TRASHFUTURE - Onward Christian Startups!

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

We read a terrible article about a tech startup in Cincinnati, Ohio that wants to combine Evangelical Christianity with app culture. We assembled the full cast of Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum to discuss it. Folks, it will raise your blood pressure. The article appeared in WIRED and can be found here: https://www.wired.com/story/midwest-christian-entrepreneurs-startup-life/ Also if you want to read about Nate’s former swim coach getting arrested for church larceny, you can start here: http://scaq.blogspot.com/2013/04/what-huge-disappointment-us-secret.html If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/  *COME SEE MILO*If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  *BRISTOL LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see us perform at Bristol Transformed 2020 -- we’ll be performing on the night of Friday, March 6 (with more details to come later). Get tickets here: https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/#date=2020-03-06&event_id=58254 *LONDON LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be playing at Vauxhall Comedy on Wednesday, March 11 at 7.30 pm! Tickets are £12, and you can get them here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-tickets-91817874735

Hello, and welcome to this week's Trash Future. It's me, Riley. I'm here in studio with the full TF crowd. I've got Hussein. Hi. I've got Milo. Hello, it's me live in studio. We have Boards Master Nate. Hello. And from a continuing to be Crisp Glasgow, we have Alice. Yes, with my beautiful new microphone. Hello. I'm going to introduce it as Crisp Glasgow forever. And before we get into things, because Lord, Lord, do we have things to get into? I just want to remind everyone we are going to be at the Bristol Transformed Festival on the 6th of March. And we are going to be doing a live show in London with special guest, Molly Goodfellow, friend of the show and fan favorite. But she is a Molly Goodfellow.

She is a Molly Goodfellow indeed. And that is going to be on the 11th of March at Vauxhall Comedy Club. Links for all of it are going to be in the description. However, sometimes an article hoves into view that I realize contains not just multitudes, but an entire show, a little slice of culture, a little slice of politics and the economy, all of these things put together that is so perfect that we cannot but gather around this old, dusty podcast table, put on our headphones and continue to do what it is that we do. Why did we buy this podcast table from the spectators second hand? Wait, that's not dust.

They were giving it away free. That's not dust. That's... All right. So racism. In 2012, Chad Reynolds found himself on a South Carolina... Immediate name. There will be some names. Yeah. Oh, they go and be some names. There are going to be some names. In 2012, Chad Reynolds found himself on a South Carolina

beach at midnight. As he floated in the dark water, he had what he describes as his first real conversation with God. What was he doing with his life? He then godets me, Chad. Well, early contender for the episode title right there. The Chad Chad and the Virgin God. Yes. What was he doing with his life? He asked, why wasn't he with someone and why did he feel so empty? These are the opening words of the article, Deliver us Lord from the startup life and wired by Catherine Joyce. And this article is all about how this bobbing ocean going Chad

is here to try and save the souls and the economy of the Midwest with a combination of God, apps and a little help from his friends. Did God tell him to eat an old beef diet? Was that the solution? Just a very buoyant Chad. Indeed. So Reynolds, a 36 year old designer and startup founder from Cincinnati, Ohio, had been working relentlessly, rarely taking vacations, ignoring his health, and neglecting his family and friends for years. That is some Chad shit.

Yes. That's the standard tech bro life. That's the bargain you make as you get an outsized reward in return for basically selling yourself entirely to whatever your business is. He's basically living the life of a sim when you've got like a very particular agenda in mind. Like he keeps crying, but you're just making him spend 24 hours a day at the gym because you want to fuck with the general. In 2008, Reynolds set aside a few months to quote sit still. During this hiatus, he went to a Sunday service at Cincinnati's Crossroads Church, recommended by a friend. At the time, a mega church of 9,000 members.

You could tell there was something extremely creative and entrepreneurial happening in that church, he remembers. Jesus. It occurred to him. Yes, that's right. It occurred to him that if he could somehow incorporate his budding faith into his next venture, things could be different. Yeah, I too remember when Paul is struck off his mount on the road to Damascus by a feeling of something extremely creative and entrepreneurial happening. I also love attending a division sized church. That's my favorite. Oh sweet summer child, it gets bigger.

Do realize, Alice, that I know you've read the notes, but you do realize that a theological link between entrepreneurship and St. Paul the Apostle is legitimately something that this dude winds up saying. Oh yes, this was what I was going for, yes. So Crossroads Church is going to come up in this episode pretty frequently. All you need to know now, though, is that Cincinnati is a town that contains Procter and Gamble's HQ, one of the companies that owns every brand, and that this church was founded by P&G executives, and 274 of its senior steering staff all have close ties with Procter

and Gamble as well. I actually really prefer the Unilever church across the way. Is that like a Dutch Unitarian church? Yeah, it's kind of mingable in the roof. Yeah. And you can wear blackface whenever you want. As he bobbed in the dark Atlantic, Reynolds says, he heard a message and replied to his plea. It was a yo.

That was the story of how yo was founded. That God had given him talents and gifts so they could be put to use helping other people, and that he needed to be more aggressive. He needed to take a leap of faith. God's side of that midnight conversation was half encouragement and half dare. It was then that I realized that I still had my AirPods in and I was listening to an Andrew Tate lecture. Even though you can't see the bottom, I've got you. I'm going to protect you.

I'm going to help you. What we have here, I think, is a version. We've all talked about how American Protestantism has the very personal God who more or less kind of resolves into a vision board or a business plan. It's like in the show, the Righteous Gemstones that was discussed on Chapo, where the main character, Jesse Gemstone, is able to get down on his knees and pray and say, Good morning, Jesus. I know that you love me and all the bad stuff I do.

You know that's not me because I'm a good person. American Protestantism is basically... Like a waste man. That's not me. It's basically the religious version of that. I haven't listened to this episode of Chaffas. I'm just like amazed at the name Jerry... Jesse Gemstone.

Jesse Gemstone. I'm just going to say too that bear in mind, to me, this may not be an immediate memory trigger for you guys, but coming from the Midwest, my parents live about an hour from Cincinnati. Mega churches are like a really weird kind of Protestantism in the sense that they're really not doctrinal at all. There's basically the Bible and there's the charismatic preacher, but there's nowhere near as what we might describe as Christian Hediths or Gospels. It's very much driven about like this extremely contemporary relate everything to your modern

life through Jesus. And so in a way, this doesn't seem out of the ordinary. It just seems like a spin, but I feel like it's important to point that out there. You'll talk about this, I know Riley, about some of these things being kind of like weird strains of Catholicism or Calvinism in the way that they wind up inserting themselves into people's lives. But I think the fundamental thing to understand this is these things are huge empty vessels. There isn't any doctrine.

There's Jesus in incredibly good AV production inside the church. That one step ahead of us. What you have is, what has been discussed before is that American Protestantism is worship of capital and the nation because that's what was poured into these giant empty vessels. But that's just the thing. And I think you're right, these are mega churches are giant empty vessels and they'll take the shape of what's poured in them. And also this is a tradition in the United States with revivalism and it takes these

shapes throughout whatever era you're watching it. This is obviously a weird amalgam, but this isn't out of the ordinary in terms of like, this is not like a new permutation of American Christianity. But what I'm saying is that it's a different shape. Yeah, for sure, yeah. This is not the nation flag gun culture war shape of the Falwells. This is something entirely new. No, this is basically like, we, I grew up with, Mike, my friends go into like,

Reverend Spike's Cool Chitin Church. This is basically, how does God want you to do with your smartphone? Now I'm just imagining like the righteous man eats a Wendy's Baconator, for the man at Denny's walks in the valley of Satan. Alarmingly accurate to what Christianity has become in the continent of North America. So when he got back to work, Reynolds recommitted himself to his company. He describes his midnight conversion as, quote, getting an upgrade to his operating system and came to see the mission of his company as a way of fulfilling the charge that God

had given him to go out and improve the world. Has he become really buggy since then? Christ's love is free, but there are in-app purchases. But like there are a million guys like this. It's just that the charge that they think God has given them is building a better jet ski dealership or something. When you fail to not sleep with hookers for the third time in a row, Jesus comes down and was like, would you like to buy some coins to help you with this?

This God given mission was to build this company called Battery with two eyes. No, no, why? This is the jet ski guy instead. Battery is revolutionizing qualitative consumer research by putting brands in touch with quality focus group candidates faster and easier than traditional methods. Our platform gives you access to hundreds of unique communities that you send on missions for your brand. So that's the mission from God, is to do focus groups.

Oh, well, I guess God has always worked through focus groups in a way. I mean, what were the apostles if not kind of a focus group? Will you say minutes of energy from you, Judas? Well, I think it's like the absurd fucking missions of mountain played and how angry they may be. So over the past decade or so, the amount of venture capital flowing into the Midwest has expanded enough for thousands of tech startups to sprout up in the old line cities of the Rust Belt.

And this story tends to be told as down and out heartland cities hustling to remake themselves in the image of Silicon Valley, the help of venture capitalists like Hillbilly, Elegy, Arthur J.D. Vance unveiled like $150 million investment fund. But the article continues, as the demographics of tech have become incrementally more Midwestern, these regional outposts have also set about remaking the industry in their own likeness, particularly where matters of faith are concerned. So you're telling me that J.D. Vance got it wrong and that these places wouldn't become more liberal and more like Silicon Valley as they got invested in?

