Shaun Newman Podcast - #1018 - Greg Treat

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Gregory Treat is an American attorney specializing in estate planning, wills, trusts, probate, business law, and related family legacy matters through his firm Gregory Treat, PLLC. He is also the founder of Avalon Circle Consulting, where he operates as a strategic consultant helping families build generational wealth, structure intellectual property, and implement covenantal business and trust strategies for long-term legacy protection.You can find Greg Treat here:avaloncircle.comSilver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Viva Fry. I'm Dr. Peter McCulloch. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is J.P. Sears. Hi, this is Frank Peretti.

This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. How's everybody doing today? I tell you what. Somebody was just in the studio.

Okay? And they're like, are you excited for Cornerstone yet? And I'm like, man, let's just get the show. show on the road, shall we? That's, I'm hoping everybody travels safe, okay? I'm praying that all the speakers arrive safe, that everything just goes smoothly, all right? We get a smooth show. Sean's going to be one happy camper.

The Cornerstone Forum, folks, is just days, well, what are we at? We're at the 17th. We are 11 days away, 11 days away from the Cornerstone Forum, okay? and if you don't have tickets, you can get full access to it after it's done. Sorry, I keep saying, the week after. So Monday through Thursday,

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It's $8. It's $8. Anyways, it's not a whole heck of a lot. And you can sit back in the comfort of your house and watch the entire Cornerstone Forum. It is not live stream, but we will, we will have all the videos going. Now, I've just filibustered for the first couple of minutes here. And Silver Gold Bull, okay, along with Bow Valley Credit Union, bringing the Cornerstone Forum to Calgary.

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We've been talking all about the Cornerstone Forum. I let off with it. I'll reiterate. If you don't have tickets, become a paid member on Substack, and you'll get full access to the Cornerstone Forum the week after as we release all the videos from the day on Saturday. Who's excited? I'm excited.

I'm feeling good. My voice is back. My leg's feeling great. Sean, stop filibustering. Let's get on to the day's show. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Right.

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share with a friend, folks. Share with a friend. Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is an American attorney who specializes in estate planning, wills and trusts. He's also the founder of Avalon Circle Consulting, where he operates as a strategic consultant

helping families build generational wealth. I'm talking about Gregory Treat, so buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Gregory Tree. Sure. Thanks for helping us. Thank you so much. Great to be here. Well, it was interesting to meet you. You're the second person that I met or had on the podcast. Apologies that I met when I was in Panama City.

I'd had some interesting conversations there and I was like, I need to connect with these people. And you're one of them. Now, I'm going to assume that most of my audience, if not all of it, has never heard of you before. So how will we just start with a little bit of your background, who you are, introduce yourself to the audience. You can go as long or as short as you want to go. Well, thank you so much. Well, my name is Gregory Treat, and I am an estate planning and trust attorney license in the state of Texas. And I do succession planning for multi-generational businesses that are, or at least businesses that aspire to be multigenerational for people all over the country. And I'm looking forward to hopefully doing it for people even outside of the United States here in the coming years.

I grew up on a fourth generation dairy farm in California. And I'll date myself a little bit. So my childhood was in the early 90s. And that was, if you know anything about the history of California these past 40 years, the early 90s was not a good time to have a small family ag operation in that area in California. So I basically spent my childhood with us losing this land that had been in my family for multiple generations by. inches kind of a death of a thousand cuts you know you're the the bureaucrats at least in the united states so far can't actually just tell you to close though i was hearing about uh some some deer

ranchers in one of the northern states up by by you guys in canada that just we're just told basically you're you're we're shutting down your business or we're shutting down your business as soon as the current generation of owners dies and but uh you know local local governments can make things hard to get can make chemicals hard to get, can make a lot of agricultural models unprofitable. And so then when my grandfather finally was like, okay, we're shutting down the ranch operations, we lost our grandfathering status, and then we couldn't reopen. And so from the time I was six until about the time I was 16, we were trying to sell ag land that could not be used for any profitable ag purpose.

And we couldn't even, we weren't even allowed to rezone the property. When I was 16, we got assessed for tax purposes as though the zoning request that my grandfather had kept sending in had been granted even though it hadn't. So instead of being assessed on 364 ag acres, we were assessed on 1,400 and something suburban lots, which is a huge tax bill, property tax bill, as you might imagine. And then my grandfather got lawyers involved. And within about six months, they had cleaned up the tax problem. They had allowed our zoning issue to be resolved so that we could finally sell the land and we sold the land for perhaps 50 cents on the dollar instead of 10. And that was horrible and awful, but also it impressed upon my young mind the importance

of lawyers. And so when I graduated from high school after I did a couple of things bounced around, I decided that I wanted to become a lawyer. And so I pursued that goal for a number of years. And then when I got out of law school, worked for some estate planning guys in Texas for a while and then realized, you know, the reason why a lot of these family businesses are failing or that they're not making the leap to true multigenerational status is not because it's not a legal problem. And there are certainly legal components to it. I don't think you can make a successful generational succession without a legal component for sure. And you need good lawyers in your life.

But you also need a difference in family culture. Like one of the things that I just constantly saw was that business owners kind of in our highly individualistic, highly atomistic, highly alienated world that we're living in now, would send their kids off to college and, and, you know, they would, they would know that they were sort of losing their children to the system forever. You know, it's really interesting. You talk about the growth of the homeschool movement. And one of the key points in the homeschool movement, getting traction was empowering mothers to realize, hey, this feeling, this bad feeling that you have when you drop your child off for kindergarten or worse for, you know, daycare preschool, that sick feeling you have in the pit of your stomach, like you're losing some aspect of your

connection with your child forever, that's a real feeling. That is your body telling you, you know, something bad is about to happen. And in many, many, many cases, it was something bad that was about to happen. And it was avoidable for many families who could make the choice to homeschool. And I think for most business owners, there's, there's a guy who, you know, he's, he's taking his son around the campus tour. And he's, he's relatively well off. And at some point in this process of him taking his son to look at various campuses, he realizes that this kid is never coming back. And then simultaneously often for the first time, he realizes, oh, my goodness, I really wanted him to come back. And he has no vocabulary for that. He doesn't know how to express

it well. He has no plan to be successful in this endeavor. And so he either does something that tends to be relationally negative between him and his children, or he just sort of buries that feeling and it kind of grows and gnaws at him throughout the time that the child is in college. And frequently that prophecy turns out to be true. Less and less, actually, because as our economic situation continues to decline, more children are being forced to come back to their parents' houses and build a life much more similar to kind of the rest of history aside from the last 100, 150 year blip that we've been living in in modernity, late modernity.

