EXPERIENCE 3 | Adventures in Business, Life, & Real Estate with Aaron Everitt

Welcome to the LOCO Experience Podcast with LOCO Think Tank founder Kurt Bear. Listen in as Kurt digs deep into the business and life stories of business owners and thought leaders at different stages of growth from all walks of life. Launching and growing anything can be a crazy experience, so expand your thinking and level up your understanding of what it takes to find success, and the world of free enterprise. And here we are with Aaron Everett, one of my long time friends, and somebody I served on the Matthews house board with was really got to know each other and really a member of one of the most influential real estate families in Northern Colorado and more knowledgeable about that whole topic, then probably anybody that I know closely, so welcome to the LOCO Experience. Thanks, glad to do it. And I think we'll just start out with a little bit of grounding, like who is Aaron Everett? Like why do people care? Why do I care? Why would I have you here today? Sure, well I'll give you a little background on me just in general. I grew up for the most part in this community, I had a stint in Wyoming when I was young where my dad was building houses, but it was a satellite of the development company we had here. So, I lived in Sheridan, Wyoming when I was a young kid, went to elementary school there, but for the most part lived here for my whole life. I have, our family's been involved here for a long time. My mom's side of the family is a long time, long time Fort Collins family that moved here in 1917. And they were Russian immigrants that came to pick beets in Windsor, if you can believe it or not. Nice. Is that German Russians? Yeah, German Russians. Yeah. And they came here in 1917 and my dad's side of the family came here in the 50s and they were in the lumber business and they got very interested in selling lumber. There's a small little lumber yard here just across the street from where we are that my granddad bought with the help of his dad and it was just a gal that was wanting to be out of the business. There was that lumber yard and one in, I don't know, wind, Oklahoma or something like that. And he chose Fort Collins one and quickly learned that in order to sell lumber, he needed to find a way to have builders come and buy lumber for the houses to build, but there was no land available for them to build on. So he, my granddad was a very entrepreneurial guy and got himself involved in the development business and learned how to do the development process in the city and became one of the large, well, at the time it was the largest development company in the city. So we, we've done over the course of our time in Northern Colorado, probably around 25,000 single family lots as a developer and then we also were in the commercial business. So that foothills mall was our family's stuff along with probably 35 or 40 other commercial buildings in the region everywhere from Greeley to, yeah, and he was still in the lumber business at the time. So you kind of had this amazing little empire he built, right, vertically integrated business, right? Like 20 lumber yards around the country. So we had stuff in Wichita, Kansas and Springfield, Colorado and these little small communities that we were having lumber yards in. He was doing that. He was doing the development stuff here, was doing commercial business with them all. Get a high battery. You had a very high battery. And I remember when your grandfather passed on and the funeral where 1,500 people were there and there would probably have been more waiting to come if they could have because he just impacted so many people's lives. Yet tremendously generous guy, but also the most down to earth person you'd ever meet. You'd never know that he was the guy that was that influential or instrumental in so many things. He just wasn't just wasn't that, he's a very humble guy and a very wonderful man somebody I look up to still, obviously, what my life is like. So yeah, appreciate him tremendously. So anyway, I got went to college and did a bunch of different things trying to escape here because I didn't think it was where I wanted to be. It's awkward growing up the grandson of an empire builder. Yeah, it is. It is. And you know, people don't necessarily understand that they think, well, gosh, you just got it sort of made and what a great life you get to walk around them all and say, you own it. It was just never who I was. I was never wired that way. So I left and went to Canada and went to college in Calgary and then got into music a lot, started getting into playing music and was in a band and we traveled a bunch around the country and I actually started to fall in love with business playing music. So when you're down to your last $45 and needed to tank a gas in a place to stay and some food, you figure out pretty good, pretty quickly how to be good at accounting and how to stretch your money as far as you can. And that's really what business, small business in general is that you're trying to move your stuff into the wickets to make it work for today and you hope that it works tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. Well, an ad value to people along the way, which is what music is, you know, that's a beautiful thing for almost anybody. Yep. So I had a lot of fun doing that and then finally towards the end of that time, I decided that I wanted to come back here because I liked here and I thought the opportunities were better. And after I traveled all around the country, I realized, hey, this is a pretty cool spot to live and there's really cool opportunities here. So I came back and started working for our company and was in the land development side of our company for a long time. So it's very probably we might have met right around there around that time. Yeah, I don't know. Started working for our company in around 2002. Oh, okay. So you've been there for a while. Yeah. And so did that was in the land planning side of the business. That was when things were really going great. I mean, you could great is relative here. It's always great here in the real estate business, honestly, we would live in such a fortunate place. It's wild that you've had just unprecedented growth in a community for now moving in on 50, 60 years. And that parts really, you know, when you have something like that going on, it just becomes real estate drives a ton of things and it's driven our community in a lot of ways. Totally. And I think not to flash forward into our conversation, but I think it's relevant is now that we have work from anywhere and people trying to escape cities and violence in some cases and things like that, like real estate is going to, I think, carry our northern call about economy through what might be a pretty tough recession in a lot of the country. It's interesting. CSU has always been the major engine of this community. Sure. It's done everything from it in terms of it's brought people, it's brought professors, it's brought students that wanted to stay here and work here. That's brought companies here that wanted to find good employees and offer a good incentive to them to stay. So you just have this great synergistic thing between the community and CSU. Well, now the community is almost such a desirable place to live and there's so many other opportunities in the community. CSU is not necessarily second fiddle, but it's not as it's not as bearing it's not as necessary. Yeah. It's still a huge part of our deal, it's still a huge part of our whole community, but you're starting to see that people want to live here regardless whether CSU is here or not. And that's a unique flip from where we've been. That's something that's very different than what was that's been in the past. I want to take, because you had such an interesting experience before we get too far into adulthood, let's talk about, like I was a super short kid, I was five foot one in 10th grade and got picked on all the time, Kurt the Squirt and all this. So talk to me about some, like you ran off to Canada, probably to escape some challenges or things like that to some extent or maybe just the strong spotlight of the family. Talk to me a little bit about like what it was like as a seventh grader or a tenth grader or things like that in an environment like that, a lot of pressures I imagine to get perfect grades and to never get busted drinking or, you know, because your family is a faith-forward family as well and all that, right? Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I probably for my whole experience as a human have battled some level of depression, right? So it's just sort of a thing that's always been a part of my life. I, you know, I don't know why or for whatever reason, but that's been a part of it. And I think some of it had to do with that stuff growing up. You, I think people have, well, everybody gets to see everybody else's eyes through their own and they make judgments about those things quickly, right? And you would look and say, gosh, that guy like that's got money and they live in a great house and they've got a good family and they're wonderful people and granddad's amazing and these towns, their names everywhere. What a, you're just kind of set up, you know? And I worked probably even harder than I ever thought I would have even as a seventh grader, which sounds silly, to not be an effort. I didn't want to be one. I really didn't. I didn't want that pressure and I certainly didn't want that to be what defined me as a human. I felt like that was really, he was just unique, right? Just totally. I didn't want to go to the mall. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to tell anybody who I was and I spent a lot of energy trying to tell my friends that I wasn't what they are in pressure of me was and, yeah, that's probably carried on for a long time. Moving to Canada was actually part of that. It was this, wow, I can go someplace, charge something else, fresh start and nobody knows me. And that was, there was something really good about that for me and it was really good for me in that season because I actually made friends that had no understanding of my background. Yeah. So you, when you walk around as an eighth grader, ninth grader, you start dating, you start arguing. You always wonder, well, is that because of me or is that because they have an impression of what I might, what I might be able to provide for them or be, you know, so I was a dorky porkit. And so if somebody, girl like me, it was because I was funny, apparently, or something, right? I could see that as being just a full of traps for people like, yeah, it really wasn't. So when I moved to Canada, I never really told anybody anything about my past or my past. Who I was. I mean, people gravitated to me for any number of reasons, whether it was my personality or coolness. Well, it's nice to be to say. But I think, you know, that was so refreshing of a time because I could actually be who I needed to be. Yeah. And I could actually kind of come in my own without feeling any strange pressure about it. And my very best friends are all people that I met, that live in Chicago or live in, you know, some of them have moved here now, but at the time, we were all from all around the world. Yeah, you were much more because they played music together sometimes or whatever. And they, you know, they would always probably wonder where I got the next 50 bucks. But it was, you know, but it was available. And I always tried to manage that as humbly as I could and not just go with a rock star life in a band that wasn't a rock star. Right. We weren't earning the money that it deserved. So, you know, you just, that was such a refreshing deal. So when I came back into my adulthood and married my wife, who was from Canada, it made a lot more sense. I could come here with a lot more, a lot less expectation. Yeah. I don't know that that always worked out. I mean, I put my own stuff on myself a lot. And especially once I started working for the company, there was, there was an interesting dynamic that developed in that that was that kind of wasn't healthy and that I wanted to please my granddad and my dad and well, and I've met your cousins that some of which, you know, could have had a chance to be part of the longer serving operation and things. But nobody necessarily really wants that pressure and it's kind of like the president job, right? Like, if you really want the pressure of that job, you're probably weird. It's pretty wrong with you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think that's what happened. I mean, I think for all of us, whether in my generation anyway, I don't think there was any of us that were like, you know, I really see myself taking this mantle. It was a great opportunity. I learned a ton and I was, and I'm super thankful that I had the chance to do it because it served me so well and so many other things as I got into other aspects of a career. Sure. And it was wonderful for that. But it was also, you know, working there had its own strange, it just has its own strange stuff. Sure. Yeah. Any place, right? Especially. But it's family business. So you'd wrestle it out and then have to go to Thanksgiving on Thursday. Right. There was stuff about that that I don't know that I necessarily enjoyed. I didn't have great relationships, ultimately, through that process with my uncle or with my cousins. And, you know, just, I got, it just was too hard to try to, how many hats can you possibly do? There you go. It's pretty politically incorrect, any more to quote Bill Cosby, but I'm going to do it anyway. It said, gosh, when I was like seventh grade, I was in speech and it was, I don't know the secret to success, but I know the secret to failure is to try to please everyone. And that role, like you can't even do it. No. You know, especially in a real estate development role where, you know, you have a choice of either spinning money out to the family, the shareholders of the organization, or you can reinvest it in the next really smart deal. But you can't do both things necessarily, or you can do a little both always. Well, and our company went through a very interesting transition. My granddad was still involved in the business all the way until the last day he lived. Wow. And really, we all sort of felt like, well, it's his company, right? So you sort of do things at the behest of his wishes. So, but like anything, when you're 86, 87 years old, you're not terribly interested in risking the next big investment, right? And here I was 35, 40 years old going, I want to make my mark. Let's go do this. Let's go get aggressive, you know, the crash really exacerbated all of that and brought it to a head at our company. When things started to go downhill quickly, and they went quick, and it was like, it kind of saw some buzzes on the horizon with AIG and things in March. But by the end of September, the whole thing was gone and it was gone quick and real estate was dead and it was the biggest mess you ever saw. We were part of our, we had sold them all, but part of that was that we, just because of all the different tax complications and everything. We can get into unintended consequences of well-intended laws any time, but- But because of that, we were invested in this, you know, we were invested in this sort of stock rate, and that stock rate went from what has a high in about 07 and November of 07 was $85 a share, by the next November was $0.85 a share. So you traded your mall for a bunch of stock that went into- A bunch of stock that ended up being fairly worthless. It's worked out and it was for any number of reasons that we were protected in it, but it was also just a, it was an illustration of what would happen. And it was also an illustration of us as a company. Here we were trying to do something that seemed like the least risky option to sell this, not pay as many taxes, do this, do that, do that, and it's going to be protected. And here we were a year later, sitting at the boardroom table going, what just happened? I think one of the things that will drift into as this conversation unfolds is that markets can be really vicious sometimes, you know, capitalist markets. I was thinking about it's basically the same thing as the negative oil price for a few weeks this spring, right? Right. Like oil's worth of money. You know, can I drink a big pit and double oil into it, get a big check, you know, come on. I know. But markets are just cruel ladies, you know, or the little, I don't know, they don't lie. They don't lie. It's really, it's like having the most honest friends you could ever have, right? Who never, who never sugarcoats anything that comes your way, they're willing to tell you exactly how ugly you are. Right. And that's what a market does. And that's what happened in the real estate market. There was a bunch of foolishness that had happened. People were really foolish about it. They had over-invested and interest rates were too low. And there was just any number of things. And banks decided that in order to make money, well, there was just a bunch of stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. Go watch one of those movies. There's lots of good movies on that whole story. But, you know, the policy that George Bush put in place that said every homeowner, every American should own a home. Right. Well, that's great. But if your, if your policy then is driven by the bureaucrats that say in order to do that, you need to go do this, you know, the consequences were pretty steep. So that's what happened. And so we're sitting around a table, my 82 or 83 year old granddad at the time, and me at 36, 37 years old, and saying, we are just, I'm like, go buy everything. Right. We have some capital. Go get it. We're all fortunate. We're like in a position where we can go do this stuff. Right. And, you know, I didn't understand all the dynamics at the time either. Right. I was pretty dumb, still at 35, you know, I'm still pretty dumb. The banks called our notes, and we had to pay them because we had the capital. Right. All of our competitors that were leveraged to the right, they had to be worked with them. They worked with them, and then wrote their notes down. Right. So here I was, you know, here we were as a company with paying off all our debts, doing the honorable thing because we had to, and frankly, we were told by one of the banks. We said, well, what about everybody, all of our competitors are writing all this down. They said, yeah, but frankly, you have the money. Right. So you write the checks. Yeah. So paid off. The note is called. And that was the terms, right? Yeah. Right. You signed it up when you agreed to it. Yes. So, you know, it was like, this is a bummer, but it definitely changed the trajectory of where we were going as a company. Yeah. We had assets we had to get rid of, and so I opened a home building company because that's the fastest way to actually sell a bunch of lots. A bunch of lots. There's nothing right now. At least you put a house on it. It's worth some money. Right. A little bit. Right. And that's closer to when we met. That's when we met. Yeah. You were right before all that. We kind of saw some things in the market that was like, you know, we're struggling to sell vacant land. Right. Maybe we should try to figure out how to do this. So we built a company that got into design and architecture and interior design. And built some amazing houses. I really enjoyed some of my walkthroughs when we were just coming back. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a really fun experience. I'm not necessarily love home building for a number of reasons, but it was the one thing I told my dad I didn't want to do when I moved back. Right. It was build houses. Because I'd watched him do it, my whole growing up, and he was miserable, hated it. Really? Yeah. Didn't like it. Didn't like customers. My dad, one of my dad's a very, at the time, particularly, he's a much changed man now, but at the time, it was a pretty, he just didn't, you know, it was not relatable to folks. And so, you know, I remember hearing a story that Gauss said, well, I don't really like the banister that you put in. And so, he just, in front of the customer, just took a sledgehammer and smashed it all up. And they're like, what the hell is this crazy person? So, you know, that was part of my experience. And so, I told my dad when I moved back, hey, I loved, I know how to do nothing. I can change the light bulb. I'm pretty good on a computer, willing to learn anything, but I really don't want to be in the home building business. And he said, well, we don't, it's good. We don't have home building division anymore. Right. We sold that a couple years before. Yeah. Right. And he said, well, hey, you know, I had this idea, we need to build some houses on the lots we have. Would you be interested in setting up a building company? Yeah. There we go. Yes, we're doing it. And those were the things you did. Right. You said, well, yeah, that's the work. So, what's in front of me? Let's go get it. That's a part of my own upbringing as, you know, farm kid. Yeah. Right. What needs to be done needs to be done. I mean, my dad's a fairly wealthy guy after building an awesome farm. But when the cob by needs to be pulled out and you've got to hook two tractors with inch and a half cables on it and be scared to sell that those cables are going to snap before the tractor falls out or it comes out. Yeah. You can't hire somebody to go pull your unstuck tractor out or to build houses on your lots when nobody wants to buy lots. That's exactly right. So, you know, you have all of your sleeves and do what needs to be done. You just have to go do it. And that was my, you know, for all the things that I've said that were kind of complicated about my family. That was a lot of wonderful things. And that was one of them. You just learned. You know, my dad. Everybody's complicated. Oh, yeah. Of course. Every life and every family's complicated. Everybody's got issues. But it was definitely one of those things that when we moved back here from shared and my dad was still building houses here and that summer I was 11 years old and he said, you need to do work. So Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I would go to work with a guy that was 16 years old. We'd jump in a flat bed truck and we'd go sweep houses. We were terribly ineffective, but we were working and it was a job and I learned to actually really love work. I do like work a lot. It's a fun thing. It's rewarding. It's way better than not doing anything. Yeah. Super valuable, right? And I just, I've always been sort of engaged with that idea that you'd go do something and you would try to make the world a better place and you can, you can do that with your own hands, which is kind of a cool, it's kind of a cool thing. So. That's a pretty cool transition into, as far as I know, kind of what you did next with the, with the E and S and that adventure and, and it's another case of, you know, I'll let the story unfold, but of a market being cruel. Like, to my eyes, at least, you had a winner of a product, you had a ton of passion. You worked the hell out of it. You're flying all over like a crazy person for a while trying to get this thing to spin. And whether it was model or competition or market demographics or combinations of those, it just didn't really work. No. It was an abject failure. Right. And, and, and it was a great idea. I'm glad I didn't finance you on it, you know, because I was a, I had a great record as a banker of financing winning things and I was betting on you. Yeah. Well, it just didn't. Yeah. You know, it's that, that's such very fascinating piece of the story. So when the has is thing was kind of going, we were getting towards the end of that. We're getting towards the end of the loss we needed to build on. I partnered up with my cousin who's on my mom's side of the family and we are the same age. And we've been buddies since we were little kids and played Legos together and I really respect a lot of what he brings to the table is smart, really smart guy, hard worker, you know, is willing to do just about anything again. So some kind of like come from good stock kind of deal on so you're going to just go do what you need to do no matter what. And he was, and I, we've just, our personalities are great together. He's very type A and I'm not a very big sort of the world role. Well, you still have your interests together, right? Yeah. We still do things together. So even, even through the failures, we still found a way to be friends and still found a, you know, like, he's one of my best friends in the whole world. Right. And we just love him to death and, and we're family, but it, we just worked our way through so many horrible, I mean, the most horrible, rough sure you could ever have. I've got to, we're going to have to cut your salary by 90% because you need to write a check. Well, and that's what strengthens the, like, this is slightly off topic, but I think that's kind of the point of the low co-experiences to wander is, you know, my own journey, you're, I was in the midst of traveling into poverty when you and I met, originally, or, I guess we met right before that, but then we were closer soon. And Jill, my wife, having traveled through that and locking arms with me as I went through different levels of insecurity, financially and different levels of crazy, psychologically, and, you know, hadn't really eaten a whole pie, but she was still there beside me. And it goes a long way. That's, that's where's a lot, yeah, you can't buy that stuff. You certainly, yeah. And you certainly can't pick that kind of partnership off the shelf. All right. Yeah, you could never trust anybody. No, no way. Like that. No way. So, yeah, we, we, anyway, break us into the idea, let's, let's start with the idea. Let's start with the idea. And then, yeah, get the, get the exciting when it was going to be super awesome and easy part and then transition into how hard it was. Yeah, okay. So, well, I got to talk a little bit about an uncle we have that it's a mutual uncle. He lives in Texas and he got into the dog food business and he got into the dog food business because there were dead cows that no one knew what to do with, die in the 150 degree Texas heat. Right. So he came up with this idea that if he could go get those cows, the farmers would, the ranchers would pay him to take him and then he could turn it into dog food. So he was getting paid. That's a very simplified version of that deal and I'm sure it wasn't, if I asked him he'd laugh and say, that's not how that went. But that's what my impression of it was, right? And so we got into this barn wood thing where I had been building houses and we started to, I had a client who was really interested in some, she was just, it was the most fun house I'd ever built. They're great, wonderful people that were creative, right? They were mutual spirit and creativity and they just said, well, you know, we don't anything different. We want everything to be as different as possible, but still make it work. So we, we were working on a very specific space. It was the band, it was the pantry backsplash, I mean, it's like a nothing, right? And we came up with this little idea of cutting up barnwood into these mosaic or formatted tiles and we did it, it was the best house I'd ever built and most everybody wanted to talk about this pantry. Like, oh, this is like 50 square feet of this house and it's amazing, I mean, this house is amazing. And so it kind of, we kind of felt like we had a great idea and we just went through this iteration of stuff and then I got the win and I said, well, let's go to a trade show. So we flew to Vegas and set up a booth on a card table or something and it was terrible, but we won product of the show. So we just had this, like, in our booth was just full of people, they were just fascinated by the idea, there's, you know, great designers, HGTV people were in our booths. Well, that's just barnwood, like, help people that are just listening to understand it a little bit more. It's like the fabric setting on it and stuff like that, the mounting and the curves and whatever. Yeah, so we just, we tried to, Luke's background is in tile, so we wanted to try to come up with a product that was easy to install instead of, you know, putting up these small little mosaics hand piece at a time. There was another competitor of ours at the time that was doing it, but you just put up each individual piece. And so we got kind of challenged to say, could we make it easier, better, more replicable, more producible, right? So you could make something that's this really artistic, cool stuff, but it was like repeatable. You could keep building this, you know, and then you could change the patterns and you could build this amazing mosaic of a wall. So we did that both with barnwood, we did it with leftover cabinet scraps and door scraps from people that were, you know, they were just losing 50% of their wood because they had to to make a door, we go get that stuff and turn it into this kind of interesting stuff. Basically found a product that was in the tile industry, we flipped it around and figured out how to mount the wood to that and then we could use thin sets. You could use all these tile setting materials to make it so a tile installer could put this stuff on the wall. It's easy to stick on the wall with wood because it weighs like a fourth as much or something, right? