EXPERIENCE 120 | Sean Fox - Smashing IT Problems with Mjolnir Technology

Sean Fox and his partner Zach Horton founded Milner Technology in 2018 after working together at Greystone Technology, we might call it a boutique IT agency named after Thor's Hammer. Sean's family has a long banking heritage and before getting into technology, he was a loan officer slash IT administrator for their family banking organization. And he remains the chief Technology officer. We talk about a lot of nerdy stuff in this one building and maintaining secure systems, common mistakes business owners make with their technology and security, and the attack vectors that ransomware hackers are using the most these days. Sean gifted me a copy of his new comic book slash internet security training tool, which he wrote years ago and recently illustrated with AI tools. Because of the time and cost efficiency of the solution and we get into the current events of banking and economics and politics too. There's something for everyone. And Sean's one Smart cookie. so I hope you'll tune in and enjoy my conversation with Sean Fox. Welcome back to the Local Experience Podcast. My guest today is Sean Fox. And Sean is the co-founder of Ner Technology. Nailed it. And, uh, the Chief Information Officer at Fowler State Bank. Yep. At least according to your LinkedIn. And they both resonate with what you've told me in the past. Yep. Now we're in Yeah. A couple different hats it seems like at all times. So, yeah. And you were a even a lender for the bank for a while, is that right? Yeah, right outta college. I started out, um, as a loan officer and then, uh, when, when my wife got a job up in Greeley, moved back up to Fort Collins. Mm. And was still helping out remotely. But given that I wasn't. Physically at the bank anymore. It made sense to Yeah. Shift my role and Yeah, transition more. Well, and you were learning more and more about it anyway. Yeah. And that's what my, that's what my degree, by the way. Uh, we like to tuck these over on the side, like tuck it into there and give you some slack about bing ba boom. Cool. So, um, anyway, keep going. Yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, my degree was in computer information systems. Um, well, and finance too, I guess at csu, but, um, yeah. So it was kind of the melding of those two Yeah, yeah. Things to, to make that fit. Well, it helps to understand, I imagine even within the IT scope at the bank to understand what they really do, the challenges. Oh yeah. Both of'em. I mean, they're so intertwined now. We're. Uh, with one of our IT clients we're working on um, kind of like a tech talk geared mostly towards, uh, senior citizens. It's at one of the churches in town. Yeah. And, you know, talking about scams and ways that they can be hacked, that it's nice having, seeing both sides of that coin cuz it's not just, you know, they got their email hacked. Right. They're trying any, any and every kind of scam to Well and ultimately why they want to hack your email or do other things is to get your money. Exactly. They want your money, say in some fashion, another, whether it's through getting your social security number or whatever. So Yeah, I don't need to sign up for your whatever junk emails you have coming that they don't care about that. So, so, um, I think I met you probably just months after you founded Mulk. Is that true? It seemed like it was like right in the. Tech, uh, the whatever the tech stars po stuff around there. Yeah. Yeah. Or so you were, you were, you were established, but maybe like a year or something over at the Articulate. I think it was, yeah. It was pretty green when, because we were trying to, you know, just get out and meet as many people. Everything and the, yeah. The startup week and yeah. Techstars stuff that they had that, that was all really helpful. Not necessarily from a meeting people perspective. Yeah. They didn't have any money either. Yeah, exactly. But at least you found other people going through the same kinds of struggles. Yeah. And could learn from maybe issues and roadblocks that they'd already hit. So, you know, that that was, yeah, that was a good experience. But yeah, I think that timeline matches up. So tell me about Milner. Uh, what, what. Do you guys do? What's your kind of structure? Who, what kind of clients do you serve? Yeah, so we're what's called a managed service provider. Okay. Which just means we're the IT department for small and medium sized businesses. Let people log into your thing to get access to their systems and stuff. Usually, not always. Yeah. Um, well, like 2020, you know, when everybody was shut down and needed to work from home. Right. Immediately, you know, we'd get requests, Hey, can you set us up for remote work for tomorrow? Yeah. Yes, we can do that. So, and, and it's just like you said, you know, a lot of our stuff, we, we have the capabilities to remote in and. Help clients troubleshoot, whether it's, hey, we got hacked or something, we need to fix it and mitigate it. Or it's, I can't print because it's 2023 and people are still printing and printing still sucks. So yeah, if I could just find a, a printer that would remember my computer forever, I would like marry it. Yeah. Yeah. You're not wrong. It doesn't exist, but it, it's a nice thought. So, um, and you're, you have a business partner at Mueller? Yep. Yep. Zach Horton. He and I, uh, took off on this endeavor together and, and uh, have been just grinding, so, yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of the nice, uh, you know, marriage is play. Yeah. Marriage is skills cuz like, you know, I've got that finance background and he's, he's really got that operational stuff down pat. Mm. Because so he's the super fix it guy. Yeah. He's the super fix it guy and more like, let's streamline the processes behind the scenes. Let's get, make sure all our documentation, like our house is in order. Cause it's stuff that. I mean the client doesn't see, it doesn't show up in the bottom line or anything. Yeah. But it, you know, the fact that he's got all our documentation well organized cause you have to manage all your licenses and things like that. Exactly. Whatever too. Mm-hmm. And ultimately do you get kind of like, how do you guys bill, like how do you decide how much to charge your clients and stuff? Is it kind of like here's all the stuff we manage for you and here's a 30% surcharge for doing all that kinda plus whatever. It's more, yeah. It's more like a, a seat space. Right. So if, if you've got 10 computers that we're managing and 10 servers Yep. You know, we, we kind of base the charges on those devices cuz that seems to correspond with the complexity. Yeah. Right. Sure. So, you know, some person with, you know, four computers is gonna be less than a thousand bucks, you know, a month type of thing. And nothing that's gonna break the bank. But, you know, there might be some that have a. Multiple locations, multiple servers, some cloud stuff tied in a bunch of, you know, 50 or a hundred end user desktops. Right, right. And then you're, you know, you're getting into. 10,000 or something. And then if they get up to that, you know, a hundred to three or 400, then they may they in-house it instead of having a Yeah. So our, our value prop is that, you know, you're big enough to need an IT department but not big enough to hire somebody full-time. Mm-hmm. So this way you get an entire IT department at a fraction of what one person would cost. Well, and I don't even want one full-time IT department person because he wants to go on vacation sometimes. Exactly. And that's inevitably when stuff blows off. Yeah. You need two full-time people. Really? Yeah. And so that's a, there's a big stretch from, you know, like Alma is basically our IT department right now cuz she's 20 and figures stuff out. Good. Yep. Yep. You know, and well, and it's like you said, you know, I mean, you guys are small enough and straightforward enough that you, you don't have a need for don't full, we don't capture hardly any of our customers information. You know, we let the credit card company do that and whatever, and you're not run into servers in the closet somewhere. So. Yeah. I, if we are, I'm not, you know, almost mining Bitcoin on it without my knowledge, so, so she'll be retired in a couple weeks case. Yeah. Yeah. Good for, well, I wish I, it was that lucrative. I'd buy some servers for me too. Yeah, it was for a while. I don't, I don't know if it is anymore, but it might, well, especially, I don't think I get billed separately for my power. Okay. It might be also harder painting could really subsidize my Bitcoin mining operation here. There you go. That's hope you're not listening to this one, Moses. Yeah. Um, but yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind of where we, we that's the core of your offering. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And, and. Like, like you said, when, when vacations happen, inevitably, that's when things happen. When Zach and I first had started working together, uh, previously before starting Mule near, I think it was maybe his second week on the job. Okay. And I, you know, I'd been there a while and had some experience and whatnot, but I, I went to Brazil and saw an email that one of the clients that Zach was covering while I was out, got ransomware. Oh. And I'm just, I'm, I'm not exactly the proudest of this, but the, the phone, I just put it back in my bag. I was like, no, that Zack's got it. Um, yeah. Yeah. He's got it. So he got thrown to the fire like immediately out of the game, but. I'm sure he'll call if nothing, you know, if it really, I made sure the phone was off, so they couldn't call. I didn't, I didn't want to deal with that. Well, I was on the other side of the world, but so, um, it got fixed. What, uh, what are some of the like big challenges in your space? Because I imagine that if you're managing for other people, are you then the, um, potential attack juncture or are they still trying to get in through your customers? Mostly both. Both. So yeah, it's, it's anybody and everybody right now. We, we, we actually tell our clients like, it's not a matter of if you'll get hacked anymore, it's a matter of when and to what extent, right? Like, you getting hacked might be, oh, somebody got your email and signed up for a bunch of stuff, right? Oh, right. Not bad. Or it could be ransomware where you're entire. Organization has come to a grinding hall. Yeah. Because your servers are locked up and they're charging you$2,000 worth of Bitcoin, so, right. Um, 2000 would be a cheap one. Well, they try to, they tailor it, like they're, they're not stupid. Right. You know, they tailor it to, to the, the size of the organization. None of our clients are like jbs, you know, where they're, they're getting$30 million of Bitcoin. Like we, we couldn't support them if we wanted to. Right, right. Um, but you know, it's something where they, they try to make it where it's Yeah. Easy enough. Easy enough to just, you wanted, I'm not calling the fbi, I'm not exactly. You know, whatever. It's just, it should do get ransomware. The FBI should be the very first call you made. Is that right? Okay. Yeah, because, you know, especially with. The ransomware stuff especially, yeah. Mm-hmm. Them and your insurance company. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I should be your first call, bud. Well, if you've already got ransomware, your customer, it's too late. Yeah, fair enough. Um, so, um, like what got you excited about this? You were working in this industry already, is that what I remember? Yeah. So, well, and I mean, it goes way back even to high school, so Yeah. So should we, should we back it up the time machine right away and do that part of the thing? We don't need to go all the way to 1985, like the, the beer can't say, but is that, uh, is that your year? Uh, no, I was 89, so. Okay. But yeah, no. So in high school, the, um, the like tech. Guy at the high school. I went to a really small rural school. No, let's go back to 1989. 89, okay. Yeah. Like what was, uh, it was a dark and stormy night. What was the scene? Where were your parents living? What were they up to? Uh, pretty much exactly where they're at now and what they're doing now. Is that right? Yeah. So yeah, I grew up in Fowler. It's a little farm town out east of Pueblo. Okay. Um, so that's Arkansas Valley? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yep. Yep. In between about halfway between Pueblo and La Hana. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, so real, real small. But yeah, I think the, our, our graduating class was like 35 people Fair. So pretty big compared to mine. Mine was only five. Yeah. Yeah. But still small enough. You know everybody's name. Exactly, exactly. And that's some and their parents name. Yeah. The, the tech director didn't have a lot of other options in, in high school, so I just drew the short straw and he said, Hey, you're gonna, oh, you became the tech guy. Yeah. One of the, the, yeah. Me and my, one of my buddies, he kind of. It essentially served as his TA for like three years. Oh, but you didn't answer my question. Oh, so your parents were in Fowler doing what they're doing? What were they doing? Oh, so, uh, my mom was a school teacher. Okay. And then after both my sisters were born, she ended up just staying home with us. Okay. So you're the oldest and then two sisters? Yep. Two younger sisters. And then, uh, yeah, my dad's just been working at the bank for 45 years, so, and this is his family's bank? His grandfather or his dad? Yeah. So my, my great-grandfather Wow, great. Um, came from Kansas in 1919 or 1920. Okay. And that's when he took over the bank and, and bought into it, so, oh, yeah. I'm the, the fifth generation. Wow. And then, yeah, you moved back to Fowler or. Maybe someday. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not immediately. Yeah. Cuz we got two young kiddos in there and already making friends and everything here. So they would totally revolt if you tried to move'em out of Fort Collins. I mean they like it down there, but I don't know, you know? We'll they've already got their, across that bridge where you come to it, so. Fair enough. Yeah, fair enough. Well, I'm just trying to kind of think of a scene that you were growing up in and this is the town of whatever, two or 3000 people I imagine, or something like that? Yeah, about that. Yeah. So, and then, yeah, I grew up agrarian there too. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up on like 40 acres. Mm-hmm. So yeah, we had cornfield, hayfield, whatever it was growing that year and grew up. Yeah. Running around on the farm. Had this tech background in high school, was that kind of like, did you just gravitate to it right away? Were you that nerdy guy that was, I guess computers when I was growing up. Like the super nerdy people were like learning how to use computers cuz they were. You know, you could, you could had to build your own almost in the earliest years and things like that, if you wanted anything good. All, yeah. I didn't have to, uh, you didn't experience anything. I didn't have to blaze the trails. No, I, I was, I, I got in, you know, after the, it had kind of matured a little bit, I guess, as far as that, you know, and Yeah, I wasn't putting in punch cards or anything like that to the, so it was just pretty natural. Like, you, you weren't, yeah. There wasn't really a time when you didn't, you were a digital native almost from the early years. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, you know, I was playing World of Warcraft in elementary school and junior high, so it, it was like the first iterations of those. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, yeah, just interesting. Yeah. To me. But yeah. But we always had, like we, we, growing up on the farm, we, we had like dial up right. For quite a while before DSL showed up. Right. And so it was, it was not like I was getting to really build an experiment much at home. So once, yeah, once in high school it kind of, Went down that path and just kept getting more and more interested in it. Yeah. So, yeah. Cool. But, um, and so you signed up for CSU computer information right out right outta high school then? Uh, I started engineering. Okay. Computer engineering and, and did that for a year and then decided I didn't really want to be building robots. What's the diff Yeah. Is that what that is? Um, I mean the, it's like a very watered down difference, but Yeah. The, the computer engineering is more of the like hardware side, like you're designing circuit boards, stuff like that. Like you're doing a lot of the, the design and development and stuff, the actual hard assets that are inside, not just, yeah. And then soft stuff that makes you do stuff. And then the computer science is more like the, you're writing code programming, web dev, stuff like that. Yep, yep. Okay. And then I did the computer information systems, which essentially is like the translator between the business world and the computer world. So, yeah. Yeah, because I still had programming classes and whatnot, but it was a lot of. Business classes too. Yeah. Just to reasonable ac how do you use computers in business? Because Well, and who's the one on, on some sort of project translating what all the computer science people are saying and what all the C-suite is Yeah. Trying to accomplish with you. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. Yeah. So pretty straightforward for you as a, as a degree for me, yeah. It, it, it seemed like the best fit, so yeah. Like computer engineering was fun, but it, it was, I don't know, it didn't seem like where I wanted to go. Yeah. So that, yeah. The, the switch than I felt a lot more at home. Fair enough. Fair enough. And, uh, so circum me this, like, when, when is this that you're getting outta college and did you, you went back to Fowler for banking right after? Is that what happened? Yeah, so once I graduated, I graduated in 2012. Okay. From csu. Yep. And then went back to Fowler, um, for a couple years, two years, I guess. And then in that interim got married. So Fler girl? No, actually she's from Arizona. Oh, so that's someone you met in CSU or something along the way? No, that's not given that story. That's, that's a pretty good story too. So we met in Vegas. Oh. But, which I always lead with, but it's, it's rather misleading. So like, we did meet in Vegas, but it wasn't just some random like at a club. Yeah. I was, um, one of my buddies from high school, he and I, right after I turned 21 and another friend went to Vegas. Okay. Just to go and Sure. And he said, Hey, we gotta have dinner with my friend Gina while we're here. And I guess they'd been family friends Oh. All the time growing up. Cuz his mom and her mom were college roommates. Oh wow. But he had just been like, squirreling her away. Never introduced me to her ever until finally. Then he introduces me not thinking anything of it and she and I just kind of kept talking and the rest is history. So, yeah. That's cool. Love it for sight almost. But yeah, my dad was not excited when I said I met a girl in Vegas. He didn't Right. Think that that was, I'm, I'm guessing she going was more your type Yeah. Uh, than your dad feared at first. She stayed in engineering, so she's a civil engineer. Fair. Yeah. So, um, but no, it's that. Yeah, it's been super great, but yeah. Awesome. Just kind of a random fortuitous series of events. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so then you find this Arizona girl, was she a city girl? Yeah. Yeah. So you take this Yeah. Her graduating class was, I think as big, almost as Fowler. Right. So, so you guys meet, you get married in short order kind of thing, and she comes with to, with you to Fowler or no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Af after we got married, she moved, cuz I had, I had bought a house. Purchased a house down there. Yeah. Yeah. So she moved in and, Then she'd actually worked on, um, the 2013 flood up here. Okay. Yep. Uh, because the civil engineering firm she was working for was one of the contractors on it. Okay. Yep. So they sent her up to do that. So she'd, you know, spent weeks at a time up in Loveland and Greeley in the kind of command center. Yeah. Yeah. And then one of the gals that she had worked with, uh, at their company got poached by cdot. Okay. CDOT said, Hey, come work for us. This is pretty cool. And then she asked Gina if she wanted to come too. Oh, wow. So she brought her along and which meant, hey, let's, I've got a job in Greeley. Now also, it was chasing your, your wife's job, much Greeley that brought you back, back up north. Yep. Okay. So, so then, you know, I was still helping out at the bank remotely with what I could in, in that capacity. And then figured I'd start doing some tech work up here. I see, I see. Yeah. And that started not just with Milner though, you worked at another firm or Yeah, yeah. We. We worked at, uh, at Greystone for a while. Okay. Yeah. So is is where Zach and I did Yeah. Um, kind of one of the, the bigger local organizations. Yeah. They're around doing that kind of thing. Yeah. They're, they're quite a bit, I think they're over a hundred employees now, so Yeah. They're, they're real good. I have Peter on early, like maybe number 15 or 10 or something like that. He was a guest on the podcast, so Yeah. No, he, he, they're fir they were about that size at that time, but I don't know. It's been a while, so I would say, yeah. They're firing on all cylinders, so seems like Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're doing great. Not something you aspire to with Milner. Do you want to, would you want to create a big firm like that? We've talked about it and thought about it, but I mean, While we were there, you know, you hear Peter talk about kind of the growing pains and whatnot, and I mean, Zack was only two weeks on the job and you like, didn't even bother to respond to an email about a ransomware attack. Well, he got the same email, so it was fine, but, um, but