← Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat
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This is rewind. There's a piece of linen sitting in a cathedral in Turin, Italy. It's about 14ft long and it bears the faint ghostly image of a man who appears to have been crucified. For some, it's proof of the divine, the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ. For others, it's a medieval masterpiece, a forgery so brilliant it's fooled people for 700 years. So which is it? Let's find out. I'm Dr. Harnee Bhatt, and this is Hidden History, a Rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained, examining all the different theories, from science to the supernatural and everything in between, from vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena. I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. We're also on YouTube with full video that brings each episode to Life. Just search HiddenHistoryPod and subscribe. Today's episode is all about the Shroud of Turin, a piece of ancient linen with a haunting image of a crucified man that some believe is the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ. For nearly 700 years, it has divided believers and skeptics, scientists and theologians. Is it the most important religious artifact ever found? An elaborate medieval hoax, or something else entirely? We're getting into all of it.
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picture this. A strip of yellow linen, about 14ft long and 3ft wide. Faint, sepia, toned. At first glance, it could be any old cloth. But look closer and something starts to come into focus. The outline of a man, front view, back view, lying flat, as if he'd been wrapped inside it. He has a beard, long hair. His hands are folded over his pelvis and his body is covered in wounds. Cuts on his forehead, like from a circle of thorns. Whip marks across his back. A wound in his side between the ribs. Marks on his wrists and feet. Exactly where someone would be wounded if they had been crucified. And if this cloth is real, actually real. It's one of the most extraordinary physical artifacts in all of human history. Not just a piece of religious memorabilia, but literal evidence of the crucifixion. Tangible, physical proof of one of the most consequential moments in the history of Christianity. That's the weight this little cloth carries. And it's why for centuries, people have fought so bitterly over it. The Shroud is kept in Turin, Italy, specifically in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, where it lives in a climate controlled bulletproof case. It's only put on public display every few decades. When it is, millions of people travel from all around the world just to stand in its presence. But to understand this cloth, we need to understand the world that produced it. And that world was obsessed with relics. In medieval Christianity, holy objects weren't just religious symbols. They were powerful pieces of the true cross, the holy lance, the bones of saints, vials of holy blood. Churches competed for these objects because relics drew pilgrims and pilgrims meant donations, and donations meant prestige and political clout. A great relic could put a small town on the map. It could turn an obscure church into a cultural powerhouse. And this hunger for relics was especially intense in 14th century European when the Black Death was tearing through the continent. By some estimates, the plague wiped out a third, maybe even half, of the entire population of Europe. People were watching their families die. Whole villages were emptying out. Faith was buckling under the weight of so much suffering. In a moment like that, a relic, something tangible, something holy, could be the difference between despair and hope. People didn't just want these objects, they needed them. Which meant they were primed, almost desperate to believe in them. And the relic Trade was booming. Which brings us to the Shroud's first confirmed appearance in the historical record. It's 1355 CE, in a tiny village called Lire in Northern France. The Shroud belonged to a French knight named Geoffroy de Charny. He was a celebrated soldier, a member of the French royal court, and even the author of a famous treatise on chivalry. He died a hero's death in 1356 at the Battle of Poitiers, defending the French King from English forces. So this isn't some shady character operating in the shadows. Geoffroy de Charny was about as respectable as it got in 14th century France. And yet there is no record of where he got the Shroud, no paper trail, no bill of sale, no letter explaining how he came to possess the was already being described as the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
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Nothing.
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What we do know is that shortly before his death, de Charny built a small wooden church in Liray and he displayed the Shroud there. Pilgrims came from all over to see it. The local clergy started making souvenir badges featuring the cloth. And today, those tiny badges are some of the old, earliest physical evidence we have of the Shroud's existence. But not everyone was buying into the hype. Within a few decades of its appearance, the local bishop wrote a furious letter to the Pope claiming the Shroud was a fake, inciting his predecessor's earlier investigation, in which the artist had reportedly confessed. So we have a holy relic drawing huge crows, sponsored by a respected knight, condemned by the local bishop as a, quote, cunningly painted, end quote. Forgery. All of this in the year 1389. The fight over the Shroud's authenticity. It started immediately and it has never, ever stopped. So how did this contested little relic in a wooden chapel in France end up in a high tech reliquary in Italy? It took a long, strange journey. In 1453, almost a century after Geoffroy de Charny's death, his granddaughter Margaret transferred the Shroud to the House of Savoy, one of the most powerful royal families in Europe.