But I realized that I wanted to help. those guys because there is a way to plan to be successful. Legacy families have been doing that for many, many generations, and they're very good at it. They're repeatable. It's not a random thing. It's not a luck thing. It's not something that's just in certain people's bloodlines. I don't believe in nobility in that sense, right, that there are certain people that just have a magical power that they can raise their kids differently and better. I think there are, now, character matters enormously, I'll say. Character obviously matters. But there are repeatable practical things that you can do in your family culture that will allow you to attain success

in a multi-generational venture. And I didn't see very many people doing that. I've been incredibly pleased over the past three years to see more and more people start talking about this, more and more online personalities. I mean, just yesterday, Matt Walsh did a, did a post on X about how, you know, I used to think that we should just kick our kids out at 18 and they can sink or swim. And now I've changed. And I'm just, I think that that's a, that's an, that's an incredible sign of where we are, that the conservatives, that the right wing is realizing, hey, you know, maybe, maybe this whole kick people out at 18 thing isn't serving us well. Maybe that's handing our children over to a system that doesn't much like us as they tell us

on repeated occasions. And maybe there is a different and better way, which doesn't mean your kids don't go to college, right? If you need them to have a piece of paper, I can get the piece of paper. There's a million different ways to get that piece paper. If you want them to have some kind of enriching cultural experience, you know, let's talk about what experience you think they'll get at a college. And then let's talk about the reality of the last 30 years. And let's talk about how can we functionally get your kids some of those benefits. But these are, these are the things that I do in my practice. And I'm delighted to be able to assist families in thinking about those things. Because I think they can be really successful. But you have to be, you have to be intentional

about it. This is definitely not the default that our culture offers you either from a cultural perspective or from a legal perspective. So that's that's a little bit about me. When you're talking about family culture and that legacy families have repeatable, practical things that they do, walk me through that. Yeah. Well, first I'll give you kind of a negative example. So I was I was sitting with a with a family that was dealing with some issues with one of their sons. And the son was kind of stock, he didn't know what to do. I didn't really want to go off to college, wasn't, wasn't sure there was a place for him in the family business. He was really interested in website design and building this a couple years ago right before the AI revolution made all that,

you know, so cheap as to be difficult to parse. But so the father and the son were, we're discussing how he was going to get a new car. And the dad was like, well, I'm, I want, I want to, I want you to build me a website. That's how you're going to, I'm going to pay you for building me these websites for some businesses, ventures that I'm starting up. And that's how you're going to get, you're going to pay for your new car. And the son went, did some research, figure out what other people were making and presented his dad with a market rate offer. And the dad said in my hearing, in his wife's hearing, in the son's hearing, in front of an outsider like me, which please, so please don't do this,

friends, said, you're not worth that much money. Okay. Now, I then had a conversation with them about wages and inflation and how things have worked over the last year. And I demonstrate, to the father that he had actually been paid, adjusted for real inflation significantly more than his son was asking for at a similar age and similar level of experience. We had a fascinating conversation about why that was. But let's assume that had been true. Let's assume that the son genuinely was not worth that much. Do you say that? No. A legacy family would never, ever, ever say that. Because a legacy family would say, what you have, your value, the value that you bring to the table is like 90% what we have taught you. We own the development of you as an asset,

right? You got to own your development as a person. We own the development of you as an asset. And so if you're not worth the money that you need or the money that would be that it would cost to do this thing, then that's on us. And so we would never, we would never communicate that. And I think when I look at that and I think about many, many similar interactions that I've heard and witnessed or heard about later, I think these are kind of coping mechanisms from a history of sending children out at 18. So if you're a peasant in England in the 1600s or the 1700s, right, as America is kind of kicking off and getting started, genuinely, there's nothing you can offer your child that

is anywhere near as good as what it will be like if they can go to America and establish themselves. That's the right decision for them to make, okay? the availability of land, the freedom, the practical freedom, the religious freedom, the fact that you're not going to be constantly tangling with a more and more advanced regulatory state, genuinely what this family needs to do is send their kid off and probably never see them again. That's the right call. But, you know, when you're dealing with families, families have an attachment. Kids don't want to leave. Parents often don't want to say. So they, you create a series of negative interactions until the kid gets mad enough to leave. This is pushing them

out of the nest. This is making them uncomfortable with staying where where they are. And, you know, I'll note that the families that handled that better seem to have been much more successful, right? Because a lot of the kids that felt pushed out of the nest really came to America and did not have good outcomes. Wherever they went, they did not have good outcomes. But I think that we're sort of reaping the fruits of several generations of, well, hey, the best thing that I can do for you as a child is send you away from kind of the crappy situation that I have economically, politically, whatever, you know, whatever it is. And you can go find your fortune. Go west, young man, right? That interaction, you're not worth that is another way of saying, go west, young

man. And there's, I think, a lot of just negative cultural patterns that go along with it, which I'll say, it doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to leave that kind of negative impact when you tell your child, you know, please go west, young man. It doesn't have to be that. But for many families, I think their experience and you track this, you know, what was it like for you to move out? What was it like for your father to move out? What was like for your grandfather to move out? And five generations back, we're talking about the people that literally left England, right, or the Netherlands or someplace in northwest Europe. And it's this really, really negative story about how what caused them to leave England or was not the opportunity. out in America, it was an incredibly negative experience between them and their parents that said, I can't stay here. Okay. And I think that's really what's going on for a lot of these families. So what legacy families is they avoid that. Now, children need to leave. You know, one of my, one of my friends, Benjamin Black, who runs the dynastus substack, he's done a deep study of how many successful families send their kids to another family or to a different situation for one or two,

years, but you send them out with the expectation that they'll come back. And many times with the expectation that they will come back either with capital or with, you know, a bride, right, frequently. So, so you send them out with the expectation that this is more like an extended hunting party, you're sending them on a voyage, right? And, and the hope is not that that the voyage ends with the kid living far away. The hope is that the voyage ends with the kid coming back with, you know, spice or some modern equivalent from the far east and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And he's now rich and he can be a pillar and a contributor to his family. But you have to lay that out as an expectation and give them permission to do that.

Otherwise, when they are forced to come back, they come back feeling like they failed, feeling like a loser. And actually living with, you know, as Jordan Peterson fond of saying, and living with losers kind of sucks, right? That's not a good life strategy. That goes like not against everything. Nah, it probably does. I'm like, you know, I'm like at 18.

What do you hope? You know, like, I don't know. Am I speaking just for myself? Am I speaking for all the people listening? I don't know. At 18, you kick them out. You hope you've given them the ability to fly and they go fly on their own

and they have to make their way in the world. Right. You're saying something completely different. Greg. Right. You're saying something very different. Very different. Very different.

Well, and I think we need to recognize that there is an economic reality that comes with the frontier that is not with us. anymore. Okay. So for close to 100 years, if you walked, if you could walk 200 miles west, land prices dropped by 10 to 20 times, right? For there, there was significant periods of time in America's history. I don't know exactly how it worked up in Canada where, you know, the land, you could have it for the price of registration, which famously was $20 in Andrew Jackson in,

in America, right? And if you could just, if you could just claim the land and pay the registration, fee, which was $20, then you could have the land for effectively free. And we have to recognize that that's not available anymore. And that, and that that determines so much, right? It means that if you're aggressive, you're willing to take risks, that you can go someplace where there are basically no rules. There's no social safety net, but there's also no limitations. There's no regulatory state holding you back. There's no environmental safety studies that you have to fill out in triplicate before you can do anything with your business. That all doesn't exist. You are free to innovate, you are free to do what you, what you can. And if you're smart and if you're canny,

and if you kind of work hard, there genuinely are opportunities. Now, that ended, you know, pretty dramatically in the 1920s because we hit the West Coast and used up all the land. And that's, you know, so, so at that point, that's when we started trying to replicate that effect by extending credit, right? So you would give people 10 year notes, right? You would give people 20 year notes. Now, you know, now we're up to the, the Trump administration is talking about essentially stacking, putting their thumb on the scales to allow 50-year mortgages, right? I want you to think about for a second, you know, the idea of a 50-year mortgage. Like, that means you have to be employed every month for 50 years. For 50 years, every single month, you have to make a mortgage payment.