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, then we just got pushed to do a bunch of different things. So one of it was just, could you code it so that people could use it in places that were like a backsplash or so we came up with a ceramic coating that we used. We found from a car manufacturer in Michigan, right? We worked way too hard on that and sold almost none of it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's exactly what it was. We got involved with a distributor who, honestly, I'm going to say was great for the first part of our relationship, pushed us, made us really try to understand what was happening, tried to help us develop a product that was really something we could take around the country. If somebody in New Jersey ordered it, it would look like what they, what we've made in the factory and the same shipment would go to California, right? And that was really great. That was just really fun time in that company. I was flying all over was, I mean, I was, there were moments that I thought was just unbelievable. I'm in New York City at Gensler Architects, pitching my stuff to world famous architects right now and I would never be in this building otherwise unless I was paying them money. And so there was this cool little romance to it. We were kind of little stars in the tile world because that's a boring field. Right. Everybody's like, well, there's a 12 by 12. Hey, look, this year's format is 12 by 24. And you know, you just kind of become this little starlet in the deal and so we, it was fun. I mean, we, you know, we sold a lot of it, but we never had our stuff right in terms of margins and what was going to cost and the distributor took too much to really make it make sense, probably, and this and that, we couldn't get there without the distributor. Yeah. So you're just stuck in this horrible place and so we just felt like we were going, and we were going broke and it was terrible. And exercise. I mean, I was, at one point I was in New Jersey and Luke called and he said, and I was on this traveling trip, called him and said, we're in really bad trouble this week for payroll and rent and everything's sitting at the same time. And I said, well, just tell me it's not six figures. And he said, no, no, it's 80,000, only 80,000 this month. You'll be happy. Right. And so I'm wiring, I mean, the car, wiring money to try to make to payroll tomorrow. Yeah. And a huge number because of the pressures, you can't be an Everett and not make payroll on Friday besides. Exactly. We can't have conversation with somebody about not having the money. So, you know, you just, I was just writing checks and I was foolishly writing checks thinking that, well, if I just get enough momentum, we're going to get this. And there was always signs on the horizon that was going to be good. Yeah. Sometimes we're going to have, we'd open a new territory, we'd get a big order from Dubai and you know, you just feel like, this is awesome. You know, we're going to make it, right? It was always just enough, I tell people a lot that when you're starting a small business, it's the most legalized Ponzi scheme that there ever is. You use, you use today's income to pay yesterday's bills and you just try that over and over and you do that enough times and then eventually you catch. Hopefully. Hopefully. Right. We didn't ever catch. Right. It was just like, you tried the hell out of it though. Oh yeah, five, six years. Yeah. Spent six years of my life doing it and working really hard to do it by the store here in town that was an interior store that was sort of left over from Luke's past that we were trying to figure out what to do. It was, it helped. What? There were moments where that certainly helped cover payroll, but it was a hard business too. We were in this, like, interior world and people were, that's just challenging, right? Yeah. A really challenging deal. Eventually we sold that to a builder who wanted it and they took it on and made it into this gargantuan showroom in Timnith. Right. And yeah. God bless us. Seems like they're doing great. Yeah. They're doing a great thing with it. So I'm proud of that. It was a great experience. The good thing just kept, like, we were just never wanted to give up on it. Just never wanted to give up on the idea or the dream, but every month you're like, it kind of came to a head probably in 2018. We had told the distributor we didn't want to work with him anymore. It was a really nasty breakup. It was not good. Yeah. It was just a really stressful, horrible, 2018 was really bad. We rebranded and did a bunch of things and, you know, it wasn't to necessarily get around anything. We just didn't know how to get out of what we were doing. And let us out of our deal and we're like, well, we can't make the product anymore. Right. We lose the money every time we make you a product. So we're just going to stop. And you're, you're like stopping our ability to raise the price and we're, we're going broke. So we can't do this anymore. So we kind of went online and tried to model of that. And thankfully we did because ultimately we ended up selling that to Stickwood, which is a huge competitor of ours at the time. Okay. We were nothing to them. But they were who we were. Right. By your little pension thing here and seems interested at it to our thing and we'll just maybe sell it easy and make a bunch of money. Yeah. Well, because that's part of it, right? Like if you've got enough scale and you get enough reach and you can do things. And they had a platform to market it to read that range that time we got to that place of rebranding. We were just, both Luke and I were just done. Totally dead. Had no energy. We're interested in doing it any longer. And so to be able to sell to somebody that could that was attractive, I mean, we can sell it. Right. Yeah. Here. Take the keys. There's no ride. I was like, can I ride you? I ride a oil two miles ago. But here's the keys. Yeah. Yeah. Can I pay you to take it? I want to ask. So I heard a quote recently, because of all this COVID stuff, right? Like there's lots of pivoting going on and stuff. And when I somebody recently said, when I hear the word pivot, I hear spend more money. Yeah. So you kind of pivoted on the last kind of chance, but it didn't have enough capital. Right. I didn't want to. You know, am I going to sell some real estate interests so that I could put more money into this thing? Yeah. Which is what it did. I mean, for years, I would, I would build something and everybody would be like, that's a great project that you just did in real estate. And I would say, cool, I got a salad and make $200,000 on this thing and then dump it into that. Dump it into this stupid thing. So it was a pretty rough deal, but you know, some of the best lessons you learned. Sorry to put you on this pop for that, because I think one of the things I want people to understand through this podcast is, is the markets a crazy lady, you know, or maybe a man or whatever. And things just happened sometimes where super hard working really smart people with super good ideas. They don't make it. Well, somewhere along the way, somebody, and probably one of it was probably the distributor said, you know, great ideas are born every 15 seconds. Right. It's, it's who can get, it actuated that those are the people that can pull it off and there's not very many people that can do that. All right. Well, her part for me was, I always visioned myself as a person that could do it. Right. Well, I think you could maybe, you know, maybe your next great idea and maybe it's two years from now. Yep. And it takes off and you're the next, hopefully you're not the next Mark Zuckerberg because he's kind of a pompous jackass, but whatever. Hopefully you're the next big successful guy because it doesn't mean that you're not smart enough to do it. No. And since that time, we realized, like, and I recognize that the talents that we both brought to the table were actually able to be utilized in ways that were profitable, right? Sure. So what we're invested in together currently is very profitable and it's a great success and we have, you know, 120 employees and it's wonderful, right? It's in a logistics business. I had no intention of ever being in and never think I was going to be in, but hey, again, it's what's in front of you. So you go do it and you do it as best the best you can. And you've got opportunities and had an opportunity to do it. So I want to get into some of your real estate knowledge because I know we've got only a limited amount of time and and this is, I can't think of very many people that love Northern Colorado more than you do and are more invested in seeing it be, continue to be like one of the most amazing places to live in the country. Yeah. Talk to me and our people listening to this someday about like what's going on in the big picture stuff? Like there's, there's water stuff, there's, there's real estate, there's, there's fights between towns over who goes where and who gets what tax dollars. There's I 25 challenges and yeah, like you're kind of a big vision with tactics kind of guy. It's a little bit of big vision for maybe even for those people that don't know Northern Colorado. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, we live in one of the most amazing spots on the planet. I feel like we live in Laguna Beach in 1950. Right. I mean, if you could have bought property in Laguna Beach in 1950 to set up whatever it takes to do it, I'm going to go do it. And if it's just a junky shack on the beach, I want it because ultimately someday this could be a really valuable deal. And that's what's happening here and it's been happening here for a long time. It's a, it's a wonderful community it, it, for any number of reasons, right? See, issues a huge part of it. But I also think just the community members that come here, it attracts a unique personality. They're more innovative. They're more curious, typically end up being much more, I don't know, hopeful, hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like there's just this sense of like, yeah, your rent is going to double when you move here. Yeah. It's the same money. Yeah. But you're like, but I love it and I love it. That's really Northern Colorado and it probably always has been, right? My dad always said, you know, there's a premium to look at these mountains and there's, there's a reality to that. If you're going to live here, yeah, you're probably not going to make as much money as you might make in Des Moines, Iowa. But right. Or you make the same, but your house cost three times as much. Right. But it's not Des Moines, Iowa. Right. Right. Right. Right. So at some point, you really are thankful for where you live. And I love it here. The people are great. The town is beautiful. The activities you can do within an hour of here or two hours are here or five hours of here are just, it's unprecedented. There's more. There's no place like this. So I love it. That, but it's been a really interesting thing to see what's happened as time's going on. When you tracked people, they also tend to be people that say, hey, I don't know that I want this special spot to go away. And so you get this really interesting mix of progressive people that want wonderful things and build a great community and do all this awesome stuff. And then also say, how do we keep it as small and as selfishly for us as we can? And I would challenge anybody that lives in Northern Colorado to tell me what negative impacts growth has had on our community. I don't see them. I don't have lived here when horse, tooth and shields was a stop sign. I mean, I used to take me only like 12 minutes to drive across town. Now it takes me like 17 minutes. Right. So it's a lot more traffic and you also have the opportunity to go eat at world-class restaurants. Right. Drinking world-class beer. Amazing concert venue. Great venues to have music. I mean, at some point you just say, I can't, as a human in a society, I'm struggling to see where the negative impacts of growth really hit. Right. I don't see them. But growth is a political issue always is. It's based on scarcity, right? It is. And so when anything is like that, it becomes political. Right. Now we're going to have two competing ideas. Somebody that wants great things to happen and somebody that's like, I want a great place and I don't want it to happen. I want to stop these things from happening. Yeah. I don't want to change. Right. And we've been in that battle for since the 80s here. Right. I tell people real estate used to be, or development anyway, used to be a cooperative between the city and a developer and a farmer. So they would cooperate. They all wanted it to succeed. They all wanted it to succeed. They all wanted it to succeed. They would say the city would say, sure, we'll put the sewer in, you know, we'll absolutely do that. We want new property taxes. We want new property taxes. We want new people coming. We want that builds our tax base. Right. Because there's new sales tax that comes with that. There's all these things. Somewhere in the 80s, there was a philosophy that sort of came around just generally that was like, growth doesn't pay its own way. And I suppose that's true to some degree for the city in that they might be able to, they might not be able to keep up with the pace of growth. But I think eventually growth does eventually catch up to pay its way. It's just that, you know, wherever you look in a graph, you can make whatever statistic see what it needs to be. Where it needs to be. Sure. And I think we haven't really, you know, when that philosophy sort of hit, it was in concert with this idea that we want this great place to be our own. And selfishly, we don't want it to be anything more than it is right now. And you know, that piece of it ended up being a real, there were political waves that started changing in the early 90s and four columns. And development went from a cooperative to an adversarial, you know, by 2000, really development was an adversarial position. So you're going to do development in four columns, it was going to be adversarial with the city. You're going to be at war with the city for two years to try to decide how to make a project work. Well, that cost time, money, energy, and raises prices. Because if I'm going to spend two years on it instead of six months, guess what? I'm going to get paid. Right. Commencement shortly with the two years. I got a bunch of capital invested for that two years instead, and that's the risky part before you start moving. A tremendous risk that it may not even happen. Right. It may not perform it out like I need it to. Right. Because these guys are trying to stop it from happening. So the risk profile, instead of it being a one in ten chance, it doesn't move forward. It's a four in ten chance. It doesn't move forward. Exactly. Exactly right. So that became really challenging. And we also have this unique deal with water and land. So lots of things happen. The politics became almost untenable to do development in town for small developers, local people like ourselves. We had enough capital, fortunately, to kind of continue on, but a lot of people just stopped, right? People that would go have their farm or their dad's farm, they'd turn it into something. Those days were done. They would go over. Yeah. And it also just brings people with lawyers. So now instead these gigantic builders come in and have enough swag to push the city around or at least to bribe the city to get it done. They have enough lawyers, right? Right. And they know the rules. And unfortunately, regulations always the same. But then they just come and build it, and then they leave. You know, they don't do other stuff, they don't care about our community, really. No. And regulations always retroactive, right? You can only choose, you can only write laws of what you don't want to happen again. Right. You don't know. You can't preemptively write the law about what you don't want to happen. And so I think some of the people at city tend to be, or at least in that era, sort of wizards of smart. Right. They just felt like they knew more than everybody. The smartest were in the room always. Yeah. I know there's no such thing. But whatever. But they would try to write proactive laws about that. So just change this tremendous, just change development here, and it became really expensive. So I know we've got kind of a limited amount of time, but I want to stay on the same topic, but flash ahead. Now, where are we at today? I've been hearing that the price of water is going nutty, that cities can't procure the water that they need, that even the reservoir, the glade won't have enough water soon enough to really make an impact on housing, and that the demand for housing is just going to, with no checkpoint, it's going to increase my house's value a lot more before I can buy any other properties, because it's really true. So you have water and land are two independent pieces of, yeah, I've Colorado's aspect. They, you need water in order to do development, and that is, that can be expensive. It didn't used to be expensive, but they don't, they're independent assets. You have water and land, which are both two different assets, and they're both salable assets on their own, so you could take land that had water on it, and you could take the water off, and you could sell the water, and you could sell the land independently. It used to not be such a big deal, but, you know, now, in the 50s, they ended up spending a bunch of time and energy, building these amazing structures and sort of lots of foresight on how to get water to be to a place where you could, you know, you could have a, that's all right. We're having whiskey. You've got to have a little sound in that crowd. You've got to have, you know, a little sense that these guys were just, they saw something amazing happening here. They recognized the place they lived, and they went out and did public work projects that were privately, private endeavors by, like, the Colorado Big Thompson project, and Northern Water and Water Supply and Storage, and these guys went out and just did these amazing things, built horse tooth and Carter and all of this stuff and pipes that come over from the Blue River and such a history. Incredible stuff. Well, fast forward through all that, that's enough water to last us a long time, right? I mean, those were projects that were never envisioned, ever run out of water, ever, right? There was going to be plenty of water. Right. But fast forward, and you go from a state that in 1950 was a little bit over a million people to today, it's a little over seven. Wow. That's a lot of people. Right. And they're all sort of taxing these resources. And people have different rationale as to how they're going to handle those resources. Some people want that to be environmentally preserved. I don't know, I mean, probably that. I'm a fisherman. I love to see our river be what it is. But there's, you know, four causes. You're moving in on half a million people that live in the North of Colorado that utilize the water supply from two reservoirs. Yeah. That's a lot. Right. Right. And truly, you know, so anyway, what happens is that the city of Fort Collins has water shares and as in their part of the development, they are able to buy water because it was inexpensive. And it was a part of developer would dedicate a part in the water bank, right? They had a tremendous amount of assets, but they