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Why?
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Probably money, probably politics. The exact terms are still murky. But once the Savoys had it, they treated it like a treasure. For about 80 years, the shroud was housed in Chambery, France. It was there, in 1532, that it almost got destroyed. A fire broke out in the chapel. The Shroud was kept folded inside a silver reliquary, a fancy, ornate container designed to protect it. But the heat got so intense that the metal actually started to melt. Drops of molten silver dripped down through the Folded cloth, scorching the linen and burning straight through it in places. A group of nuns called the poor Claires were the ones who patched it up. They sewed in patches over the worst of the damage and reinforced the back with a layer of linen called the Holland cloth. Hold onto that detail. Those repair patches become very important later. In 1578, the Savoys moved the Shroud to Turin in modern day Italy. And that's where it stayed ever since. For about 300 years, it was a quiet object of Catholic devotion. Important, yes, but not really studied, not really questioned in any rigorous way. That all changed in 1898. That year, the Shroud was put on rare public display in Turin, and an Italian lawyer and amateur photographer named Secundo Pia was given permission to photograph it. Now, this was amateur photography. In 1898, Pia had to set up a tripod, use a long exposure, and develop his glass plate negatives by hand in a dark room. So it was complicated enough even for the pros. But that night, he took the P negative back to his studio, lowered it into the developing fluid, and waited to see what would emerge. What he saw nearly knocked him over. Here's the thing. In person, the Shroud's image is extremely faint. If you saw it in the cathedral, you'd see a dim, blurry, sepia colored figure, almost like a stain on the cloth. The features are vague. You can tell it's a man, but you can't see his face clearly. It's more of a smudge than a portrait. But on Second, Opia's photographic negative, where lights and darks are reversed, that vague, blurry smudge suddenly resolved into a detailed, lifelike, three dimensional portrait of a face with cheekbones, a beard, deep set eyes, and what looked like an expression of suffering. Let's unpack that for a second. In terms of what that means for the Shroud's legitimacy. It means the image on the Shroud is itself a kind of negative, where light and dark are reversed the way they would be in modern photography, which would have been completely impossible to create in the 14th century because nobody had even invented photography yet. The concept of a photographic negative didn't exist. So how could a medieval forger have made an image that only works when you photograph it with technology that wouldn't be invented for another 500 years? This is the moment the Shroud goes from a religious relic to to a global scientific mystery. And once that question was out there, it could not be put back in the box. Which brings us to the most ambitious investigation in the Shroud's history. Fast forward 80 years to 1978, when an American group of about 30 scientists called STIRP, which stands for the Shroud of Turin Research Project, was granted unprecedented access to the clothes. We're talking biophysicists, chemists, physicists, photographers, forensic specialists. A lot of them came from places like Los Alamos National Laboratory. So these are serious people. For five days around the clock, over 100 hours of direct examination, they ran every test they could think of. X ray fluorescence to detect the chemical elements. Ultraviolet photography to see things invisible to the eye. Infrared spectroscopy, thermal imaging. They sampled fibers using sticky tape. They photographed every inch of the cloth at multiple wavelengths. They went into it expecting to find paint pigments, brushstrokes, evidence of forgery, and they expected to wrap the whole thing up in a tidy bow. That is not what happened. What Stirp found was deeply weird. The image isn't paint, it isn't dye, it isn't any pigment they could identify. It isn't even on the surface of the cloth the way you'd expect. It only sits on the very topmost fibers, basically just the outermost wisp of each thread. The blood stains on the image's wounds, on the other hand, those tested positive for actual human blood components. Two scientists on the team, John Heller and Alan Adler, found porphyrins, bilirubin and protein, all consistent with real blood. The implication being that this could actually be the blood from the wounds on Jesus body. So after all of that, what was Stirp's official conclusion? That they had no idea how the image was formed. They couldn't match it to any known artistic technique, they couldn't replicate it in a lab. They literally said in their final report that the image formation question remained open for believers. This was huge. Scientists had examined the Shroud and walked away saying, in essence, we don't know what this is. But the story wasn't over, because 