And if you don't, then you will lose your house. you will you there is that is an incredible risk right last year a while back we had the the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank right you know why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because they had long-term obligations and short-term assets and when those short-term assets didn't pay when the money didn't come in they were unable to meet their long-term obligations and they collapsed this bank and everyone said oh my gosh this is just a terrible business decision why would any sane person you know, agree to absorb the risk between short-term, you know, income and a long-term obligation. And that's what we do with everyone. And that is a direct result of our culture trying to come to

terms with the fact that there is no more frontier, at least not within the continental United States or the continental North American continent. So we have to recognize that there is a change in circumstance that requires a change in behavior. Yeah, well, a hundred years ago, you could done what you're talking about with go west here in Canada. Certainly, roughly the similar idea to Andrew Jackson was playing out in the west here. And I kind of wonder about if you went to the extreme north and forgive me if I got listeners up in the Yukon and Northwest territories, none of it. That is barren land in the middle of nowhere. And I wonder if a similar idea plays out up there to what you're talking about. Regardless. I think it does. I think it does. Even even to some extent to this

day, though it's getting harder and harder, right? Yes, but what you're talking about is the access to it is becoming more and more difficult. So then you come back to an idea, forgive me for using pop culture references, but it reminds me. And I guess the only way I know it is like the godfather, peekie blinders. I know those are two criminal organizations and that's not what you're saying, but you keep everything in the family. The family stays tight net. And when I think of the godfather, that's exactly what they do.

Is that what you're talking about, except in less maybe a nefarious way? Yeah. So, I mean, there's kind of the crime families. People talk about the crime families. And there's, you know, fictional, fictional stories, you know, Game of Thrones, Dune, you know, the great houses, right? Sure. The great house effect. You know, one of the things that's very interesting, you know, you've probably heard that when when divorce becomes widespread, then society collapses a generation after that, you've heard that, that discussion.

and that statistical reality. So that statistical reality is the end, the chopping block, the final piece of some brilliant academic scholarly work that was done by a gentleman named Carl Zimmerman back in the 1920s and 30s, as I recall. He basically invented the field of family sociology, wrote a great work called Family and Civilization, and then kind of repeated the thesis in a variety of there's family and civilization in East and West, talking about India and China, there's family in civilization. There's how do we, there's family in marriage, marriage and civilization. There's all these books. He's basically repeating the same thesis through the rest of his career. And basically he posits that there are kind of three stages to family development, right? There's the first stage. He

called it the trustee family. And the trustee family is a family where the members, they own collectively, and they work collectively. So the family is kind of like a union rep, right? The family is this organization that pools labor so that they can negotiate effectively with the market. For most of human history, you needed 10 men, you needed the bump, the economic bump that comes from having 10 adult males in one firm that could negotiate collectively in order to afford the cheapest form of real estate. So one guy working alone could not, he would get maybe 5% of the value of real estate in terms of his daily wages.

But when you got that bump from 10 people, then suddenly they could afford a real estate for themselves and their families. And that was, that was the, the kind of the minimum unit of society was that, that 10 men unit. And that's, it's the basis of the Roman Legion. It's the basis of the, it was called the medieval lance, right? So these, in, in Rome, they went from the stone masons were units of 10. And they, they were the smallest unit that could effectively afford real estate. And that became the military unit for the Roman Empire in the medieval period, the Lance was initially a military unit, and then it kind of became the organizing principle of their society between the Crusades and the Protestant Reformation

in a lot of ways. So this number shows up in a lot of places. There's a great paper by a gentleman named Stephen Ruggles, power patriarchy and pay in modern America. And it documents how in the beginning, you know, at 1800 in America, 90% of people were living what he calls corporate families, right and corporate families are situations where the reason why you're able to afford your house is because you either inherited it from a family member or your family helped you buy it or you're actually like leasing or a living on land owned by your family or by a business owned by your family in 1890 percent of the people who got married and reproduced in America lived in that kind of situation and you can watch as wages for single men rise and the

corporate family declines. And this has happened before. So you go from the trustee family where the family controls, owns property and it negotiates, like people come together to present a unified front of the labor markets. And then you go to what's called the domestic family. And in the domestic family, a lot of times there's still family property, but everybody is working separately. Everybody has separate jobs. Everybody has a separate income situation. And this is the decline of This is sort of the inflection point that Doughton Abbey is placed in, right, where we still have the family property. We still have this ancestral holding. We still have these assets that are kind of sticky that a bunch of the family members orient around.

But we actually all do something totally different to earn our living. And then finally, you have what Zimmerman called the atomistic family or the atomic family. Modern really, we would call the nuclear family where you break down and you just have the sexual couple, husband, wife, and children. And this is associated with high rates of mobility, a cash economy, all of those things. What Zimmerman shows in family and civilization is that this has happened at least four times, twice for the Greeks, once for the Romans, and then once in the medieval period. And every time that it happens, one generation, 40 to 80 years after we hit the nuclear family,

we have the divorce rates and then 40 to 80 years after the divorce rate spike, then society collapses and they're conquered by their neighbors. By the way, we're in year 60 right now of our of our little experiment in high divorce rates in North America here. So say that again, what year are we in? So we broadly speaking in America, we allowed no fault divorce across the country starting in the 60s. And then that was that process was materially complete in the 80s. But so we're in the West Coast, California, where I grew up, we're there in year 60 of uh of of what you know carl Zimmerman who did this comprehensive study of

every culture that we have records on he said yeah so you you go from when you're a trustee family when you have the dominant unit of the dominant way that families exist in your world as trusty families you become an empire you become an imperial power you're wealthy you accumulate wealth famously julius caesar you know you know in britain there there's hadrian's wall and right the Roman Empire kind of pushed up to these points. And then they never really went back. They never really tried to conquer those people. And the reason for that was because Julius Caesar and then Caesar Augustus and then

Hadrian kind of the last time that they ever really sent troops up there all came back and said, hey guys, you know, we have households. Households are what create wealth. These trustee families are what create wealth and multigenerational success. And those, you know, northern barbarians, they don't have households. And that means they don't have any wealth. And so we could conquer them. We're militarily superior to them, but we would gain nothing because they don't have anything

worth stealing, which is a fascinating insight to see in these historical records. But yeah, I think when we see what we're seeing now with the breakdown of the family, this is, you know, roughly a 200-year process that we've been on. It doesn't just start in the 60s with divorce every single time that we have gone to a point where people are kicked out at 18 and the nuclear family, the husband, the wife, and their minor children becomes the dominant unit of society. Within 40 to 80 years of that, divorce spikes, it's almost like families are not humans are not designed to live that, that closely together or that, that, that's separated that, that atomistically separated from a larger family group.