also control a tremendous amount of water. Right. As they said, they're city. They're the largest municipality. They should control the water. Well, their political process becomes so complicated that the relief valve is Timnith Severance. Millions are Millican, Johnston, who are all being supplied by water districts, private companies or public utility, private public partnerships that end up having all the infrastructure to supply domestic water to these communities. Well, great. Still great. We trade shares. You get the water. You do the development. Everything's going just swimmingly until you don't have enough water. Right. And now the sudden water just goes. Is that because of a drought or just too many people or it's both going to get worse? It's just because there's going to be more droughts and more people. Yeah. It's just you can't survive a drought. We've had droughts. The drought is not an issue for domestic water. I mean, I suppose at some point it could be. Right. Currently it isn't. And currently wasn't even our worst drought in 05 and whatever, 0205. We didn't run into municipal water issues. We certainly conserved our water. We did what we were supposed to do. But that was just. You stop watering your lawns. You can take a lot more showers. You can take more showers. You can drink more water. Right. Keep us alive, at least. Keep us alive. So that piece became, you know, when the city controls a bunch of water, both four cons and loved ones control a bunch of water, these outlying communities end up saying, well, cool. Do the district money. Do the district stuff. But you got to bring the shares or you got to bring cash and lieu of those shares. This year, probably last year, I guess, 2019, October of 2019, the municipalities that are in these outlying areas all got together and sort of said, hey, we can't keep up with the price of water. So you can't bring cash anymore. You got to bring certificates. So that became a chase for every watershed certificate. Whoever you got a certificate. Now you can do development. Right. Well, Colorado Big Thompson, which is CBT water, which is basically the gold standard in our community. Everybody uses CBT for outlying communities. That came about and all of a sudden CBT went from $22,000 to $24,000 to $60,000, $70,000 a share right now. Right. If you can fight it. But nobody wants to sell it because it's going to be worth $150,000. Sure. Could be. And you're looking at something like no more than about 5,000 open shares right now in the community left. Wow. So that's like 15,000 houses in the all about it. What can we do about it? Well, there's proposals, right? I mean, you have glade. Sure. That's 10 years, you say. Yeah. But you start today if there was a shovel dug in glade. It's 10 years before. Drop of water. I remember Aaron Million was working on a project forever to get some more green river water or someone here. Is that dead now? Is that? It's challenging. California has a bunch of say on our Colorado River Basin. You have a ton, a tremendous amount of say on that. We owe that water to them because they bought it. They used it first. They are. They're first rights on the river. So that basin is very challenging. You have. Let go ahead. Excuse me. That basin is super challenging. The it's just not that easy. And the infrastructure for that is tremendously expensive. Right. You try to think about piping water back to the river. We did a big trip to the Northwest right in late June. And actually my wife and I and our exchange student took a 4,700 mile RV trip. And saw all these places and one of the striking things is like in Montana and Idaho, living in some of those rivers and the Columbia River. Like it's just pump and water out into the ocean like in a magnitude that we can't imagine here. They forget. But 5% of them in the putter, we'd fly everybody out. Yeah. My friends from Canada were like, you call these rivers? Right. This is like creeks. Right. And Colorado is so unique. It's one of only two states in the whole union that has no water that flows in. Hmm. So why and Colorado are the two states that don't have any water that flow in? There's a corner up in. We should be the richest in water because we just first rights keep it all here, right? But then we'd starve out a bunch of erasoneans and Californians and stuff like that and they would be pissed. Plus you have an act you have an activist community. Right. It's not a bad thing. It's just that you have an activist community and they have a vested interest in seeing things not happen that are environmentally impacting. Right. Most of ours are environmentally impacting. Sure. They're also fun to ride boats on. Yeah. Just don't have sort of all of it. But they're con, you know, the conversation around that is sort of like, well, what do you do about this competing interest between environmentalism and growth? Well, they only really fell to that period as price. Right. And I don't think that's what either side necessarily recognizes in the region. But the activist community doesn't really pay for that price because they already, they're already here. They're here. It's harming them directly. It's harming everybody else. They're just in rich. Right. Right. I mean, right. It's automatically they're just getting rich because their property is going up there. Right. Right. And whatever. Yeah. Like I get it too. Yeah. I totally get it. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, that's life. Right. Like some things are really hard questions and you can see the good and the bad of both sides and, you know, you can get a Subaru or you can get a big four-wheel drive diesel truck and there's good and bad. So both of those things. Those things have issues. Yeah. Yeah. But what is the right thing to do? What is the right thing to do for the people, you know? I'm an advocate for getting as many people to live here at the price that they can possibly like a reasonable price, right? I'd love for people to have affordable housing. But it's such a, all of it's a nice place to live. It's a wonderful place to live. But it's all kind of this sort of convoluted conversation around affordable housing. There really isn't, there's no opportunity for affordable housing because we're not allowing it to happen. Right. We can make whatever policy we want. Yeah. If water is $60,000 a share, affordable housing doesn't exist. Yeah. I mean, good luck. Bring your own water. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, to be, just this is just as frank as it can be, just did a deal that the buyers in 2006 bought a share of water for $22,000 and 35 acres for a total of $100. The whole thing was $200,000. Okay. I just closed on that deal and what are we now, seven, 12 years later, that deal just sold for $475,000 cash with three offers on it. Right. There's nothing like it, right? Yeah. Where are you going to go find 35 acres with the right water and it ain't going to happen? Yeah. There's just that, you know, it's the under... Without even adding value. Why did nothing happen? No, it got worse. Right. No, there's no house, the ditch fell apart and stuff that was like really, you know, it didn't get any better. It changed. It just, it ended up being that there's only one true element of, it's the piece that I think most people who are, that struggle with capitalism, this is where it really rubs them wrong. And it's because these seem unfair. Right. Right. We want to have both things. We want to have a pristine environment that has, like, we live in the Pleistocene era and we don't want to see a neighbor, but we also want our house to be in this place. I want to be able to walk into the coffee shop. Exactly. And I want my house to be $100,000. Right. Well, you just, you're just irreconcilable things and the only true system that allows that to sort of be cooperative to some degree is capitalism. Right. But the only relief out to this situation like this is price. Right. It's, it's the only outcome. Yeah. When you, when it's going to go up, the price is going to go up, you know, help people from out of town all the time in selling and buying their houses and houses are fun to buy and sell. I love shopping with people. That's always a fun deal. My favorite stuff is this other, like, big picture real estate stuff. Yeah, I love it. But you, somebody comes here from Maine and they go, I'm paying what? Right. And he said, yeah, well, but chances are, in 10 years, this house is going to be worth twice that. Right. Right. And they just, you know, their hair just flows back. Well, and I, frankly, for what I've seen, I'd rather live here than LA anyway. Absolutely. And so there's going to have to be some price parity figured out and that, to me, is what is going to carry, hopefully, this Northern Colorado economy through kind of a, you know, an economy that's been damaged by the response to the COVID threat. Yeah. But real estate is so, it's so fluid. People don't realize that but real estate is a really fluid business. You, while it's just an asset that seems like it sits there and you can't, it's not very liquid. You can't go spend it. It target tomorrow. Right. It's a dynamic that, I mean, COVID, I would have never guessed this is what was going to happen in real estate market, right? I would have never guessed, and I'm in the real estate market. Right. I'm very, very versed in it. I would have never guessed that COVID's impact would be that prices would be out of the market. Because everybody from Seattle and Las Angeles, Portland must move here in New York City, like if one, 200th percent of the people in Brooklyn, Ireland want to, or Manhattan, Ireland want to move here, like they'll drive the price up like 50 grand of house just in that. Yeah, they don't, there's no, there's, there's just, and why wouldn't they? And why