10 years later, there was going to be one more test. And it was supposed to settle everything. In 1988, after years of negotiation, the Vatican gave the green light for radiocarbon dating to see how old the Shroud really was. Three independent labs, one in England, one in Switzerland and one in the United States, would each receive a small sample of the Shroud. Each lab would test it independently. Then the results would be compared. This was the gold standard. Three of the best radiocarbon labs in the world. Total independence, with no way for any one last bias to skew the results. The findings were published in the journal Nature, one of the most prestigious Scientific journals on Earth. In 1989, the verdict, the shrouded turn, dates to between 1260 and 1390 CE, with 95% confidence. In other words, medieval. Right around the time it first appears in the historical record, right around the time of Geoffroy de Charny. For the first time, science had given a clean, specific, statistically rigorous answer. The cloth was made roughly 1300 years after Jesus would have lived. Not in the right region, not in the right century, not even close. For believers, this was a gut punch. The headlines were brutal. Shroud is a fake Vatican cloth dated to Middle Ages. What had felt like an open question to many people now seemed officially closed. But not everyone accepted it. And in the years since, the consensus that Nature paper created had slowly, methodically been picked apart. Here's where things get interesting. Despite the radiocarbon dating to the medieval era, the Shroud of Turin has remained one of the most visited religious objects in the world. Public exhibitions in 1998, 2000, 2010 and 2015 each drew millions of pilgrims and curious tourists. Meanwhile, the Vatican has done something subtle and, honestly, kind of brilliant. They've never officially declared the Shroud authentic, but they've also never officially declared it a fake. Pope Francis called it an icon. John Paul II called it, quote mirror of the Gospel translation. The Church is saying, venerate it for what it represents, not for what it claims to physically be. That's a careful position, and it's one that has held up regardless of what the sign said. But behind the scenes, the radiocarbon dating wasn't actually the final word, because some very credible scientists, including some of the original Stirp team, started looking at that 1988 study and asking some very uncomfortable questions. And the question of how the image got there, that was still up in the air, too. So let's get into the theories. Let's start with the strongest case for forgery. Like I mentioned, in 1988, three of the best radiocarbon labs in the world dated the shroud to roughly 1260 to 1390 CE, almost exactly when it showed up in Lirey, France. And the findings are published in Nature, one of the most rigorous scientific journals on the planet. So how does radiocarbon dating actually work? Quick crash course. Incoming. Every living thing absorbs carbon while it's alive. Plants take it in from the air. Animals get it from eating plants. And a tiny fraction of that carbon is a special version called carbon 14, which decays at a known steady rate. Once an organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon. So scientists can measure how much carbon 14 is left in a sample, Compare it to how much should be there and calculate roughly when that organism died. For the Shroud, a piece of linen made from flax plants. Radiocarbon dating tells us when those plants were harvested. And the answer was in the middle ages, not the first century, when Jesus is said to have died. Not even close. The argument is this was masterfully painted forgery, but a forgery nonetheless. Now, the STIR findings do throw a wrench in this. Heller and Adler found real human blood components. Porphyrins, bilirubin protein. That's not paint. And it would be a lot of work to stain that cloth with human blood. But skeptics push back on this in a couple of ways. First, they argue the blood tests weren't as conclusive as STIR claimed. Second, and this is where it gets interesting, they point out that iron oxide was also found on the cloth. So what's iron oxide? It's basically rust. It's also one of the oldest pigments humans have ever used. It's that red color we see in cave paintings going back tens of thousands of years. Medieval artists used iron oxide constantly as well. And here's where it gets tricky. Iron oxide can also show up in real blood because blood contains iron. So when Sturp found iron oxide on the shroud, you can read that two ways. As evidence of real blood or as evidence that someone painted it on with medieval pigment. Skeptical investigator Joe Nickel took it a step further. He demonstrated that you could create a shroud like image using a technique called rubbing, Pressing wet linen over a sculpted bas relief, then dabbing on iron oxide pigment. The result, an image that looks startlingly similar to the Shroud. Now, Nickel's version doesn't have all the weird microscopic properties of the original, but his point isn't that he made