You know, Camille Paglia talks about how, you know, for, we had to develop new studies. There's no, there's no historical studies. There's no ancient studies of what it's like for a woman, to be alone. Because in all cultures everywhere on the world, women just didn't exist in groups of less than five to 10. Like every task they did, everywhere they went, everywhere they were, like aside from the moments when they were, you know, in a bed, marital bed being intimate with their husband, there was always a bunch of people around. That was life for women. You know, men would sometimes go off and do, you know, lonely solitude oriented things. Then they'd write great epics about it. And it was considered this incredible spiritual achievement to have done that. Many cultures,

That was kind of the final trial to become a shaman or a king or somebody of high status, not just an ordinary guy, but somebody that everyone would respect was to go off and do something by yourself. But for the women, that doesn't exist. And so we are doing new things that have never been done before. But yeah, whenever you see that, this economic fragmentation, then it just seems to start a process that leads to the divorce and then the divorce leads to the collapse of societies. we understand kind of the single, the single parent family becoming the norm.

So, so that, that is the process that we're in. And, and I think that, you know, there are warnings in many religious texts about, about even stepping on to this process at the first, like when you study, what does the Bible mean by honor your father and mother and study stories like Naboth's Vineyard, where he looks at the king and the king says, hey, I want that land. And he goes, yeah, I can't give you that land because that would be betraying my ancestors. What does that mean? what's going on there? Well, it means you got to have this continuity. You don't, you don't have the

right to exist as an, as an independent economic unit the way we understand it today. Now, independent economic units are great for GDP. All right. If what we're trying to do is make the big line go up, then you, what you want to do is break things down and maximize the number of virtuous actors. So, so that, that's a valid strategy. That's what we've been doing. But there are fertility costs. You know, again, you saw the Rome, had the fertility consequences, there was actually a situation. One of the, one of the emperors, about two or three hundred AD publishes incentives for any Roman woman who will have children of Roman birth, right? Because so many Roman nobles were only having children with their concubines.

And that was causing a number of social problems for them. So we've seen this before. We know more or less where it ends. And so yeah, it's very foreign. It's very different from what we've seen in the past the past 100, 150 years, maybe 200 years, kind of broadly. But I think we're facing the same kinds of problems that people who have gone down this path have faced in the past. And that's, you know, that's one of the reasons why, you know, one of the other topics we were going to talk about is that's one of the reasons why free markets do not create suburbs, because individual people are not incentivized to do that without a lot of pressure from a government who's subsidized them to, again, to try to make GDP go up. And perhaps it does.

that, but you know, we have to ask is, is GDP the only success condition that that we have for life and are people interchangeable? What happens when you don't have healthy, stable marriages leading to healthy, stable families leading to children having expectations about how they should treat the people who came before them and critically how they should treat the people who are coming after them in terms of how they're raising their children? So, yeah, it's a very different mindset than what we've, what we've been in these, these past, decades. Well, I just think about myself and like got three kids. And when I, when I first had all three of them, my brain was, you know, when they hit 18, out the door they go. And they're going to try,

because at 18, I was ready to go. I want it out. But it's funny. You know, as I went out and explored the world where to come back to, roughly home, roughly. And, you know, you know, know, you bring up all these, you know, like, I feel like everybody's been kind of like, something is just off, right? I don't know what it is, but I'm going to go search it out. Something is just off. And then you see the attacks on the family. And you're like, well, that, okay, I get that. But what you're talking about is even like the free markets and suburbs. I think you should explain that thought for people because, you know, like, where does everybody want to live? And the burbs, why? Sure. It's a nice area and it's beautiful. And, you know,

you're close to the city, but you're kind of on the, you know, skirts and you know, blah, blah, blah. But walk me through the free markets, don't create the suburbs thought. Yeah, I mean, that's a provocative statement. And, you know, arguably, arguably there's one free market in the world that's created a suburb. And that would be the factory owners in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century into the 19th century. And by the way, those are the factory owners that made marks palatable in central Europe for a long time. were so bad as people, as bosses, as city planners, as urban planners, that a lot of people who experienced life under their role were willing to try to see what would happen if we tried Marxism.

That's how bad those guys were. But they, and again, even that, what is going on there? You have a factory owner who has enormous economic control over his city. He buys up large amounts of space and he builds suburbs, right? That's the origin, the Viennese suburbs. And then that idea kind of comes over in the Levitt towns and then the Sears Housing Corporation and the kit homes. But what I've learned, so one of the things that I've known for a long time is that suburbs are broken, like as an economic model. And so I did some study.

I was like, okay, well, I'm a free markets guy. I don't know that I would call myself a libertarian, but I have a great respect for the Austrian School of Economics. and I love a lot of those forms of analysis. So when I see something that has a lot of government money in it, and hopefully your listeners are aware that there is a lot of government money in suburbs in that whole process, but I say, okay, so what's a free market example that we can imitate? And I went through it.

And aside again from Vienna in the 1880s, I couldn't find any examples of a free market producing these things. They're always produced. So they kind of took off in America when the GI Bill, right? there were these GIs that came back from World War II. We'd kind of shaken them up and they weren't really ready to go back home. A lot of them came from very, very and economically depressed neighborhoods. And so we didn't, there was some policy considerations.

We didn't want to have the deadliest people that we had ever trained, go back and face a really negative economic situation. So we built huge amounts of suburbs in mostly California to house the GIs as they come back. And the government explicitly paid for that. So that's really where you start seeing it take off. And then we noticed something, which was when you break apart, instead of having multi-generational households, when you break people apart and you have every house, have its own washing machine, its own washer and dryer, its own appliances, all of these things,

then the municipal tax rate spike and the salaries that county and city officials can pay themselves goes up considerably. And there was some enterprising consultants that went around the country. showing as, hey, if you have a, if you have a suburb, you have a new development, a new subdivision in your world, then your tax revenue is going to go up. You're going to get money and you're going to be able to pay yourself. Okay. And, you know, I finally, I ultimately found there's a great book called Strong Towns, which lays out a whole bunch of these things. And it basically says we're, we're in what's called a growth-based economy. What does a growth-based economy look like? It means that we are able to, or rather we, we are choosing to look at growth, to look at new development as though it is

income. So if you were to evaluate all urban areas, all municipalities in at least the United States and I would expect that Canada is the same, if you were to evaluate them based on the the accounting rules that apply to any other domain, they're all hilariously insolvent. Okay. They're not just broke. They are, they are beyond broke. They are massively, massively in debt. But when cities, you know, Detroit famously went bankrupt and what do we do in response to that? Did we fix the underlying economic model? No, we change the municipal accounting rules. And again, Strongtowns goes into this in much greater depth. But basically, we don't have to look at future maintenance costs. So when you install a road, when you install a sewage system, when you install a water line,

when you install power lines, as a city, you don't have to look, you don't have to account for the ongoing maintenance costs, you don't have to list them as expenses. You don't have to list them even as deferred expenses when you're deferring them. You just say, hey, the new investment, the money that's coming in to build those and the money that's coming in to build the houses, that is income to us. We're going to look at that as income. And so long as that money coming in initially, these big swazza money, which are ultimately derived from loans, right? Banks are lending to the governments or they're issuing bonds, which is another form of kind of government credit. And we're getting a bunch of money in the door. And so long as we have enough of that money in the door to offset the current salaries for our long-term personnel,

right? The mayor, whatever city officials we may have, then we're calling that good, right? We're saying that's a balanced book. And again, if you did that in any other context, you'd go to jail. But that, I mean, that's one of the reasons why the municipal corporation and the municipal accounting rules are, are so extreme. It's because we can't get people to produce suburbs by the operations of the free market. We have to subsidize it at every level. So there are tax subsidies. There are just outright grants to developers that happen.

