas City is affordable city and we're in the middle. There's a lot of highways that go through Kansas City. We're not far from Chicago or Denver. And I think people go to some of those larger cities and find them to be expensive. and difficult to live in, and then somehow they hear about Kansas City and end up there and can make a good living there. So this northeast community that your new Jerusalem farm serves looks like a third white, a third Hispanic, a third black from all different walks of life, some retired age folks,

it feels like we're talking about a lower middle income place where people are just getting by a month to month. Yeah, but it's also changing because we're about in, of the six neighborhoods in the Northeast, which make up what we call the historic Northeast, we're in the westernmost neighborhood, which is only about a mile from downtown Kansas City. And so, you know, and there's a lot of old historic homes built in the late 1800s, 1880s that are mansions. really. And so you do have a lot of younger professionals, wealthier individuals also living there in these historic homes that have fixed them up. They look beautiful. So yeah, I say it truly is diverse in both socioeconomically and ethnically and so forth. That's kind of a cool place to live, it sounds like. It is. I love it. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. That's very cool. And that concludes part one of our conversation with Jordan Shealy, and you don't want to miss part two.

It's now available to listen to. Together, guys, we can change this country, but it starts with you. I'll see you in part two. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people.

Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.