a perfect copy. His point is a skilled medieval artist had the tools, the techniques, and the motive to make something close enough to fool people in 1355. Then there's the art historical case. Gary Vicon is a former director of the Wolters Art Museum in Baltimore, and he wrote a book called the Holy Shroud, A Brilliant Hoax in the time of the Black Death. His argument is essentially, stop thinking about the Shroud in isolation. It appeared at the exact historical moment when Europe was desperate for relics. The Black Death was killing a third of the continent, the relic trade was exploding, and a French knight just happened to come into possession of the most spectacular relic ever produced. For Vicon, the timing isn't a coincidence. It is the story. So the forgery case is strong. We have hard science from three top labs published in Nature. We have a plausible technique for how it could have been made. We have a perfect historical context for why it would have been made. And we have a knight who never could quite explain where he got it. But here's where things get complicated. Let's flip the script. What if the radiocarbon dating, the absolute linchpin of the forgery argument, was flawed? Let's start with a study published in the journal Archaeometry in 2019. Researchers led by a scientist named Tristan Casabianca actually obtained the raw, unpublished data from the 1988 dating through what amounts to a public records request. And when they reanalyzed it, they found something the original study found hadn't really emphasized. The samples weren't consistent with each other. Here's what that means in plain English. In a clean radiocarbon test, if you cut a piece of fabric into chunks and date each one separately, all the dates should land in roughly the same narrow range. They should agree with each other. That's what tells you the test is valid. The 1988 samples didn't agree. There was significant variation between them, what scientists call statistical heterogeneity. In layman's terms, the numbers were all over the place. Some chunks of the sample dated noticeably older than others. That kind of variation isn't supposed to happen in a single unified piece of cloth. So what does that mean? It means the sample they tested might not have been a clean, uncontaminated piece of the original shroud. It might have been a mix, partly original, partly something else. If it was a mix, then the date you get is also a mix. Not the actual age of the original cloth, but some kind of average that doesn't really represent anything. And this is where Ray Rogers comes in. Rogers was a chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the original Stirp team members. And when the 1988 dating came out, he was initially convinced it was correct. But years later, he got his hands on threads that had been left over from the radiocarbon sample, and he ran his own tests. What Rogers found and published in the journal Thermochemica octa in 2005, was that the threads contained traces of cotton and a substance called vanillin, a chemical found in new linen that disappears over centuries. Rogers found that the main shroud tested negative for vanillin, consistent with extreme age. But the radiocarbon sample tested positive, consistent with newer cloth. Combined with the cotton, this suggested the radiocarbon sample wasn't original shroud material at all. His conclusion. The 1988 sample was taken from a part of the Shroud that had been repaired in the Middle Ages, most likely after that fire in Chambery in 1532. Remember the poor Claire's nuns and their patches? Rogers argued that what got tested wasn't the original cloth at all. It was a medieval patch invisibly rewoven into the original by skilled nuns in a way that fooled the scientists who chose the sample location centuries later. Now this is contested. Some researchers strongly disagree with Ray Rogers and In July of 2015, three Italian researchers published a paper of their own refuting his finding. In their analysis, they found that the difference in Rogers findings came from contaminant in the samples. Without it, they were both identical. But there are others who have found evidence supporting the Shroud's authenticity. A team of researchers at the University of Padua used completely different dating methods, mechanical testing, infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and concluded the cloth was much older. Their estimated date range roughly 300 BCE to 400 CE. It's a big window, but includes the time when Jesus would have lived. Now, these results have not been independently replicated and the methods are, are controversial, but they're out there. Then, in 2022, a study using a technique called wide angle X ray scattering, basically hitting the cloth with X rays and measuring how the fibers have aged at the molecular level, concluded the linen was consistent with the first century ce, right in the target zone. So we have at least three peer reviewed challenges to the 1988 result from different angles, using different methods. None of them are conclusive, none of them have produced a new consensus, but