There are state level subsidies. There are federal level subsidies. And then there's the even larger subsidies, which are the Fannie Mae Freddie Macs system. When the government underwrites, when it says, hey, if your mortgage is qualified in these ways, following this process, the government will just buy it. right this government agency will just buy the by the loan and we're going to stack them all together

and we don't care by the way this is this is what caused the 2008 crisis right because somebody kind of finally figured out hey this isn't a free market the government is subsidizing us so let's just lean into the subsidy right and that ultimately crash the u.s economy and had and it wasn't wasn't too pretty up there in canada and the rest of the world either uh you know the great financial crisis was was built on the fact that at a functional institutional level the u.s government subsidizes the building of single family residences in ways that we wouldn't allow in any other context. So it's not a free market institution. It's a thing that you have to have your thumb on the scales to an incredible degree, to an incredible degree. So what stops, and this is where we got

to in our conversation last time, what stops a guy or a group of people from taking over a municipality and going like, listen, we get it. There's all these subsidies that are coming in through the government. We're not really interested in a whole bunch of this. We're going to insulate our residents through the laws that a municipality can have. And we're just going to do our own thing. I'm way oversimplifying that, but that thought process. I mean, the reason is that without certain types of,

of federal subsidies, and this is just as true in Canada as it is in the United States, but in the United States, you know, I think everyone remembers that the point where suddenly we had green street signs for everything, right, had this standardized street. That's a, that's actually a part of the Patriot Act. And there were federal funds that are just basically given

to every municipality in the country without which those municipalities could not operate in the sense they could not make payroll for the mayors, the city officials and certainly not the police officers without those ongoing subsidies and then without the loans that banks are giving them for issuing for creating new what's called new growth, right, which is a new subdivision that will you start it, you get a bunch of money up front. And I think the theory was at some point in the distant past, not really, you know, in my

lifetime or your lifetime probably, but at some point in the distant path, the idea was you get this money up front, you're supposed to kind of care for this money and it's almost, it's supposed to offset these future obligations. That is not what we do with those things. We just take out that money and we spend it. And once it's gone, the solution that everyone tells that municipality is, we'll just go build more, find some new land or, you know, sometimes maybe an existing piece of real estate, you know, clear out the land and then issue it to a new developer. That's where you get stories like there was, you know, famously there was this little pink house that was eminent domain in the United States in order to give to a developer so that he could develop

the entire region, the entire subdivision around that, that little pink house. Of course, the hilarious thing is, is that right about the time, because that case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, the developer actually went bankrupt, the development never happened. And so this, this little house sits alone in the midst of all of this wreckage, because they did tear down all of the other houses around it trying to kind of get this, I think it was a lady to sell. But that was their plan. They were out of money. And as a municipality, in order to keep paying the bills, in order to keep paying the people that were their employees, they needed new growth. There was no open land within their jurisdiction. So they had to knock down something that was already existing and rebuild it. That would allow new bank money to come in. That would allow new federal money to come in. And that's what keeps the system going. So without that, if you're not going to have that, you would actually need an entirely different economic model to run your municipality, I mean, down to the level of how do you pay? pay for the mayor and the dog catcher and the street sweepers and the sewage guys and all of that. How do you pay for those people? Because those programs are hilariously underfunded.

You know, you would effectively have to have tax rates much, much higher than any of the municipalities around you. And people would complain. It would be very upsetting to them. So that's why it doesn't happen in the current time. It's because our cities, our municipalities, are dependent on loans and federal grants, and we don't know how to make up the difference, right? We don't know how to create an economic engine that allows us to operate without that. I come from a place where oil and gas is very prevalent. Yes. And you have a lot of wealthy municipalities because of that. And I just wonder if the same problems exist here. Well, I think they do mostly because people aren't looking for an alternative, right? There is not seen as a reason or a need to spend that money. But,

you know, what I'll say, if you go look at Bentonville, Arkansas, Bentonville, Arkansas is an incredibly nice place. It's the home base of the Walton family, kind of the worldwide headquarters for Walmart and all of its suppliers, I think four or five years ago now, they basically required all of their top level people to move from California and New York and all these places. and if you're a VP of Walmart, you know, Walmart parent corporation, you have to live there. You have to be there. If you're a certain type of vendor, if you're above a certain status of vendor, you have to open a new headquarters in Bentonville. And you have to have a person there that can negotiate with Walmart basically any time of day or night, which is a very interesting, very interesting

thing for them to do. So they've kind of centralized that. The Bentonville municipality, as I recall, I looked these numbers up a couple years ago, so they may not be current. But, you know, as of two or three years ago, the annual budget of Bentonville, Arkansas, the municipality was somewhere in the $30 to $40 million range. That's what it was spending. Okay. And there's a there's a trust, a Walton trust, that by its terms, it has to spend a certain percentage of what it has. And so by its terms, in the year that I looked up, it had to spend $118 million on Bentonville. And so it takes care of the city. It pays, you know, helps people pay salaries.

It does all these things. And then it improves the city in a number of ways. It maintains all the parks. There's a number of really cool museums. Famously, if they get to the end of the year and they don't know what else to do with the rest of the $118 million, they have a number of companies. The biggest one is owned by, I think, a great grandson of Sam Walton. And they just buy from them future work on bike trails.

And as a result of that after, you know, 10, 15 years of doing this, Bentonville, Arkansas now has like five or 600 miles. of bike trails. So really nice amenities. It's a super, super safe place, great place to raise your family. A lot of the frustrations that people have with poor zoning just get rolled over. Right. If you, there is a, there is a person at the Walmart trust that if you can get into their office and you can make a case for why there should be a corner store, that person can call the mayor and say, hey, I think we should have a zoning exception here. And we should let this person, you know, do that. And that, and that, and that, and that, materially improves the city. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, our cities are not well set up because they're centrally planned, right? I mean, that's that when you, when you set back and you say,

okay, at the beginning, we're going to create a master plan for this region. And the banks are, are essentially going to get together with some of the developers. And we're going to decide in advance, hey, a ton of housing is going to go here. And then some retail is going to go here, some commercial. We're going to have a downtown over here. And you're, you're basically making your, all of your decisions at the city level. And there's no, decentralized. There's no, so, you know, the classic is instead of having clinics, and we're learning from this, right? Certain cities are saying, oh, that was a really dumb idea. Let's not do that. But for many years, the thought was, instead of having lots of smaller hospitals,