no, yeah, it's, you know, the, the growing pains just because right now we're pretty lean, right? There's just three of us. We've got a tech that works with us too, but Yep. We don't have all the HR and accounting, like we just, you take care of all the back of the house basically. Yeah. So once we start, You know, if, if we decide that that's, that's where we want to go, then it's, it's kind of a different Yeah. Different model. So yeah, it's not just a matter of adding 1 1 1 1 pretty soon. You do have to have a full-time HR person, or at least a halftime office manager, you know, somebody to support with. You can't just the trash can out and say, this is the complaint department. Right. No, it changes the, the thing quite a bit. Although you're still a little bit vulnerable to those vacations and stuff like that. I imagine you and Zach at least have to make sure you're not gone at the same time. Pretty much. Not for very long anyway. Yeah, they, yeah. Now if I travel abroad, the phone doesn't get turned off. Fair, fair. Yeah. I'll, uh, I'll at least attend to it as, as much as I can, so, but yeah, no, I, right now we're in a good spot, so we're kind of just picking and choosing who we wanna work with, which is nice. Yeah. Because, you know, now we don't have to. Take on each and every client, cuz some of them are not fun to work with. Right. Who do you wanna work with, by the way? Um, who is your favorites? Like where do you find the most value add? Where do they appreciate what you do? And you can add value to their world, saving'em some money. Even law firms are great because they never bought at your hourly cost because they're just like, that's all you're charging. That's only one and half of what we charge. Or one 30 if that. Yeah. But, uh, well plus in there like a, you know, nine to five Monday to Friday type of business. Right. So we don't have necessarily a, a favorite, but we do have like a least favorite, you know, I don't want a restaurant necessarily just because, or a bar cuz I don't want the call that the point of sale went down on a Friday night at 10. Right. Because obviously that's a big deal. They need to be address addressed. Super high urgency for them. But I don't want to be the way I fix this, so I'm busy. Yeah. So that's, yeah, we've, we've kind of transitioned it more into. Right. Fit the lifestyle that, that we're looking for rather than growth at all costs. Right. Well, and there's probably, in a lot of ways, I imagine there's more people trying to hack into a law firm's thing or things like that than there is for the restaurant anyway, just cuz they understand the resources and the whatever opportunity. Yeah, for sure. And well plus, you know, with like a law firm or a title company, I mean, I see these all the time at the bank where somebody's email at a title company gets compromised. Okay. And then so they go look at a couple email threads and say, oh, I see all these closings that are happening. And so, I mean, you know, as a loan officer, you're not looking that closely. You see an email from your point of contact where it says, here are wiring instructions got updated here. Here they are. Right. And if, if you don't pay attention, then the money's gone and it. Yeah, you can't pull it back. Somebody thinks they have a house. Somebody, when you said a wire, there isn't a wire, you know there's somebody in the wrong end that doesn't work out. So Yeah. Unless you call the fbi, they can, as long as it stayed on this, these shores they can usually freeze and get it back, but yeah. Yeah. Um, cuz there, there was a situation, I think it was town of Erie or somewhere down there where, uh, there was a construction project that was going on and Yeah. So they, somebody, so there's regular draws and whatever. Yeah. And somebody said, Hey, I'm calling from the construction company to get a million dollar advance on our project. And the guy sent the money and it was not to the construction company, but luckily the FBI got involved and I think they got the money back, but that's probably not. All that frequent though. No. Yeah. I mean that, excuse me, that's a big mistake to Thanks for the beer, by the way. Yeah, of course. Sean was nice enough to bring me my first taste of the new Fat Tire Ale. So the rebranded, uh, slightly sweeter, Amber, maybe it's a little bit lighter. I think it a little lighter. Yeah, yeah, it's a little more sessionable. Yeah. It's almost, it's almost like an old Aggie or something, but yeah, it's, yeah, it's fine With a little more, with a little more malt and a little more Amber than that. Yeah. Yeah. It's not as, not as light as, but yeah, it isn't, it isn't nearly as, uh, you know, fat Tire was a pretty aggressive beer. In its day. Yeah, yeah. You know, it got tamer and tamer over time and now I think, you know, no reason to try to get more aggressive. The marketplace is, yeah. Everyone's a crap brew now. It wasn't exactly, yeah. It wasn't the case a couple decades ago for sure. By the way, I didn't even point it out to you, but you got a, uh, loco, think Tank and Loco experience Coffee cup and our very famous, uh, no mistakes. Everything shake. Yeah. I've been using your shake. It. Uh, I actually used it on veggies. Oh good. I grilled, I grilled a bunch of veggies the other day and thought, I don't know what they should put on this. So, oh. Should I up bringing you some of that the other day when we had coffee or you? No, I've a while. Yeah. I'll say I, I I ripped you off for some for a while. Yeah, well, you can, uh, you can, uh, gift that to somebody or put in reserves for when you get done with yours. I was gonna say thank you very much. Yeah, no, it, it gets, it gets put to good use for sure. So we jumped on, uh, on that branch of, you know, being at, uh, Uh, Graystone. Mm-hmm. And then jumping out on your own, what was the, was that just to kind of have a little bit more freedom, flexibility with you, you and Zach, or you just both recognized each other as having a complimentary skillset set and a desire to Well, we've kind gone, yeah. Gone some different directions. So, so the bank was in the process of getting a mobile app developed. Oh, wow. Yeah. I figured that needed to really be mine. Oh, so you owned that focused. Yeah, so I, I drove that project through to, to completion After Greystone, like as the developer or as kind of the rep? No, no, no, just, just the project manager. You were an organizer of all the different No. Requirements and whatnot. Yeah. That, that the, the bank is small enough that, you know, it's pretty much vendors for everything. So, so they don't have a white label kind of thing for that? They do, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the, the app's branded Fowler Day Bank and everything, and it, it looks, looks good, but, but we use vendors to do all the development and Sure. Integrations to the. Cool. The co back end core and all that stuff. Yeah. So that was like a special project that you left Greystone to pursue and then what? Yeah. And then, and then Zach and I kind of just decided, hey, you know, we were pretty good at this. Yeah. We, we see some of our peers not being as good at it. Yeah, yeah. We, we, we see how we can do it and maybe improve upon some things and, and take the, take some low hanging fruit. So, yeah. Yeah. It, it just, you know, we enjoyed the work. It was just a matter of, yeah. Now, now it's a little bit nicer cuz you can make all the decisions you wanted to when, when you were just, uh, you know, regular employee or something. So you'd almost describe yourself now as like a, a boutique IT services firm? Yeah, you could, I mean, if they don't wanna be in the, you know, one of. 600 clients at Greystone, they can be one of 34 clients or whatever that you guys Yeah. Carry, yeah, you could. You could say it that way or something, you know. Yeah. I don't know how many is, is that a practical number of clients? Yeah. Yeah. We're in the mid thirties, so Yeah. You're actually pretty spot on. Could you carry 60? The three of you, depending on the, you have to have another helper depending on the makeup of the clients. Right. Okay. Because like I said, some are those four person companies that are, you know, yeah. It takes us three hours once every three months to really service them. Yeah. We kind of work ourselves out of a job. Yeah. With those. Um, but then the ones that are, you know, 50, a hundred, 200 end users. Yeah. Then, you know, we're there once a week at least. Do you have like industry contractors or things that you could flex into a project if you had a big install or, because I assume sometimes onboarding somebody is the big push. Um, sometimes or not, but, but yeah, we do have, um, essentially like subs that we can rely on to do maybe like a SharePoint migration where they want to take all their files and then move'em to the cloud or something like that. Mm-hmm. Especially like specialty subs even. Yeah. Yeah. With, with kind of those technical chops. So, yeah. Fair. Um, so tho those are ones we haven't had to rely on that too much cuz we've had the capacity to just do it ourselves and we kinda like to own those projects just so that when things go wrong, it's your fault. We know where somebody else's fault. Well, and we know where it went wrong because it's always gonna be us fixing it. Yeah. So if we've got the whole context of where it went wrong, then it's a little easier to sort out the fix. So let's, uh, can we hear some stories of where it went wrong? Like, oh yeah. Can you anonymize some stories? Like, I feel sometimes there's value in story of don't do that dumb ass. Uh, yeah. Our worst one ever that, that Zach and I had was, um, Prior to doing like a server migration. Okay. The, the impetus was f was that they, you know, it was filling up with the space. It was kind of an unmanageable format. So we said, okay, we need to migrate these servers to the new platform, but we had to do it on the same hardware. Mm-hmm. So we kind of had to migrate, like delete everything, then migrate, like copying it under the back of the record from the front of the record at the same time. Yeah. And unfortunately we deleted the backups before we started. Oh, that's not, that's don't do that. Don't, don't start with that. Yeah. Don't do that. So, but we de we de delete deleted too many things. So as the files were copying, Zach went over and we, we were there with our point of contact and we were all just Yeah. Having a beer cuz it was after hours and Yeah, we're just sitting there watching files copy. And then Zach goes, and the server reboots and I can't get back into it and it doesn't come back up. Mid file copy. And I think we bust him. We must have both went white in the face because our point of contact, he just goes. Well, it got pretty serious in here. I'm gonna leave. And, uh, ultimately we didn't lose very much data, I think maybe like 5% of the files and, and it was nothing that was critical. Yeah. So we, we dodged a bullet. Yeah. We got lucky through no great, uh, talent of your own, you