Well, the dimension of Vance, I think, shouldn't get past anyone. Anyone who takes this book seriously would essentially consider what we'll be discussing, which is that there is a mega church come startup incubator and gentrification engine, which is exactly the solution to the creeping tide of political polarization in America, according to that analysis, which is that there is a good and nice working class that has become corrupted by capital going away from them and that you need to do is bring capital and morality back so that they can become righteous, upstanding members of the working class. Like that's largely the J.D. Vance argument.

And so what better than a mega church that's also a startup incubator, which we will discuss? He'll be the elegy, but there's no vowels in it. So it's an entire book of constants. The Bay Area currently has like an enormous amount of U.S. venture capital funding and a big theme of what gets discussed in this article is that, yes, big tech is still considered allergic to expressions of faith. And for some Christians, accordingly, the industry ship... These days you'll get thrown in jail for saying you're wise.

For some Christians, accordingly, the industry's shift towards the heartland has been liberating. Jason Heinrich, the founder of several Midwestern finance and tech organizations, says, when my wife and I moved back to the Midwest, it was so much easier to be a Christian than in all those other places. In Chicago, he goes on, if you casually mentioned that you're going to church, there aren't these sets of assumptions that you're a Trump supporter, a gun toad or out protesting on weekends. Unlike where we live before in Whitechapel, where I kept being arrested by the Sharia police. Let's park there for a second. It's incredibly easy to be a Christian anywhere in America. There's literally no place that they're persecuted. Remember when Bloomberg

put the entire Christian population of New York under surveillance? Is this fucking guy living in Aaron Sorkin's imagination in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, where they're just condescending to crazy Christians? I would say that if you are what I would describe as the sort of like, evangelical, talking about being saved, talking about God calling you to do things, that will come across as very strange if you live in a place like the Bay Area or New York, in the sense that people might be religious. But I think the frankness with which a lot of evangelicals talk about it, if you live in the South, if you live in the Midwest, I think that they're not to say that this guy has a point because I mean, in a sense that you're going to,

on average, more people that you encounter in your professional life are going to be evangelical Christians in the Midwest or in the South than they are in those other areas. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's more to say that your average tech startup person doesn't give a fuck about church, whereas your average white collar person, white collar job having suburban person in the Midwest might very well. That's their target demographic in a way that in New York, for example, where I used to live, the majority of religious communities are immigrants. They're not fourth generation Americans with white collar jobs. There are some, but it's rarer. It's the language of persecution that I can't get around. The idea that

they are escaping a place where they're not welcome to go to find and build this new community where they are. And this is the language that, again, is going to come up throughout this as these people are talked to. I mean, if you were booted out the polycule for like finding God, I don't know, that would amount to persecution. Asking my polycule if they've been saved. I would say that they're absolutely, anywhere you go in America, there's absolutely this idea that you're somehow under siege for being a Christian, because it's this thing that's hard coded into basically any conservative or center of right media. I remember this living in North Carolina, and I was getting my car fixed, and there were some relatively benign story that

Fox News was covering, and it's usual Obama wants to turn you gay and Muslim way, and all the other Volkswagen customers at the Volkswagen dealership in Fayetteville, North Carolina who were white dudes, were just like, I can't fucking believe this guy, they were losing their mind. And I was just sort of like, I'm sitting there, I'm in civilian clothes, but you know, obviously, normally it'd be in uniform. And they kept looking at me to agree with them. And I was from thinking, like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? Like, clearly, you have enough money to afford a fucking Volkswagen in America, like, what are you so mad about? Obama wants to take my fucking Jetta, and I'm not standing for it. But that's 100% such a default thing that like this,

the way he's phrasing it is more of like the cuddly, unhappy to find my people kind of thing. But I think that idea, I mean, you can find that same Christians are under siege, white people under siege mentality in fucking Orange County, California. You know, you can find it, you can probably, I'm sure you can find it in like Nassau County, Long Island, or Westchester County, New York, all these places. Someone say that's what the movie Under Siege is really about. Because I think that's a thing that, there is a point to be made that these kinds of open expressions of evangelical Christianity are way more, I mean, no one in New York ever asked me if I would go to their church. I mean, obviously, people like Orthodox Jewish people come up to

me and ask me to fucking go to school with them. But anywhere I lived in the South, my neighbors, the first thing they'd ask me was I a Christian? Do I go to church? Do I want to go to their church? Like that is such a common thing. So I imagine that if you grew up with that, then the Bay Area might seem kind of hostile with people more be like, you know, do you want to drink cava and do DMT with me? That's completely different way. Moving in next to Joe Rogan. So that's one, that's one of the themes, which is this idea of building a new promised land for Christians and traditionally liberal jobs. The second of these themes, this comes out here, which is, as the article says, perhaps the most interesting part of the

Midwestern convergence of faith and technology is the way people there have begun to question the cultural tech entrepreneurship and try to make it more humane. Being an entrepreneur, you go through some very dark moments says upcoming name Christy Zulki, the 37-year-old co-founder of Knowledge Hound, a Chicago-based data visualization startup. McGruff the Knowledge Dog. He barks anytime someone knows something. So what's the problem here that we're actually trying to solve? That Christy Zulki says that the Midwest startup community is trying to solve, or not in the Midwest rather, the more

humane approach to entrepreneurship is trying to solve. Is it like the underlying inhumanity of entrepreneurship as a whole? Raising funding is very lonely. I was more concerned with when Amazon treats, in my home state, it's cheaper for them to put an ambulance outside versus having air conditioning in a state where it can be above 100 in fucking August. I'm also concerned about, even when you think about Amazon treating its white collar workers, where if you remember the New York Times story, a woman had a miscarriage and she didn't come to work the next day because she was still in the hospital and her boss sent her

an email like, why the fuck aren't you at your desk? Now, like all that stuff, you said yes, but have you considered that raising funding is very lonely? You're basically convincing everyone that your idea is amazing. Well, they constantly shoot it down. Again, I wonder why. Considering you're telling me that this is a Wendy's, or if you used to listen to my idea for a Knowledge Dog. People keep shooting down my Knowledge Dog. When the cops come to my house and shoot my knowledge, it's the sort of thing that can make people question their faith. Or if you don't have a faith, you start to clamor for hope that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Now, if you don't have a faith, then you start a podcast. That's the correct

hierarchy. This is such a bizarre view of what faith is supposed to represent, right? I don't know if this makes any sense, but to me, it sounds the kind of conventional way of supposedly seeking capital for your bizarrely knowledgeable dog is by convincing investors that they're already inflated numbers are actually fine and they'll just get more and more inflated and you've just kind of got to believe in the numbers. When your idea is so bad that you can't convince a bunch of high birdbrained VCs in Southern California, that your Knowledge Dog actually does, can also do racism as well. Well, number one, it goes to show that your idea is really bad, but it's also this idea that, well, if I'm really faithful and if I'm a servant

of God, if you'd like whatever you want to call it, then I should be bestowed these things. If I'm not bestowed these things, that's my crisis of faith. That's not how kind of faith should like that type of relationship with God should work. Maybe this is explained further down in our conversation further, but faith is supposed to be about struggle. So I'm trying to understand why even the kind of smallest amount of pushback to a real world idea. I don't understand why they're all mad at me. One of the key insights here, right? I think this speaks to what you're saying, as well, is like their version of Christianity is extremely secularized. I think, Nate,

this goes to what you were saying earlier about how mega churches are basically just social clubs for evangelicals that take on the shape of whatever their aim and manifest Republican movement conservatism into like a sort of theological underpinning. So it's basically like if you think about the gemstone Falwell personal God as a kind of justification for whatever you want to do, whatever hierarchy you're in, this is different. It's basically like that gemstone Falwell personal God that just tells you everything and is a Calvinist wish fulfillment engine. It's different. It's concerned with works, stewardship and ownership, but ultimately, and this is unstated, but again, runs throughout

like a vein reassuring you that you are destined to be on the top of a paternalistic hierarchy. In a nice way, in a nice way, rather than in the F 150 way. Who's saying to your point, it's not a challenge. It's a reassurance. It's a comforter. It's a blanket. I mean, I will say, if you go into a meeting of Midwestern VCs and tell them you want to make Tinder, but Jesus is calling you to make Tinder for ultimate frisbee, that won't seem as weird as you said in California because in the Midwest, two of the people in that meeting have probably met their significant others that way. God called them to play ultimate frisbee together and that's how it happened.

There is no more Christian ass sport than ultimate frisbee, to be fair. Because you're praying you won't look like an ass form. In many ways, in the end of the day, isn't Jesus the real ultimate frisbee? Hey kids, let me wrap with you all about a loose dude who hung out in Galilee and liked to throw the disc around with a few of his friends or shall I say apostles. That's right, Jesus Christ. Off-brand ultimate frisbee is like that final disc. So Cincinnati, which has become one of the Midwest leading tech cities, has also become a hub for people trying to find some relief from the loneliness at the heart of this industry that

prizes unending drive and competition. That's the real problem with the industry, is the loneliness at the heart of it. That also could just be capitalism in miniature, like it's not just the tech industry that's driving loneliness and constant competition. And the loneliness is real, like just because we're making fun of it because other people have worse problems, doesn't mean that Christy Zunka or whatever her name is, isn't genuinely feeling quite sad about having to pitch her unusually smart dog. I think as ever, like mental health discourse is now one of these things where like it started out as a good idea and it's now become a monster, which we're going to have to slay at some point,

because even the fucking startup dipshits are like, you know, raising venture capital funding is a lonely place and it's like, no, no one cares, fuck off. So that there was a group for these people with this common interest to connect was in part thanks to Chad Reynolds, who we know, who banded together with a group of entrepreneur friends, including, and again, I don't know if we have like a name siren we can have, but Tim Brunk. That is a fucking Midwestern ass surname. Hunks before Bronx. Very excited.