right, distributed, decentralized in a sense, we're going to have one big city hospital that's going to handle everything. And it's just going to be so efficient. It's going to be so great. Right. Of course, when you have one centralized thing like that, then, you know, if the person that's in charge of ordering medicine, for instance, for that hospital gets it wrong. by 1% people die. Whereas if you have 10 or 15 smaller hospitals or clinics and such that have the ability to order medicine and a couple of people get it off by as much as 5%. They can call other local hospitals and say, hey, you know, I ordered too little or I ordered too much. Can we, can we, you know, kind of barter almost? And you have to do that because these are regulated,

regulated substances, you can only give them between regulated entities, right? That's the wonderful world of medicine in our time. But that's the problem that we're having is that these cities, they're all centrally planned and any inefficiencies are so difficult to overcome because we're, we want to stick to the master plan that there's no one to appeal to, right? There's no one that we can have a conversation with that will allow us to say, hey, it would really make a lot of sense to have just like a couple of corner stores. You know, we were, you know, we were in Panama One of the nifty things about Panama City is even in some of the more rural areas, a corner store is never more than 10-minute walk from wherever you happen to be, right?

Which I found just amazing, right? And you always go, get some coffee, get some Coke, get some, you know, whatever, you know, get some sodas and various things. And the reason for that is there really wasn't anyone saying no. There's not, there isn't the kind of control that we have over, you know, our municipalities and our urban zones in modern kind of Euclidean zoning, right? And even people that are trying to do non-Euclidean zoning, they're still stuck within this frame. They still don't want to recognize, hey, maybe we need to leave things up to smaller groups of people.

But in Benville, where you've got kind of this local potentate that is powerful, that is able to make decisions, you can have a conversation with them. And if you pitch them a great idea. So if you have enough money, Bentonville is an idea of very, very, very, very wealthy families or a family where they have kind of flipped this on its head a little bit. Right. Right. So if you have very deep pockets, you could, you could change the game. And I would assume that that, I mean, I haven't made a study of it, but there are some wealthy oil families in, in Odessa and Midland that people, people talk about, having a great deal of influence in those areas in the Permian Basin. And I would assume that a similar effect plays out in Alberta and kind of the oil fields up there.

Right. But yeah, so you can do that. But the issue that we're having is that's not something that's easily available to people that are kind of what we might call normal people or even small business owners. I think that there are ways around that because one of the things that we recognize is it's incredibly expensive to raise kids and to raise families and to build things up doing it the way that we're doing it. And I think there are better ways there. But yes, if your plan is, well, we got to have a suburban house to house everyone and therefore housing is very expensive, right? Then you have to have an incredible amount of money to overcome even at a local level what the federal governments and the banking system can offer.

But that's because we're dependent on the banks, right? So if I rewind this conversation all the way back to the start. Yeah. One of the ways in which you think or perceive or I don't know how to put it, Greg, of getting out of where we're heading, is this idea of the family unit extending on past just essentially 18 years of a child's life and kicking them out. Correct? Right. Right. So people listening to this have to wrap their brain around.

what is popular right now. Popular right now being you hit 18, you go find your own way. And the parents are free to do whatever they want. We have to get back to this idea of keeping the family together longer and working as a unit. Well, and when we say free, what do we mean by free?

We mean you're going to go out and you're going to get a ton of student loan debt and then you get a big mortgage, right? So you're going to access the credit. credit system to the tune of five or ten times or more your annual income, right, you're reasonably expected annual income. So someone is extending that credit to you in our system. All right.

And why do we do this? We do this in many ways because the only thing that governs moral behavior in public these days is essentially your credit score, right? Why don't, you know, and you see this one of the things about when, when people try to build communities that are outside the banking system, you get a lot of bad behavior, like a lot of bad behavior, especially between people that are not family members, but even sometimes within families. And the reason is because apparently those people, the reason why they didn't cheat on their wife, the reason why they didn't, you know, lie in steel was because they were worried about losing

access to the credit card. They were losing, they were worried that the financial system, if they displayed a certain level of bad behavior, that the financial system would take away from them, their ability to operate and they didn't want that. And so when you remove that as a constraint, people engage in a lot of bad behavior. Another way of thinking about this is, you know, people go into business with each other. You have a money partner and a guy that's going to work the business. And for most of those guys, you know, the plan is at some point we've built the business up enough that the guy that's actually working the business is going to go get a loan and buy out

the first partner, right? The original money guy. Why do we do this? Because we don't trust. We don't have the ability to say over a long period of time, I'm going to trust you to keep your promises, right? And as a result of that, what I want is a security interest. I want and the people that can get security interest that can ruin somebody's life if they don't, if they don't fulfill their long-term obligation, is the bank. That's what the bank is.

The bank is this kind of quasi-governmental body that's got some powers that usually only governments get to have. And it can ruin your life if you don't make the mortgage payment. It can ruin your life if you don't, if you default on your loans, right? If you ruin your credit score. And I think as a society, as a culture, we've gotten to the point where we expect that. We expect that that is what is necessary to hold relationships together for the long term. And that's really what I see as holding us all back is because we need those bankers. We need those loans.

We at the present time, we don't know how to maintain long-term economic relationships without the bank as this as this guarantor, as this heavy in the deal, as the, like we're using the bank. You brought up the godfather. We are using the banking system as our godfather, right? They're the people that if you behave badly, well, don't behave badly because the scary guy that sits in the corner will hurt you. I'm not going to hurt you.

I'm a nice guy. But that guy over there, be afraid of him. And so do what's right. Keep your promises. Work hard. Sacrifice maybe even to keep your, to keep your promises in a changing situation, perhaps. And so for me, I think there's a lot of work that's been done basically say, hey, if we could, if we could make promises to each other and keep them, there's a, there's a famous sermon by John Winthrop called a model of Christian charity, which it's the phrase, it's the sermon in which the phrase, America is a city upon a hill first, first appear. So everyone in the United States has, has read this sermon, probably the last three paragraphs of it.

Most of the sermon is actually on loans. It's on how Christians ought to lend to each other. and extend credit, especially between business owners, to allow people to, you know, he doesn't say this because he's writing before Marx, basically to allow each other to afford the means of production. And so your goal as a Christian should be to maximize the number of small business owners, small, you know, holdings within your sphere. And you do that by extending credit to each other in a kind of decentralized way. And as a result of that, John Winthrop and, you know, the Massachusetts Bay Colony,

They were able to build something like 25 or 26 townships over the course of John Winthrop's life without a formal bank, without a central banking institution, without any special legal or governmental privileges given to that banking system. They were able to build it basically because they had an incredibly high level of trust and the community itself reinforced that you got to pay your, you got to pay your debts. And the last church that was still trying to do that was the Brethren Church, at least in the United States. and they shut down their kind of communal lending programs in, I think the 1980s, maybe the mid-1980s, somewhere in there, because they said there's just not enough public virtue for us to keep doing this. We're losing too much money, and they were getting a bunch of pressure from the IRS and from the banks to stop, you know, kind of undercutting the things that those institutions wanted it to do. But when I read that sermon in its entirety as a teenager, one of the things he kind of mentions in passing,

well, of course you would do this for your family, right? And I thought to myself, man, you know, a lot of people wouldn't do this for their family. But I'll bet you we could recover that a lot easier than we could recover kind of widespread public morality and a promise to keep your, you know, to honor like oral contracts and such. So that's that's kind of the way that these ideas hold together for me. I think that if we can get to the point where as families, we can say, hey, I'm not going to securitize our relationship. I'm not going to bring a bank in and say, well, the bank's going to lend you money and that and that's going to govern your behavior. I'm going to trust you because I've trained you because I know your character.