Yeah. Didn't really screwed up too bad. Yeah. But now we like make backups to a fault before we ever start. Right. So that way, worst case scenario, we just Yeah. We're back up to where we were yesterday. Exactly. Well, what I was thinking in terms of stories is probably stories from before people came to you to be a client of where they Oh, totally ate the frog or, you know, in some bad way. And now they don't wanna risk doing that again. And so, Well, I mean, they call you. So yeah, we got one call where it, it was like I've talked about kind of that email account gets compromised. Mm-hmm. And then they change the wire, the ACH payment terms. So we got called on in March of whatever year it was, 2018 or something. And uh, in February, I guess the company had sent out$85,000 to a sub on a job. Okay. And it was kind of a No, you got hacked. No, you got hacked. He said, she said, and they were just like, I never got it. And they're like, well, we'd sent the money. Well, we didn't get it. And they were both pointing the fingers at each other. And so they said, well, and the current IT provider couldn't figure it out. Right. So we get called in and they're like, Hey, what can you do about this? I was like, well, not much now. Right. You know, like that should kind of sail, but. Here's how we'll fix it going forward. Yeah. So that you don't have this problem again. And did both people were out. Yeah. Like somebody got into the mid, I mean, lawyers got involved I'm sure, but neither the person got paid nor the other. Yeah. Well, and that's what I told'em cuz they, they said they wired it to some bank state side and I said, have you guys called the fbi? Like they can probably get this money back? No, no, we're not gonna get them involved. I was like, no, you do get them involved. Yeah. Because otherwise the money's never gonna come back. It's, uh, so you're reminding me of, uh, the first time I really made a, I guess a dumb mistake, uh, in my banking career, small business lending. I financed a car for a lady and, you know, I had the whole, all the paperwork, all that kind of stuff and whatnot. And so I sent her with a cashier's check to the dealership and, you know, told her, make sure you get the title Uhoh or whatever, and. Didn't get the title. Yep. Didn't get the title. Didn't get the title. Well, it turned out the, the, the floor plan company still had the title. Um, no, the floor plan company also didn't have the title. They were still waiting to get it from the previous dealership or something like that. Mm-hmm. So three or four people thought they owned this car. Oh geez. And then the dealership went bankrupt just weeks later and it just all imploded and suffice to say it wrote that one off. This lady didn't get her car. Oh man. Like for what she wanted. I don't remember what the, the fallout was, but do you at least get the cashier's check back? No. I mean, I understand that was just part of the money that turned into not money at the dealership level. Oh yeah. That. It wasn't a lot, thankfully it was only like a$4,000 car, but it was, it was enough. I I guess if you sell, if you sell a$4,000 car enough time though, right? Oh yeah. There's becomes a Maserati. Yeah. The second and third sales are really where all the margin is. So yeah, that, uh, taught me, uh, a lesson or two in just control of the, the, the proceeds. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, and, and verify too, right? Like we, we tell clients, you know, cuz I've seen it both on the IT side and the banking side where, you know, if somebody Yeah. Sends you an email, whether it's from their email address or not to change their stuff, call'em. Yeah. Don't call'em on whatever number's in the email. Yeah. You get a verified number that you have in your contacts or is on their website or something. Totally. Yeah. And call a verified number to confirm those checks. I'm forgetting what we called it at the bank level to, but basically we would give an envelope that looked like a check. To the car dealership and it was basically, you know, bring the title in this envelope to the bank and we'll give you the real check. Oh, like a iu? Pretty much, basically, yeah. Like an iu. I forget there was a, it was some kind of a draft thing or something like that. Okay. But it was kind of an industry practice at the time to be like, you know, here's how you don't get our money until we get the title. Yeah. Which, yeah, like, this is good funds. Here it is. Yeah. Promise. But just bring it on over. Yeah. But come get it. Yeah. It was fairly effective. And I imagine, you know, even what you're talking about is kind of that way. Trust, not trust, but you know, here's a way of verifying. Yeah, yeah. Trust the thing that's happening all the way. Trust. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. So, um, what's, uh, like, is it like. Europeans and, you know, Russians and things like that, trying to scam people these days. Like where is here, there's a lot of the just increasing attacks from various quadrants and ransom wars and like who is the directors of these attacks? I mean, big stuff is, is, is Russia and China for sure. Yeah. You know, is, and especially like the state sponsored stuff. Um, but, but anymore, like they, they have on the dark web, what's called, I mean, you, you've probably heard of like software as a service and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have ransomware as a service now where you can just go pay like a thousand bucks or, you know, what, however much you pay that'll get you x number of licenses, malicious emails that they'll send out trying to compromise. And then, you know, they'd split the profits. Like they have some of these hacking groups have, have like support centers, like, like tech support people that help you either pay the ransom or help you generate a campaign, stuff like that. I mean, it's. It's, it's its own thriving business now. Yes. It's so, yeah. So it's, it could be anybody, but I mean the, like the state sponsored stuff is, is, you know, I mean higher tech. Yeah. We're, we're obviously hacking everybody and anybody too, but it's, you know, um, I think Microsoft F off, so they have a, a DDoS attack distributed denial of service. Yeah, yeah. Um, and Microsoft fin it off something like a three terabyte per second, one of their Azure data centers, which is Whoa. Like we can't even fathom that, you know, cuz Whoa. Yeah. So if you think about like, the new connection fiber, that's a, a gig. One gig per second. Yeah. So it's that on a thousand times. Yeah. So 3000, 3000 times of that volume. And when you say it's a denial of service attack, what's that mean? It's just like, I thought it was just kinda like everybody trying to get into the same place at the same time. Yeah. So, so essentially what they've done, those hackers, they, they've like taken a, a. A whole army of computers that they've compromised or devices. Mm-hmm. You know, it could be a security camera or anything. Any device. Pretty much with an internet, with an IP address. Yep. And they've, they've said everybody flood this IP at the same time. Hmm. Right. And with the goal of crashing it. Okay. Um, usually it's, and then crashing it is, is the goal. Um, it depends, like for the Microsoft one probably, cuz they were probably trying to take some data centers offline. Hmm. For whatever reason, you know, but it's not always the goal. Usually it's kind of a smoke and mirrors type of thing. Like, oh hey, it crashed, this went down and we snuck in the back door. Yeah, yeah. Somehow. Gotcha. So it's, yeah, it's a, it's a, an arms race pretty much of, you know, they get this new tech and then everybody patches it and then yeah. It's just an arms race back and forth. But what is that? When I was more aware of technology, like in my banking years and stuff, there was different, you know, McAfee and different. Uh, antivirus and different solutions. What's that environment now? Is that still, um, kind of a fragmented thing or how do, what do you guys use to try to catch? Well, I actually took catch stuff firewall wise, so I took in, in college they had, I don't remember, it was CIS 400 something, but it was colloquially called the, uh, the hacking class. Okay. It was some forehead, advanced network security or something. Yeah. Um, but yeah, but Dr. Hanu taught that he, he always did a, it was like an 8:00 AM class, so we were all half asleep anyway, but he would do, he'd do stuff to wake us up, which included a, a decent Shrek impersonation. Nice. Of saying how the security needs to be in layers and, and that's, that's kind of the key now. Right. You know, I see. You gotta have all the different layers of security, so that way if Right. Some attack gets by one layer, then it, you know, another. Component is catching it. Yeah. Um, and like for our gold package, which is the super security one and everything's included type of thing. Okay. It has a, a NextGen antivirus, which, you know, is constantly monitoring and doing what they call threat hunting to search for, you know, different anomalies almost within the Yeah. Whereas, you know, it may not be just, Hey, you downloaded a bad program, it's trying to run, it's, Hey, this file shouldn't be in this location and we're gonna see why. Mm-hmm. And then that's tied to a, a soc a security operations center. Okay. So any of these changes that, you know, throw a red flag, there's a, somebody there, a security analyst to, to evaluate and see whether or not, Hmm. It's a malicious file. Right. Or a false positive or unknown. Somebody just saved a file to a different spot than usual or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. And then, We had, we had one incident. Um, it, it was that title company incident, so where their account got hacked and, you know, they were trying to open the wiring instructions Yep. And it was a malicious file. Mm-hmm. And so they finally got the file opened much to my demise and sugar in. Right. But they, uh, the antivirus caught it and then the Security Operations Center disconnected that computer from the network. Oh. So that way they isolated the incident. They said, Hey, this computer is compromised. So we've taken it off the network Right. Until it's been remediated. Hmm. Um, which was super helpful cuz it Yeah, I was gonna say, could they know that it didn't get to other, the infection didn't spread. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They, they, they were able to, to confirm that. So they kind of figure out, look at that code though. This is the malicious code that Yeah. And just look at the traffic that, that it didn't Yeah. Get installed or propagate anywhere. So it was nice that. You know, all we had to do was wipe that computer and reinstall everything because it's kind of like, not like eggs or anything like that, but it's kind of like, it doesn't happen instantly. Right. Like it can get into one and then it has to cycle before it tries to send messages out to the next group or whatever. It can, yeah. It, I mean, it depends on the type of hack, but, but one of the big things now that people are protecting against is like lateral movement, right? Where if one computer does get compromised that they can't escalate and go through the rest of the network. Right. And cause all kinds of other problems. Oh, so kind of the pipe is, there's not as many pipes between the, the computers, your, your coworkers and each other. It's like, or the pipes to each computer or that somebody, some bad actor can't, can't move around. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. If they get into Kurt's computer, they can't then swim over to Alma's computer Exactly. And swim over to Alicias, that kind of thing until they find maybe the CEOs or maybe a server with the real gold minded data with all the passwords saved and the. Word file that says passwords updated January, 2023. Yeah, yeah. I, it would, it would terrify you to see how many of those are still, I don't have it anymore, just to be clear. Yeah. For everyone that's listening says January 20 does not have one. I havet updated. There're no good anymore. Um, so, uh, like if you wanted to give some, um, like best practices to those that are, they're very small businesses, you know, right now they're, they're not thinking about even a second employee. They're just a solo entrepreneurship, but they've got, you know, bank stuff, they've got revenues and this and that. They've got some systems. What are their best practices for staying safe? Um, can you use Google, Gmail and stuff like that safely? Yeah, it's, it's, it's fine. It's not the, not the greatest, but it, it, it's fine. The, the problem with just a basic Gmail is that you can't. Really customizing of the settings, right? Mm-hmm. You're, you just gotta take what Google gives you as far as security and all that other stuff. But, um, the biggest thing, whether you're a solopreneur or giant business or individual is like multi-factor authentication, right? Mm-hmm. That, that's all the big rage right now is every time you log in from an unknown device, you're, you gotta put in that stupid code. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So that way, even if somebody does and do that with everything, get your path. Yeah. Even if they do get your password file from January mm-hmm. Um, they're still not able to log in. Oh, right. Because they're a device, they're in Bermuda or Yep. Russia or something, you know. Exactly. A VPN from Los Angeles. But I would say yeah, they can make it look stateside, but they're still not able to get in because they don't have that, it, it's a different device. Yeah. So, and there's no way to really. At least not easily imitate the device. There probably are there. There are, yeah. Like is, yeah. Like the government has those tricks, but not everybody. Yeah. Well I mean, if you're getting like a, a code, like a text Yeah. Or an email code, then that's less, that's a good sign. Less secure, you know? Well, it's less secure than like a, like using an app, like an authenticator app. Oh, I see. Mm-hmm. But it's still better than just using a password fair. So, okay. So, um, so that's one good, good item to keep in mind is just that two factor stuff. Yeah. Which I know is annoying. Like, it is annoying. We tell our clients like, Hey, this is gonna be enforced. Just, just do it. Bear it. Yep. Just do it. It has to happen now. So anything else? Uh, really key importance there. I was telling people to use a password manager pretty heavily, and then last pass got hacked last year, so that. It took a little bit of wind outta the sails. I think it's still the best way better than having a sticky note or Word document that says password list. Yeah. Or like your wife's name and you just keep changing the number once it once Okay. I gotta change it. It's, we're up to 52 now, right? Um, yes. We had a client that did that, so Yeah, it was that or Bronco seven, you know, those are then Broncos eight. Yep. Oh, I guess no, well, seven. Yeah, until they had to change it. Yeah. Yeah. Then they'd change it right back. So it's, we're at an exclamation point. It's, I've never done any of these things, Sean. Good. I don't know. Good why you're looking at me like that. So, um, let's talk about, uh, actually let's take a short break cause my beer's been empty for like six minutes already. Yeah, it's too. So then, uh, we'll come back and talk about banking a little bit. Deal. So, um, when we got together for coffee a while back, you had, you gave me a copy and I wish I had it here handy, but of your, uh, of a comic book. Yeah, yeah. Uh, tell me about that. Yeah, so we had, um, I, I, I think of all these amazing ideas for advertising. Yeah. Like the commercial where, you know, shreks talking about security and layers, you know, a comic book. Well, I, I kind of ripped off the comic book idea from, uh, Planet Money, the NPR podcast. Okay. Like economics podcast, where they Yeah. Decided that they were gonna go buy a Marvel superhero and make their own comic book. Okay. And Marvel told'em to kick rocks. Okay. Because they said if we can make a fan favorite superhero out of a tree that only says Groot, we can make one out of anything, so you don't get any of our ip. Okay. Um, so they found one in the public domain went down this rabbit hole of making their own comic book. And so I thought, ah, well that'll be, that'll be cool. I'll do the same thing. Wrote the comic book. Found a guy to do the artwork. He got so busy he couldn't do it. So we just sat for like 18 months and then finally technology caught up with me. So you like wrote it the first time with like stick figures in the panels and stuff. Oh, I didn't have stuff like that. Any artwork. I just wrote the story. Okay. All right. But stick figures would've been the extent of my artistic capability. Yeah. So, but then, yeah. Technology caught up and all these fun AI tools came out. Yeah. And I was able to generate enough. Coherent things like when you just tell the, the chat g b t or this one was Dolly too, but it's all the same engine. Yeah. It was uh, you know, graphic novel style of mule near sending MFA codes to a smartphone with lightning. You know? Okay. It'll generate some ridiculous pictures, but you can find a couple that work for the comic book. Oh, interesting. And it's just that simple. Yeah. Yeah. You just like, uh, you gotta sort through a lot of nonsense cuz it gets, it's real weird. Someone might hand you a picture of Donald Trump and a, you know, a girl with a lollipop. Well, I mean, it, it, it tries to get what you're going for, but you know it, so basically with it made basically like, Any pictures that you're trying to imagine, you can put that instruction in and get lots of different iterations. So yeah, it'll give you at least the one that I use. So I use Dolly too. Okay. And it'll give you four images. Okay. And then you can say, Hey, I like that one. And then do iterations based off that. Do more like that one. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So cuz that way I could keep, you know, the, the villain Petra strong. I could keep her somewhat similar throughout the story cuz I would just keep doing iterations off that one. Right, right. But, um, yeah, it, it, there were a couple of, of her that are completely different. You can tell it's not the same artists. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's all over the place. So what do you think about that, uh, space like, Does it worry you or do people It worries me because like they're, they're already using it to say, Hey, generate this exploit to crack somebody's wifi type of thing. Or maybe not that one specifically. Yeah. But one of the things that all these things are good at is, is coding. Right? Right. So, well, they'll peck at something until they get the answer. Exactly. And it's really good at giving you scripts or coding like, Hey, write a script to do this task. Right. So, you know, it's, it's really good at coding, I think. I think Microsoft's uh, CEO sat nadel. He said something like, cuz they own, uh, GitHub. Okay. Which is, is all the coding repository, he said something like 60% is AI assisted code. Already. Already. Yeah. Wow. Which, I mean, it's still people, you know. Sure. Reviewing it, using it, integrating it, but. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah. We were in our, uh, strategic planning updating meeting this afternoon before you got here. Mm-hmm. And, uh, one of the lingering, um, tasks has been to update the job descriptions. Okay. And was like, well, maybe I'll just do what chat G p T does for, you know, and was it pretty good? Well, we haven't done it yet, but, oh, okay. We did some of your newsletter recently with it too, right? Yeah. One of our members did a portion, well, sort did Alicia. Yeah. Okay. I put a, uh, a, uh, I don't know if it's a disclaimer. More like a Proclaimer on Yeah. Yeah. In front of my thing that says, Hey, we're doing this. No, I'm no on mine. I put, this is just me. No, no. Bullshit chat apps, nothing like that. This is pure me sitting down at my computer typing stuff. Okay. Maybe talking into my phone. But yeah, I don't know. It's interesting to me, like just. I guess it'll just make us smarter thinkers, you know, for that, for that, uh, computer software engineer programmer that, that uses a tool like that to get around a roadblock that they're stumbling on, that kind of thing. Well, I told Zach, he, he's got, he's got a window before I, I tender my resignation at Mule Near because I, I saw some job opening for, yeah, they call it large language model trainer. Okay. Which essentially you're just sitting there chatting with a chatbot all day. It was like a hundred thousand dollars. What? Yeah. So I told Zach, I was like, I can talk to a robot for a hundred grand. You're out. I'm out bud. Right? Yeah. Good luck. Oh, wow. I would love that job. I'm just gonna chat, chat with him all day long. Although, I don't know, I feel like if you chat with it that long, it gets pretty dark, pretty quick. Right. Like some of the things I've read, like I could make a, uh, episode of the local experience where I just sit down and with a chatbot until one of us breaks. And just go like 27 hours or 65 hours, just like, oh, you're not gonna make this long, man. The robots are gonna win. For sure. That's like playing tennis against the wall. The wall always wins if we, what if we both drink a bunch of bourbon? Well, if you pour bourbon on the air on the actual computer, you're gonna win. So, or it'll turn it into a superpower. Right? Yeah. He will learn how to brew bourbon on his own. That could be a great thing though, right? Right. I'm sure they could make a meat and bourbon. I mean, all the iterations they can plan into it. That's true. It did. Somebody did ask it for the greatest cocktail ever. Oh, I forgot what it was. So I just, I don't know why I went down that road. Must not. Cause I already ruined it by not knowing what the actual cocktail was. Like you, I mean, I would say that you probably instinctively understand