Hunks before Brunk, never been thunk. All these people wear a white polo shirt that's tucked into a pair of khakis. They all wear the same, that's like the Midwestern uniform. They're actually like an action man and you can't take the khakis and polo shirt off them. No, they have no genitals. If I take that plaid off or you die, Tim Brunk has a startup called Cladwell, personal styling for those who don't fit in a box. Malcolm Cladwell, the guy who just dresses snappy, but through insane theories.

Oh well, the real secret to unemployment is just wearing these lovely trousers. Your closet can be changed forever as it goes the type marketing text for Cladwell. It's as simple as making a choice, a choice to start dressing based on what we like, rather than what on others think. Rather than what our wife tells us to do, I'm my own person, Janice. Janice, now that's a Midwestern name as well. Oh yeah. Janice Brunk.

And Tim Brunk. Not as good a name after Tim Brunk, but still would be a good name, not if it just come after Tim Brunk. Tim Metzner. What the fuck do you let all these fucking Germans emigrate to the US? Cincinnati is full of German Catholics, I swear to God. And this is what happens. This is what happens is 200 years later,

you end up with a guy named Tim Brunk. In a second, we're going to get Timmy Lee voiced, mind handy. Now, the startup Tim Metzner had was called Differential, which is a software board. Doesn't do anything stupid, I don't think. Maybe it does. And they started an organization that would eventually be called Ocean, named after Reynolds's long dark night of the soul.

They were, in large part, responding to a hunger among their fellow entrepreneurs to redefine what success means in tech. So what is Ocean? Well, Ocean, what we'll find, we will find out, is an angel investor that... Oh, you're doing a thing. Yeah. Invest in the angels. Yes, but no, but in the biblical angels, the fucked up ones that drive you crazy if you see them.

So we'll come back to Ocean a little bit later. There's like a big secret. We're only investing in the Muslim angels. I love being the CEO of Ocean. I'm only investing in Muslim angels. My boss knows that I'm doing this. My brain is so broken that whenever I think of angel investor, I just think of like Gendo Ikari.

Yes. Crossroads, we're going to come back to that. But Crossroads is this church we mentioned earlier. It's the congregation that helped usher Reynolds towards his conversation with God. And as in recent years, it has become the emblem for the fusion of sensibilities between tech and evangelical Christianity. Today, it is a 52,000-member mega church with 13 campuses, a presence in six prisons, and an app called Crossroads Anywhere.

Hell yeah, I love to disrupt prisons. Yeah, I love a prison ministry. Nothing weird about that. Can I throw a couple of things in here really quickly? So one thing to bear in mind when talking about this part of the US and about this sort of tendency in general is that, and I know Riley, you're going to talk about NAFTA and the sort of after effects of that, but this area used to be very tied in with heavy manufacturing in the United States.

You laughed for a second when I saw they just retired to one of the oldest lots sets of train cars in the New York City subway that were built by the St. Louis car company, the St. Louis train car company in the early 60s, and had been on the fucking rails in the subway that long, because they used to make stuff like train cars in St. Louis, and they used to make cars and car parts and consumer electronics all throughout this region. So this is an area that's been really hard hit. The cities that were more or less segregated, a lot of them were destroyed in riots in 1968.

The cities were under-invested. They had a ton of white flight. They had a ton of problems with the opiate crisis. They still have problems with it. You've got huge, huge problems with people dying of heroin overdoses in places like Cincinnati, Ohio in general. Cincinnati is South Ohio, and that's close, like anywhere close to the Ohio River going into Appalachia.

You are dealing with huge problems where basically for a decade plus, the only Medicaid-approved fucking health clinic you could go to that hadn't been shut down by state budget cutting was a pain clinic that just gave you oxycontin. So this area has got problems that are magnified versus your garden variety America fucking Brezhnev rotting from the inside problems. And so the idea of what's the appeal of these kinds of things, you can't really live in these areas about being confronted with the reality of this, whether you've got a job and you have a suburban home and whatnot,

or you're down on your luck. The idea of there being a 52,000-member megachurch with presidents in prisons kind of makes sense because, to be honest with you, if they are appealing to people who are born and raised, who aren't transplants and quite frankly, there's not that many of them in a place like that compared to other cities in America, a lot of them probably know folks in prison. So a lot of them probably have relatives who are in prison for heroin or for drugs.

A lot of them have relatives who died from that shit. So I mean, there is a spiritual crisis, don't get me wrong. It's got material causes, but there is absolutely a spiritual crisis in this region. What we're going to find is that crossroads is, as much as they're claiming to solve it, is in fact acting in ways that are driving it. Yeah, raising funds to buy heroin can be a lonely place,

but what if those tracks were a railroad to salvation? Honestly, what they did raise funds for, it would have been better if they just did what you said. Then Rory Stewart, room to disrupt. We'll find out what that is later, but the lead pastor, Brian Tome, likes to say that crossroads is Brian Tome. He's a nominative determinism.

It strikes again. He's actually distantly related to the Chockel brothers. I changed it at Ellis Island. It was originally Brian to me. So it's lead pastor, Brian to me, likes to say that crossroads is quote more of a startup than a church. And now this is an excerpt from another article detailing one of the sermons. So at the end of the aisles,

attendance wait, holding pales overflowing with packets of apple seeds. God has placed this seed in you, and he wants to see it come to fruitfulness. Tome says to the crowd, his spiked and styled, dirty blonde hair and untucked plaid shirt, lending him the air of an aging film star. He's got the airy. He's got frosted kicks.

Let God lead you to Flavortown. He's the front man of Lincoln Park when Lincoln Park first came out. Slathering barbecue sauce on the Bible. Gowing his head, he prays, asking God to lead everyone to the right seed that will bring forth the right fruit at the right time in every business. Those who are inspired are to take these seeds from the attendance and go forth claiming their spiritual destinies as entrepreneurs.

But pastor, these are all poppy seeds. I like that phrase claiming their spiritual destinies as entrepreneurs. The Falwells, with their rampant corruption, frothing culture war, and draconian university honor codes, they're a yesterday organization. Crossroads is the organization of tomorrow. They don't need to buy Brian Tome a jet. They don't need to be skimming off the top.

They don't need to be doing any of that because they just have the startup money there. And it's about the Protestant anxiety of elevating yourself above the rest, but also this anxiety to evangelize by genuinely saving others. But to be sure, saving them from lives not just without Christ, but without fulfilling jobs as product owners for my startup that's tender for dogs. For sure, these people aren't dominionists, right?

They're not grooming a bunch of suit and tie freaks who are going to infiltrate the Department of Justice and work their way up or whatever. They're interested in making Christian apple or whatever. Yeah, I think I disagree with your point that the Falwells are yesterday's story. It's more that the people that they have brought to their side now live in a completely sealed, enclosed ecosystem.

Different niche, different niche. That isn't going to cross paths with this because those people live in places where their schools are all private Christian schools and they typically live around the areas, like in the Atlantic coast or the south. They are such a hermetically sealed environment that those people aren't really going to...

You're not going to draw them away from the church they've been going to or you're not going to draw very many of them. They're in an armed camp. This seems more like an opportunity to build a business off the back of drawing people who probably are familiar with evangelical Christianity, but this is just the angle

by which they've tried to make it relate to them. Yo, we used to have Jerry Falwell and now we have Jerry Failford. I think that's progress. I kind of think that they've taken a model that already exists and they're just kind of applying start-up aesthetic to it. The thing that whenever I was reading this and I'm hearing it now,

it's like the thing I'm thinking about is Amway and MLMs, right? Because where were most of these MLMs? Amway being kind of like the cosmetics company, I think, that was like targeting women mainly from the Midwest or mainly from these kind of like traditional small kind of towns and cities where religion was a really big deal and if you were a woman who wanted to even go and do like full-time college,

that was like something that was really kind of frowned upon or kind of you would be looked at in a weird way. And what did the guys at Amway do? Like the people at Amway who were just kind of saying, well, you could run your own business from home and you can still kind of fulfill your Christian duties. You can go to church and work at the same time by getting more people onto Amway.

You can look after your kids and have cosmetics parties and everything and you can have a good Christian business. And the thing about Amway obviously was the same with all these MLMs was like they were huge scams and they were systems that just didn't work. Same with like things like ACN which was targeted towards like young Christian men in America

and also ironically like young Pakistani men in the UK who were then being told go to the mosque and like recruit people to come join like ACN and everything and don't worry about what we do or what we sell. Donald Trump is one of our patrons, etc. It sort of feels like this is the same thing except what they're kind of doing is like the way that they're advertising it is almost

look at like what's happening in California. There's like loads of kind of like success stories that have started but the problem is like the secular approach of which startup culture is there and it creates this kind of loneliness and a credo. So what if we did that but what if we kind of implanted Christian communal culture and that way we can kind of create a better and more ethical

and certainly more Christian Silicon Valley. What you need is success church basically. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, listen, more and more women want to start a business but also believe that a woman's place is in the home and that's why we've created live Jasmine. I think I slightly misspoke and I said Falwell's a yesterday organization.

I think they are very much that a today organization for what they do. But in terms of the next American religious group that is going to be pulling on the levers of where power is going to be, I put my money on crossroads. Sounds good. It's something I want to point out too.

