EXPERIENCE 203 | Intrepreneurship in Action - A Conversation with Cole Shrehlow, CEO of The Flyover and Chief Musician at The Crossing Church

I became acquainted with Cole Strehlow circa 2012, when my wife and I first began attending The Crossing Church in Fort Collins, where Cole still serves as Chief Musician.  He was a gifted writer with a Theology degree from a small university in Northern Wisconsin, and was trying to string an income together through church music, freelance writing, and crappy jobs.

A few years later, he was the first employee of a startup called Wintermind Group (featured in Episode 24), which later merged to become Pop Acta with Cole as right-hand to the CEO.  At Pop Acta he headed a skunk-works project in 2022, which sprouted wings and took off as The Flyover - a wholly-owned subsidiary with Cole at the helm.  Condensed daily email news, minimal bias, and growing quickly into state-by-state versions.  

Cole’s is a journey of consistent growth in responsibility and impact, built on do the right thing.  

Enjoy.  

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Transcript

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I became acquainted with Cole Strelow circa 2012 when my wife and I first began attending the Crossing Church in Fort Collins, where Cole still serves as chief musician, he was a gifted writer with a theology degree from a small university in northern Wisconsin. And was trying to string an income together through church music, freelance writing, and crappy jobs. Few years later, he was the first employee of a startup called Wintermind Group. Featured in episode 24, which later merged to become Pop Acta, with Cole as the right hand to the CEO. At Pop Acta, he headed a Skunk Works project in 2022, which sprouted wings and took off as the Flyover. Pop Acta. A wholly owned subsidiary with Kohl at the helm. Condensed daily email news, minimal bias, and growing quickly into state by state versions. Kohl's is a journey of consistent growth in responsibility and impact, built on do the right thing. Enjoy. Let's have some fun. Welcome to the Low Code Experience Podcast. On this show, you'll get to know business and community leaders from all around northern Colorado and beyond. Our guests share their stories, business stories, life stories, stories of triumph and of tragedy. And through it all, you'll be inspired and entertained. These conversations are real and raw, and no topics are off limits. So pop in a breath mint and get ready to meet our latest guest. Welcome back to the Loco Experience Podcast. I'm here today with Cole Stralow and Cole is, uh, the chief musician at the Crossing Church, uh, where I work. sometimes attend. Um, he's also the CEO of the flyover, uh, which is a media company based here in Fort Collins. And he is a proud husband and father as well. Uh, thanks for joining us in studio Cole. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Um, let's start with the thing that nobody probably, unless they're a subscriber knows much about, which is the flyover. Uh, what is it? The flyover is an email news publication. Okay. And we have eight editions of it, but the short synopsis would be, it is a daily email that comes out with a general overview of the news. And it's designed to be a one stop shop so that if you want to, you can just read this email in five minutes and have a good sense of what's going on. In the United States and also the world. I remember from like some years ago when the partisan divide was trying to be avoided, there was like some specific email newsletters that we like, we give you both sides or, you know, kind of thing. You can find some that are really intentional about that, where they will literally tell you like, Hey, this is what the left says about it. This is what the right says about it. That's kind of neat. We don't do that. We just tell you what we think is true. Fair. Okay. So you've got your own kind of, I listened to the. Um, daily wire, uh, podcast pretty much every morning and every afternoon. Um, cause I don't read much anymore. I'm old and have bad, I got glasses in the other room, but, but they touch on four to seven topics briefly. In the morning, you know, that comes out like maybe 6 a. m. or something. And then again at 4 p. m. And so that's like one of the ways I, you know, other than scrolling through X or whatever, so I can see the value of, uh, you know, and so why do people, it's a subscription email. It is. So they just want a quick summary of. The news, the important stuff. Is it economics focused? Business focused? Is it politics focused? It does not have a particular content focus. Okay, it's really broad. Okay. So the top three stories would just be whatever we think are the most important stories of the day and actually it's more like The top two are the most important. Sometimes the third one is a fun one like a list or just something interesting that's happening. Okay So it's pretty broad. You know, we do sports, politics, whatever, science and tech, uh, celebrity news. If, uh, we actually don't do, okay. That's good. A lot of that. That gives you more credibility in my book. What was that roast, uh, uh, that came from one of the award shows the other day or toward it? It was like, um, Hey, Hollywood, you know, One of the things you learned in 2024 is that Americans don't care about who you want to vote for or something like that. Yeah. And if one of, if a celebrity does something really dumb and it's funny, we'd probably run it, but we probably wouldn't have them talk to us about things. And you're, what do you think? Do you have a consistent, like, do you, are you the editor of this publication then effectively or not anymore? Um, not anymore. I've gone through all the stages. So in the beginning I was writing it and editing and editing it and sending it. Then graduated to editing and then passed off most of the, actually to still do it sometimes, but then passed off the editing to our editor in chief, David Klein, who does most of that these days. And you, do you create content still? Yeah, I do because we are, we're, What's that? What was the celebrity guest content? No, no, no, no. Um, well, one of the important things about the flyover is that it's no longer just one email. Like we started it with this national edition, but then we quickly thought, Hey, what if we expanded this to States and did the same thing, but on a smaller scale? So we, we started the flyover in January of 23 and then about a year later we started the Texas flyover, which is just the same thing, but only for Texas and then last year we rolled out. six more. So we have seven state editions and one national edition. You know, as I think about that, as you know, newspapers have faded so much. And, and even, you know, the, the, the color or the Colorado or the Fort Collins, the Colorado and yeah. Right. Like, yeah, it's got a couple of local stories and a handful of local reporters and stuff, but it's mostly national kind of. Associated Press kind of stuff. Yes. So it's hard to pick up any kind of, even a state biased news. Yeah. Yeah. There's surprisingly not a lot of news products out there that are geared at this, toward the state level. Yeah. And what I like about that is that there's, you know, there's 50 states, you know, uh, their nation states effectively, you know, governed by a federal, um, thing. So just even by having it state based, It kind of gives that 14th Amendment vibe. Yeah. I mean, there are some States in America feel like a country. unto themselves. California comes to mind. Lots of them. I mean, there's just massive, massive markets and their massive markets with incredible amounts of loyalty and distinctiveness so that, you know, somebody in Texas is really excited about West Virginia is West Virginia. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You can talk to someone about California, about West Virginia, and they probably think of something, right? Right. Understand the distinctiveness of the region. And you have a separate North Dakota, South Dakota edition. Not yet. What would you do a Dakota edition? Cause it was just, I don't think so. I don't think so, but we haven't got that far yet. Actually. We have talked about splitting California in half, right? Cause we haven't got there yet. And it's just so big and so diverse, right? It's culture that people care about are so much different in death Valley or Truckee than they are in LA or San Diego. And it's hard. There are some businesses that would be interested in advertising. All over California, but the more you slice it up, probably the more useful it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And so your customers sign up for, uh, the news, uh, your subscribers, and then based on how many subscribers are reading your daily emails, or at least subscribe to it, then businesses like have a sidebar. ads and things like that as your revenue model? Yes. We are entirely advertising supported. Okay. Yep. So there are several ads throughout the newsletter. There's two like larger sized ad blocks and those go along with the primary sponsorship. And then there's smaller ones that we call section sponsors that are just little, like one paragraph hits. Okay. And more of a kind of FYI information on this thing. Yeah, just less copy. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Um, And so what's the scale of the, is there multiple people, content creators, like does each of these states basically have a content creator? Each, each state has its own writer. Okay. And then we have one, two, three, four editors at this point. Oh, wow. So how do you, I mean, I assume this is your first, uh, I've known you for a while, so it's your first like CEO of a media company, but how do you like keep the The flavor of, of the flyover consistent while having all this, uh, state by state content and whatever, I guess, uh, how does that fit fly over time? It is that fly over time. It is a big challenge when you're growing as quickly as we are to hand down the flavor of the distinctiveness. Yeah. Um, I think it just comes down to people. That's kind of my whole philosophy about business that I've acquired so far is that, uh, people and systems are both really important people. Solve this problem. Like if you have a few key people that really understand what you're trying to do and what you're not trying to do, then conversations just happen that sort those things out over time. Um, we decided that we were okay with hiring writers remotely for the States because we felt like it was valuable to have somebody on the ground. Yeah. Like somebody writing about North Carolina to be someone that's hopefully from there actually lives there and would just catch things that I wouldn't catch. Like I could talk about North Carolina, but I wouldn't understand it. Um, and that's, that's a lot of just kind of? Input, um, you know, we talk about our editors. We keep here because we think that the osmosis of just having people in a room is super valuable. And that's how we pass down the, well, we, we kind of jokingly refer to it as an oral tradition of what we do and what we don't do. I actually, um, This is maybe embarrassing, but for the first time today, started writing down an actual style guide, which is kind of nuts because we're two years in and we have eight additions, but that's just how it's gone. Like we're growing so fast, so much going on that it's mainly just conversations and everyone kind of gets it. Yeah. Yeah. But we're, we're trying to grow up. Um, is there like, like obviously kind of like a, if you could have a voice, Separated and together for each of those kind of 50 states demographics. That's its own goal. But what is the, like, is there something else that the flyover is trying to do? Is it, is it intentionally, is it programming us in some fashion? Is it propaganda of some sort? All art is propaganda, right? Um, We, Bye bye. It's going to sound like a cliche, but we honestly just want to tell the truth. That's how we approach it. Yeah. And, uh, news has gotten so wacky that the new rebellion is just kind of doing the simple thing in our opinion. Like just telling people what happened is revolutionary these days, right? With no slant on it. It's hard to find. It really is. And to be clear. Like we don't know how many people couldn't believe it that that Kyle Rittenhouse guy shot white dudes, right? Like they couldn't believe it. They were sure he was gone out on black people with an assault rifle. Sure. You know? Yeah. I think in, you know, both sides of the aisle are guilty of this. If you go to any of the mainstream media outlets, um, that cater to one side of the audience, typically. Like you you'll read an article about something that's happened, especially if it's about the president's or about any sensitive type media outlets. Products, excuse me, any political stuff, the people that read those things, um, many of them are waiting and looking for the attack. Like they're ready for the slant and that's kind of waiting, waiting for that thing. Yeah. So in a sense you can understand why like an MSNBC does what they do because they're trying to make money. Sure. And that's maybe a misconception that I think some people have about media companies as they think of them as this just totally, I don't know, neutral entity that sits around and only talks about journalistic integrity. They talk about making money because they're a business and that's why they exist. Like they have a mission too, of course. Um, but I think there's a little bit of naivete about the approach of media companies to the world and why they exist. Um, they're, they're going to deliver what their customers want because if you don't, then you don't have a business, right? So there's this interesting. Give and take there. Which, uh, not to shift you out of this, but big news from Facebook today and Instagram. Did you see that? I actually didn't. I've been so busy. Oh yeah. Mark Zuckerberg said they're basically adopting a community notes model and stopping third party censorship. Yeah, that is interesting. I think that's worked so well for X now that maybe it was inevitable. Maybe. Yeah. Hard to say. Um, but well, and Zuckerberg kind of went back to his roots. He just cut. Kind of scared a little bit. I think so. Cause the market moved away from him a little bit. Right. That too. That too. Well, and even, you know, when he shared that, you know, there was a fair bit of government pressure for us to do this or do that on Rogan's podcast, that was like, you know, a whole bunch of people went, We knew it. I knew my posts were getting shadow banned. It turns out they were. No, but so back to the flyover. We, like all media companies need to make money. What we have noticed is that there's a lot, like a huge chunk of Americans that just want to be told what happens. And maybe that's, I think that's obviously been there for a long time to a certain point, but I think there's a lot of fatigue. Like people are tired of the level of bias in media and they're ready for more of a Walter Cronkite style Just tell me what happened. I want to feel that way again, and I can make my own decisions about what I feel about it Yeah, instead of being told how to feel about something or yeah. Yeah. Yeah