You're a good son and I'm a good father and we're able to maintain a long term virtuous relationship with each other. And as a result of that, we still need money, but we don't need a bank, right? I can extend credit to you and you can build things. Now, you should get these things in writing. You should get legal structure set up. But in a lot of senses, a trust, people that term trust, is the legal instantiation of certain relationships of trust. So in order to have a trust, the legal instrument, you have to have someone that you trust, right? That's kind of an old joke when you're explaining to people in the state planning context what a trust is.

But that's how I see these ideas coming together. Correct me if I'm wrong. But, okay, so you go off. you're the first person in your family in today's world you leave at 18 you go you get to get education you take some debt on for there you buy your house you take some debt on for there and you know and on and then you work you know for some people it's a relatively short time for other people it's a relatively long time to pay off all the debt that you took on so then your kid turns 18 over that time and then they rehashed the same thing you just did they go out they climb up the same mountain

Right. And what you're talking about, in place of the bank to go get all those loans, to go do all the things, you implement a family trust. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but that's how my brain puts it. At the highest level of oversimplification, yes, exactly. So you put in a family trust so that your children can then go off and do the things you did. But instead of enlarging the bank's holdings, paying the bank, they actually enlarge your holdings. It's your investing. You're investing. in your own children to go off and build things. And the people who benefit from that are the family as a whole. Right. And one of the things that I always say, people are like, well, how do we avoid the trust fund baby? Right. And I talked about this a little bit at the event that we met at.

But one of the things that you have to have is you have to have a virtuous mission. You have to have something that, you know, I climbed this far up the mountain. And I don't want to kick you out because I don't want you to climb up. I don't want you to spend 20, 30, 40 years climbing up the same. same mountain to get exactly where I am here with a lot of uncertainty, a lot of raw deals out there, a lot of likelihood that you will fall off the wagon or get tricked or have a bad circumstance. Maybe your spouse will leave you. Maybe there's a million different things that can happen to people that put them in a really bad situation. No, no. And the main thing is that while

you're doing that, you are, as you said, enriching the banks. And to the extent that what you're doing is subsidized by the government, it subsidized in exchange for control. political control, right? So if I want to be free and I want my kids to be free and I, and I don't want to enrich the banks who may not have at least our interest may not be perfectly aligned on every point, then I want my kids to move up from where I am and to carry forward this mission. And that's, that mindset is really the differentiator between successful or one of the key differentiators between successful legacy families and people that just produce trust fund babies because they're wealthy, right?

When the kid doesn't understand, hey, our family, there are great, glorious things that we can attain if we keep climbing up the mountain. There's more to be had. There's more freedom. There's more wealth. There's more virtue. And on the flip side, there are people who oppose us, right? And I think this is particularly relevant for people that are, we might say, in the freedom movement or the liberty movement, right? Do you really think, like, there's a lot of people, you know, the Canadian truckers, for instance, right, that have just gone through so much.

do you think that that's going to end when when you die? Do you think that the government is going to forget when it comes to evaluating your kids? Do you think that your family? Like, do you think that they're going to respect this deal that says, well, we just restarted at every moment, right? Every generation and the kids get a clean slate. Do you think that the government's going to give your kids a clean slate if you ever stood up and said anything? I mean, if you do, like, great, that's amazing.

I applaud your optimism and I wish I lived in a world. I wish I had access to whatever information is driving that for you. But I don't think that's what's going to happen, friends, right? The Chinese Communist Party in China knows literally every person and the entire extended family to something like the ninth generation. That's kind of like a cultural, Chinese cultural thing of everyone who has ever stood up against them, okay, at least within their own people. As we take stand.

And I mean, this happens in local areas, right? You stand up against the local power structure and you piss somebody off. Sometimes the way people find out that they have offended a local power broker is when their kid gets a suspicious denial of something that they needed. You're like, what's going on? It's like, oh, well, you know, you made that sheriff's race five, 10 years ago, way more expensive than it needed to be. And people are just blown away by that because they've bought into this, this idea. Well, we're different people. That's not really how the world works, man.

That's not really how the world works. So there is greater glory to be obtained. There's greater freedom. There's a better way to live. if we can keep climbing the mountain. And on the other hand, you owe freedom, you know, liberty-loving patriot person, you have already earned enemies.

And those enemies are not going to go away just because, you know, you send your kid out to get a bunch of debt. In fact, that is in many ways kind of the place that they see as a vulnerability. I've talked to a whole bunch of legacy families who are maybe more left-leaning. And one of the things that they just,

they have in this kind of smug way is this confidence that they're going to outlast people, right? because they know how to generationally reproduce, and they are actually very good at that, right? They have developed a specialty, and that's probably the most virtuous thing about them. Most of them are following the commands in our holy books much better than we are, right? But they do that, and they are confident that even if somebody, even if a Trump arises, well, he'll go away and he'll die, and his ability to influence things will end with him. But my family and the views that we represent and the agenda, the interest that we're moving forward is going to keep chugging along.

And in 20 years or 40 years or 80 years or 100 years, we will win. And in order to beat that, in order to beat someone that has that mindset, you have to join them. Okay. And in fact, what I would say, you know, there's this famous study about how, you know, on the left people, the elite liberals behave very differently from how they say people should behave. Elite liberals say you should have free love and say you should have an open marriage and say you should have, you know, very few children. But they in fact do the opposite of those things. They are staying, you know, getting married early, staying married, being faithful, having children, raising their children to work in their family enterprises. And they're being incredibly successful as a result of that. And we are not. And I think that's, that's to me, that's not why I got into this business. I got in this business because I just think it's a better way to live. But as someone who cares about

liberty and who sees my country and yours kind of spiraling into things that are very different, you know, we have not gone this way before and that's that we should be concerned about that. I think the people that think, hey, well, I'm going to, I'm going to engage in some political risks, but I'm going to send my kids out because it doesn't really matter, right? The government will treat them fairly. My my, my, my, my, my troublemaking won't affect them. A friend, I, I don't think that's realistic. But it's not realistic. I got young kids and I don't need to go into any of the minor ones that I've already

experienced, but I've already experienced them from my stance on COVID and other things. Right. Right. And that my kids being an extension of me. Right. In their ways they also have. Right. When you talk about it be.

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, no. Well, just, I mean, wouldn't it be like, you know, there's a friend of mine who, his great-grandfather or his grandfather, something like that, was the estate planning attorney for a notable U.S. business family, right? If I gave the name, you'd all recognize the name. And his fee for handling the estate of one of the billionaire families of the prior generations was 1% of their stock in their parent company. And basically, he gave that stock away to charity.