I mean, I think I texted this to you guys when I was back seeing my parents back in October. I remember when I went to the gym and I sent you guys the food. I sent you guys the photo. Yeah. I mean, you were looking jacked. I'll admit that. No. I was too in awe of your pets.

It wasn't me being ripped. I went to the gym and the front desk of the gym and my parent, the town my parents live in was what I would describe as a motivational poster to like, it's basically said something to the effect of like Ben Garrison Christ. How, you know, how, how sad would it be to be strong for the world but not strong for him?

And it basically was strong for him as in strong for Jesus. It was like get jacked for Jesus. Yeah. Because people who own the gym are evangelicals. And that, if you have grown up around that stuff, even if you weren't part of that community, it's so, it escapes notice because it's everywhere you go. I grew up around that so much that,

I mean, I remember just thinking about this the other day, driving to and from the town I went to college in, there were a bunch of like ads for like handyman services and they, all their names were like Christian theme, like almost called painting for the master and I had like a Christian fish sign on it because that, that's everywhere there. Like that's, so in a way,

Getting strong for a dude. In a way, this is kind of genius because basically it once again, it's like what if, what if, what if, what if apps were for Christ? Well, and we'll see with, we'll see how this, how this plays out back to the main article. The story of Crossroads Rise runs pretty neatly in tandem with that of Cincinnati,

which 20 years ago was considered an urban cautionary tale. So, so you know, like, and I get Nate, I'm sure you know this as well. Cincinnati is like a bunch of Fortune 500 companies like headquarters there, P&G, Macy's, Kroger, a bunch. It was also after the signing of NAFTA, basically drained all the blue collar jobs out away from the state.

Now again, J.D. Vance says, this caused a great moral decline and that's the problem, but I digress. What if the key neighborhoods talked about in this article is called Over the Rhine. Always fucking Germans. Largely named for the Germans who lived their ages ago. Anti-German podcast.

Which was largely, and again, these are the people who the writing of J.D. Vance and the J.D. Vance types tend to ignore a largely black working poor area. Yeah. But that's because when you talk about the working class, you mean the white working class, the bros. And this is going to come up again.

This is also going to, and this neighborhood is going to come up again because it is a sort of focal point in the church's development. So Crossroads was founded in the 90s by these Cincinnati executives, including these from Procter & Gamble people. They did so by conducting a bunch of surveys

and market research and decided to build a church that would appeal the non-church goers, young business professionals, and specifically men who would bring families with them. They did market research to open their church. Yeah, they did. You know, they, they, because like, like Nate said, it's, it is a purely a product.

It is purely a, it's a thing to go on, on, on Sundays. We need to appeal, we need to get more men into the church. We need to get away from this toxic perception that going to church is gay. We need to- The epic bacon church. Yeah. Oh my God.

I have their manifesto and Alice, I'm afraid you're right. Could God create a bacon sandwich so huge that he himself could not eat it? I mean, the epic bacon church. The epic bacon motorcycle, Budweiser church. The epic bacon church is the Kanye West church, right? Hmm. Wait, there's the Kanye West.

Well, I mean, I was thinking about your book who's saying, like thinking about people trying to like very desperately grasp its trust to make Islam relevant to people who spend all their lives on YouTube. Like it's basically the same thing. It's just, but what if those guys like, they own one plaid, one button-up shirt, five polos, and 10 different Indianapolis Coles jerseys?

How do you get them interested in church? So they hired Tom, a tan boisterous minister who rides motorcycles and would go on to tape a regular video message to the congregation called Brian Bings- God damn it. Big Ben Bongs for Brian. He's just using the search engine, Bing.

Brian brings a beer as the lead pastor. The church hosted adventures like Man Camp and an annual- It's so low hacking all of this. And an annual super bowl of preaching. A tenant from the church's manifesto holds that beer equals authenticity and that they would do anything short of sin

to bring people to God. Now, you did say that they had a manifesto. I have the manifesto in front of me. Why do they have a manifesto? Shouldn't there just be like a nice creed or something? This is also giving me Jacob Rees Mog book flashbacks, just like in the game of religion, there's one quarterback and that is Jesus Christ.

I have their manifesto in front of me with their tenets. Here are their main ones. The first one, death to religion. Religion meaning- The Ayatollah. Religion meaning any man-made system- No, that was kind of the opposite of the Ayatollah's five, wasn't it? Religion meaning any man-made system of rules and regulations

that promises to get you to God. Religion says, follow the rules, be ashamed of your failures and keep secrets. Religion is a liar that traps you in your own fear. We step out into the open, look fear in the face and say, you can't shame me anymore. Damn, epically red-pilled. Church for fairies.

This is very, this is very Andrew Tay. What it is, it is that first bit of the prosperity gospel, Jesus as sort of vision board for whatever you feel like. Yeah, and the sort of reliance too. These are the types of guys who like openly say, oh yeah, well Christianity was a start-up anyway. And they say that like completely seriously. I mean, you've got early adopters, right?

You've got your apostles. And then it was about making an investment in the expectation of a return of eternal life and salvation. So the second is bring your vices. So again, all your old issues advice magazines. Yeah, exactly. It's very much again, the- All of this just seems to be Gavin McInnis

talking about Jews for some reason. So we get, then the next one is beer matters. First, it's tasty. Second, it's a good way. Are we sure that this is like some kind of a long con by a like long underground Dionysian cult? Or it's like a- It's commercial.

It's one of those bizarre ad strategies by like BrewDog. What they just got way out of hand and now is a mega- It's a church for punks. Yeah, punk church. This is if BrewDog just decided to pivot to like religion. So what we have- Don't give them ideas. Second, it's a good way to know if we're being weird and churchy.

We call it the beer test. Listen to whoever's on stage and ask what I have a beer with them. I wouldn't want a church to be churchy. BrewDog's new knowledge IPA. We need, it is that same strange Protestantism of religion exists to confirm whatever you feel. Yeah, and we're all just folks, right? Let's survive.

The third one is that I'm going to read is what really brings it home for me though, which is we create culture. Once upon a time, they say the church was the epicenter of creativity and innovation. If you wanted cutting edge, you went to the church. Let's bring that back. The church with a capital T and a capital C. The Catholic church.

I'm pretty sure if you wanted cutting edge, you went to the synagogue. Well, let's bring that back. We follow a God who invented and crafted the entire universe. Creativity is in our DNA. And what I'm getting from this, right, is as you said, Alice, they're a form of mission-driven Protestantism that has accidentally become Catholicism. It's just the problem is they all want to do good works

and dedicate beautiful creations to the church. But when you're some Patagonia-wearing evangelical from Illinois and you try to make a Bernini sculpture, of course, what you're going to end up doing is writing a program that allows people to rent a mattress. Of course. I was just thinking about not super related, but having to go to an event at my swim coach's house,

which was like this like tract housing, not McMansion, but you know, you get the idea of former farm... Just go through all of your traumatic Christian memories. Midwestern memories here. I'm talking about a swimming coach living in a McMansion has a deeply like pedophile alarm bell. So it has a pre-financial crisis a lot. Yeah.

Like old former farmland now tract housing house that walls were completely bare except for a few Bible quotes on like pewter plates on the wall. He was a huge bully, huge piece of shit. And a couple of years before I got out of the army, I remember seeing a news story that he apparently was on the run in Mexico because he had been defrauding churches and swim clubs,

had a domestic violence charge and apparently was using this money. He was literally stealing money out of people's donations out of mailboxes to fund his cocaine habit. And when he finally got arrested in Mexico, and I'm going to put this up on the screen for you guys, he was arrested. This was his mugshot.

This was his haircut. Yeah, he looks fucking cool. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah. For the record, Alice, I'll show it to you later. He's wearing a teal polo with a white T-shirt underneath and he has a center part butt cut. Like he's a fucking 90s teen pop star.

I was going to say that this has a slightly different vibe just from the numbers. When you say like metal plates with Bible verses and going on the run for embezzlement in Mexico, that's Mormon to me. That's a different kind of guy. That's a Utah guy. That's a Mormon guy or that's like a Falwell guy.

I think if he'd embezzled all of that money and then like, I think if he'd done a pyramid scheme that somehow was going to do something. Bro, I'm looking at the comments on this news story from somebody's blog and it's all full of people swim parents. Being like, he put the swimmers first. He was just doing the best he could to fucking make money to take care of swimmers.

Believe me, these people are deeply insane and they will find a way to rationalize it through Jesus when we're not put the swimmers first. So let's go back to Cincinnati. In the mid-2000s. I just want to do like Protestantism at all with Nate. Yes, Protestant. Growing up Protestant in 1990s, Indiana.

I wasn't Protestant. I just grew up around this shit. Growing up around Protestants in 1990s, Indiana. That's what made it so fucking foreign to me was because these people are so... Yeah, it's a whole different world. So anyway, let's hear about how they're going to make it biblical to fire people.

So that takes us back to Cincinnati. Then in the mid-2000s, non-profit development corporations created by some of the city's businesses, including Proctor & Gamble, invested more than half a billion dollars in Over the Rhine and the tech sector followed. The consequences... So they did the JD Vance thing.

They just funneled high-tech funding into this deprived neighborhood. And they did it before JD Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy and they didn't even do it to solve political polarization. Before he invented thinking. If you think about it, there's never been political polarization in Cincinnati or the surrounding area ever since.