obvious slant put on things I think clearly there's a large market of people that are just interested in knowing what's going on and Not only do they only want to know what's happening. They want it to come to them without the flood of You Euphemisms, slanted language, editorialization, just nonsense that should flunk you out of journalism school. Yeah, yeah. That gets you a job now. So, so that oral tradition that you're talking about and that, that future style guide that will be coming out in a Q1 or whatever is, um, in some regards, that's part of it. That's, you know, that it has to be kind of true. It has to not have a slant and an apparent intentional slant on this. Yeah. I was writing down examples today of, to try to help writers know like what to avoid. And one of them would be, I remember seeing articles about Hamas and ISIS, I think being referred to as freedom fighters and, you know, we call them terrorists, because that's what they are. Right. Yeah. And there's lots of really sensitive hot button cultural issues that are, in my opinion, typically hidden with euphemisms in order to disguise the true nature of what's happening. And that's all over the place. For sure. We, we try to just not do that, like just describe it. But again, like just describing something, honestly, not easy to get, make some people angry, but I mean, totally. Well, I was thinking about Israel, like even like before this October 9th, I think, yeah. Was it October 7th? Maybe it was that attack. I don't remember the exact day, but it was before that, you know, Netanyahu was in real trouble was in a lot of, you know, corruption mud and having a hard time with their Supreme court. You know, and you know, this war has taken a lot of, uh, Some of the troubles off of his plate in a way, right? And and not to totally dissimilar from Zelensky in some way. It's sure, you know, as long as he's the freedom fighter War has a way of galvanizing people and making troubles go away for a while. Yeah, they always come back you consume content Like how do you how do your writers get their news? And how do you get like news about the world that you can kind of help to determine? What are those most important stories or is that just based on your advertisers? You Just kidding. Well, you know, we write about what we're allowed to write about. To be clear, we say whatever we want. I've never had any input from anyone, nor will we take it about what we're allowed to talk about. Um, our writers and editors just do a big scour of the internet. You know, they kind of start with the news wires, AP and Reuters, which used to be neutral and really aren't anymore, but they're still useful to see what's happening. Google news is a great resource to see what's happening. Just kind of those things. make the rounds across lots of different places, including some that we wouldn't actually publish articles from just to see what's happening. And part of the battle is finding, you know, we want our people to read multiple sources about a story to get a well rounded picture of what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. And then to pick a source that we think communicates the clearest and the most truly about what's happening. There was, I found a post on my ex from a few months ago and I, I shared a article from like, I, I, when I see something as Al Jazeera, um, on the Google news kind of site or whatever, I'm like, well, you know, I know the angle that they're coming from, but I know there might be some things that are more true in this article than some I might read. Yeah, you definitely get a bigger picture by reading both sides of it, especially with a extremely controversial issue like that. Yeah, but then there was like a, a new Al Jazeera because Al Jazeera stopped being shared by Google for a while at least. Oh, did it? Yeah, like shortly after that October 7th thing. And I think they're back on there again now. So I don't know if they had to kiss and make up to Google or something, but they had chosen like some kind of an other Arab oriented news site to be their, uh, Google news allocation for that. That's interesting. And that's actually part of the story of the flyover. I think is that the internet is not just about first party publishers anymore. It's really about the people that curate stuff and put it in front of the aggregators. Yeah. Yeah. The aggregators. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think the internet is moving more and more toward aggregation. Are you old enough to remember fark. com? With a K? Yeah. F A R K. No, I don't. Oh, that was, it was an aggregator of stupid Stories, and they would each have a little label, uh, I think it was FARC, and, uh, like, there was one label that was Florida, like, they would just share, you know, Stories about Florida, man. Yeah. Historically been Florida, man. Florida has raised, changed its reputation in the last 10 years. We have an addition in Florida and we have all kinds of Florida stories. Right. Like the dude that like hooks onto a shark and rides his unicorn pony floaty out at two miles into the ocean, hoping for the best, some states are easier to write about than others. Um, but anyway, that was an aggregator way back, probably circa. OUTTA 2003. Mm-hmm 2005. Like you were what? Behind the ears? Still? Probably at the time. But that was an aggregation site that I would go to just to see this one. Probably very interesting. Weird dudes. Mm-hmm Uh, impression of what were the dumb and silly stories, and sometimes nudes were the things that a person should have. Um. Yeah, I think we, that's part of our model is aggregating. It's not just that we also do original writing. Like everything we put in there is our own perspective on it. But a key part of our value proposition is just scouring the internet to find what we think is what matters the most, because there's such a glut of content on the internet now that it's actually value and just spending the time looking through stuff. Don't make me screw around so much. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, So let's talk about, um, where did the flyover come from? Maybe let's, can we talk about the inception story? Um, I guess just for guests, uh, the, I want to say local think or local experience podcast, episode 18 or something, uh, Jacob lease, um, was my guest and at that time he was probably in about middle of year two of the winter mind group. Uh, so you were, you were number one employee of the winter mind group. I was, it was me and Jacob in the basement in conjunction with Brian Oaks. Yeah. Okay. And what were you doing? Uh, can we go way back to there? Yeah, of course. This inception of, and then I want to go back. Well, we'll come back to once we jump in the time machine, we'll come back. We can go as far back as you want. There's a funny story about the moment I was born. If you want to hear it, I do, but winter mind. So I was doing the stage for us. Yeah, I was, uh, I've before winter mine for a long time. I was doing a lot of jobs that I did not enjoy, nor was I well suited toward them to them, but they put money in my bank account. And so I did them. Yes. Um, and then the great Jacob Lease called me great, powerful, great and powerful. Jacob Lease called me and said that he was, he had mentioned to me like six months before that he had started this business and thought it was going well. And Thought maybe there'd be an opportunity. And I was just so jaded at that point. I was like, yeah, okay, Jacob. Sure. Like, right. Like the world's actually going to work out. Yeah. Like at some point you kind of, it's hard to believe anything when you're having, when you're on a rough path. But then right when I was considering leaving Fort Collins to go take a job with a different company in Kansas city, actually, where I'm from, when my, where my parents live, Jacob called me and said, he wanted to talk about this position at winter mind and they were doing. Fundraising for nonprofits via email. Okay. And so I jumped on it. I jumped right out of a concrete truck and into Jacob's basement. Okay. What was the, what was it was you were driving a concrete truck? Yeah. It was the previous. Yes. Which like entailed like driving around with full Tanks of those guys with the thing, like it in the right place and cleaning it all up at the end of the day and all that, all the stuff that you would imagine you look like a pretty strong back guy, not as strong as you wish for concrete, not as strong as it used to be. Right. Yeah. Um, so yeah, so you're happy to check this thing out. And what were you doing at winter mind? Yeah. Uh, I was getting emails from people that we worked for and then doing some light coding to them. And then just making sure everything was like doing a QC of the actual, and an email, if you don't know, is a piece of HTML. So just doing some light coding on it to make sure everything was correct. All the tracking links were correct. Okay. Um, and then using our system that Jake built to actually send the emails at an enterprise or large level. Okay. And so I, it was actually kind of, so you're spammers. No, of course not with good information. We know we're definitely not spam. Okay. So you're, but you're fundraising for different nonprofit organizations and curated email outreach. There are a list of people that are interested in that kind of thing that have expressed interest in a particular cause or whatever it is. Yeah. So you try to kind of match. Philanthropists of varying types with causes that they might be more interested in and through some intentional outreach, something like that. Okay. All right. Um, and so like that obviously grew and so the circuit me, what, this is what that was right at the beginning of the local, this was like, right before COVID hit, okay, yep, January, 2020. Okay. Yep. That's when you joined. He has started. It is. Yeah. I remember sitting in the basement with Jacob looking at the news about COVID and we were just. Kind of casually saying like, I wonder if, I wonder if anyone here will ever get this. I mean, it was that stage. Right. Right. Brand new. Yeah. I don't have to worry about it really here. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I remember those days as well. So then what does that look like going into that? Like, were you in an essential business? You were working remotely, so it was fine, probably. Yeah. I mean, what was like from a, like you jumped into this startup. And then I just kept going to Jacob's basement every day. Yeah. I didn't really do whatever he told you to do. I mean, we, so we did that for a while. Did you know how to do this HTML stuff and whatever? How did you, he just, he taught you how to do things he didn't want to do anymore. Or you had to go learn it, watch YouTube videos and stuff. Um, he taught me a lot of it. Yeah. I mean, well, I guess I had done some HTML. It was like reasonably talented at tech stuff. I just hadn't done it for a job before. Okay. Gotcha. Not actual tech. Not like you were kind of a digital native. So it wasn't scary to you, but figure it out a little at a time kind of thing. Yeah. So I just jumped in and started figuring it out. Jacob taught me a lot and. kept doing that, and then we moved to desk chair in Loveland, in downtown Loveland, which is a Okay, yeah. Shared workspace. Yeah. We got an event coming up there in a few weeks. It's a nice spot. Yeah, it is. Mm-hmm They're, they're community partners. You know Jim down there? I do, yeah. Yeah. And the whole team. Really? Mm-hmm We did that for a long time before we moved back to good old Fort Collins. Yeah. Yeah. And then like it was Winter Mind Group for a while. Mm-hmm And that's originally at least Jacob and Brian. Yes. And then we merged with another company that was doing very similar things, um, with two other guys that own that company that were a long time associates and friends with Jacob and Brian. Oh, I see. Okay. Yep. And then, but Jacob continued to be the CEO of this, what became Pop Acta? Yes, it became Pop Acta and Jacob was the, became the CEO of that company. And then, like, to, like, the flyover origin story is Is that you? I got this idea. It's not me. Or it's Jacob saying It's not Jacob. I got this idea. Brian? Nobody? It's not Brian. It's a guy named Guy Short. Okay. Yep, one of the owners. Sup, Guy. Um, Guy. He's got this idea. He's like, we need to generate our, our own center of truth. Uh, center of truth. Well, I think he just enjoyed like, go ahead. Like the intro to Tucker Carlson podcast. He's like, we're not, uh, agenda driven or propagandist. We're honest brokers. Right. Uh, that's kind of the theme I'm sensing maybe from Guy. Yeah, for sure. From your team. He enjoyed, um, some other popular morning newsletters, like 1440 morning brew. I think the skim, like it's a, yeah, I've been a subscriber of the skim before, actually. Okay. Yes. We were not the first people to write a morning email. Okay. Um, that industry is, Thriving at the moment. It's kind of like podcasts and that anything you're interested in, right. You can find a newsletter for you. It's probably an ish thing. Yeah, that's fair. So I think he just enjoyed them and realized that. So most newsletters, they start with the content. Like you are interested in tennis or woodworking or the news or whatever it is, if you have a subject matter interest, or you have expertise or whatever it is, you want to write about this thing. And so you want to start a newsletter. And so you move from content to the email world. Okay. We were already in the email world. So we did it in the reverse order where we had an idea for content, but that was after we were already in the world. Huge number of database that was sorted and dialed and yeah, like just knew the email world. Well, that was a competitive advantage for us that we realized we could start a product and use what we knew about the world of high volume email to get off to a fast start. Yeah. Which also kind of other rapid. Like, was there already a state by state edition thing idea at the very beginning? Or was it like, Oh, wait, we need this too. I solved another problem. No, that, no, that came later. Yeah. With the single edition, it seems so simple when I think on those days when we just had one edition compared to what we're doing now. But yeah, so that was guy's idea. It was a great idea. And then we, at the time I was running one of the teams at pop back to. And I started to do to write the flyover as I was managing the other team that went on for a while is just it's a small business. You're absolutely stretched too small. Yeah. Like you do what you have to for a while. Right, right. Um, and then we As soon as this flyover revenue could meet one third of your salary, then you could kind of focus on growing that. Something like that. Yeah. We You know, you have an idea, but you don't know how people will receive it. And it became apparent pretty quickly that people were into it, which was great. And that allowed us to start staffing up and making plans from there. Is there like a, a face of the flyover or is it like when you think about the daily wire, it's Ben Shapiro or whatever, or, you know, Tucker Carlson network or whatever, but it's not in that sense. No, but there's, I'm the closest thing to the, like, I'm probably the only name that goes in there. I'll sign things sometimes. Like the Babylon Bee has its own kind of persona now, even though kind of the creator of the Babylon Bee mostly doesn't do much with it anymore. Right. Now we try to make the brain the star of the show. Yeah. Which is contrary to some advice. Like, a lot of people will tell you people follow people, not brains. And that's, I think, true in a lot of contexts, but in this one we felt like it was important not to attach it to a single person. Yeah. And just to make, The brand, the thing that people come back to, like if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, the flyover would, would keep on going and they could come hire you or someone else wouldn't hire me. I don't have enough of the skills, although I'm curious. I enjoy, uh, digesting large amounts of news, telling the truth about it. Just do it in a podcast. Um, so I guess like, what does pop back to do that's different? like that niche, because they're just email, but for other people's causes, whether it be nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, um, other, yeah, it's just a link in the chain to help causes get in front of people that care about it. Yeah. Okay. So will the flyover point people back to pop act in a fashion? No, it does not. It's its own kind of medically sealed in terms of, and that's why you're like separate. Now you have mostly no idea what's really going on at pop act anymore. I wouldn't say that Jacob talks and whatever else, I wouldn't say that we share an office space. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, but I work exclusively on the fly over these. Yeah. Is that, uh, well, Jacob will listen to this. Probably. Has that been a good decision for you? Has that been like, cause it's probably comes with a lot more like there's nobody to tell me what to do. Oh, I have people to tell me what to do. I'm sure. I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yes, I think it was a good decision. I think I was, I was just interested in trying something new. And, uh, Writing has kind of always been my thing. Like I enjoy that. And that really had nothing to do with what I was doing at pop act. And then this opportunity came up to use, we're going to get bored and go leave and do something else. Perhaps if he didn't find you something, Oh, I don't know. Probably not. He's still done. I'd probably still be there. Took you out of the concrete truck. Yeah, I'd probably was not in a hurry to run anywhere else, but. Was excited about the possibility to do something that scratched that itch for me. Um, I guess what else do you want to talk about as far as like, what were, what would be some of the main things you've learned about business? Let's say, um, like, in growing from like a, like, cause you're, when you're there, you know, working in Jacob's basement and it's, you know, three of you doing stuff and kind of spinning up a new. Revenue model, even a new concept of sorts, uh, winter mind was like to go from there and to, you know, scaling teams, hiring remote writers in other States, trying to keep that content tight. Yeah. I, I think I've learned a lot. I, I have the benefit of being around a lot of smart guys and girls that know quite a bit. So I've had, We have the benefit of having people in leadership that just think differently. And that means you see different sides of issues constantly, which is helpful. So I think it's helped me develop emphases are not one sided, like hopefully you're kind of well rounded because I've just learned a lot from people that are really smart guys like Jacob and guy and Brian and Dan that are super excited about. What they've learned and we'll pass that on. And then you kind of take that and strap it on and try to be well rounded. I think I've learned that people and systems are both extremely important. And that if you leave one side out of that equation, you're going to be in trouble. And I would put people at the top of the hierarchy of what's important in business, obviously nothing original. Smart, focused people can make it work even without a system, but. A system makes it a whole lot better. Yeah, it sure does. It does. And so I've experienced that, like, what is it, what is it like to do something yourself and then to add a lot of other people into the mix and we've been able to build a really great team. Like I'm thankful every day that I walk in for the folks that work for us. Do you like them? And yeah, we get to come to work every day with people that I actually enjoy and that are smart, good at their job, proactive, and that just goes a million miles toward what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah. I think smart people with good attitudes are. The most important thing. Are they coming to your cause or do they're coming because they want to work in media or they're coming because they want to get out of what has become such a propagandized media thing. And to have somebody attempting to give me the facts is refreshing. I think it just sounds like a fun job. Okay. I think that we have people from lots of different backgrounds, some of which are what you're describing. Um, some have less of a professional writing or editing background. but they're all good at it and they all were interested in what we're up to. Okay. So we don't try to market to one. We don't try to draw people from a particular background, although we like it if they have some sort of journalistic experience. Layoffs at MSNBC lately. Yeah. Well, sorry. Too soon. You know, I'm kind of like, I'm a little bit Elon Musk can't just be one person because nobody can tweet 40 times a day and run four companies and whatever. But I don't know. He's something else. He really is just like, anyway, um, let's talk about your other job. Okay. Um, were you, You weren't first stage, or were you there at the Crossing Church from its first days? They mentioned the other day that we're 15 years of church here this month or later this month. I rolled into town in 2012 and they got started in 2010. Okay. Okay. And how did you connect? Were you, I remember Gary McQuinn was part of the church in the earliest days and he was from Kansas city. Yeah. Gary went to the church that I grew up in and I had known him since he was, I think in seventh grade or so. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so he was kind of a mentor for me growing up. He was the cool guy that was like four years older than me that I emulated in a lot of ways, even if I wouldn't have admitted it. Interesting. So Gary was great. Was he early in the ministry track kind of stuff? Yeah. Or, okay. Yeah, yeah. His parents were, um, in the same small group as my wife's, uh, aunt and uncle in Kansas city area. Really? Yeah. So they, they knew Gary from before he moved out here. Okay. Yeah. So. Yeah, I was sitting in a house on Matt street in Olathe, Kansas, where I lived with four of my friends. And let's just say I was in the mood to get out of town and do something else. And, um, Gary called me and asked if I was interested in moving to Fort Collins. And I honestly had never even heard of it. Sure. I didn't even know. anything about Fort Collins, but I said, sure, let's do it. We've got this church. They really need a worship leader. We could pay you 600 a month. Nothing at first, but yeah, they, they did help me out. Um, so Gary called me, I was in the mood to get out of Dodge because my girlfriend had broken up with me and I was just like, let me get out of here. If you've ever been there in life. And so I threw everything I owned in my Crappy Honda Civic hit the road, headed out West. Interesting. So that's really what drew you here. Yeah. Um, let's, let's actually, while we're in the time machine, let's just keep going back. Like, let's go to five years old, five years old. Yeah. Okay. Like give me the family dynamic. Uh, give me, uh, siblings, all that. I am the oldest of eight children. Oldest of eight. Yeah. Dang. Okay. So I grew up. I would say it felt like I was half parent, half child sometimes because there were so many kids. And what was the span of those? Uh, 18 years. Okay. Yeah. I'm the oldest of four in a 10 year span. Okay. So I've got half kind of the experience that you did. I learned how to cook when I was 11. There you go. You know, feed my siblings, but, uh, I'm sure it was different for you. I remember going to basketball practice my senior year of high school and, you know, Well, first I went to the hospital because my brother had been born. I ran off to basketball practice my senior year. I'm like, Hey guys, I just have got a new brother. Yeah, big thing. I mean, it's no big deal. It happens every year or other year. Yep. It was a good thing though. Like where your parents, um, like it's like Catholics or, um, some of the other, not Catholic, just love kids. Yeah. Yep. Awesome. Okay. And were they with a, like, how can you afford so many kids that were they in the Kansas city area already? Yeah. Okay. We were in Kansas city, which was pretty reasonable market. Yeah. My dad is a doctor. Okay. So that helped. And yeah. And your mom was stay at home then? She was. Not, yeah. She was a nurse for a long time. Seems like plenty, uh. Yeah, I think she worked harder than probably I do as a full time person. Yeah, yeah. Um, so you had, you were, you were back up. You and a couple of the other older siblings were back up to mom on this herd of kids. Uh, and what were you like, like when you went to kindergarten? Were you already like responsible? Uh. No, I didn't even go to kindergarten. I was homeschooled. Oh, you were homeschooled? Yeah. All of you guys? Uh, no. No. There was a big mix of things that we did. I kind of did a little bit of everything. Like I was homeschooled for a while, then tried public school, then Christian school, then homeschool. Just did a little bit of whatever. Okay. And everybody kind of got to self direct in that way. Um, I don't know if it was self directed, but. It changed as the generations, not the generations, but the years went by, I think my siblings spent more time in public school, but I did a little bit of everything. Okay. Yeah. And like, did the music come early? No, I, I mean, I did piano a little bit when I was younger, but I think it was my freshman year in high school. like most 15 year old boys, I just wanted to impress girls. So I sure started to, I figured learning the guitar will do it. Well, guitar goggles is a real thing. So I picked that up and okay. And what was your, like, were you a good student? Were you an athlete? Uh, not interested. Not a good student. I was an athlete. I loved basketball, did track and cross country, had, had dreams that my physical ability could not Fulfill in the basketball world, but I did play at a small school. Okay. Yeah. All right. Um, and then like, just picked up music. Were you, were you raised in a Christian family as well? So that was there with you from the start. Um, then you went, what was your secondary education? Um, where'd you go to college? I was like, secondary education. I don't even know what that means. Did I do that? I think it's a thing. Okay. I don't know. Did you? Yeah, I did. I went to a Bible college actually in Wisconsin. So you go to Green Bay. Yep. Keep driving north. Okay, go into the woods. Yep Go past the rows of trees and all the cabins and whatever in the snow and just keep going. And then you get to pin bind Wisconsin, like up on the Southern shore of superior or something. It's about 45 minutes away from iron mountain, Michigan and the up. Okay. Yeah. So the way up there. Yeah. Yeah. My uncle was the president of the college at the time. And a lot of my friends have gone there. I decided kind of last minute that I wanted to go up there cause I thought it would be good for me for a year just to spend some time. That's a lot of girls up there though. Probably like 400 of them. Okay, all right. No, not that many. Um, and I didn't, Ever date anyone in college, so no, not that many. That's why you picked up the guitar originally, but that proved out not to be like the Nope. The Lord had other plans for the guitar and it had nothing to do with girls. Fair enough. Yeah. Were you a songwriter right away? Uh, I messed around a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, cause, cause like, to be honest with you, like when I first came to know you, like after our first coffee meeting, probably years before you went to work for Wintermine. Yeah. I remember thinking writer was one of the defining, what writer and kind of philosopher cause you would share more of your, you probably shared more of your original music earlier in the Crossing thing. Although maybe you still do. I think so because I had more time back then. Right. There were no kids involved. Yeah. A chance to write a song was, yeah. Yeah, that's before I got married. Yep. Fair enough. So, um, so that was all kind of more later as you kind of evolved as a, as a person. Yeah. I don't think of myself as a good musician. I think, no, I mean, I'm not that great at the guitar. Like I know what I'm, I can, I can play the guitar, but I'm not like. I always compare myself to people above me and I'm very small. You know Jimi Hendrix? I know Jimi Hendrix. I can play enough. I can sing enough to like, it works. I don't think I'm a recording artist. Like a man's got to know his limitations. Yeah. Yeah. And I know mine and I think they, they work well in what I'm doing. Um, I do enjoy writing songs when I have the time to have a little bit of a gift for that. And sometimes they work. Um, for whatever reason, they always end up being Christmas songs. A lot of them do. I wrote a song for when my wife walked down the aisle at our wedding, though. Oh, cool. Yeah. Do you want to sing it? No. I have a confession to make that, uh, like in the, over the last maybe two, three years, I'm 50 now. So my, my voice just doesn't have the range that it does. I no longer can, can, can. outperform you on the vocals parts of the crossing worship. There was a season where, where I could get a little higher highs and a little nicer shifts, but no, probably I don't have your impressive range by any means. No, I mean, well me neither, but mine kind of overlaps with yours. It used to, now I've lost some of the places that you can go. I can no longer go. Uh, so anyway, it's hard to make it work for everyone. It really is. Um, how are you the, like when it's chief musician, does that mean you have Like what songs everybody's playing even if you're not there that week and stuff. No, what's that job really look like now? It just means that I pick out the songs that we're doing if I'm on okay that Sunday I don't if somebody else is doing it and then it means that I practice with the team and then I'm there Sunday morning And you're there two to three times and you get at least one week off a month kind of thing more like two Okay. Okay. Um, so not as much lift as it used to be. Probably. I did it four days, four weekends a month for years. Right. And it's kind of crazy when I think about it. Um, I could never do that now, but it worked when I was, A young man. Yeah. You know? Well, and you were like freelance writing without a real job. And then broken a coffee