And his grandson is one of the greatest activists I've ever known. He consistently picks fights with people that if he had received basically all of his grandfather's fortune, right, in cash, then those would be difficult fights. As it is in his unresourced state, he just gets hammered. It seems like, you know, he picks fights to people that are way, way bigger than him. And the fact that he is still around doing what he's doing borders on the miraculous. to my way of thinking. But I just am always so sad, huh? Who the heck is that?

So he's, he's a, he's a, he's just a friend of mine from, from North Texas. I wouldn't be at liberty to, to disclose who he is. But I just look at that. And every time that I talk with him, what he's doing now, I think about this time where he told me the story of his grandfather. And I think, man, you are fighting the same foes that your grandfather fought because they haven't given up, right? And you are losing. He's Catholic. And so a lot of the stuff that he does is kind of within the Catholic community. So I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll say that. But that's,

that's all, that's all I would, I'd want to say in a public forum. But, but I've seen that, you know, and I, I think about Erica Kirk and Charlie Kirk's kids and all the horrible things that people have said online about those kids. And I just, I just look at that and say, you know, they, they, they aren't going to forget and they aren't going to forgive. And they, they believe in some kind of generational transfer. And they're going to do whatever they can to harm those. kids, right? And that, I mean, that's just the thing that I find most inexcusable about a lot of the stuff that's happened with Charlie Kirk's family after his death is the people don't, don't appear to appreciate that, hey, man, like, this isn't over for a lot of the folks on the

left. And I wish, I wish we would factor that into our decisions regarding that family. When you talk about a mission and like a family having a mission, the quote I wrote down that I was, this is what set us off for people listening. I found this roundtable very, very interesting for Mikkel Thorup to have in Panama City talking about the family. But you said, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't know if I wrote it down correctly, Greg, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. Find a hill to die on and you'll have a hill worthy to live on. When you talk about a mission, is that the mission? I mean, I think the the mission, the the mission is to make the world a better place, right?

The mission is to allow our way of life and the things that we believe to be actualized. If you believe something and you don't want the things that you believe to actually have a tangible impact on the world, right, whether that's ideas about liberty, about how people should be treated, about justice, about, you know, public order, all of those things. If those beliefs don't actually impact a territory, I question what it is that you believe. Right. And so for me, what I see is if you have a, if you say, hey, the world is a certain way, right? And that's, it should be a different way. Right. We talk about sometimes people will talk about like norms, right, maybe even biblical norms,

if I'm allowed to say that in this context, right? Sure. So if you've got a, if you're in an industry, it can be, I mean, it can be, it can be these big political things. It can be as small as, you know, there was a, there was a friend of mine in DFW who was in the, um, uh, the HVAC industry, right? And his family decided that the way that they were paying their people, they had kind of very low skilled guys that they would send out first on jobs. And they made the decision that that wasn't serving their clients. That wasn't serving their employees very well. And they were just going to train their employees to a very, very high level of

excellence. And they weren't going to have any low level guys that, that just didn't really know very much, right, but could maybe troubleshoot 50% of the things. They were going to train all of their people to a very high level of excellence and get them credentials even. And as a result of that, they spent a bunch of money and they lost for several years in a row, they lost their people, right? Because they would go somewhere else so they could be paid more and kind of step into this high-ranked position. Okay. But over time, they actually changed the way that the HVAC industry operated in DFW. They push the limit so that Everyone suddenly had to train their people to that.

And that took like four or five years. They basically had a loss that they were incurring in terms of how they were training their people. And they and they they pushed the limit, right? They changed how things operated. Another family was in plumbing. And they were they were kind of influential in the shift from lead, right, to PVC, right? And pecs now, right? As we've, as we've gone off into it.

Right. And they, they were an early adopter of PVC because they saw, hey, this, this, the lead, the lead pipe stuff, there's something bad here. There's something that we don't want to participate in as a family because of our, our views on what it means to do the right thing. Okay. And, and as a result of that, we're going to adopt this new technology. We're going to take risks. Now, when that new technology came off and when the regulators kind of came in and said, hey, we are making this shift, right? they benefited enormously.

They profited enormously because they made a bet based on their convictions about what was right. And that's the kind of thing. At the end of it, what my friends said about those two business decisions, they said, you know, we didn't know it was going to pay off, right? That really wasn't what it was about for us. We came to the point where we would rather let our business die than behave the way that everyone else in the industry was behaving, right? that if if putting lead pipes in people's houses and sending out bad age fact technicians,

if that's the way that you had to be to make money, then we, we would eventually hang it up. And that's what I meant by a hill to dine. Now, there are many places where, so it can be something as sort of small, though I'd say respectfully like the,

the lead to pex thing. And that family is actually really, they have done some studies about microplastics and how those things are affecting people. And so they're actually pushing the limits right now, what it would look like to engage with new pipe materials and all these things. And I think they're amazing humans, amazing people. But again, it's a similar type of thing of, hey, we know there's a problem here and we're

going to fix it or we're going to die trying. And that scales all the way up to political activists, right? To the final sentence of the Declaration of Independence, right? You know, to this we pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor, right? I mean, that's if you have something that you believe in as a mission, that this is the most important thing, and I think what I said was not just, not just it'll be a place, a hill that you can live on. It'll be a hill that your kids can live on, right? And that I think is where too many people fail the test, right? Is that they take the safe path and they build like everyone else. And at the end of

their lives, their children look around and say, man, there's just really nothing here that's worth fighting for, right? Now, there's other people that are so focused on the mission that they don't build anything for their family. That's also a problem. But more and more I see that first, that first issue of families who have some good things, they have some wealth, but they haven't made the commitment. They haven't said, hey, this is the thing that God put us on this earth to do in terms of virtue, in terms of quality, in terms of not hurting people, right, in our industry, doing what, and I think that's one of the reasons why we have so many of the problems that we have in the modern world is people that engage in planned obsolescence and people that are

okay, you know, if we can get the regulations change so we can pass off poison in our products, we're just going to say, oh, hey, that's cheaper or better or whatever, right? That's, I think, the problem that we're encountering in our, in our economy and in our world, and you see it destroy families, right? You see it because when the kids grow up and the kids know the score, right? When they come in and they have a certain amount of wealth and also even use the word privilege that they've experienced in their life and they get into the inner counsels of their family and they find out, oh my gosh, we really are the bad guys, right? We really are doing this bad thing.

Okay. And we know we're doing a bad thing. And that, you know, you can't build a multi-generational structure on top of that. You have to believe. Your kids have to believe that you're virtuous. And that means you have to be virtuous. You have to be making the decisions that allow you to look yourself in the, in the mirror and say, I'm a good guy and I'm proud of what I'm doing.

right it's worth it what I'm doing right and and that's so so that's when people ask so like how do you how do you find that I say find find the hill we're dying for and then if that will be what allows your kids to stick around okay I appreciate you hopping on and doing this I don't know I don't know what people think of this whole thought process but um I feel like there's probably a lot for people to chew on myself included because I've gone down this rabbit hole now twice at the end I'm like I still got to sit and think of on this. But either way, I appreciate you hopping on and talking a bit about it. Yeah, thank you so much.