No, and this neighborhood over the Rhine, right? That didn't have any riots in the 60s. Any police shootings or anything? No, definitely not a police shooting in 2000 that caused another riot. And then we had a tech sector-involved redevelopment, I guess. I'm sorry, guys, to bring it back, but I happen to look up his name.

And now, this is a story from 2018. Former swim coach Ken Stapcotti was sentenced in U.S. Exactly. In U.S. District Court, a 21-months-in-prison on Friday for using counterfeit money at a minor league baseball game in April. Stapcotti admitted to bringing over 200 counterfeit $20 bills with him to a Dayton Dragons game on April 18, 2018,

making numerous purchases with the fake bills, including his ticket, food, beverage, and other concessions. He ended up using 41 of the bills, receiving genuine currency back on his purchases. When approached by investigators, he tried to hide initial 54 bills under a stadium refrigerator. The officials also found 166 worth of genuine currency in the sole of his shoe.

Yeah, he should have invested that to start it. A $3 bill with Master Chief on it. Like, yeah. He's just addicted to crackerjack. It's a sad tale. He wanted to be a big treat boy. So that's what I'm saying. You've got to understand this world.

This is the ocean you're swimming in. These are the fish that you're trying to save with Jesus on an app. I got carried away in the quest to find a gulp that was big enough. The Nonprofit Development Corporation invested a half a bill in Over the Rhine, ending political polarization forever. They're making it this kind of like corporates,

like wholly owned subsidiary, like every other one of these redevelopment states. Investing Over the Rhine, like it's 1939, maybe. So what happened is 65% of the neighborhood's black population was forced out. It's 73% of the affordable housing was black. I think you mean we're involved in a landlord-related pilgrimage.

And it's led to now having some of the highest income inequality in the nation. Neighborhood advocates spoke of the Development Corporation as if it were an occupying colonial force. But to the outside world, it became a shining example of a general Midwest flourishing of the tech and startup industry. But the thing is also,

you cannot separate the role of crossroads specifically from the way that this is happening. For example, crossroads runs a job skills training center called CityLink. And CityLink owns a number of restaurants in Over the Rhine that serve as training centers for chefs to fill a shortage of chefs in Cincinnati required to work all of the chic new restaurants

demanded by all the tech people who've moved there. The totalizing ideology of this church has in fact infected every corner of this neighborhood of Cincinnati, turning it not into a company town, but in every corner, fueling a Jesus inflected bout of mega gentrification. And also, as we remember, there's lots of these- The fucking prison ministries!

Yeah, gentrification equals cops, equals more non-white people in jail, equals prison ministries, equals people getting sent to do their job training to then serve the needs of the white tech saviors that are coming in to this city. I'd love to do the fucking second wave of Victorian colonization,

where we just do like the civilizing mission, but we do it in like a small corner of Cincinnati. Yeah, it's manifest, well, it's the thing, manifest destiny has flipped around and it's going into the country again. And it's all on the blockchain. So that's the other thing though. Do you think that the prisoners

and the crossroads prison flock get the same encouragement with the apple seeds that the white entrepreneurs get? Are they being encouraged to build their businesses? Are they being encouraged to be on the tops of these hierarchies to help others? I somehow doubt it. Signing and fashioning a shiva of apple seeds.

The Kingdom of Heaven is here and it has exposed brick walls, four-tollar coffees, and no black people. Sir, we have ascertained the prisoners had inspirational contraband. Well, he was found with 14 pounds of self-belief hidden under his foreskin. So, fast forward to 2013.

And the atrium of Tomes Industrial Sheik Church has been used as an informal workspace. It's, and this is all like in this same area. Industrial Sheik. It's all in the same area. There's half a billion over the Rhine. We're also, this is the kind of thing we're getting. And all these young congregants,

including Reynolds, Brunk and Metzner, were hanging out there working. I think I did my pupilage with Reynolds, Brunk and Metzner. At the time, recalls, Brunk, there was little in the way of a support system for the young tech entrepreneurs that were starting to proliferate in Cincinnati. So, Tom encouraged the folks at the breakfast gathering

to continue meeting on a weekly basis and become one of Crossroads' numerous interest-oriented small groups. Had to do an agile sprint. They made a Microsoft Teams. Let's be clear. At this meeting, we're not just having breakfast. We're having Brunk.

Right away. Working Brunk. The meetings took on an intimate tone. All of us were a few years into our ventures, Brunk. Because they didn't have more than five guys. It's a problem. Yeah. So, long enough to have seen the vision

and optimism turn to disappointment and betrayal, Brunk himself said he was haunted by the fictional depiction of Zuckerberg at the end of the social network, a lowly tycoon who ruthlessly alienated everyone. Imagine being emotionally affected by this, by a movie that shitty. Yeah, yeah.

Emotional. Because did you know both those twins were played by the same guy? Emotionally affected by someone who got everything he wanted. Brunk says, you ask yourself why I keep doing this and what's a satisfying life? Damn, you just really zucked everyone, huh?

What is a satisfying life? What is his answer to what a satisfying life is? Does it involve giving up all of his wealth? No. No, of course. Well, you know what they say, satisfying life, satisfying life. The things people shared in those early meetings

were, quote, very vulnerable stories of failure, struggling to find funding or scaling their company or breaking up with their co-founders, anxieties about making payroll and taking out family loans. Oh, sad nerd club. Breaking up with my co-founders. I'm sorry, I just don't think we can keep

fucking if we're going to run a successful church startup. I think it actually works pretty well if you just run around the VC headquarters seven times and then blow a horn. Also, that's one for the real heads there. I love the idea of doing interfaith dialogue by doing ta wa for round the crossroads church, too. Yeah, anxieties about making payroll

or taking out family loans. Again, you can, though. You can do all this. Yeah, but sometimes it makes you feel sad and if you're sad, you have to have a bunch of like-minded people to talk about that. Crucially, you have to do it in a place where there aren't any black people

for a mile around. Dealing with all these problems is obviously very popular. They launched a public story sharing event called Unpolished, and over 400 people showed up to the first one. By 2014, I know. Just an open mic to be a sad nerd. Unpolished is one Dutch guy going,

so does that mean we can wear it to blackface or we can't wear it to blackface? So, by 2014, Brunk Reynolds and Metzner decided to transform the community into something more formal, a non-profit business accelerator. This is Ocean. Officially, the organization's goal

was to cement Cincinnati's status as a start-up-friendly city and to, quote, increase God's presence in the marketplace by cultivating founders. They're Christians. God's last presence in the marketplace was hissing a bunch of guys with a whip.

Yeah, it wasn't- Like, evict the marketplace. Well, you know, we evicted it, but now we're finding a synergy. By cultivating founders, it will be good stewards of their success. Parable of the talent shifts, of course. Yes.

Parable of the talents being a story in the Bible about how a rich man- You leave your servant, the master leaves his servant with some silver and the servant wisely invests it and comes back with gold and the master is very happy. This is in tension with, for instance,

literally any of the rest of the New Testament, but, you know, whatever. So, Ocean is housed in a- The Parable of the Talents comes up dozens of times in this article, by the way. Of course, we cut a lot of them just because it was so repetitive. It was like, if you had another Bible verse

you could reference, other than, I think it's Matthew 25, they would have, but they didn't, so- So, they don't. I've realized who these guys are. They're Mike the Salvation Sorrentino. So, they're housed in a former car dealership building owned by Crossroads.

Ocean received his first operations budget. Why does it own a car dealership building? Because it's a megachurch and they just own everything. Come on, it's normal for a megachurch. Again, why does the Catholic Church own all of that beautiful artwork from the Renaissance? Why does a Protestant megachurch own a used car dealership? In order to fund NATO's stay behind careers

to exacerbate the strategy of tension in Italy so the Communist Party wouldn't become elected. So, the righteous man rides the jet ski of Christ. So, Ocean received. Pause for one second. There's a point, like, when the Catholic Church does it, we're like, oh, well, this is just the story and history of the Catholic Church,

because, like you said, they own Church land and church artwork and all these fucking palatial things they've had for centuries. But when a Midwestern church buys a fucking car dealership, that's no different. But to us, it rings this, like, crassness bell, if you want to call it that. Like, just because it's the same thing.

How many Bernini's do they have in that car dealership? You know? I think one of the differences is, right, you can see it not just as a crassness bell. Dude, it's covered fucking floor-to-ceiling with Thomas Cankade paintings, right? I know the goddamn Midwest. So, I think one of the things, right,

yes, you do point this out. We think it's normal for the Catholic Church to own a bunch of shit. I don't think it's normal. I just compare them to a bunch of... No, no, no, no, no. But I think that that's taken as a given. Like, it would be...

It's taken as a given that that happens. Whereas... It's like extremely, extremely first-year university student atheism. We're like, oh, the Catholic Church, they're like a businessman. So, hang on, flash forward a thousand years and someone's displaying to some tourists

the Sistine PT Cruiser. But I think the difference here is that, with Protestantism and American Protestantism, it has transformed into something that has become so much like all of these elements of the Catholic Church. It's sort of worst worldly excesses. It has become that so quickly that it has just

agglombed onto it whatever's around. And that means in the Midwest, old malls and abandoned car dealerships. So, it received its first operations budget through a sizable grant from the church. The bounty of crossroads is annual beans and rice week. Milo, you made a prediction around this earlier. This is not for racing beans.