shop. Like, yeah, you want me to do this four times. Yeah. Okay. I'll do it four times. Sounds great. At least it fills my time. Um, so is that something you want to continue to do? Like you're, you're a CEO now. Like you can be like, Hey, you know, I'm a little too busy with my jobby job. But that's a good question. I don't think I'll do it forever, but I think I will do it forever in the sense that I'll be available forever. Like if somebody needs me to fill in, I don't know how long I'll do it. You could shift down to once a month here soon, even potentially, I think eventually something like that'll happen. Honestly, I think it'd be better. Someone else took over that had more time than I have available. Yeah. Yeah. Cause people will always ask, like, you know, they want to have the stuff ready early. They want to have like special stuff. And I'm like, I, what I can do right now is show up and I know all the songs a bunch of times, but I kind of need everybody else to kind of practice on their own. Yeah. I think it'd be better if. There was someone that had time to really focus on it, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Is there somebody on the worship team that could rise up in that? Yeah. There's another guy. Um, well, he's no less busy than I am though. Jack Crenshaw has his own. He's great. Yeah. He's super. Yep. Um, he doesn't have more time. His range is a little higher than mine. So I have a harder time singing along with him. You might too. We talk about that, but I'm sure he's nice for a lot of guys, uh, and gals. Um, anything that you would want, like, you know, just the random listener that maybe goes to church and participates in the worship, but just to a peek behind the curtain of, um, sure. I mean, I worship teams. I really believe in a simple model doesn't mean everybody has to do it that way. So I grew up in a Baptist church. Okay. We sang hymns with a handle old school. Yeah. Old school, which I think was great for my development. I was just like looking at notes and singing and doing that every week. Yep. Um, But I am a big believer in simple church in, and especially in like the singing portion of the service, just doing it in a way that's really accessible for everyone. Yeah. I think there are lots of places that have shifted to more of a performance style thing where you engage in it by listening to it and kind of singing along. Yeah. Um, It's just not how I prefer to do things. I like to try to pick songs and pick keys that allow everybody to get involved. Um, I love to get, drop it down to acapella at least once a service. Totally. I was just going to, I was just thinking about that. Yeah. Cause that's what it's about. Like, it's not about me and that's a big problem. I think in that space with people making it about them and I, I would, luckily I was trained by a great teacher. friend named JD Summers, who was just really good at it and also had a great perspective on it, taught me well, like, Hey, this is not like your time to shine. Like, Oh, this is not about you. Like get up there and help them sing. Yeah. That's what you're doing. Um, and I, I don't like doing it any other way than that. And that means that I would pick songs that are. Some of them, I mean, I love hymns because of the richness of the, of the language and the, the meaning behind it. So the job is almost like to draw out worship. Yeah. I'm trying to lead worship. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. Not put on a concert. Yeah. It'd be a lame concert if you're coming to hear me. But my, my goal is just to help other people engage in it. And that means you do things a certain way that allows people to participate in it. Yeah. Um, you want people to participate. You want to look around and see other people singing. And for the church body to do this, like the liturgy, the work of the people is every Sunday we come together and we do it together. And if you can like, look out into the crowd and see somebody or more than one person, like singing their heart out with tears. Yeah, I mean, that's not always like, that's not how you measure your success, but it kind of is honestly, like when I'm looking out there, like, I want to see people singing because if they're not, then I feel like I'm failing because if, if everyone just shows up to listen to me, we failed. Yeah. Um, I want people to show up and to And what do I need to know to be able to engage in worshipping, um, along with us, doing it together? And it's about us doing it, not me. I've had that, uh, those moments before, you know, even though I was baptized, I guess, gosh, back in 2002 or one or something like back then I was kind of a Semi christian growing up kind of in comparison, probably. Semi christian. It was like, I went to church and stuff a little bit, but well, I didn't know what the good news was even after being confirmed. So I couldn't give you some of the evidence of my, like, I don't know if it was my fault, but I was pretty curious about everything else in the world. So I think they just kind of avoided that. It was more like. If you go to this church, then you're good. Don't sweat the small stuff. Here, memorize the books of the Bible. A lot of people have that story. Yeah, I think so. I don't think it's uncommon, necessarily. It's kind of my story, sort of. Yeah, even as a Baptist, it's kind of background. Not the same thing as you, but I mean, there's always that element where, like, if you grow up in it, like, I made a confession of faith when I was five years old. Right. And maybe that was real, but when you're like 16, you're thinking about like, I don't know about this, you know, it's not as clean as we would like it to be, but yeah, yeah. Well, and it would be nicer for all of us if it was just cleaner. Anyway, you get baptized and you're just clean from there. Clean thoughts, easy, easy living. Got the floaties on. Alas, it's not easy. Um, we'll end up delving into faith, family politics. What else should we do in this first chapter of Any business y things, any music y things you want to touch on or should we just take a little break and kind of come back into some of the more, uh, topically oriented conversations? I mean, I don't know if we're going to come back to any business stuff. I mean, I could talk about my, my journey to, uh, How I got here. I mean, yeah, let's do it. I, so I knew that. Oh, so yeah. So you get here. Yeah. Keep going. Yeah. Do it. Well, yeah. I got in the car, got in the Civic. Got outta here, Yeah. Um, let's do, and man, did I have some terrible jobs? just the worst I was. Yeah. So you like living in Gary's basement or something like that? Yeah. Or like Yeah, I have a thing. Yeah. I lived in some basements. Yeah. I lived in Jacob's basement actually. Okay. We'll get to that part. So yeah, I came out here and. So I graduated from Bible college. Good luck with that. Did you want to be a pastor? I wanted to be a missionary actually. Okay. I thought that's what I would do is cause I, so I spent two summers in North Africa and Morocco. Okay. And I was pretty passionate about that. I enjoyed it, but then I came back and I think reality kind of set in about just who I am. Yeah. Like I spent college, I would say learning a lot about who God is. And then time after college was along with that also just learning a lot about who I am. Yeah. And being realistic. Okay. Like, or maybe even more specifically, like learning who I'm not. Yeah. Yeah. And thinking about like charging off and starting a church in North Africa was like, you know what? I don't think I'm going to be very good at that. Yeah. Like, it's just not really, there are parts of that that I'm wired for and parts of it that I'm just not. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just not, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. So that's what I wanted to do. But I came out here and just started helping out at church. And then my first job was working at a flood restoration company with Rich Gardner, who, you know, Rich and I, if we just look each other in the eye for another company or for, cause he went independent for a while too, uh, for a company, for a company. So both of you are working together for this crappy flood restoration company. And we can. If we just look at each other, we know, like, we got some stories, like Rich and I have been through it. That industry has You know, it's almost there with bankers and attorneys in terms of, you can trust me, I'm a flood restoration expert. Oh, gotcha. Well, I wasn't, uh, swindling anybody. I was just swimming in their basement. Oh, gross. You know, that kind of thing. So it was, it was not a fun job. You just got the job was just to deal with sewage and different things. Yeah. I saw you get, you have your local moment thing. It'll come from that. Okay. All right. Um, but I did that for a long time. Felt like a long time anyway. And then just bounced around. Like I, I did work for a government contractor here in town making maps. Oh yeah. Kaki CACI. I've seen that company before. Yeah. It's like G G O whatever, like GIS kind of properly. It was things that I think AI would do now. Probably. Yeah. Um, It was kind of fun, actually. It wasn't bad, except after a while, you just, your brain started to melt. And what is that word? That's like the art of map making cartography. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Good job. Sort of. I was a sort of cartographer for a while. Are you excellent at Scrabble? Um, my wife usually beats me. So no, I'm just curious. You know, a lot of words. You're just not that, uh, I don't know. I'm just not that great at Scrabble. She just wants to win more. Probably. She is competitive. So I did that. And where is, where does Alex come along, by the way, like this journey from church? So she was there. Well, that, that's kind of a funny story though. She, so I saw her pretty early on, like that first year that I was there. And when I saw her, I had this flash of recognition, but I couldn't place it. I knew she looked familiar. Like, who's that pretty girl over there? I don't, I feel like I've seen her before, but it'd be awkward if I went and talked to her because I have no idea. Right. Probably not actually. So now I'm just the dorky guy going to ask this girl. But it turns out she was from Kansas too. She was from Emporia, which is about an hour and a half Southwest of where I'm from. Okay. And we started to find out things about each other, such as we had a lot of, or we had some mutual friends Which was good because she remembered being in the same room as me and not liking me. Oh. I didn't remember her at all. So you'd have these mutual friends kind of stand up for you and say that. Yeah, kind of like I, I recognized her, but I remember. Or she remembered, like, noticing something that I did that she did not like. Oh, I don't know if I was just in a bad, I'm pretty good at making bad first impressions and I definitely did it with her. So then she saw me and was like, Oh yeah, I know you. I don't like that guy. Um, but then mutual friend was like, no, no, like give him a chance, whatever you should. And then, then we found out that we were born on the same day. Oh, which is? November 11th, 1987. November 11th, which is Veterans Day. It is. Or always. Always. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So we were born about an hour and a half apart on the same day. Wow. Like, six hours apart. Interesting. Which is just one of those things that gets you talking. Yeah, yeah. You realize that. Was she there at the crossing from the McQuinn connection from Kansas or how did she land there? No, she found it in a directory of churches. Okay. Yeah. Just was checking it out. Gospel Coalition, I think. Okay. Interesting. Um, so what was it that, like, I assume was, was Gary also from the same kind of Baptist church background that you were from? Same church I went to and the same college. Same Bible college is everything. And then, um, The crossing would probably be contrasted as maybe a little bit more less dogmatic, uh, of sorts, maybe? Actually, not in important things, just as dogmatic in the really things that actually matter, in my opinion. Yeah. How, yeah. So how did you resonate with the crossing from a, from a theological standpoint when you arrived, how was it different from what you, it jived with? A little bit less strict about some of the things around the edges. Okay. Fair enough. All right. Yeah. Um, Do you had, like, even in high school, other times in your, like, faith background, had you been, like, wondering? Or Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Things really changed for me my freshman year in college. It kind of felt like the matrix. You start seeing the zeros and the ones, like you understand life for the first time. Yeah. So I did, yeah, uh, college was, it was really big for me. Okay. Yeah. And like, in what ways would you care to expand maybe a little bit more? Well, I was spending all day around a bunch of friends that were a lot more mature than I was a lot more like spiritually mature. Um, and just a good environment, like an environment that was admittedly like really rigid in some ways that was unhelpful. Yeah. But within it, there's this group of awesome people that I spent all my time with. Yeah. Yeah. And. That had a big impact on me. I think, um, I'm not sure if you're a sports guy at all, but, uh, last night, the, the NDSU Bison won their 10th national championship in the last 15 years or something like that. And like some of their players and stuff that have had interviews, like it's just kind of that kind of team where everybody's so. like invested in the team, that Michigan team that J. J. McCarthy came from kind of had that same kind of tone last couple of years ago or whatever it was. And just that notion of we're a brotherhood here. It's beyond that. And that sounds like kind of the environment you're describing. It was a brotherhood, which goes a long way for a 19 year old dude. Yeah, for sure. You need that. Yeah. So when we departed, you had started to change, uh, minds of, uh, Alex and Uh, or at least your friends that helped to get you, uh, at least a, a first date. Gary threw Gary and his wife through a birthday party for us without telling me about it. Yeah, but this is like before anything. And then we sat next to each other. They knew that Alex didn't particularly like me, but they're like, you're gonna like, we like him. So you're going to sit next to her. You just need to learn more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somehow that worked. But a big, but a boom. Yep. And was it a, uh, high speed Romance engagement and just shortly by modern standards. It was super high speed. I think, I mean, I think we dated for like a year and then we're engaged for four months or so. So, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Jill and I were, we did it for a year and then got engaged and then we waited another whole year. Cause yeah, she was still in college and her dad was paying for it. I was scared. He was going to make me pay for it. If I married her first, so we got married right after she graduated. Yeah. I distinctly remember my father in law. Like when I. Asked him if I could marry his daughter. Yeah, which I did because I'm old