wouldn't you? Like, I love here. That's what it is. So you just have this really interesting thing that in Colorado politics in general, it's a very fluid state. It's been bright red. It's been purple. It's been dark blue. Yeah, it's getting blue. It seems. You know, so you have this sort of politics that go on here. And I get it. You move here and you don't want it to change, but that's an unfair burden to expect then you can have it all. Right. If you don't want it to change cool, didn't it just expect that you're going to spend way more for your house than you ever could imagine? This is what it's going to be. Yeah. And that's what it's going to have. Your children won't be able to live here. They won't be able to afford a life here. And that there will be no jobs that will pay them what they need to do to live here. So that's your consequence, but it's your choice, right? So yeah, real estate is my picture of real estate is I don't see, I mean, I tend to be, I tend to actually be a fairly, like for the last four years, I thought, okay, we were just suit drop and stock market stock, I mean how can't just can't do this and it can't all be because this, the orange man is in office. Right? I can't, it can't be what's happening. So somewhere along here, it's going to have to change. Yeah. And, but it hasn't. Right. And so locally, I tend to think that I don't know that I see something. They'll be bumps. There's always dips. It's, there's way too many things upstream that caused that to be trouble. Yeah. Reserve Currency and Terrible Infrastructure. Well, it goes to the dollar, maintain, Reserve Currency status, and like basket of currencies and all that stuff. So there'll be dips and bumps along there. But I do think at the end of the day, people want to live in a very safe community where they can go do what they want to do. And they can still walk to the coffee shop. It's a good place to live, and it's a great place to be in the real estate market. I want to, like we got probably only 10 minutes left or something like that. But I want to go up into some third-reel stuff. Like talk to me about your family a little bit. And especially the question I wanted to ask was, like I talked about with my wife, marching through poverty with me. And though, is it Anna, Anna, right? And the kids, and like talk to me about that, especially when you were like depressed, frustrated, humble pie, and dude, figuring out the wood wall business and the whatever. And then the other two things I want to talk about a little bit is you're a relatively libertarian kind of guy, like myself, which is always interesting. Tell me how you got there. So there's three questions to close out. And if you answer them all three, then you can go home. So talk to your family, talk to me about your politics, just a little bit, and where you got there from. And then talk to me about your faith, just a little bit, and how you got there, and why. And you got 10 minutes or something. Go, yeah, like, I think that's part of the local experience is just touching on things that you might not otherwise do. I married the most wonderful person I could have ever married. I loved her to death. She's, she's perfect, right? She's just perfect. Oh, mine's not perfect, but she's perfect for me. Well, she's perfect for me. I wrote a song way back, way, way back when I was touring and playing. One of the lines was I really kind of gone through all of these tumultuous relationships and it just wasn't good, like you do in college, right? So I wrote this line that was sort of a, and I'm praying somebody out there would love me for all that I'm not, right? And that lyric has sort of, I actually got it. My wife actually loves me for all the things that I'm not. I'm really a messy guy in general. I have complications, and I move too fast, and I, but every, you know, every day I come home, my wife is their kind, settling, compassionate, and really is sort of embracing me for all of it. Whether it's good or bad, right? So we can be excited about a great real estate deal, but we can also be humble pie, right? And you just, and there have been moments where we were like, you know what, we don't have any money to do, what we need to go do, like we want to go to California, we're not going to that, we're going to get the car and drive up to Grand Lake and sit on the beach. You know, I'm just going to go to the library. Because we're just, you're going to feel like, but that's who she is. She's great with that, right? She's wonderful. I have four boys. I love them to death. I got twins, Markerson Sawyer, who are 15. Wow, which is crazy. They're sold out. Right. No, it's crazy to think. And they're wonderful boys. Their two brothers are Elias and Emerson. Emerson is 13 and Elias is 12. Well, what a tight pack group, huh? Two and a half years. Bang it out. Two and a half years. We never, we couldn't figure it out. We thought it was maybe the laundry, but we were doing it together. But now, I love them to death. They're great people. My kids are homeschooled. We homeschool our kids, because we're just weirdos, generally, and that stuff. And, or you're concerned about, I just want them to, I want them to be, I wanted to have the most influences long as I could in their life. That's why we homeschooled. I like that. My wife and I said that what mattered to us was not so much the theory. It's put in obligation too. Yeah, but we didn't really care if they were amazing writers, or readers, mathematicians, engineers. They might all become that. So it's strictly selfish on your part. Totally. Yeah, I don't know. But I wanted to have the most influence in their life for the longest period of time I could, because I recognized that when I was probably in sixth or seventh grade, your parents start to sort of take a back seat to your friends and to your teachers. And it wasn't because we wanted to control the kids. It was that we wanted to have a rich life with them. And we wanted them to still be able to lean on us when they had hard conversations that we knew would come. And so we said, let's try our best to be in that space for as long as we can. Yeah, well, and you kind of, at least, went away from influence, but then came back into it. Yeah. And kind of grew a lot, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure. During that time. So yeah, I love my family. We love it here. It's a great spot. My kids, you know, it's really cool. Oh, and you found one of my friends from Seattle at home just down the street. Just around the corner. No, it's wonderful. They're wonderful. I love our life together. It's a great, it's a great kind of almost this strange little love story or cool little love story that I, I love her. She's amazing, you know, so that's my family line. Well, I hope God bless you with just that feeling until the end of your days. I think it will. I think it will. I would talk about politics a little bit in this way. I feel like I may don't hurt people and don't take their stuff. Kind of guy. And that's kind of what attracted me to the idea that you could be, you don't have to be a die hard, political wank to live in America. You don't have to be Rush Limbaugh and you don't have to be Bernie Sanders, right? You could find other things in America. And most people are neither of those. Right. They're compelling, interesting characters because of our media and because of how we live and operate as a society of sort of culture of fame stuff. Right. But I'm not attracted to any of those things. I'm attracted to the idea that I, like, we might have more in common than we have. Most likely we have more in common than we are different. Totally. And I'm sitting at a table with anybody and we can enjoy beer or whiskey or, or a conversation, right, about anything. We might see differently about the objectives of the Puda River. But I'd like to learn that to understand why. And maybe I would hope that I'm compelling enough as an individual that you might want to understand why I am what I am and why I think the way that I do. Why do I think the Puda River ought to be done? Right. We should be doing the Puda, right? Those are things that I think I'm was most compelling about sort of libertarian philosophy. Yeah, and I know it's taken to the extreme. It's a pretty rough world and there's bad guys about, that's one of the challenges, right? Yeah, and nobody cares who, what Austrian economics is, nobody cares, right? So we can't win. You know what's the right one? I can't, I can't see you. Come on. Nobody really wants to, I mean, nobody's going to ever talk that way. And I don't love the intellectualism of the libertarian side of things. I don't think you need to go cloister yourself in a tower and tell everybody how to do it. They shouldn't be that proud. They haven't even broken one in a hundred percent, right? So it's like, it's not a party that I'm very, I don't appreciate the party portion of it, but I really do resonate with the idea that like, you don't, we can build a coalition about things to make a great place, right? And Fort Collins is this example of that, right? A bunch of diverse ideas. That's what led me there was, was I wrote down a note here earlier, it was just laws. Yeah, like the laws make it harder to do things and when you make it harder to do things, then less things happen or they cost more. That's exactly right. So, and the experience in Fort Collins is that it's a group of people from all over the world. I don't lock my back door. Right, like I haven't for 10 years locked the back door of my house, even when I'm on vacation. So if you see that I'm going on vacation, go steal my shit. I don't really have any shit that's worth taking but go steal my shit. And I want to live in a place like that where I can trust everyone of my neighbors and really everyone in my community