Where members eat... You just fought for a week. Where members eat frugally and pool their savings into several major church donations. I mean, there's a thing. Oh, that was awesome. This is another article. Traditionally, the money goes mainly to fighting

the city's homelessness and heroin epidemics. But this time, they put all $120,000 toward the accelerator. Cool. Off the PT cruiser. What I was going to say was that I... Nate is right again that the introductory sociology thing is right because the Catholic Church did do all of this shit. There's a bunch of very fancy now churches in Rome

that were just built on top of Roman temples just because that was what was there. And they would have been car dealerships. So, yeah, maybe in 500 years time, if Ocean is still going, we'll just be like, oh, well, the Thomas Kincaid paintings are very nice. I'm just picturing in like 25, 20, the like Trad Ocean guy who thinks we need to rediscover that and go back to the old ways. Well, they have fucking synergy brain Twitter 500 years from now.

And there's like the statute Twitter equivalents are guys with Thomas Kincaid avatars. All the monks are wearing polo shirts. Thomas Kincaid avatars just posting a PT cruiser and being like, and being like, we used to build things. Yeah. We have to stop this now in order to save our descendants from the press ask to go back.

It's a picture of a bunch of furries on the street in Cincinnati. There's a picture of a pristine PT cruiser in Poland somewhere. How far we have fallen. It used to be like this everywhere. So under the Ocean accelerator program, which is open to entrepreneurs of any or no faith, because this is ridiculously secularized. It's Christianity themed organization, which again, fine.

I don't give a shit. The founders are given seed investments of $50,000 each, along with business, personal and spiritual mentoring. The curriculum builds up to a public demo day where participants then present their product, their tinder for whatever in front of an audience of potential investors from the stages of one of the churches. The mentoring is important too in the kind of theology here of

this being an ideology, a faith of self-reliance, where your own grit, your own personal outlook and well-being is what makes a difference. It isn't just like a glorified fruit machine. Well, here's the thing. Occasionally dispenses money. Alice, I can actually say, I would listen to a podcast of Brian Tome and not Brian Tome, rather, Chad Reynolds talking about this.

And he said that he believes that his spiritual mentoring is all about the five sources of capital that God endows every human with. Oh, you call them five. So you have your physical capital, your emotional capital, your family capital, things like this. And then the last one is, and of course, the human we work at both measuring vibes.

Okay, emotional capital by small, as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said, Give a man a jewel pod. He'll blow clouds for a day. Teach a man to open a vape shop. He'll blow clouds for a lifetime. It is ludicrously self-reliant. Because it is essentially the religious version of the dominant comings. We have to get the people with high IQs at the top

to rule over the people with low IQs at the bottom. It's just this is translated as spiritual worth, of which financialized capital is some of it. Well, I would also say, too, that it doesn't purport itself as elite or elitist. It purports itself as community reliance and taking care of your neighbors. Thing about it is, it's really crucial here at what you define neighbors as, how they define neighbors, how they define congregants. I think the whiteness has a lot to do with it.

It really does. I think one of the weird things that you'll encounter with some of these environments is that it kind of furthers a sort of soft white separatism in a way that erases class boundaries, at least in the context of church, not explicitly like we're all the same, but rather like the idea that we take care of one another within a church. But that's only among the people who are welcomed within that place, and invariably, they're white, and invariably, they have zero tolerance.

They're not going through the prison ministries to make the coffees. Yeah. And if they, for example, openly love their gay children, then they're no longer welcome. I mean, I think that's an example. Yeah. I suspect that... I don't know about this church. I suspect that they may... I think that because they are so secularized, that they're so open to, oh, we're open to anyone of any faith, etc., I suspect they might take a little bit of a different, but no less pernicious approach.

And we'll see this come on later. They talk about stewardship and stuff in a way that is, I think, more elitist. And I think that is the break with a lot of these other megachurches. That is, the way in which this particular empty vessel differs is that they do have this idea of leadership and entrepreneurship. And indeed, it is one we shall see. So, this comes out in how they try to instill what they call Christ leadership in their participants.

I knew they would call it something awful. Scott Weiss, Oceans Founding CEO, is eager to ward off the impression that Oceans Counseling is just for believers, or that it preaches an old-fashioned prosperity gospel. He says, we in no way teach that because you came here, God ordains your business, he says, what's more important is that we don't want you to be one of those high-tech founders who have gotten a divorce, suffered depression, or tried to commit suicide.

Mason So, it's wellness stuff. Scott It's wellness stuff for people who prefer a slightly more conservative set of cultural empty signifiers. So, you can have wellness stuff in the Bay Area. You can drink your kombucha, you can go on a meditation retreat, but I don't know, people look at you slightly weirdly if you say church, right? Mason But one of the big things, and this takes off what you were saying earlier, which is that I think this is a church

that's less likely to exclude you if you say openly love your gay child. I think, I suspect, based on what I get from this article, I could be wrong. However, what they're much more concerned with is giving you the image of yourself as someone who has to control your employees. That's the message we come to again and again. Before we get to that, here are some of the startups that have been backed by Ocean recently. VRT makes real estate investing accessible and affordable for individuals and families. Our real estate investment platform enables you to invest as little as $15 in attractive

rental properties using a crowdfunding model. Mason So aside from it being called VRT, you see the gentrification link here. You and all of your white friends can go in on an attractive rental property that someone who has not white has been evicted from, not that this is exclusive to white people. Mason Something I point out too is that some of these areas are some of the worst hit in America from the foreclosure or subprime crisis in the last decade. I mean, lots of people I know from the region have their families who've lost their homes.

And so one of the big kind of pernicious things that has happened in American capitalism is that funds like these and larger funds, they might share the investment capital for, have been buying up for closed homes and now rent them. Mason Yeah, it's terrinellious. Mason It's this shift towards renting. And so in a way, here you have an aspect of that being rebranded as empowering for people, even if they can only, I almost said, bung $15 a month. Mason If they bung Bob.

Mason If they bung enough Bob. Mason And this is not a new thing even for gentrification, even in black areas, like talking about Korean American groups, they have sometimes K's, which are friendly societies where you do exactly this. You bung Bob and then once, each month, somebody gets the total collection of Bob and you can use that to maybe buy a store or whatever. So like the mechanism here is very, very well established. It just has a dumb name. Mason I thought I'd never own property, but I actually bunged enough Bob to own a share in

a clock tower and now my tenant is a hunchback. Also, they have a, the way that they're a technology company, of course, is that they have a proprietary neighborhood rating algorithm. Mason Yeah. It is a Korean American K society with an attached message board for where you can be racist and you can do next door stuff and be like, hmm, I saw some teens. Mason Oh, if you think that's bad, check this out. Spatial.ai is the world's first human-driven location data set built by categorizing billions of conversations from social networks into actionable consumer segments. Mason Did they just back every single startup that was like, we invented a way of like locking

your car doors really quickly. Mason Read the mind of any community on a map. Mason And it just shuts the car door lock for you. Spatial I actually read more about this and the founder, whose name is Faust, worked very, very, very hard to make it something that didn't just tell people to not go into black neighborhoods. And it was really hard to make the app not that. Mason I've worked really hard to make these calipers not do phrenology. Spatial That was just a map that shows you a yellow cloud where there are good restaurants

or whatever. But yeah, these people just, they can't stop making a racialized underclass. Mason Using my calipers to steadily plot the course of a ship across the map but just sweating as I look at the heads of all the other people in the room. No, not down that road. Spatial That is what it is though, right? It's completely incidental whether or not any of these people are on a personal level racist, right? They're still in over the Rhine. They're still buying these properties to rent. And even if they're being like perfectly nice and oblivious about it and even if they think that black lives matter and they wear shirts and they go to marches and things of that nature,

they will still be engaging in racial violence without even knowing. Mason So here's the, we'll get to that in a moment. But here's the third app that I found which is called FLECH. It's about us. Just has a three-step process. Spatial Stop trying to make FLECH happen. Spatial Step one, students download the FLECH app. Step two, the FLECH IB can take attendance by detecting the presence of students phones to the FLECH app on them. Step three, attendance records are available in real time at admin.fletch.com. Mason Password admin.

Spatial Yeah. So then it made a thing. Mason What if your phone was the cop's? Spatial Yeah. Spatial What if your phone was the cap security? Spatial I take back everything I just said. This one knows it's doing racial violence and just thinks it's good. Mason Well, my thinking when I hear this is that like, this is like the very kind of first phase of building a kind of pseudo-silicon valley,

right? Which is that all the investment is going into these kind, in these apps, which are taking over property, taking over land, taking over surveillance. Mason Remember the neighborhood activists who said that they were like a colonial force. Spatial Yeah. Spatial So, and this is now what we've sort of been building to for a bit, which is Wyce's description of the potential impact of ocean's work carries a certain missionary edge. A new business on average will hire 13 people by the end of year two. That's 13 souls that a business owner can influence for good.