school. Yeah, same and he Like he was he was positive but the one question he had was like and he's trying to be nice She was like, how are you gonna make money? How do I say I don't know in a way that gives you confidence? Some hope at least. Yeah. What was your, your status in life at that moment? I was, I was doing the map thing. I was a cartographer. Okay. Well, yeah, you know, that was, uh, It wasn't terrible. Just slightly above poverty level. Yeah, it was like 14 an hour. Okay, so it was pretty poverty level. Yeah. But at least it was consistent. At least I had a job. He didn't know how much money I had. He didn't need to know that. He just didn't need to know that I had a J. O. P. As far as he knew, you might have made 18, 20 bucks an hour. Right, exactly. Who knows? Um, so yeah, I did that. And Then I went to work for this terrible marketing firm. Like someone started an app marketing company. Okay. And it was just not great. It was just some random job. Yeah. It was just two people. They needed someone to write content for them. Are they still around? No, it's long, long gone. You don't talk about them anymore. I'm just kidding. Yeah, not really. That didn't go well. They didn't go to jail or nothing though. No, they didn't go to jail. It's just like poorly run and bad experience. Um, And then from there, I did Uber for a while. Okay. Okay. And then I'm kind of surprised you had a new enough car that you could qualify to do Uber. Right. Well, Alex had a better job than I did. She's a dental hygienist. She's like, you can borrow my car. She made a lot more than 14 an hour, which was handy. That's actually a really great job. One of my Yeah. Um, one of our close friends, they live in West Vail now, but, um Hmm. She, the, the wife went to college for dental hygienics or whatever. And I, you know, it had the four year degree, five and a half year degree with economics, and I was a banker and stuff. And it was so annoying because she made so much more money within me early in our careers. Dental hygiene school is no joke. It sounds like it's very difficult. Like they have to put in like a miserable two years. Yeah, it's not, it's not an easy kind of journey, but for 20 grand, you couldn't make. 15, 000 a year more than all your friends early in your career. And, you know, yeah, she was only working three days a week when I met her. And I was like, you do what now? Right. I work at six and they're miserable and you make twice as much as I do. It was not how I drew it up in terms of like, you don't want to be in that position where your wife is way, making way better. Did you think that you were looking for a sugar mama? Or just that you needed to figure some stuff out. I don't think so. But she did have some hard conversations. Cause I was like pretty determined and like, I gotta feel like I know what I'm good at. I gotta find a thing that matches my skills. And I couldn't. Which was, which was what at the time? Writing. It was writing. Yeah. Okay. That was like the only thing that I was like, yeah, this is like a multiple skill. That's what I remember from when we first connected. Um, kind of in those same days, really. But then she got pregnant. Okay. And then. That just changes things. And so I went and I got my CDL. Okay. That, uh, I forget what it's called. There's a school in town. Yup. Yup. You see the trucks driving around every once in a while. Like whatever those guys make 24 an hour. It was more than 14. Um, so I did that. I went and got my CDL and I was just such a fish out of water. Right. I mean, I adapted to it, but it was like every day I would show up and be like, I'm doing this. Because I'm a man, because I have a wife because there's a little kid on the way and I just have to do this. What are you like drinking three raw eggs on your way out the door in the morning? It was, yeah, it was kind of rough. So I did that. My first job, like the first CDL job I got was working for a company in town that moves drywall around. Okay. So if you see those trucks with a big hook on it, sure. I had never seen this in action before, but they roll up to the job site, dude gets a remote control out. Hooks the, um, big, a big loaf of drywall. Loaf of drywall is a good way to put it. And then pulls it over to a window and you shovel it in there. And that job sucked. A little dusty. Uh, you're carrying drywall. Like that stuff's heavy. Oh, right. Like it was as strong as I've ever been in my life. That's for sure. Right. Um, but we're not really built for that. Like we shouldn't sign up for rugby and we shouldn't do drywall deliveries. No, I had more of a, yeah. So I did that. That wasn't fun. And then I went and did, uh, let's see what was next. I went to the oil field. Oh yeah. With your CDL, with my CDL and hauled water. Okay. Frack water stuff out in Weld County, you know, slinging water. That was interesting. I don't, I mean, I didn't know anything about the oil industry and. Then all of a sudden I was out there riding around, like driving this big truck, which actually I was kind of good at, like, I liked driving big stuff. Like it was kind of fun, you know, like, Well, you got the confidence that it's not, you're not going to wreck something. Yeah. Yeah. So I kind of enjoyed driving stuff around, but the hours are terrible. Like I was getting up, I had to be in, uh, what's that town East of Greeley. Um, Well, Eaton is north and there's, uh, uh, Keer starts with a K. Uh, Kuh, Kuh. I should really know. Kersey. Kersey, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was in Kersey. South and east of Greeley, yep. And I had to be there at six. Oh, damn. So. So you were leaving here at like 445 or something. Leaving super early and we didn't, it was like a 12 hour shift. And my daughter had just been born. Wow. Adelaide. So it was, it was, it was a thing. So I was, uh, Doing that for a while, but the interesting thing about the oil field is that that's kind of a brotherhood like you mentioned earlier. Sure, yeah. You get out there and the thing is there's real danger. Yeah. I mean, there's super high pressure There's gas like you're walking around with this monitor and if if it starts beeping like run against the wind And so I think that that level of danger kind of galvanizes because I noticed the big difference between construction site life And oil field life similar kinds of dudes, but construction guys are just angry in my experience Like a lot of anger. Yeah, and they had to settle for this job. Yeah, I think so You And then in the oil field, it's more like there's some of that, but it's more like, we actually do have each other's back because this is dangerous. And I'm going to do this for a while, or I'm doing this because I've got a family and I need to kind of make, Mm hmm outsize income compared to the education that I'm bringing to this industry or whatever exactly people are out there for opportunity But they just work themselves to death. Yeah funny story about the oil field just to Demonstrate like what the mindset is like I was at a frac pad after they were done and I was just cleaning it up cleaning it up And that's one of those things where after they like moved the stuff all out or whatever. The Halliburton guys would be like, Oh, it's just water. I'm like, okay, it's just water. It's purple, buddy. Glows. I wonder how much cancer I'm getting today. Um, but I, I was by myself in the middle of the day, cleaning up all this, this water with some suction. And I knew there were Halliburton guys there. They always have the red jumpsuits, jumpsuits on. I just think about, uh, I'm thinking about Dick Cheney in a red jumpsuit. He should be in an orange jumpsuit. Yeah, he probably should, but Red jumpsuit is fine. Uh, I knew they were, I knew they were about doing something, but it's a big area and I couldn't see them. Okay. By myself, totally quiet. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw six people in red jumpsuits sprinting in the same direction. Oh. And that's like max adrenaline. Right. You run the same freaking way they are right now, like, I mean, I was about to, I felt like I could run faster than anyone at that moment, like I was just taking off thinking this is it, because they warn you about this stuff. They tell you like, if you see someone running, you freaking run the same way you hold your breath, don't breathe like this could be it. And so like all that goes through your mind in about half a second. Right. And then as I turned to run, I see a football fly through the air. Like they're over there playing 500 or whatever. And I thought I was about to die and I was not thankfully, but that's how on edge it can be in that industry. I'm not surprised. So, so like what a carbon monoxide cloud can just like come at you and kill you or something? No, there's this gas that is in the ground. Okay. Um, in the Weld County area and I'm sure in other areas, but the guy said it used to be just like south of 14, I think. And now it's north of it as well. Um, I forget what it is. Sulfuric gas or mustard gas, basically. I forget the name of it, but it's one of those things where it's like, you know, three parts of a million could kill you or whatever. Oh, damn. Very small, like you don't. You need to not breathe it. Yeah, interesting. That's why if you go to a frack pad You'll see them walking around with little monitors on yeah, and they're just if it gets one part familiar. It's like It freaks out. What's up? Is it like arsenic based or something? I couldn't tell you. I would be talking out of my backside trying to guess what it, I don't remember. So you work in the oil fields for a while. You got this little baby, young wife. That was hard. Who's no longer making the kind of money she was because now she's all of a sudden, yeah, can't work three days a week anymore. Um, what'd you guys do? Did you have families? We had some great friends named the dollars. I don't know if you know, Jill or Mark dollar here in town. I don't think I do. They graciously took care of Adelaide while, while Alex was working. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's kind of like a, for them mostly volunteer. You guys have to buy some food once in a while and stuff. Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah. So that was super helpful. Wow. And then after that I did the concrete thing. I worked for two different concrete companies. Um, one that was based out of alt. And then Martin Marietta here in town. Okay. Um, I got fired from the one and all. Because you didn't know what you were doing or, well, I'm sure if you talk to them, they'd tell you something that I did, but they, I think they just didn't like me and kind of made something up and yeah. Uh, well, no, actually. So I was working like 12 hour shifts and then forgot that they had what they call a safety meeting and in the, And the construction and like the concrete world safety meeting means like, yeah, we'll talk about the OSHA thing for five minutes and then we'll just yell at you about whatever else is going on. Um, yeah. And they had one at like five 30 in the morning in alt and I got off work at seven o'clock after like a 14 hour shift and forgot about it. And they were super pissed that I forgot about that meeting and then just kind of used it I think to get rid of it. They didn't like me. Do you know what safety meeting means in, uh, It's uh, at least with some of my friends, it's uh, like when you go smoke a joint before you do a big project. Oh, gosh. I, uh, I didn't get fired because of that. It's been that way for like 25 years. Anyway. Um, and I, I neglected that. We have the, the, the local experience. Oh, the true local experience. The homegrown experience. joints there. I forgot to offer you one, but I think I'll pass on the Elon Musk. I figured probably my mom will probably watch this. Um, anyway, so then I went and successfully talked my way and do another job in the industry here. It's a pretty established player. Martin Marietta, huge, huge. And they're a pretty good company. Um, so that was going fine. Yeah. Um, but you were still going to move back to Kansas city just for, I mean, I did not like support from family and your job sucked really never get to write anything except for like when you were stopped at stoplights and you're like, that literally happened. I still have stuff on my phone, like stories from when I was just sitting there waiting for the next load. You're just like exploding probably for lack of. Opportunities to express yourself kind of felt like that. Yeah. Yeah. But the concrete world is not, it's because you don't know what time you're going to start. So every night you call in and they're like, okay, you need to be here at 543 tomorrow. Right. With a fresh load. Yeah. Interesting. Well, just like at the plant. Load up at that time. Yeah, yeah. But they were so strict about being late. Like they, I did get in trouble because I was, they were like, you were 30 seconds late. I was like, dude. Yeah. I was 30 seconds late. Cause it's. Four 47 in the morning. Like I understand, I understand that you need to run a tight ship, but jeez. And my baby cried like literally three hours last night. So I slept from 10 until midnight. And then again, from two until three, there were plenty of mornings like that. And then you get called over cause you're a 30 seconds late. And I was like, guys, I can't do this anymore. Like, this is freaking insane. Yeah. Um, so that's why I think maybe now my management style, I'm like, I don't care if you're 10 minutes late, like just. You know, get here at a reasonable time and stay till a reasonable time. Do your job. But don't be 10 minutes late for a meeting with me. Right. Yeah. You know, but there's two different things. Let's just, let's just be reasonable here because I think when people relax, they tend to perform better. Yeah. Okay. All right. I dig it. There's the nugget. And so then that's kind of where we came from. Like when Jacob calls, cause you had like a one or two year old by then. Do you guys have a second? Yes. Kid too, right? Okay. Yeah. He was newly born at that point. Okay. So I had the son and the daughter. Okay. But I did get sort of an offer in Casey from cousin connection. I was going to go do that. Which was going to be what? I was going to be writing for a political company. Oh, interesting. Okay. Whether or not it actually would have happened is kind of up for debate. It was an interesting situation. All right. I think I had an offer from them. Like I was operating. Oh, I did. But like, it was like, you answer my calls, man. A trust based offer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh, and then Jacob came to me with the winter mind thing and yeah, everyone. What an interesting thing. Like it's kind of a say yes story in some ways. It is. It is a say a story. And I was thinking about like, what could you learn from my journey? Like, I think a lot of people. Look at a ladder in front of them and they think like their challenge or the process is how do I get onto that next rung? But the, honestly, the really hard thing is when there is no rung, like there's no ladder, like when you're working at a concrete company and it's like the opposite of what you should be doing is like, well, there's nothing like, there's, it's just, I