together they make it really hard to say it was a medieval forgery with total certainty. And then there's a historical argument. British historian Ian Wilson has spent most of his career building a case that the Shroud didn't just appear in 1355, it was rediscovered in 1355. Wilson points to a sacred relic that existed in the Byzantine Empire called the Mendelian, or the image of Edessa. It was a piece of cloth supposedly bearing the miraculous imprint of Christ's face. It was documented in Edessa in modern day Turkey from the 6th century onward, transferred to Constantinople in 944 and then disappeared during the sack of Constantinople in 1204. What if, Wilson asks, the Mendelian and the Shroud are the same object? What if it was secretly transported to Europe, eventually ending up in the hands of the Knights Templar and from there to Geoffroy de Charny, whose uncle, by the way, may have been a Knight Templar. Who was burned at the stake in 1314. It's a fascinating theory. It would give the Shroud a documented provenance going back at least to the 6th century, long before the radiocarbon date. But, and this is important, academic historian Andrea Nicolotti, who teaches at the University of Turin, has examined Wilson's chain of reasoning carefully. And his conclusion is that while it's not impossible, the documentary evidence simply doesn't support that direct one to one connection. The Mendelian equals Shroud theory requires a number of leaps. The historical record doesn't quite back up. So that leaves us in this fascinating limbo. The peer review challenges to the radiocarbon dating are real. The historical alternative is intriguing but unproven. The Nature paper is still the scientific mainstream, but it's looking a lot shakier than it did at first.
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right, let's go all the way with this one. Let's set aside what we think we know about the dating and the documentary record and just ask the most basic question that science still cannot answer. How did the image get there? Because remember, after a hundred plus hours of testing, Stirp said they didn't know. The image isn't paint. It isn't dye. It isn't a scorch from heat. It isn't a photograph in any conventional sense. It only exists on the topmost 200 nanometers of the cloth fibers. To put that in perspective, the image on the shroud sits on a layer of fiber 450 times thinner than a human hair. No artist, ancient or modern, has ever convincingly replicated it. Some researchers have proposed, and you have to take this in the spirit it's offered, that the image was created by some kind of intense burst of energy, a, quote, corona discharge, as one theory calls it, or a flash of radiation. The basic idea is that something emanating from the body itself scorched the very surface of the cloth in a precise photographic way that captured the image of the man wrapped inside. If you believe the Shroud is the actual burial cloth of Jesus and you believe in the Resurrection, well, that is exactly what the Resurrection might look like scientifically. A burst of energy, a photograph of a moment that by all natural laws, shouldn't have happened. That's where this theory ends up, at the intersection of physics and miracle. Now, there's a really interesting middle path here from a Cambridge art historian named Thomas de Wesselau. He doesn't believe in supernatural resurrection, but he does believe the Shroud is authentic, actually first century, actually wrapping a real crucified man. His theory, when early Christians encountered this strange, ghostly image of a man on a cloth, they interpreted it as proof that Jesus had returned. The visions of the risen Christ in the New Testament weren't apparitions or hallucinations. They were people seeing this image. The Shroud, in other words, didn't depict the Resurrection. It caused the resurrection story. It's a controversial argument, but it's an argument that takes the Shroud seriously without invoking miracles. And then there's a human side of all of this, the meaning the cloth carries for the people who believe in it. The CNN documentary Finding Jesus captured this beautifully. For millions of believers, the Shroud isn't a debate topic. It's the closest physical link they have to the most important moment in their faith. To them, the question of authenticity isn't academic, it's personal. I'm not asking you to believe any of this. I'm asking you to sit with a question. What if the image formation mystery isn't a mystery because we haven't been clever enough yet? What if it's a mystery because something happened that we genuinely don't have the science to explain? That's the what if of the Shroud of Turin. And honestly, here's my hot take. As much as I love and believe in science, I do think that some things just simply cannot be explained by science. And maybe this is one of them. For me, the Shrouded Turin is one of those rare stories where the answer matters less than the Question. Because what this cloth really exposes is how we relate to evidence. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who follow the facts wherever they lead. But the Shroud is a perfect mirror. Skeptics look at it and see clear cut science, case closed. Believers look at the same exact cloth and see a mystery wide open. Both groups are looking at the same data. They just see different things. And that's not a flaw in human reasoning. That's just how we work. The Shroud also reveals something about our deep, almost biological need for tangible connection. The reason relics existed in medieval Christianity and the reason mysterious objects still hold us captive today, is because abstract beliefs become real when we can touch them, when we can stand in their presence, when we can say, this is the actual cloth. The Vatican, weirdly, might have the wisest take of all. The Church doesn't insist that the Shroud is real. It doesn't insist it's fake. It just says this object inspires people. It points to something larger than itself, and maybe that's enough. I think there's something kind of beautiful in that. Not everything has to be proven to be meaningful. So if I had to pick, what do I think happened? Honestly, when I weigh everything, the most likely explanation is that the Shroud is a medieval creation. The radiocarbon dating from three independent labs published in Nature is still the strongest single piece of evidence we have in the historical context. The Black Death, the booming relic trade, a night with a vague backstory, all of that lines up, but most likely isn't. Definitely. The peer reviewed challenges to the radiocarbon dating are real and credentialed. The image formation mystery is genuine. Nobody has ever convincingly replicated this image. And until someone can either explain how it was made or reproduce it under controlled conditions, there's room for doubt. What I love about the Shroud is that it's a perfect example of how science actually works. Not as a final verdict, but as an ongoing conversation. The radiocarbon dating was the answer until newer studies started complicating it. Newer studies are the answer now. Until someone runs the next test. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is, we don't know yet. And maybe for an object this old, this contested, this charged with meaning, that's exactly the right answer. So here's the thing about the Shroud of Turin. In some ways, it kind of is still happening today. Modern testing is ongoing, new papers come out every few years. The debate isn't frozen in 1988. It's evolving in real time. So instead of imagining what would happen If a brand new Shroud appeared today, let's flip the question, let's ask, what does the Shroud teach us about how we react to mysterious objects in our own time? Because here's the Every era has its Shroud of Turin. Think about Bigfoot, think about the Loch Ness monster. Or think about UFOs in the Pentagon's recently declassified videos. Grainy infrared footage of objects doing things planes shouldn't be able to do. The government can't fully explain them, the scientific community is divided, and the public is left to decide individually what to believe. These are all our modern shrouds. Mysterious objects, passionate communities on every side, and evidence that's just unresolved enough that the debate stays alive in the cultural conversation, sometimes for generations. People want to believe, people also want to debunk. And the mystery itself becomes the story. In the social media age, the Shroud effect is supercharged. Every viral mystery, that ghost video on TikTok, that weird artifact some hiker found, that AI generated image that definitely isn't AI generated, goes through the exact same cycle we've been watching with the shroud for 700 years. Discovery, wonder, skepticism, investigation, debate, repeat. And just like the Shroud, most of these objects don't get a clean ending. We don't always get our answer. Sometimes the mystery just becomes part of the cultural fabric. Pun absolutely intended. The Vatican's careful position on the Shroud, refusing to declare it real, refusing to declare it fake, just letting it be an icon, might actually be the most modern position of all. Because in 2026, we are absolutely swimming in objects, images and footage that we can't fully verify. Deepfakes, AI generated photos, doctored videos, conspiracy theories about everything. We're all going to have to learn how to live with mystery without insisting on a clean answer. The Shroud has been teaching us that lesson for seven centuries. We're just now starting to listen. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of hidden history. I'm Dr. Kruni Bot. Join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. What do you think about the Shroud of Turin? Is it the actual barrel cloth of Jesus Christ, A brilliant medieval forgery or something we just haven't figured out yet? Let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear your theories and I might bring them up in a future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate review and follow if you're listening on audio so we can keep building this community, community together. I'll see you next week for our next episode.