Mason Unlucky for some. Spatial So, according to Brunk, the accelerator's idea of stewardship, which is an evangelical watchword for responsible management, is not really about Christianity, which is interesting because it's an evangelical concept. It's not really about Christianity. Mason Sure, that's true. It isn't. Spatial Yeah, and it's, as I said with the parable of the talents thing, it is not scripturally very well supported at all. That's the incoherence at the heart of the

prosperity gospel, and one way around it is just to strip the Christianity out of it and do this secular like vibes church. Spatial Yeah, Pope Francis putting his lips fully over the mic on the Vatican pulpit and going, I've told you people a thousand times it's more of a vibe. Mason Like, this is not like, so long as you don't, so long as it's not about Christianity, so long as it is about good stewardship, you never have to confront the question, what profits is a man if he gained the world and loses soul by it, right? It just, it becomes this quite anodyne sort of corporate thing, and you still have all

of these nice signifiers like church with a capital C, and it's just, it's so cynical and so evil, and I hate the idea that my immortal soul, like, bad enough that I have to suffer Tim Brunk in this life without him pursuing me into the next one. Spatial So, their idea of stewardship is about being a good boss, giving employees decent benefits and reinvesting profits locally, like from the commandments, you know? Mason Yeah, of course. Spatial But if we want to talk about stewardship and local reinvestment, this is from another article about over the Rhine that I hope should engender a feeling of

smoldering rage in everyone hearing this. I'm ahead of you. Mason Over four years, Rachel Thompson, a long-time Black resident of Over the Rhine, over four years, Rachel Thompson, a long-time Black resident of Over the Rhine, saw her rent creep up with promises of ceiling fans, Harvard floors, and a new bike ramp that she never saw. Thompson is now working 100 hours a pay period to make her ends meet and pay her rent. I'm working, she says.

I mean, I'm working a lot, and it just seems like I can't get my head above water. It almost feels like you're drowning. Her work schedule, she says, has prohibited her from learning the ins and outs of the new community as it has been redeveloped. Mason Well, of course. You're not supposed to enjoy it. You're not supposed to be able to go to the coffee shops with a nice blonde wood. You're supposed to go to one job, come home, go to your second job,

go to your third job, come home exhausted, and then go to your first job again until, at some point, you're forced out. Spatial And what's up, fucking ocean boy Chad Reynolds? How is your metaphorical drowning and distressive? Oh no, I can't self-actualize properly feeling. Fuck you. Mason Yeah. Spatial And fuck you.

Mason I feel like I'm drowning, and so I have created an ocean with which I will try to drown other people. Spatial And I think in a way, I would prefer the sort of like Eric Trump piece of shit, like fuck you, you deserve to be poor. Here's an idea, don't be poor, level of just full-on mask-offness versus this very, this kind of cuddly idea of we're saving souls and saving business plans. Mason I prefer the spite too. Spatial Because at least the spite's funny.

Spatial Well, the spite also lets you know who you're dealing with as opposed to people who, I mean, it's, once again, Alice making reference to like entry-level sociology stuff. The whole, the idea of like, well, Christians being hypocritical. Like, I realized that this is really like par for the course, but in this case, just taking a very cursory glance at who's included in this idea of stewardship and community support versus who's excluded tells you a lot about what this community's idea of redevelopment and what this city-state idea of redevelopment means. And what it really means is a certain, people need to feel good about themselves.

Also, poor people should disappear. I mean, to quote friend of the show, Ahesha Christianity, the left-wing religion that right-wing people inexplicably love. Mason So, one month, Thompson was a couple days late on her rent and was forced to choose between moving out or waiting for the eviction process. It feels like we'll always be 500 feet behind, she said, no matter if we follow all the rules or try to show that we are good people. So, also, you know, who's asking about her burnout? Interesting. Who's asking if she is pushing herself too hard at work,

or if she's going to have some of that time to spend with her family? Mason Yeah, she should take a few months to sit still. Wasn't that what the guy said? Mason Yeah, to sit still for a while and reconsider what it is that he... And it was good that the church used all of that money to invest in a bunch of... I really am sticking to this point, Nate, that you said, which is, I'd rather they were just the Falwells or Donald Trump Jr. or whatever, because I don't care that it's a church stealing money, what I care about is the fucking smarm.

Mason Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and I think too that the idea that these people go to special breakfasts to think about how do you fire people in a Christian way? How do you evict people in a Christian way? And it's like, well, you're still basically doing economic violence. Whether you make yourself feel better about it because you fucking... Somebody has given you a motivation poster to put on your wall. It doesn't mean that it's not harming the people who were the targets. And I think... Yeah, it's all wrapped up in an idea of how do I make myself feel better about participating in a system that you'll never truly be ahead unless you're Mike fucking Bloomberg.

And along the way, you're gonna have to make yourself an accessory to the acts of cruelty that the system requires you to perpetuate. Mason And Libs do this too, right? We are well familiar, I think, with the epic foreclosure lawyer clapping back because she's still with her. This kind of smarm... It is bipartisan. It is a parasite on our society. And it will slowly crush people who work three jobs or whatever and drive them from their homes and exploit their labor. And it has to be stopped. Mason And so, carrying on, Bronx says that this notion of Christian management is just holding

up midwestern norms of community mindedness against the perceived ruthlessness of tech's origins. While Silicon Valley's leaders have sometimes reinforced a culture of fear and greed, Bronx says, there is more consideration for things other than power and success here. Mason Fucking clapping themselves on the back for us. Libs It's just taking the most authoritarian forms of tech industry and coating it with religious benevolence. And the fear that keeps coming up for me is this makes it really hard to hold these dipshits accountable because they're working within a very long-established religious system which provides them with that kind of cover to be like, well,

it's our Christian duty to improve society and we're improving society by bringing all this industry and bringing all these jobs in and showing a kind of quote-unquote alternative version of what secular Silicon Valley capitalism is like, because we're kind of doing Christian management and we're forming Christian companies. And for us, profit is not the end goal. Salvation and kind of... Libs We're in the jails doing Christian bale. Mason Being servants to God. I've seen a lot of this language before and seeing it in different contexts as well. And they can often get so wrapped up in this sort of benevolent language,

which I guess is kind of what you're referring to. Libs In fact, what Tom says specifically speaks to what you're saying here, which is that he came to believe that the downstream problems in the kingdom of God occurred because things happened upstream and he wanted to shift tactics to encourage people to make more money. Downstream being poorer. Mason I think I keep going back to this point that these are people who just refuse to acknowledge that like, capitalism is the problem, right? Libs Of course, they don't want to because they're the beneficiaries of the problem being caused.

Mason Jesus loved capitalism. Libs So they were in California and they were like, the problem is that the problem is that people don't hang out enough. Mason And the problem is that people hang out in the wrong way. They do They only hang out in polycules and in tiki bars, which are the only two places I went to when I was an ally. Libs People in the Bay Area only know to eat hot shit, be bisexual and go to thekink.com.

Mason But everything else is fine. So if we took all those kind of bits about LA and ignore the fact that they have caused massive swathes of gentrification and they have pushed out... Libs Google bus drivers sleeping in the buses. Mason Right. They've pushed out historical minority communities, like Chinese people in Koreans and stuff. And they've made LA one of the most unlivable sissies in the entire world. And we just take that to Cincinnati and we build Christian LA. And that's what it is. Every time you're reading this out, it's like, they're trying to build Christian Los Angeles.

Libs Well the trouble is these LA people, they have their polycule, but they don't have a weird name like polycule. Mason I didn't realize Cincinnati was in fucking North Dakota. Libs It's a small town in North Dakota. Mason Here is this script from a video that Unpolished made about what their mission was in Cincinnati. A long time ago, pioneers went west into the wilderness. They saw a river and imagined a great city. Somewhere along the way, people settled and dreams vanished. Things got broken. We forgot who we were. The images at this point shift to images of buildings with boarded up

windows, empty malls and barbed wire fences. Maybe God lets things break so he can make everything new. Maybe he's calling for new pioneers brave enough to start rebuilding. The promo video then resolves onto a background shot of Blondewood superimposed with the logo for Unpolished. Libs And that, children, is why you need to go fight for ISIS. The thing I'd say is that what caused this decline is... Mason Tim Brunk. Libs Yeah. Well, nothing could be more entrepreneurial than the management,

consultants, and fucking capital, VC advisors who made the decision that you could make, you can increase profit margins by 10% by relocating all of the manufacturing base from Cincinnati, Ohio and its environs to Mexico and then onward to fucking to China, to Bangladesh. Like the point being here that these communities have been hollowed out because it was literally to save pennies. And this is a story that's repeated across the entirety of the United States, but particularly in the Rust Belt. And so, I mean, I don't doubt that these people believe that what they're doing is somehow... Mason Tim Brunk It was massive, but they were doing it again.

Libs Yeah. Mason Tim Brunk You know, doing it some other way that's more venal or more materialist, but ultimately, until you can see that the conditions that are causing spiritual decay, if you want to believe in that, are related to an economic system that makes one person work 100 hours per pay period, another person, you know, take a few months to sit still and have those options sort of baked into their life trajectory, then all you're going to be able to do is you just get Christian rock vibes instead of whatever vibes you think are fallen.

Libs Instead of Bruce Springsteen. Mason Tim Brunk We're using Chris Rock's full name, I see. Libs Yeah. But that's the other thing, right? Like, one thing capital needs is it needs manifest destiny. It always needs to export its contradictions somewhere. And America was founded... Mason Tim Brunk Was always this tweet. Libs When America was founded, it was manifest destiny. It was let's take over the rest of the continent. It was free real estate, allegedly free real estate.

Mason Tim Brunk Slaps the roof of country. Libs With NAFTA, it was, well, we can do labor arbitrage. We could push all the wage labor out to Mexico because this is territorially defined capital. It's machines, it's building things, and so on, and that continued. And now it's been hollowed out so much that the new racialized underclass that's there to be exploited, moved, dominated, etc., is back in the center of the country. As I said earlier, manifest destiny flipped around and went in reverse. And now the exploitation is back in... The frontier of capital is in Cincinnati now.