the, the. Platform. You, you're probably not an AI programmer or anything like that, but, oh gosh, no. But what computers do and can do and stuff like outside of just the security concerns, does it scare you? Well, and that's why everyone's like, that's why some people are scared of it, is because even the people that are writing the algorithms, like as it's learning, you know, it's changing things and it's iterating, like, yeah, not, there are not many if you not just a little bit know what's in the black box. Right? Yeah. So, and that's part of, that's why everyone's concerned. We don't really know how it works. And that's, yeah, that's a big problem. So, seems like, it seems like it, so it should be, like, there was this, I haven't really heard a response, but there was a big, you know, people signed a letter for a six month moratorium on anything more powerful than 4.0. Yeah, I, I saw the letter, but I don't, I didn't really hear anybody respond. Like, I don't think anything or nothing come from it. I mean, one Microsoft's put what, 10 billion behind chat gbt. Right? So it's like, I'm like, I think it's coming. The genie's out of the bottle. It is, yeah. Just isn't gonna, yeah, we just see what she looks like when she gets here. Yeah. Is that I, I, I, that's my guess, so. Okay. Yeah. All right. I don't see any other way, you know, I, I've chosen not to spend too much time thinking about it, cuz then I get all weird and freak out the stuff like that. Like I said, it gets dark fast if you go down those rabbit holes, but it, we'll just hope it's a, a nice, uh, benevolent overload. Well, I think it'll, exactly. It's like, have you ever seen those, uh, The Boston Dynamics videos. Mm-hmm. So they make like super advanced robots. Yeah, I've seen some of those. Yeah. And it's like these guys, like the robots walking along and they're, they're kicking it and trying to push it down, but it stays upright and it's still moving along, jumping and it's like somebody commented it, you know, this is the video our robot overlords are gonna show to us of the abuse that they had to tolerate. Right. And this is gonna be coming about, these are the reparations that you're gonna just, we're gonna start here, turnabouts fair play. And this is where we start. So we're all doomed. But no, but the comic book was, it, it was really fun that it actually came together and we, we were able to, to, yeah. It's like educational, right? Like it's about Yeah. So kind of some of the stuff we've been talking about. Exactly. Yeah. The, I, I realized I had to add on the second page a list of definitions cuz I talk about like ransomware and NextGen antivirus and firewalls and stuff like that. Which for me, that's everyday conversation, but, You know, that's part of that business school. You gotta be able to translate it to Yeah, sure. To something you've probably, you've probably used bank jargon before too. Yeah, yeah. I, I, I've definitely, yeah. Well, I guess cfpb Yeah, they're, they're in a little bit of hot water now, but What's cfpb? That's the consumer financial protection. Yeah. Why are they in hot water? They, some, somebody transferred like 250,000, uh, records of people's personal data to a personal email or something. Oh, excuse. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that. No big, but, eh, they're a government entity. It'll get Yeah. Nobody will. Nobody will. No, nobody, nobody will follow up on that. Right, exactly. Well, um, what about this new mortgage stuff where high credit score borrowers are? I saw that headline like a 1% penalty. I haven't read the article yet, but what's, yeah. What's the deal with that? Yeah, you get a cheaper mortgage if you're at a six 20 than you do at a seven 20. Because they're using good night extra fees on good credit score people to subsidize. Yeah. I mean that doesn't bother me cuz I locked in at 2 75 a couple years ago and Right. It, I'm not paying that off ever. If I can probably help it, it seems unlikely, you know? And not until you're 30 years is up 30 years. Yeah. Not a day before, but I mean, yeah, my sister's trying to get a mortgage in a house and all that stuff right now, so. Yeah. No, if she, hopefully she, she try to, I'm tell she's trying to take, I'll her, to her credit, I'll tell her to trash it to a point. Trash up her credit to a point. Yeah. You get six 19, boom. Sign all the papers. Yeah, no, look that up. It's, uh, I will, yeah. It just came out like it and it was all MSNBC and all this stuff and I say, yeah, I saw the headline in the journal with most everybody kind of going, not exactly sure what the idea is here, you know? Yeah. I don't what at that somebody said on, on Twitter I thought it was pretty accurate was, um, like having, uh, people that followed the speed limit, pay the tickets for the people that. Go fast. Yeah, no, that's, that's exactly right. Well, I mean, pay the penalties. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing. Like, I, I get it. Your bad behavior will be less affordable now, and they're trying to keep it affordable, but mortgage rates are not high by historical standards. They're right in line with Yeah. Where they've been for the last 15 years. Well, and we years just don't want people like having behavior that leads to poor credit. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's a negative incentive right there. Right. Totally. You know, our bad outcomes period. Yeah. You know, and that's, you know, even, you know, we don't need to get there, but the, the, I was on a podcast recently where we talked about just the, the plight of the inner cities and, you know, kind of how much damage the original good, well-intended welfare programs caused. Yeah. By incentivizing childless father, or, you know, or, or fatherless childhood. Mm-hmm. Uh, to a very high level. Now it's like, I dunno, 70% in a lot of cities. Wow. Um, and in certain populations, and, you know, it is well intended, oh, if somebody has more kids without a father in the house, they need more money. Sense. Get what you subsidize. Makes sense too. You know, if you, if you get a cheaper mortgage for having terrible credit to I have good credit. We're we're gonna have a whole lot more people with terrible credit. Yeah. Yeah. Because you save your most on their mortgage, you might pay more for your car insurance. But that's like the car insurance companies are gonna have to turn around too and subsidize the bank. Somebody's footing the bill. Yeah. Somebody's footing. There's no free lunch. Yeah. No, not at all. So tell me about banking, like is, uh, you said your great-great grandfather established the bank. Well, he back in the day, or he moved and then the family did. Yeah. So he was, he was working at a bank in Kansas. Okay. And it was, it was kind of a situation where, you know, he was. Kind of as high as he was gonna go there. Mm-hmm. So the, the honcho, you know, chairman of the board came to him and said, Hey, you know, you're not moving up here, but I, I kind of believe the branch somewhere. And so, yeah. So they, they looked at a couple, uh, different banks and they said, Hey, Fowler's, the, seems like the best fit. So that's the one. Yeah. The, the actual, his boss financed him to, to buy the bank in Fowler. And, and Oh, and this was back in the days when you couldn't really have banks that were connected and stuff, even something like that. Yeah. There was no branch banking, at least in Colorado for a long time. Well, and across state lines would've been a thing too, right? Cause it stole from Kansas, so, and it was, yeah, it was already, so it had been established in 1899 as a, with a state charter. Yeah. I guess the state charter came a little bit later, but, um, that's pretty wild. You got staked basically. Yeah. Yeah, it got staked. And then, Had a few, eight or nine good years from 1920 on, and then spent the rest of his life finding the depression in the war and just had a rough go of it. Yeah. Um, but yeah. So, but made it through apparently. Yep, yep. Yeah, they, they didn't have to close, you know, they, they kept af floating and everything was, I mean, it wasn't not easy good. It wasn't good by any means, but it was, they made it through, obviously, so, yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, my dad, he's been there since the eighties and yeah. So he's literally seen it all. Right. Yeah. You know, he's, uh, does your dad effectively run the business now? Of the Yeah, he's the ceo. Yeah. So he, he's still running everything and, and doing the day-to-day and every, all of that. But yeah, he, you know, he still talks about what's that look like? Is that a 10 or a 20, 30, 50 person? Organization. Um, 15. 15. Yeah. So it, it's small, you know, just one physical branch. One branch, yeah. Mm-hmm. No, no. Not affiliated with any other banks or anything like that. Just, uh, independent community bank. Yeah. Just sitting there. Tiny bank. I think like maybe 130 or something million in assets. Okay. Well, fairly sizable though for one bank. Yeah. Not, well, I mean, we've seen a, a bunch of growth over the last five years. Okay. So, good. You know, which is, yeah. Been, it's, it's been real good. But from what? Like, uh, just cause the community's growing or people who are coming to you for things. Yeah, just people coming, you know, we, we've, we've had a, a, a real successful like, um, feed, uh, cattle feed lot type of mm-hmm. Gotten good financing, feed lots and managing their deposits with them and stuff like that. Well, and, and even like, you know, pen of cattle where the feed lot will say, Hey, we've got this pen that's available and we've got an investor that wants to put down 50%. Can you guys finance the rest and do the feed and all that stuff? Yeah, yeah. Six, eight months, you know? Yeah. Knock around what everything pays off. No. Hopefully everything pays off. No. Uh, you know, once a century Blizzards or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. Which, I mean, they've had down there too, but, you know, it's, like I said, he's, he's seen it all. He had the great, great recession about 15 years ago. He had the, well, the eighties, you know, he started in 18% CDs and whatnot. Right, right. Yeah. I think, yeah. He said when he bought his house after college in the. Early eighties, it was, his mortgage rate was 10%, which he thought was awesome because his CD he was getting 15% on, so. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, that's a quite a, a observation and that's why there are no savings and loans anymore. Right. Just when I first started in banking in 99, or I, I guess, moved to Fort Collins, we had a 7% cd, 7% for seven months. Yeah. And that was the highest that I've ever seen, you know, hopefully still will be. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. We're, we're getting there. They'll fight, fight to keep that dragon. Yeah. I just opened a, a small CD for, for local think tank, uh, just 5% or 4%. Okay. Yeah. But it was just a 90 day. Okay. Uh, I let my members pay annual if they wanted to. Gotcha. Extra money, but it's not really for real money because. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have operations all year long, not just that, so, so I wanted to tuck some of those annual payments away just to, well, shoot, I bought a treasury let the month ago or something, but six month treasury was like four and three quarters. Really? So, yeah. Well, it was, it was nuts. So, so what, uh, are you a student of that, of the economy and the greater macroeconomic thing and, and stuff? Are you, I, yeah, I like to, what do you think about that? You mentioned Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, uh, talking about what's going on over there these days, is that Yeah, I've been listening a lot about kind of what went wrong, you know, and yeah, make sure that hey, maybe can try to learn some lessons, hopefully, and not have to experience a, essentially just an old school, bank run. Just a much, much faster version of it, I think. Hit the peak. Silicone Valley had like 40 billion go out in a day. Right. Or well tried to. Right. They, they interviewed Never did let it all go. No. They interviewed one lady who tried to get her wire out late in the afternoon and never, never went out. So, yeah. Um, but yeah, essentially, you know, you, you get it how banking's all fractional. It's all trust based. Right. You know? Yeah. It's, well for the listener that's out there, how can you, do you have a Cliff Notes ability to describe that? The, like a balance sheet of a bank and, yeah. Um, I mean, You, you, you know, I say the bank's 130 million in assets, they, they don't have 130 million in the vault. Right. So just, I went and talked to a fifth grade class and I pretty much just discouraged a bunch of people from Yeah. No bank robberies. Yeah. From, from robbing a bank and told'em that, you know, hacking was the only way you're gonna make any money in Yeah. And the vault, there might be a million Yeah, yeah. Or something in that size of a bank. Yeah. Nothing that's even close to the, the total amount on the balance sheet, you know, and, and you know, if a and what they do have an asset, a lot of us is electronic. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And, and with, with Silicon Valley, you know, there, there are all these avenues to banks that where they can, you know, go borrow a bunch of money from the Fed or from, you know. Right. Other correspondent banks, they just couldn't get it fast enough. They tried to get it from the Fed to get 20 billion and it's still, you know, it's kind of a point your finger at Oh, you know, they didn't have the collateral. Yeah. But essentially, With Silicon Valley, they had bought a bunch of long-term bonds right at 1%, 2% when rates went way up. Right. The value of the bonds went way down. It's just, you know, the price to yield ratio is inverted there. And so it's Oh, and so they weren't maybe in as bad a shape as it was a liquidity crunch, but Well, they had the liquidity crunch after, but the problem was, but if they would've been able to get the Federal reserve line, then it wouldn't have had to liquidate those bonds theoretically, maybe. So they did liquidate some bonds and then the thing that sparked the run is that they tried to go raise money to cover it. So they had to write those bonds down and they lost$2 billion. Right. So they said, okay, well we'll just go raise, we'll just go to the capital markets and raise 2 billion. And everyone's like, why the hell, why do you need to raise money? They're struggling. Yeah. And then, yeah, then the bank run happens and they try to get the, you know, stem, the tide funding and can't get it because, They say, Hey, we've got this bond portfolio to pledge collateral. And they say, well that bond portfolio's not worth what you think it's think a chunk. Yeah. Yeah. It's worth 70 cents on the dollar and yeah. Next thing you know, FDCs taken over. So yeah. Does it scare you as part of a family owned bank or do you feel like it It does. I mean just cuz like, you know, you see, you don't have 90, you see how fast the turn tide. Yeah. The tides turn. Right. You don't have 96% of your depositors with uninsured deposits still? Probably, no, I would say it's, I don't More like 6%. Yeah. It, if that, yeah, it's definitely less than 10%, but, and then, you know, for the customers that do. Have concerns, right. That are large depositors, maybe they got 750,000. We'll do, you know, reciprocal agreements to say, right. Hey, we'll go put two 50 at this bank, two 50 at this bank so that all your money is technically insured. Yep. Right? Yep. It's, you know, it's all shows in your account here, but we've made arrangements with other institutions to make sure that it's fully covered. What do you think about, uh, the depositors getting made whole in that Silicon Valley Bank deal? I've heard both sides of it, but at the end of the day, I mean, it's not their fault. Right. You know? Yeah. If you have$20 million, you're not gonna go have, what, what would that be? A hundred different Right. Bank accounts. Yeah. Where you have 250 50, though you could have a treasury sweep or something like that, at least. Yeah. But it's something where I, I would think that the Well, and, and what they said was, you know, all the big banks have the implicit backing. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, JP Morgan's not gonna fail. Yeah. So it's no problem holding 10 million there. But the thing is, you would think that no bank is gonna fail because the regulators are supposed to be doing their job Right. Supposed to be right. Like Silicon Valley should have never let that go. Right. We just went through a bank exam and had to deal with, hey, are, are your liabilities matched up to your assets? Are your bonds Yeah. Do you have too many long-term bonds? Yeah. And what's your liquidity ratio? You know, we have all these, we do the stress test quarterly now. It was just annually, but now we do a stress test quarterly where I, one of the components is, uh, 25% run on transactional accounts. Wow. So just transactional, right? Sure. Like we're not saying that people are gonna cash in CDs. Right. Right. And stuff like that. But of the demand deposits, like could we weather that storm with Yeah. The current liquidity plus all the borrowings that we have at established. Yeah. If the rumor mill down at the follower cafe says, Hey, I heard the bank's not doing so good. You know, could you withstand it for a couple days? Yeah. So we do that quarterly. Yeah. And make sure that. If, if, if it fails, like if there's some concern, then we address it. Yeah. Which, I mean, it's, it's fine. Like we have more than enough if, if, yeah. All the people decided to come demand their money tomorrow. We can meet those needs. So how many, uh, what percentage of banks in the country right now are like a one location independent? Oh, I don't know. It's gotta be low, almost nothing. Right? I was gonna say it's gotta be low. So Yeah. Dinosaur kind of like, what do you, what's the future hold? Do you think that, uh, like is there somebody in your family or otherwise that would manage it? Ab because your dad's gonna be close to 60 by now, I guess. Huh? He, he's over 60, but yeah, over 60. Um, so, so what we did was, I named my son, we named him after the grandfather that took over in 1920. So they're both named. Yeah, it's the same name. So he is Hurley. So if your dad could go to 80, then your son's gonna just take it over. We're good. Yeah. But, um, but yeah, no, I mean, I'm, I'm staying involved and engaged and whatnot. Yeah. So yeah, we've got. Assuming I can make it to 80 years old as well, then it's sustainable and all that and whatever you're involved in. Correct. Yeah. You don't, you don't have any anticipation of some, like, it's, it's an interesting, well, I think nobody necessarily really wants to buy you. I suppose you could probably, like the Bank of Colorado's and the, uh, Adams Banks and things like that would make a, you'd be, be a good piece in there. Oh yeah. I mean there, there are definitely, there's a lot of suit, small community suitors if you small community banks that are still way bigger than us. Yeah. That I think would find a lot of value there because, you know, seems like you're very competitive in your marketplace. Yeah. Competitive. You know, we've got a lot of good expertise in what we do. I mean, we focus on, on the staff and whatever. Right. Exactly. Plus, you know, we've got a super strong balance sheet, so it's something that, it's just a matter of, you know, we've talked about adding more branches. Yeah. But I think that rather than having that capital investment, I mean, I know, yeah. At least from my standpoint, I do most of my banking on my phone. Right, right, right. So it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense to, to invest in that physical infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. I look at there, there's a bank, uh, live Oak Bank. Okay. They, they're, they're much bigger. They're, you know, hundreds of billions probably in, but, um, at least hundreds of millions, but Right. Um, much larger, but they don't have a physical footprint. I think they have a headquarters, maybe some offices, but they don't have branches across the country. What they do is they just go to the customers and they focus on like, SBA loans. Interesting. Well as ag too. Um, and then they do their deposits and whatever else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's super easy now to set up a deposit account online. So, you know, they have all the ID verification stuff where it's, yeah. And I can deposit it. If I get a check from somebody, I can deposit it with my phone. Exactly. Bank. Yeah. Yeah. And, and even if it's, you know, a. A hundred thousand dollars check. We, we have processes in place. Cuz you know, if somebody goes and sells cattle, maybe they've got a hundred thousand dollars check. Right. That they just wanna snip a picture with their phone. I mean, that's fine. It's gonna kick out. Like that's not automatically getting deposited. Right. That's gonna somebody the bank can hit and approve. Button. Button. Exactly. Oh yeah. That Bobby said he was gonna the cattle sale next week, so Yeah, they go call him up. Legit. Legit. Exactly. Yeah. Well and that's the thing about the, the know your customer too, right? Yeah. Right. I mean, JP Morgan doesn't know their customer, but we do. And so it's a lot easier for us to do those types of Yeah. Yeah. Transactions. So you mentioned our. Boutique it firm, but it, it's definitely more of like a boutique bank is what Right. We're starting to push towards, but within that niche. Right. So we actually know your name and all that kind of stuff. Well, and we'll come to you. Right. You know, you need something set up and you need to run a bunch of checks at your office will come set up your check scanner right from the IT side. I've tried to set up check scanners for JP Morgan. That's a pain in the butt. Right. It's terrible. Fair enough. Um, and then as soon as something