hope lightning strikes, you know? And so I think what I took away from that though, is that if you're in that situation where you feel like you don't know what's next, The most important thing is just how you handle yourself and your reputation because being a part of a community will Probably eventually get some sort of an opportunity for you if you're thought of well, yeah Yeah, and so I Jacob liked me so that was good lived in his basement apparently some years before or whatever before You guys got married? Right before I got married, I, I shagged, I lived in, uh, Jacob and Leslie's. You're like, dude, I just spent some money on a ring, I got no money for rent really for the next few months. Could I live in your basement? I remember quite literally scraping the money together for that ring and just broke. But, yeah, so I lived in Jacob's basement, which was fun. Got to know them. Yeah. Um. So, Jill lived, um, next door to Leslie. Oh, really? When I first started dating Jill. Hmm. And if I remember right, like the, I think the story is that Leslie like ratted or didn't rat on Jill, but she like confronted Jill over the fact that I, my car was there in the morning one day. Cause Jill's folks, you know, were part of the Mountain View church, which is also where Leslie and Jacob had attended. She was all over it. She's a confront the dragon kind of a gal. That's great. Jacob needs somebody like that in his life. Some of my favorite people in the world. Same here. I wish I was more intentional, spent more time with them. Um, so that's quite an interesting, uh, dynamic. And actually I really like that last bit of, like, you know, I've, I've, I've You know, I left banking, and like, tried to start a restaurant, ended up with a food trailer, had this, got this local think tank thing going, and now people are like, I remember, do you make any money on the podcast? I'm like, no, not really, but I like doing it, you know. But, the thing I said in Rotary especially was just, kind of kept my legs pumping, and waited for a crease. Yeah. And that's a little bit, you know, you were both in a position to say, yes, you'd even with me, like when we first got connected, like that writer philosopher kind of, yeah, thinker, creator stuff. Would you like to hear my ideas world? A little bit like, like the, the, the truth message resonates with you, whether it's the truth of media or the truth of Christ, frankly, and that was, yeah. You know why? Partly why I featured own listeners, people that are listening out there now should check out my blog from December of 2024, which gave some kudos to and, uh, some thoughts around the notion of Shalom, which was, I read that. That was neat. Um, yeah, kind of a tail on and a tribute to your sermon from some weeks before. So thanks for that. I didn't, uh, do you, how do you sharpen your sharpener? Sword, uh, from a faith perspective, like, was that like you were assigned to that week and you had it coming for a while and you just got the preaching thing. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I just panicked every night for about five nights and then it was over when you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute. I do my best work under fire. Not really. It should have been, I always wish I had more time, but, um, I enjoy doing that. I don't do it a whole lot, obviously, but it is an all consuming week. Yeah, for sure. When you have, uh, other stuff going on in your life and you're, when you're trying to do that in the margins of time that you have, it's. Quite difficult. And do you have church leadership responsibilities beyond the the worship team kind of leadership element? No, you don't have to, you're not like a proper pastor. You don't show up for Tuesday morning meetings or whatever that kind of stuff. Don't care if we're under budget this month and are tithing. I mean we care about all that stuff, but it's not my burden in the sense of like I'm the first person that has to know. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Um I feel like we can roll into the, uh, the later segments of the Loco Experience, the faith family politics, uh, things. Um, we've talked about faith intermixed here and there. Um, I guess, why? Why have, why were you raised in the faith and remain connected to it for the most part? Um, have you, have you, We talked there a little bit of periods of doubt. Why why Christianity not? Yeah Hebrew or Jewish, you know Islam. Why not something else? Why not something else? Are there many paths? Mm hmm. That's one of the questions that people well, I mean I Christians with I It was the faith handed down to me from my parents. Okay is I feel like that's the For a long time that answer has been unpopular. Right, but it's actually a good thing. Yeah Yeah, like where I'm coming from like I'm trying to do that for my kids It's a positive thing like not everybody has to have a story of like wandering in the wilderness for forever and then discovering Right something like it's I think it's it's a good thing It's nice to have a culturally anticipated thing rather than an exceptional thing. I think so. I mean there are obvious pitfalls associated with the The cultural realities of Christianity. Like if you, it's easy to blend in and to be fake, like, yeah, there's all that stuff, but I think that I had a former client when I was a banker say, well, one thing I know is if you say you can trust me, I'm a Christian. I cannot trust that person. Yeah. It's unfortunate. You know, statements like that floating. Yep. I have experienced it and seen my, my dad experienced that in business some too, with other people. And it's sad. Um, but I think the reason, unfortunately it's because people do it. Yeah, you know, like, I don't know. Unfortunately, that's, uh, the reality in Christ forecasted it is like there, you know, you'll say, I said that I claimed the name Lord, Lord, but I never knew you. Yeah, the dynamic and reality of the church is that there's lots of people inside of it that aren't either aren't actually Christians or just don't act like it. We can't sort those things out, but yeah, you just keep going. Um, but I think the reason that I am still a Christian is because like, after it was handed down to me as I grew up and started to think on my own, like it, it made the most sense to me. And navigate this brotherhood conversation. Brotherhood conversation, but also, I mean, I am fascinated by some things that are easy to ignore. Like, one of them is just the fact that we exist. I mean, if you ever want to trip yourself out, just like, think about the fact that we're here. Right. Why is there something rather than nothing? That's wild. Yeah. Like, what, because there has to be, like, with every rationality and every, like, rule of how the universe works, you think about the concept of a first mover. Sure. And, like, how is it possible that Just right here. It doesn't matter. Right. Instead of no matter, how is it possible that the world exists because every single explanation for those things, every single attempt to account for the fact that you and I are here with a natural explanation ultimately fails logically, because there is no rational explanation for existence. If you discount supernatural realities, like you either have to say either matter, it has always existed, right? Or it came about by natural processes, both of which violate logic. One of the things I've talked about on this podcast before, but not for a while is like after the, The wood telescope came out or whatever. What's the new thing? The what? The new telescope, the fancy one. Oh, the web web. Yeah. James Webb. I thought it was like the wooden telescope. That was like, they were like years ago, you know, they were kind of, they kind of came to this conclusion that the universe is like 13. 8 billion years old, give or take, right? And here's why we think that based on these new fancy pictures. And it kind of seems like it was, had to have been intelligently designed before that moment. To, like, go off the way it went off. Like, you can find quite a few articles along that line since that time that that telescope was released. But in contrast, when I was 12 year old trying to figure that kind of stuff out, it was like, Well, there's either the Big Bang, Or God, intelligent design. And now it's like, well, no, it looks like there was some kind of intelligent design thing behind it. There's a lot of mystery. If you believe in the big bang, then there might've been something ahead of that. There's obviously lots of mystery in the origin of the universe. I don't claim to understand all of it. I think we can disagree about those things and still be. Brothers and sisters. Um, but yeah, so anyway, to me, like there's this seed of just a demand for an explanation of why we're here. And then it goes down the road from there for me personally, it's like, okay, now I believe that there has to be some sort of a creator. Cause it's the only thing that makes any sense and all other explanations fall short for me. And then there's just the life of Jesus. Like there's a testimony of Jesus. There's, uh, this person who is more personally attested to historically attested to than any other one, any other person in history who was seen by witnesses. After he was crucified coming back to life like you have to reckon with those things, right? Right got a deal with that like you, you know You like C. S. Lewis said you have to say that he's a liar a lunatic or Lord Those are really the only options anyone that says they're God Like you either need to like put that person away because they're crazy Don't put them away because they're claiming something that's insane kind of a con man. Yeah, they're con man or They're telling the truth. And Occam's razor points me toward the fact that it's true. That's not the only reason I believe, but that's like part of my journey. Is that the older I got, the more I questioned it, the more it stood up. Not that there's no mystery and not that there's no things that it kind of ties together with. the way that he talked in some ways. Kind of that, like he could have been more, look at me, look at me, like you were talking about in your worship performances, but his real destiny was both to be the sacrifice, but also to point to the opportunity to, uh, reestablish a relationship with the creator. In a way, how do you, I had, um, some faith conversations with, uh, with a close friend just the other day talking about kind of the, the, the three in one person element, you know, the father, son, Holy Spirit kind of element. And like, how do you reconcile that? And is it. Like, I guess, let me just share what I said about that a little bit. And because where I don't probably feel as comfortable as where the Holy Spirit fits in, but kind of from even a little bit like my, from my blog, the chaos and structure and order, I almost imagined God the father as all the pent up energy before the big bang, as well as kind of the creative ability. In some ways, but then the word, the, the, the Christ person being kind of some of the structure and order that was applied to all this energy in some ways, and the Holy Spirit is more like the, the mysterious little ghost that can talk to us and get us to be normal instead of meatbags. Um, yeah, I think. But yeah, talk to me about your impression of that, because I think that's a big. Are we monotheists? Are we tritheists? I would say yes. It's one God, three persons, right? Yeah. Uh, I, first I would just say that I think part of the journey of faith is, um, being okay with mystery. I think when you're younger, Maybe you're like, yeah, I want to understand everything and have an opinion about everything and it really matters And I do think a lot of it matters But one not the beginning of wisdom like part of wisdom is being okay with mystery and saying I don't understand everything perfectly Yeah, and that if I were meant to understand this perfectly, it probably would have been communicated a little more clearly Okay, and so yeah That's how I feel about the whole, like the, the mystery of the Trinity. Like, I can't explain how that's possible. And I would look like a fool. I think if I tried to, like, I just, you try to, you, there's that, um, Maxim that was popular for a while of not putting God in a box, which I understand what they're saying, but also it's like, well, what if he builds the box? Like, what if he defines the parameters and says, this is what I'm like, and this is what I'm not like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's all you can do is just look at how he describes himself and take those things into account, um, on their own and then hold them together as well as you can and not try to be able to understand, like, how can three in one be possible? Like, well, he's God. I don't know. Like, how did he speak the world into existence? I don't know. And a healthy amount of that is good. As long as you don't go so far down the road that you're like, everything is fine. I don't care what's true or what's not true. Like there's a healthy balance. I think of like embracing mystery and then also holding on to what God says about himself, like what he's like and what he's not. So when you think about, um, like the, the third of the stars are the devil's minions kind of language from that revelation passage that you preached on. Um, is that a real physical act? Like, is that. I mean, obviously, in our understanding of the universe as we see it, we're not going to see these stars cast from the sky, but is there, I guess, in your interpretation of the world, best to understand it, is there demons floating around? Is there, you know, are there, What, what are those kind of, like, when you hear a story like that, Revelations 12, like, how do you interpret, like, how that's actually going to be, or is that metaphor? I don't think it's metaphor. I think it's, it is apocalyptic language describing real things. Okay. Yeah. So anytime you read Revelation or other books of the Bible. One of the first things you have to do is think about what the genre of literature is. And I heard somebody compare it to a newspaper. Like if you're reading a newspaper, you kind of, you don't think about the comic section the same way you think about the editorial section. Like you understand that there's genres of literature and that those are communicating different things in different ways. So you have to keep that in mind, which means if you want to understand revelation, you have to think about first century apocalyptic literature. So now we're really getting into the, which is basically the book of revelation. That's what it is. Yeah. But there's actually other there are other works that are like non canonical. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you can like go back and look at how those, not that I'm not a biblical scholar. Sure. I did four years of Bible college in the woods. That's what I'm working with here. Um, but yeah, so I, I, um, I think that those things are, it's using apocalyptic language to tell a story that's true. And it doesn't mean that it's physically manifest in exactly the same way as, you know, that's why you get some goofiness with some books or like, Just think people talking about like super literal interpretations of that there's well and Daniel predicts tribulation as being like 1400 days and Paul's is or no John's is only 1350 Or whatever, you know, a different kind of, uh, a period of this and that, whatever. Different authors working in different genres. And there's a lot of mystery there. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. But I do believe in a physical element to all that stuff. Yeah. And I think going back to what you're talking about, we're talking about the story of Christmas. Um, sure. That passage that's talking about this dragon waiting in front of the woman, like it's, it's representative of what was actually happening, which is the, the dragon. Was this King Herod, right? Well, yeah, there's the, there's the shadowy dragon. Cause a lot of times there's the actual events and the future events all woven into one. Yeah, yeah, they are. But I think Herod takes that role in that vision. It's like, he's the one that's like waiting to devour the Messiah when he's born. Right. And so what's done and heaven is done on earth. But as directed by the devil, ultimately. Yeah. He wasn't, that wasn't just a normal thought. You know what? I'm going to just kill all the baby boys. I think it is kind of a normal thought for a psychopath in the first century ruling a part of that region, like, because it's not a unique event in history. Yeah. That kind of thing. Sadly it's not like, I can't believe this happened. Like that kind of thing has been a normal, um, terrible, but not unheard of. So I believe in shadowy power behind the scenes, just taking Someone like Harrod that was yeah signed up to do a terrible thing easy to manipulate from those shadowy forces if you will. Yeah We're really getting into it. Yeah, it's a little deeper than I'm going to go If you good you need a potty break or not, no, I don't need a potty break Well, by the way, we were gonna mention that we were both wearing our socks because it snowed here several inches last night So we both came to the office wearing boots and yeah Neither one of us wanted a podcast wearing boots the whole time. So, family or politics next? Let's do family. Okay. Um, one of the things we like to do is a one word description of your children. Would you like to attempt that feat? Fun. Well, let's do one. Uh, can you do a separate word for each of them? Yeah, each of them. Yes, and you can expand, talk more about them and stuff. Adelaide? Adelaide. Adelaide is the older girl. Six year old, seven year old girl now, just turned seven. She's gotten kind of big. Yeah, she's tall. Yeah. Um, I would just say sweet. She's That's pretty nice. She is Excuse me, that Super easy first child. I think some people have like, she's just recognize you didn't have a lot extra for her, uh, but they loved you all the more. Yeah. Um, just a super easy kid to parent. Like really sweet loves whatever we're into. There's a lot of fun. Um, she's just a great little enthusiastic, conforming and great little kid. Like very excited about whatever we're doing. It's so easy to parent. How fun. Um, And then there's my five year old son who is a lot more difficult to parent. Okay. I would say energy was his. Is this one word? Yeah. Okay. I mean, he's a boy, right? You know, like our culture just wants boys and girls to be the same and they're not like, they're just not, I mean, like he has challenges associated with him that are never associated with Adelaide. Yeah. Like his physicality, his running around and breaking stuff. Like he can't help himself. You know, the seeds of masculinity sprouting, like he's a boy and he, he's a little bit of a bull. And she might be able to beat him up for three more years, but she won't because he's a boy and she's a girl and whatever. Rafe is just a really smart kid who is very into whatever I'm doing. It's fun to have a, have a boy that's like, thinks you're cool, wants to do whatever. Whatever you're doing and has stretched us as parents, but you know, obviously we'll love him just as much as Adelaide and are, are figuring it out. So, uh, aside from Gary's encouragement, like what was it ultimately that, that drew you and Alex together? Is that family was forming or that kinship, if you will. Yeah. Aside from the, the birthday connection, the Kansas city connection, like, yeah, those are just fun things. She must've changed her mind about you at some point. Apparently, apparently she did. Um, no, I just, I liked her vibe. Yeah. I liked, like, it was easy to hang out with her, you know, I was attracted to her and We felt like we could be friends easily because we had a lot of common interests. Like there was never, I never felt like I didn't have anything to talk about with her or that we were so different that it was hard to find commonality. Like, We just have a good time together. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's really nice. How are you the same and how are you really different from each other? Where this marriage has continued? We're the same in that we both love to hang out at home. Okay. And that's just such a blessing. I am so thankful that she hates doing stuff as much as I do. Like, this is a big night out for you here. You're going to be here until 6. 15 or something. How long is this going on? Hey, it's fine. Uh, no, she's great. Um, what do you guys do to spend your time together? You just read, hang out on the couch, scrabble. Oh, you said she beats you in scrabble. Uh, we, I avoid that cause she beats me. We do play board games sometimes. Yeah. Um, but we do a lot of reading as we're on the same couch and a lot of watching shows and dreaming about vacations. Yeah. Talking about the future. Couch time is the thing that like marriage councils, marriage counselors would say you need. I feel like we're really good at that. And like, there's not like a, Hey, we need to go do something or whatever. It's just, let's just cause there's a show on. It doesn't mean we can't talk about whatever we want to talk about here. Yeah. Yeah. I dig that. So we have a lot in common. Um, and then the ways we're different is that she's more of an extrovert still than I am, and I think is more like a lot more time conscious than I am. Okay, yeah, I can see that. Like, I think time is her love language, if you believe in love languages. Yeah, yeah. Like, whatever it is. Sure. Like, she, she wants Like, quality time thing. Yeah. Whatever. Like, once there's been time with me and that was a source of friction in the beginning, I think that I didn't understand her well enough and she didn't understand me well enough and that I need a little more space or did back then. Right. She does not want space. She wants to be close to me all the time. And that was like, just kind of a natural friction point when you realize like, Hey, we're different. Yeah. And you figure that stuff out. I need a little space, like get off me. Yeah. Like that sounds bad. Not that I want to be away from her, but like, The creative pursuits we talked about, like, you know, a little bit of space to do that stuff. Like Jill and I are that way too. Like, I just kind of would rather just be hanging out with her all the time. And like, especially when she's working at home, like, and I'm home, you know, like, Hey, what do you think about this? I'm working like, I'm like, the TV's on. You're not working. Well, I've worked. Yes, it is. I barely hear it. Like I'm working. Yeah. But I think. If you're too much the same, it causes problems. Oh, for sure. Because you just fall into the same ruts and we're different enough that we can help each other, like come out of those ruts. I think like, I think she is much better at time management than I am in some ways, like, Hey, it's seven 30 and the kids need to go to bed. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I was thinking about that too. Actually, I wasn't at all. And I think I'm maybe a little bit better at keeping things in perspective and not getting. bothered by stuff and like smoothing things out a little bit, like providing some stability. And we take those strengths and weaknesses and put them together. And 10 years in, we're still, we're still growing along. Are you 10 years this last year? Yes. Congratulations. Thanks. That's probably, that's way above average these days. Yeah, probably so sadly. Um, what would you say, is there other family aspects that are significant to you guys? Do you guys have a lot of interaction with grandparents? And, and we do, my mom's in town. Okay. If you mean, yeah, like my mom's in town right now. Yeah. Um, we still, we still see a lot of our parents. Yeah. Um, Alex's folks are out here for Christmas and then my mom got to come out. She's still hanging out near the West branch, but for, but you still get a lot of interaction time. Yeah. Yeah. They both live back in Casey. Well, plus they got seven other kids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of kids, but I think we both really value. We both, both for ourselves to be able to spend time with them and also that our kids get a lot of interaction with them. Yeah. It's been a hard thing for us to try to figure out, like, should we move back to Kansas City because our family's all back there? Yeah. Um, but the opportunity has been here. Yeah, and that's it feels like we talk about that every six months like yeah, and the answer is always No, we shouldn't move back. Yeah, but it feels like it will be Sunday. Okay, eventually. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective Politics I guess All right. That's our last, uh, mandatory segment. Um, you, you know, you kind of said you're, you're, you're truth brokers here at the flyover and stuff, but, uh, you know, certainly you've probably bring some political slant to it as well as your editorial staff and whatever. But where do you, everybody does. Yeah. You know, that's one of our beliefs is that no one's neutral. How has your politics developed over maybe the last five or 10 years, especially? Oh, I think I've become more practical as one does when they get a little older. I think I used to be more of a, I used to love Ron Paul and I still have a lot of respect for him. I don't know. I may be like less, uh, less naive than I used to be about what's possible, but still have pretty similar beliefs about how I think the world should be. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, um, you know, I'm probably a, uh, libertarian first and foremost. And, you know, I came up with kind of my own ideas and then learn about Ron Paul? I was like, yeah, what, he's saying? Yeah. Yeah. You know, cause I was kind of in that five years ahead of that kind of conversation. So me and Jacob probably have that in common that we were kind of coming to those conclusions. Then Ron Paul came along and it was like, yeah. I had a lot of respect for him. I think he's one of the only politicians that I felt like I had personal respect for. Interesting. Maybe that's naive. Maybe he's a bad guy too. I don't know, but I liked what he had to say. Fair enough. And like maybe there's some element of you know, maybe Russia will invade Ukraine if they see a weak U. S. or, you know, maybe China will take Taiwan if they, if we don't have bases all around the South China Sea and Philippines and elsewhere. I don't know. Well, I, yeah, I think politically, I, I think it's important that we care about what's good for our neighbor, what's the best for our society. And I'm a generally conservative person because I think that The old paths are the best paths. Yeah, yeah. I think that the old paths are more likely to lead you towards truth, although we can obviously think of historical exceptions to that, like where things were quite obviously bad. I had a blog years ago that was, uh, I rephrased the Ten Commandments as the ten principles for your best good. You know, try to not be so commandment y. But, but like, it's just better if you bother your father or mother. Like that's actually just better than if you don't. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's really simple things. Right. Yeah. I think that the world is in such a rush to find new ideas. Hmm. Um, and often new and novel things are not good. I was, uh, you know, uh, x. com conversation recently where, um, I commented that. It feels like some people in the modern era would like A. I. to, like, become A. G. I. and, like, become the boss. Because they don't really believe in God, but that could be the God. They want somebody to tell them what to do. Kinda. Yeah. What is the right thing? Yeah. And you know, and other people from a faith background, especially whether it be Jewish or Christian or even, um, Islam or others are like, well, it's kind of written here, you know, it's principles based. It's not quite, you know, it's not, and then there's a whole bunch of other people that are like, I just try to do what my therapist Right. You have a Deep question. They're like, well, I'm just trying to pay rent. Yeah. I'm just trying to stay alive. Well, like, like what percentage of practicing therapists that people can book appointments with today, uh, would you trust to have a balanced conversation with you? If you were having a mental health, I don't know, not a great number, 20%, something like that, because ultimately people are people, yeah, they're all broken too. Yeah, I think so. I think my philosophy in life is that. Um, I personally don't have anything to give you that you don't have, I believe Jesus does. And I think I can give you something in pointing you toward him as I've helped you find what I found. Yeah. Um, and so anything that I have to offer people is not my own. Like I didn't, I don't have any, I got no fresh ideas really. Not really. Like there's nothing, nothing new under the sun. Like I You're just trying to go back and find, find the wisdom that has been written down for quite a long time and proven for quite a long time. And it turns out, like you said, that some of these things that it's easy to scorn or turn your back on are actually like what you should be doing. And there was no mystery. Like, I think there's this, I say there's no mystery, I talked about mystery earlier, but like there's this inherent need for people or some people think they have to find something esoteric. Transcribed Like knowledge is secret. Knowledge is the secret club. You're supposed to be a part of like, if I just get to like the, and they don't think of it this way, but like the third level, sure. Quadruple Mason, whatever it is. Yeah. Like, like what? Let's try to earn rest, try to earn rest. If I get smart enough, then I can just chill a little bit. You try to find something esoteric or something. That everybody else doesn't have because you think there must be something else out there But the truth is like you need to look the other way. You need to just think about what is Written in stone over a long time. That's just right there. Like it's not a magic club There's not some secret code out there that's going to set you free. The truth will set you free. And I believe you believe like it's just right there for you. Like you don't have to ascend a mountain and talk to some old guy in a shack or something. Like you just need to open up your Bible. I'm thinking even about the, like one of the reasons I really