Mason Tim Brunk But also, I think I point back, I point to as well, just to kind of wrap it up on my take, is that one of the quotes you read from, I think, from Tim Brunk was the idea that this was... This is this communitarian approach is more in line with Midwestern values. And I feel like anybody who's lived in the Midwest or is from the Midwest can tell you that there's a very sharp cleavage between who is in the community and who's out of the community. And the entire history of the Midwest is one of extreme violence. I mean, violently depopulating the area of Indians and then subsequently the labor struggles and the racialized labor struggles. And the fact that, I mean, my home state was the only state that was

openly run by the Klan. Now, it's a northern state, but the Klan was the dominant political movement in the 20s, for example. These are places that are primarily... The city centers are like urban agglomerations have been hollowed out because of white flight. So, I mean, the idea that all of this is just... It's because God willed it to be broken so he could fix it again. It's just using a different excuse to paper over the rough shot ass fucking remnants of what was once a community, but the capital decided wasn't useful anymore. Sad to see such sharp cleavage, real Lara Croft PS1 shit. So, when filtered through the church's production machine, which includes a 75-person experience team, unpolished then became something much glossier. It started as a trust

exercise and seemed to have, again, sad nerd, don't get to self-actualize club, fuck off. And then it morphed into a platform for glorifying entrepreneurs as the new heroes of the church. One would Christian startups. But equally, right? I think that if you have to have a sad group about how it's a tragedy you don't get to self-actualize, you have still glorified yourself. That is still self-glorification. Yeah, the article makes it out that there's this difference, that this well-meaning bobbing chad has been hijacked by this kind of colonial enterprise. And I think it's like two halves of the same whole.

Well, they are going to rebuild. They have a vision in mind for rebuilding the Midwest economy, and it involves building enormous eyes of needles and really, really tiny camels. At this point, unpolished lecture series was now a full-blown multi-day conference with multiple speakers. In his introductory remarks, Tome set the tone, declaring that, well, whilst entrepreneurs are not technically God, they are like Tome. Heresy, heresy, eyes turning completely red. Heresy redacted. You have creative capacities has that no one else has except for God, he told the audience. Heresy. Big heresy. Improving current processes never changes the world. Growing something incrementally never brings life. It only slows down death. You're here today

because God wants to grow your business. How is this any different from, I don't know if you ever watched The Boondocks, but there was the parody version of if Martin Luther King came back and it was at the event where there was the hustler preacher and he's like, buy my new book so God can tell you how to lose weight and get a husband with the businesses. And it's like, how is this any different? This conference featuring a pastor Graham of Linnehan who comes up and solemnly declaims that entrepreneurs are special because even God cannot nut. This is like, again, this is like a blueprint that is just being mapped onto tech, right? Like when it came to, there have been so many of like these, what do you call it? These preachers.

Not preachers, but like these are like the Tony Robbins kind of motivational speaker genre of people who use kind of religious language and they use religious expressions and they even kind of set themselves up as if they were running like a secular mega church and they've had like people who have kind of quote unquote like benefited from them who have said, I feel that like Tony Robbins was sent to me by God, right? Although I'm kind of push out these ideas for like, it was destined for you to go. The audience are like God, right? You the audience, you the entrepreneur exist between God and humanity. This is the same with the MLM stuff, right? The MLM stuff is one where it's like, well, God has taken you here, so God wants good things from you. God believes in your family

and that's why they've brought you to Amway, right? Every time you say MLM, I think men loving men, they do be doing that. It was in a fight, Jim and Luton, that God first spoke to me. Reinforced Tom's capitalist apologetics, complaining that God created entrepreneurs for creation and conquest, that Apostle Paul was an entrepreneur, as you mentioned before, that Jesus wanted to spread the gospel and he eschewed their religious elite and academicians. Apostle Paul, thank you. Fast tax businessmen. Christianity. What has been your fisherman but having a fish start up? So, Christy Zilke from Knowledge Town, who we mentioned earlier, went to the 2015 conference

and appreciated how the speakers addressed both practical questions of getting funding and also quote, how to have a heart as an entrepreneur. Her own church in Chicago was called Soul City, a progressive, diverse community, especially if you're Dave Portnoy, a progressive, diverse community where the husband and wife team frequently referenced Tinder insermons and all this doing the soy face constantly. I love to go to the Soul Calibur Church. And all the staff wore Black Girl Magic T-shirts. Oh, no. That one hit me in the fucking soul. So, just like it happened with the first group at Crossroads, the entrepreneur group at SoulCycle quickly gravitated. They're all white people after.

SoulCycle, SoulCity, SoulCity. SoulCity quickly gravitated towards discussing immediate concerns such as, what is the Christian way to fire someone? You said that earlier as a joke, but it's a real thing that they talked about. Where is the Camilo Torres of our time? To be fair, the only angel who ever got fired went on to start a very successful startup. Actually, there was some real state that was undervalued for reasons and that he was able to make a very hot business there. Yeah. Arguably, he started the Pepsi to God's Coca-Cola. Or should Christian entrepreneurs build businesses with an evangelizing mission? Or is it enough

just to live out your faith by being an honorable boss? I can bet where they came down on that question. An honorable boss. Yeah, but a boss weeb. Here's the thing. It's just Mark Carrigan shit now. Yeah, boss she though. It was good for the beehive. It's good for the bees. I am an honorable man. There is no difference between Mark Carrigan and this except they're marginally more considerably more successful and marginally more religious. Wearing black girl magic shirt but one hand on my katana. To them, all of these developments represent what they think think of as the quote democratization of tech as the industry spills past its enclaves on the coast, may change some of the industry's character as well, slower and less cut through at the New

York or San Francisco and perhaps more collaborative too. And that differences have been draws for coastal expats who've moved to the region. So yeah. Democracy. The democratization of tech. Ask Rachel Thompson how that's going. What if on top of her three jobs, she just learned to code, then she could be part of the democratization? Well, what the democratization of tech for them means is there's a little more mild social conservatism and I'm going to work a 12-hour day instead of a 20-hour day. It means that Rachel Thompson still can't live in her house or if she does, she still has to work three jobs. It means that she doesn't have access to any of this venture money which is going towards starting up again someone else's scammy app.

It means that in my father's house there are many shareholders. There is no democracy for her from these people. Fundamentally. And again, this is exactly the same as like Silicon Valley, right? When they talk about the democratization of tech in San Francisco, what they're talking about is like, in theory, anyone can build a startup and like, you know, there's so many incubators and you can just like rock up with your keyboard and that you could make millions without kind of saying that, well, actually like the people who control the wealth. I've come to met my millions in San Francisco with my keyboard. I'm going to do a start-up about space. There's just enough money in the startup competition to save the community.

Right. But like, you know, the people who own... To save D-Reme. You know, there's a small amount of people who own the wealth in San Francisco and a lot more people have gone broke in San Francisco than they have like been successful. And again, the people who always fucking lose in this are the people being gentrified out of like neighborhoods that they've lived in for generations. And, you know, when we talk about Rachel Thompson, we're talking about the same thing. We're talking again about like a very small group of people who control the wealth,

who will fund a bunch of really dumb startups once like all the kind of like Christian Airbnb and Christian Tinder have like gotten to like, you know, gotten to their maths. Christian Airbnb. Christian Airbnb. You and me. Be with me. Be with me. Be with me.

And abide with me. You know, and then, you know, the result of it is basically, again, the result of it is fundamentally gentrification and gentrification that fucks over people of color. And in places where there are like, where the people of color like far more spread out and there is far less bargaining power and where there has been, again, like much more significant economic hits, it's just kind of exacerbates the problems that we've seen in other like major cities around the world, right? So long as these people have democracy, people like Rachel Thompson will not.

Those two things are mutually exclusive. And you know what else? Don't forget who started this whole thing. The executives of the company for which this was already a company town. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed except it has gotten slightly worse. The vibes have changed. Yeah.

It's gotten more smug. Can I suggest an episode title? Bulletproof Brunk. Anyway. Brunk 2. We're all, you don't have to be Brunk to Brunk here, but it Brunk. Brunk a Brunk to Big Ben to Brunk for Brunk's thing. If it ain't Brunk, don't fix it.

A Brunk's tale. Once upon a time in the Brunk. The Brunk is burning. So we've gone for like a full hour and a half here. So I think it's time for us to say goodbye. Our Brunks are Brunks. And I got to run because I have to go on holiday. You're a working Brunk.

I have to go on a working Brunk to go on holiday. So I am going to say thank you once again, all of you lovely people for listening to us. This has been your weekly TF. As you know, there is a Patreon five bucks a month. You can hear it from us again on Thursday. Five bucks a Brunk. Five Brunks a Brunk. Brunk to us again on Brunk's day.

Yeah. Brunk it. Brunk it on. Bungabong for Brunk. Bungabong for Brunk, won't you? Bungabong for Brunk. And our Brunkie on. Yeah.

So you can check that out. And also this is coming out on Tuesday. So you can come and Brunk me tonight at the vaults festival. Excuse me? Performing my new work in progress, Brunk at 6.30pm. There's a ticket link in the description. There's a ticket Brunk in the Brunk's description. Exactly.

Let's see, otherwise you heard us talk about the live shows, grab tickets to that. And finally, you should remember that our theme song is by Jin Sang. It's called Here We Go. You can find it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. And with that I say, good Brunk. Brunk.

Good Brunk to you, sir.