to not steal my shit. You know, and I think ultimately that's what I'm attracted to about that philosophy. I'm not an existentialist. I'm a person that believes that we were created. Sure. And we were created for a purpose. Right. We don't know what that purpose is but we weren't just... We know it isn't to go steal people's shit. Yeah, and it's my cousin but we're getting into the religious thing. But as part of it, we have to have values if we're going to be self-managing. I don't believe in Sartre's stuff that says that you should, you know, that we go find our destiny based or find our purpose based on what we make of our own world. I think we're created. And I think that moves us into a space of being better than we might be. Simply because there's a destiny that was laid out for us by a creator. Right. So I'm that... I'm not... I don't find myself in an existential thought process. I am a person that thinks that I'm actually a... I don't know, a modernist or an enlightenment person thinks that there's really cool stuff that we, as humans, we were given a gift of life liberty in the pursuit of happiness, but not by government or more my fellow man, we were given to it by a creator. Right. And so I live in that space both in my politics but also in my own life, right? I believe in a creator and I believe in redemption and I believe in a very simple faith. I'm not a... I'm by no means a zealot. I'm a person that... You're not a dogmatic guy. No, and I don't have to be comfortable with that, right? I can look at scripture and say, Genesis is a wonderful, beautiful poem that was written and ha-dum is the Hebrew word for Adam and I'm okay with that. I can also be really comfortable that if God made the world in seven days and there was a true Adam in any of, I'm okay with that too. I don't have to have that answer. Right. And so I don't spend much time worried about it and I certainly don't spend much time thinking about, you know, parsing apart what chapter 16 and verse one. I don't know that person. Yeah, yeah. But I am a person that believes that redemption's real and that God is the one that says, I wanna have a relationship with my creation and so I'm gonna give you the vehicle in which to be able to do that. And the end of all of it is that all things are forgiven, right? Right. And that's a lot of my own perception is like, I'm a little bit like a dance in the boundaries of appropriate behavior and conversation and things like that sometimes. And I, but I also resonate with almost all the pastors of my church and they're like, you know, I think, God's kind of with that guy and he believes in him, right? And I bet you have the same kind of experience. Totally. I was, I wanted to be in the religious field. I wanted to have that as a career at some point in my life. But I wasn't, but I didn't go that way. And ultimately I'm really glad it didn't because I feel like for me, there's just this really simple deal. If you believe in substitutional theory in theology, which is that Jesus came and died. I think of it as well. Right, like this. And he was rose again. That's just substitutional theory, right? You just say, well, he took my place, took the place of this and that's, it was all put on him. You have to take the whole thing if you're gonna do that. And so for me, I take the whole thing. I take everything was substituted on my behalf. And so that's where I live in my faith. So where can I ask if there's a place where you came to that place? Like, did you have, I know you grew up in a Christian family, but did you, like, run away? I grew up, so for context, I grew up going to a church and I got confirmed at 13. But it was a church that I never knew what the good news was until I was 24 when I moved to Fort Collins, right? I was in a coffee shop in Calgary reading a book called Love Is Now that was written by Peter Gilquist, which is a, this old funky book. And I bought it for all my kids. You can buy them for like five bucks online now. It's an out-of-print book. Peter Gilquist, an interesting guy, a campus crusade guy, and I was just burnt and I'd gone through theology school. You said you were there, but headed in that direction was gonna go work in the ministry kind of stuff, whatever. And just was done. I mean, you pray every day, you reach a Bible, nothing happened, you know, just talking to the wall. So I was like, I'm a professor of mine. So I really had to go read this book. So I found it in the library, sat down at a coffee shop thinking that I'd read like, get a cup of coffee and read a chapter. And I sat there all day, read the book. And when I was done with the book, I was like, you know what, I don't think I ever want to live the same way I ever did ago. I want to live in this rich idea that there's no portion that I'm gonna add to the idea that there was a substitution for me. What am I gonna do to add to a finished work? I like that. Right, what am I gonna do that says? Okay. I imagine you had the same kind of pressures to be a faith guy, as you did it, be an ever guy and learn this big thing, right? But then once you read that book and you said, you know, it's actually a lot simpler than that. And I don't have to carry this burden. I'm just a simple guy, right? Like, I'm gonna sit at the foot of the cross and say, hang on while you're doing what you're doing. Let me do something down here. Like, yeah, I'm gonna fix it up for you. I'm gonna fix this, I know what you're doing. What you're doing, good job. I'll see you in a little while. I just got some of your work to do. I gotta open some ice down here. I'm sure I'm here. And all that stuff, I don't know that, right? I feel like we really are people that it's finished. Cool work. It's really interesting stuff that I'd rather be involved. I'd much rather be involved with my employees and I'd ever be involved in our church, right? Yeah. That's much more compelling to me than anything. Right. So, in that regard, that's what my faith means to me. It's simple, it's liberal, right? In terms of the church, right? But it is what I feel most at home in is that I'm really grateful for it. And it's the place I can find my most gratitude and thankfulness is that I get to have this sort of transformational, fundamental relationship with someone that isn't based upon my performance. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why I love my wife. Right. It's why I love my kids. It's why I love my best friends. So, why wouldn't I say the same thing about the God that made me? That's really interesting. Yeah. I think that's probably a good place to stop if you want to. I wish I could just keep going. No, I don't wish to keep going. I think it's, we'll have you on again. Yeah. It'll probably be a few months because we're very popular. Well, good. I'm glad to hear it. Do you want to ask me anything? I'll give you that. That'll be the, that we just established a new, a new thing. Because this is, yeah, it sounded like an interview. I wanted it to be a conversational style. I think it was a little bit that way. I either checked the chair in there, but what do you have for me? I'm always curious about your, I always appreciated in the banking world when we were working together that you would find people that had great ideas and you could, you could figure out a way to make that work for them. Whether that was green ride or, you know, whoever else. You just saw good ideas and made it happen. Like, why did you do that? Because banks don't do that. They only lend umbrellas when it's dry outside. Right. Yeah. That's one of my favorite quotes is Mark Twain. Right. A banker is a man who will loan you his umbrella and then take it back when it starts to rain. That's right. You know, well, I think it goes, it probably goes to my deep roots, as my dad was, my dad was the son of an alcoholic, came from a broken home, my dad's next younger brother just died because of longtime alcoholism and things and the next one to come is probably going to be the next to go. But dad took that challenge and turned it into a great opportunity and he started a farm evenings and weekends when I was five year old or something. And over time, he reinvested and reinvested and did it better, did it better and created an amazing thing. But before that ever happened, like he, his cousin's inherited a quarter-sectional land, 160 acres, not a big property, as you know. And dad was a motorcycle mechanic since he was 14, he graduated high school, but just kind of, you know, no thoughts of college, earning minimum wage or just more. And the seventh banker that he talked to, loaned him enough money to buy a tractor and enough to pay the first half of the cash rent that was due. And probably that, you know, that I've actually changed some lives and created some jobs by risking the bank's money. And that's why I'm not there anymore because I wasn't ever going to be able to make bets with other people's money and I didn't have any money in my own. So, you know, that's why I keep working hard to help with local think tank businesses. You know, I want to help people create legacies. We didn't even get into the legacy project, but I guess that's part two. So yeah, and that's, you know, that's one of the things that I think is so cool is that we come from such different places, but there's so much the same. Yeah. And our hearts wound up in so much the same place as far as we wanted to, so I got tears in my eyes. You're glistening a little bit too, and so let's just click classes one more time for microphones. Yes. And guys, be good, sir. A little talk to you again soon. Sounds great. Thank you for listening in to this week's local think tank podcast. Remember to subscribe and follow us wherever you listen to podcasts and for more information on our business resources, follow us at www.locothinktank.com.