liked the, the podcast format is I get to bring other people's wisdom instead of me. Hmm. Acting the guru, you know, I'm not the best podcast host out there, but I'm interested in talking to people I find interesting and whatever. And yeah, seeing what they think. Um, and that's kind of the same tone. I was just looking over at the seven habits of highly effective people. Like it's not really so much this writer saying, do this. Cause I've come up with these seven new tips and tricks, da da da da, he's like, no listen, listen, listen, listen, I studied 5, 000 highly effective people, and these seven things are kind of the truth of how people are often effective. And it's usually not novel. Right, exactly, and the Bible is kind of the same way, and the principles around human politics, and Canada going crazy, two no's out, I guess, you know? Right, exactly. So to bring it back to business, it's like a, this is a Jacob Lee's doctrine for all of us that pop back to the ideas live in the excess ideas live in the excess of execution, meaning like you can have a million ideas. The thing that's probably going to get you from A to B in life is just actually doing one of them. Yeah. Yeah. Like showing up today, doing your work and then going home. It's like following the path every day. True in business, true in your spiritual life, I think is like, it's just not a mystery. It's more about consistency. Next right step in front of the last one and knowing where you're going a little bit. Yeah. Are you optimistic about, um, this country now? Um, you know, we got, you know, I don't, I never asked you about your Trump fanaticism or the whole election 2024, which was kind of a crazy. It was wild. It was fun to watch. The scene, you know. Uh, what was the, uh, my favorite short description of the year was the, uh, the vegetable made way for the plant without a vote to save democracy. It was, it was an interesting time for sure. I think I'm fairly optimistic about the future of America. Yeah. Yeah, I think that. I think culture has swung way too hard in one direction. And I think you're seeing a backlash to that now. Yeah. And Alex and I were talking about this last night at how, like, it's also possible to go too far in the other direction. Um, culture tends to be a pendulum. Yeah. And it just goes back and forth and it seems like when it's really far in one direction It's really hard to imagine it coming back the other way But I think we're in one of those points right now, whereas we're really coming back the other way And hopefully it doesn't swing too far crazy. Yeah Yeah, yeah, but I think people are just sick of what they perceive as nonsense Yeah in america things that just seem to be silly on their head That are accepted or pushed upon you and people are finally kind of hit a breaking point No matter what you think like you mentioned trump like everybody, I don't think everybody that voted for him really loved him to be honest. I would not imagine. So, yeah. But I think people are so tired of the direction of America that started in the Obama years in some ways and just went really hard that way to where we looked around and people are thinking, wait a minute, like, It's kind of a King has no clothes moment, right? How is this? Okay, these are the updated title nine rules Yeah, like really, you know, it seems trite but like it's emblematic. I think we see a video of like a If you see a 6'9 Biological male playing basketball with a bunch of 5'8 girls Any reasonable person thinks yeah, something has gone wrong here And maybe that's not something that happens all the time or like the thing but that's that's a thing representative, I think of how people view culture. Like, wait a minute. It's a visual like story that tells you what happened. How do we get here? Cause it feels like 20 years ago that never would have happened, you know, and you can point to any number of social issues you want, but that's my sense of it. It's just that people are, sensing that we've gone way too far in one direction. It's time to push back, push things back the other way. Well, and I, like, I think about such things as like, like all these girls, especially transing themselves, you know, trying to turn into boys and some boys trying to turn into girls usually later, you know, it seems like usually the 20 something boys that become girls or whatever, but it's so harmful to them usually. Yep, it's um It's a destructive pattern in our culture And I'm talking more probably about the because I interact more with the boys that have become girls kind of hmm, you know because they were unsuccessful at becoming a man and so now they wear nails and I'm a I'm a firm believer that Um, you cannot fundamentally change yourself in that sense. Like, it's in every single, you know, in your DNA, your gender is written into that. And not to discount that there isn't confusion for some people for whatever reason, but, um, it's so silly to think that you can go into an operating room and change your whole identity and like become a man. If you're a woman, like that's, ludicrous. And we're at this point in culture where you're almost expected to say that. You shut up. I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, that was just probably the most extreme example. Yeah. It's a lot of extreme examples, but then they just point to other things that are downstream that like, if this happened, there's a lot of other stuff along the way. I say it, I said it in my podcast recently with somebody, or maybe it was just a conversation. I was thinking about the, The, the, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs moment in the debate. And I was like, well, you know, if you're going to eat the cats and you're going to eat the dogs, you know, you got to go down to the humane society and get them for yourself. You can't be stealing people's cats and dogs. It's so funny. To barbecue them. Uh, yeah, maybe that was the battle cry. Like whether it's true or not, like they're eating the cats. Like, someone's got to say like the emperor has no clothes. Like things have gone very wonky around here. Well, and some of those stories, like recent news, current events, and sorry to keep you late, but like in the UK where they're like, we, we arrested the 13 year old girl for public and, or for public intoxication because she was found with, uh, seven 30 something Pakistani men and they're. And we didn't talk to the Pakistani men because we don't want to confront that problem. It's hard to wrap your mind around. I think that's, um, people are so desperate to be thought of well by a certain group of people. Yeah. They will come to find themselves doing something ludicrous. Just to be thought of well by the zeitgeist. Yeah. And if the zeitgeist is crazy, but all you care about is being thought of well by people that ascribe to the zeitgeist, like you're gonna find yourself doing some things like are happening in England that just make no sense. Yeah. And putting people in jail for Facebook posts. Right. Um, and ignoring the tragedies that are happening. Hey, my neighbors keep getting raped by the Islamists. Oh, that's a, that's a arrest. Right. Okay. It's hard to wrap your mind around. You know, they do, they are getting raped by the Islamists, I'm sorry to say, but it's true. Yeah. I'm sorry, that isn't a laughing matter at all, but it's Right. And it's, yeah, I mean, I think people are It just shows how swayable people's beliefs are. Mental stuff is like that becomes something that's better to just keep the peace and over reactionary Because I think they're obviously there are real problems going the other way in society but like if your reaction to racism is I can't comment on anything someone with a certain skin color does then like That doesn't make any sense. Like, why can't we just, why can't we just have common sense and evaluate, uh, people by what they do and evaluate situations as they arise and not try to make broad sweeping judgments. How would you evaluate the European situation today compared to 20 years from now? Uh, I'm going to get over my skills trying to talk about geopolitics. Um, I think in some ways they're behind us in the cycle of where culture is going. That's my only comment. They will see similar movements. They are seeing similar movements actually in like the Netherlands, if you remember the farmers thing, Italy and yeah, a lot of different things. Um, I feel like they're They're following along on a similar path culturally as the United States and they're just like 10 years behind us That's my amateur armchair. Yeah, that's fair We like just kind of move faster like they took took us there and then kind of they're gonna be slower and coming back Out of it too. Yeah, maybe so if you Let's talk about business like you didn't really and I'm not I wouldn't even call you an entrepreneur right like you saw opportunity and you were the right man for the job when it came to Yeah, I'm not a founder. I think I was just there to pick up the mantle. Yeah. Well, and certainly probably you've figured out how do we make money? You know, how many resources do we spend on this? How many editors can we hire? How many States can we launch when there's a lot of those kinds of things. It's an ongoing conversation. So that, that is there. Um, but what would you say like to or about entrepreneurs? To entrepreneurs. To entrepreneurs, yeah. Aspiring entrepreneurs especially. People coming out of high school, thinking about going to Bible college, thinking about starting a business. Don't know what that would be. Hmm. Um, I think it goes back to the people comment. Like I don't have anything original to offer for business advice. Honestly, I think that success comes from working really hard with good people. Like ideas are kind of easy to come by sort of, but it's also about timing. Sure. Like you have to have the right idea at the right time, but I think it's just all about executing with people. Um, so build your people skills is the most important thing in some ways. Bring good people into your organization. Like be very selective or learn from good people. A big formative part for you was that. You probably learned more from the men that you were around at the Bible college than from the Bible college. I did. And I've learned a lot more from being around Jacob and guy and other people about, um, regarding business than any book I've read. The people you spend time around probably learn more from faith from Gary and Aaron, Daniel and et cetera. Then, yeah, you become like who you spend time around and the people that you bring into an organization are going to define it. Ultimately, like that you can't have a bunch of people that are moving one direction and have your organization not go that same way. Yeah, fair enough. Um, and so I guess I would say just be very careful about who you associate with. Yeah. Not in terms of like trying to keep yourself pure or whatever, but just like, yeah. Um, especially on day to day is that people are creating with and for you. Yeah. Like we would not be where we are right now if we didn't have people that were invested in the idea. And wanted to help bring it forward and just get along with each other. I have learned a lot about that. Um, culture fit is important as any other. Um, item on someone's resume. You've got the skills, don't have the culture. Yeah. Yeah. Like culture is extremely important. Okay. Um, final segment, the Loco experience. Okay. The craziest experience that you want to share with our listeners. Well, uh, back when I was working for the flood restoration company, Oh yes. There was a, there was an unfortunate incident in a house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a group of older, older folks were living there. And the story went that cats set the house on fire via pushing on the stove or something. That's the story. I don't know. Yeah. But there was a fire in their kitchen. And so these people in this, uh, in the middle of winter. So they moved out the cats did not. Okay. So there's a house that's had a fire Yeah, that has about ten cats living in it. Just yeah, never leaving the house. So just think about it And then there is me good friend Rich Gardner In a van headed up to Cheyenne to go inside this house and to try to bring out items that are not destroyed and catalog them. Oh God. And so we're sitting in there in this freezing cold house because the heat isn't on or anything. Cause there's a fire. Um, it smells like hell itself. I have never. Like you walk in and you're like retching immediately. Something like that. I've never wanted to get out of bed less in my life. Like never knew that I could be that miserable. So that's one of them is like, well, that's one of the things I think about when I hang out with rich, like we really been through it, like we, right. Have, uh, spent a month. And we're going to be doing that. Cause was Rich on paid staff early in the crossing journey? No. So he was at first kind of an intern. You couldn't be here. He was a pastor, but he was, we don't have enough budget for everybody. Kind of thing. So we did that. And then the other equivalent moment I think was when all the floods happened like down towards Boulder. Sure. And there's been a couple. Mhm. Yeah. I think it was 13. I think it was. Yeah. That sounds right. Especially when they had to find the lions and whatnot. Yup. Down there in someone's basement that had flooded via their sewer system. And it's me and Rich and hazmat suits, like doing the same thing. And we're like carrying stuff upstairs. And this poor woman would see us carrying some fairly, some family heirloom upstairs and just start crying. We're like, Oh, sorry. Like. It's fine. It's fine. I'm not having a good time either. Right. The crib that you're sad about. Yeah. I learned that you should never keep anything valuable in a basement. Yes. Just don't do it. That is true. We have our stuff that is in the basement is in tubs, so, um, yeah, they're recording again. I don't know if she'll use that feed or not. But, um, so it could get, you know, 10 inches deep in the basement without, like, filling the stuff in there. That's smart. Yeah. That would help. At least it's that. Yep. Right. Um, but we don't have any other room. We need basement stuff. Um. What is the number of cats that you would, uh, be willing to host in your home? Zero. That's probably zero. Do you guys have a dog? We don't. I think if we ever moved to a place that has more space, we'd like to get one. But it just doesn't make sense in our, we have a tiny little yard and yeah, there's the garden in the back instead of a yard and normal dogs wouldn't like it. No. Um, if people want to sign up for the flyover. Join the flyover. com. Join the flyover. com. Just put your little email in there and you'll get spammed like crazy from these, uh, truth brokers. You will get our emails and there's also seven state editions. So if you live in Texas or Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, um, some other ones, Colorado, yeah, uh, you should Google that as well. All right. I dig it. Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for sharing the time. Yep. And, uh, look forward to, uh, next worship service. Sounds great. All right. Thanks, Kirk. All right. Cheers.