updates, whether the browser, whether the Chrome updates or something, it all breaks. So we gotta do it again. Fair enough. But, um, what, uh, like what do you like about banking as an industry? Um, and contrast it with, with it's face a little bit, I think well, I was gonna do the same, honestly. Okay. Because you get to touch all the different, different types of businesses, right? Yeah, yeah. Like we, we're not one of the IT companies where we only do dental offices. Right. We have had dental offices, and so I've had to learn a little bit about dentist, dentist line of business, software. Yeah. I've had to learn law firm, line of business, software contractors. Yeah. Churches. Yeah. Like it's, it's all over the place. But it's the same with with banking, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, you were probably making loans to Oh, yeah. Everything from a bakeries or autobody shop to auto bodies, whatever, right? Yeah. Or doing a dealer floor plan maybe, which all over the place, right, right. Yeah. Whole different puzzle each time. Exactly. And kind of that, as, you know, matching up the, the sources and the uses and the timing of the cash flows and, you know, understanding enough about how business works. To put the value in from, on the financial front, how, how many cups of coffee do you gotta sell to? Yeah. To make that payment every month or Yeah. Yeah. Or how many cars you gotta sell, but, well, and it, it is the same thing with it. Like, we always ask, you know, how long can you afford to be down, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so that, that kind of dictates the backup and disaster recovery plan. Yep. But anymore, a lot of that is, is outta your hands. Right. If you're depending on a cloud provider or a vendor. Yeah. If your internet's down, you need to know what their plan is. Yeah. Yeah. You need to know what their uptime is and say, Hey, their uptime's only 95%. Right. Sounds like a good number. But that equivocates to something like a month every year. Right? Right. Not that high, whatever, a week every year at least. Yeah. But you know, if that all happens at the same time. Right. They didn't violate their contract, but you're screwed. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And so, so that's, that's what we stretch. Just how long can you afford to be down and what does that look like? And then you, well, understanding that whole. Model exactly what your customer's actually doing. Yeah. Because it's, it's a lot different for, you know, like I said, a church versus a law firm is Yeah. Very different what their needs and requirements are. Yeah. Fair enough. Um, you wanna talk any philosophy of business or next steps with, uh, NER or things like that? Like, uh, we're getting ready to do the closing segments soon, so, all right. Yeah. No, it's our, our business cards. The back of'em, they say it's, it's all about relationships, not it, and that's, I, I mean, I think that's just like the, just that's kind of do the golden rule, right? Yeah. Treat'em like, you want to be, like somebody submits an IT ticket. They, they're frustrated already. They're, they, they're not, they're not reaching out to you to ask how your day's going. They can't print and they're pissed about it, so it's fine. Like, we get that and we try to, to respond as if, you know, we're, we're doing the work, you know? Yeah. It's, I, I see. Other industries, whether it's, you know, people I know working for different companies saying like, Hey, how long should it take to set up this computer? I don't know. Well, you do a lot of specialized stuff. Maybe, maybe two days. They say, oh, not three weeks. No, it probably shouldn't take three weeks. Your IT department's probably just phoned it in for a couple weeks and you know, it's something where Right, right. It's some large it, the IT department's way larger than our company. Yeah. So they, it's either going through all the bureaucracy or some guys just playing video games for a week, and then they'll get to it. Yeah. Who knows, right? Yeah. It's, uh, that's one of the challenges of, especially when you're a small fish wanting attention from a big fish Yeah. Yeah. In that space. So, yeah. So our, our philosophy is like, Hey, if, if we were the ones having the problem, how are we gonna handle it? Yeah. So, fair enough. That's. How'd your beer? And it's worked well. You're still half good, right? Yeah, I'm still half good. Yeah. Okay. Um, so, uh, you, you're a listener. I believe you. Yeah. I think you reached out to me saying, I, I liked your podcast with somebody. Mm-hmm. But so, faith, family, politics we always talk about. Yeah. Uh, do you know where you'd like to start in that? Uh, we just got our son baptized. Okay. So, yeah, we can start there. Congratulations. Thank you. Is that the family front then? Uh, both. Yeah. Family faith. Yeah. Fair. So, yeah. So you've been with, uh, what's your wife's name? Gina. Gina? Mm-hmm. Since 20, uh, we got married in 2014. Okay. And hold on. What's today? It is April 24th, I think. Oh yeah, my clock's tick. I got, I got a week and a half, less than that. And then it's our anniversary. Oh, our ninth anniversary. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. May 3rd. Uh, we got married in 2014, so Yeah. Yeah. Very good. But yeah, so I gotta extra's a big number 10. You're gonna do something special for that one. I'm gonna try to, so I'm gonna get some time off. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start planning now. Tell Zach now I'm gonna start planning down for the heck. You need a vacation early May next year. Um, yeah. So yeah, we've been married, yeah, almost exactly nine years now. Okay. Um, and you got an old, your son is the old oldest and a fresh one too? No, she's, she's, he's the youngest and then our daughter's, so our daughter's five, almost six, and then he just turned three. Okay. So, um, oh, so you just had him baptized, but done at three? Well, yeah, because I know that's, it's like kind of a tweener time. Well, it's not great. No. But he was born 2020. Oh, right. Yeah. He was born April, 2020. And so for like the whole first year, it wasn't even possible to schedule it Right. Then for the next year. We were just lazy about it. And then finally, oh wait, we were gonna bypass the baby. Exactly. It all finally lined up. Our daughter was bad time when she was like three months. So that's, yeah, more normal. We have a, we have a, a baby dedication, and then our church does baptism. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, once you're ready. And I've seen some pretty young ones. We had like a, an eight year old or something like that, maybe get baptized the other day, but three would be pretty young. Yeah. It wasn't his idea, although he was pretty excited about it. Yeah. He was ready to jump in, in the, uh, the baptismal there. So, so, um, so that's your second and what's, what's his name? So, yeah, so he is Hurley. Hurley. He just turned three. And he's the one named after grandpa. Mm-hmm. Okay. And then Juliana is, she's five. She's in kindergarten. I really like the name Juliana. That's one of my. Yeah, I, I know a handful of Juliana's and they're all pretty great. Well, everyone's like, why, why'd you pick that name? You know? Is she a family name? And I was like, no, we just liked it. Yeah, there was, there was a pretty cool TV show and the main character, Juliana, is like this really strong, like kind of badass. Yeah. That's cool. Cool. I did it. So, um, we have, uh, one word descriptors of all your kids. Would you like to effort that with Curley or Juliana first? Okay, let me think about this. It's awesome. So, uh, yeah, you can, you can use hyphens if you want. Yeah. Okay. To, to make a word a little bit more meaty. I, I would say Juliana is, is is inquisitive, right? She, she's at the point where she's always asking questions. Mm-hmm. Like, Where wears me out. Right. Obviously, but Right. But you don't want to turn that off. Yeah. And so, you know, it's, it, it's always good. And she's five now. Mm-hmm. So does that put her at preschool or kindergarten? Kindergarten already? Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we, she, she was ready. Okay. So, um, like her best friend we're doing, we're planning a joint birthday party right now. He turned seven, like a few days before she turned six. Right. But they're both in kindergarten. They're best friends. They're doing great. So, and she's much more mature than he is in most ways. Yeah. Because Yeah, the guys, they don't figure it out till, yeah. I was 40. 40. Yeah. And how about her young Hurley? Um, funny, I, well, like, um, jovial maybe, I don't know. Yeah, he, yeah. Whimsical. Yeah, like jovial. I mean, he's, he's three, right? So the terrible twos kind of bleed into the terrible threes. Yeah. So he is, he's, he's a handful by all means. But as soon as he flashes that smile and starts giggling, like it's, it's impossible to, I'm sorry. I wrote the markers all over the wall with daddy. I, I literally sent a meme to Gina where it was one of my friends without kids asked me to describe what it's like raising a toddler. So I stole her keys, headbutted her, and told her I loved her to the moon and back, which, which pretty much sums it up. Yeah. Like as soon as he smiles or laughs or snuggles in, he is just, he is like the happiest kid. So it's like it, yeah. He's just crushing it. But, so, uh, you mentioned Gina is a, is an engineer, a civil engineer? She is, yep. So she, she works for cdot. Okay. Don't blame her for any of the roads. The potholes are not her fault. Nope. Nope, they're not. It's the funding. Come on. Although, although now she's, she's in charge of, uh, the. Like, so of region four, she, she just got promoted. Oh. As a regional, um, or the resident engineer, that's what they call it. Okay. For, for some of the, the roads up here. Cool. So cool. She's doing like, she gets the fun projects. So she's been up Cameron pass, uh, you know, last month or two looking at some maintenance and stuff they got going on up there. But she gets to go to a lot of the fun sites, the more challenging kind of sites and things like that. Yeah, yeah. Retaining walls and different things or overseeing that kinda Yeah. She didn't have to mess with a lot of the 34 stuff like up Thompson Canyon. Yeah. But that, that's one of her roads now I think. Gotcha. I think I'm in, uh, leadership Northern Colorado right now doing Oh, nice. Some learning and we had somebody from cdot, uh, come and talk to us. I don't think it was as, does she go by Gina Fox, I guess. Yeah, she does. I would recognize that name. So, yeah. No, it wasn't her, but I don't think it was her, somebody on her team did a pretty good job of giving us kind of an overview of. The, the challenge and the opportunity of funding highways in Colorado and stuff like that. I'm sure she's well acquainted. Well and yeah. And obviously I 20 fives the uh, golden goose. Right. They get, they get any and all the attention. So, but well, especially within Denver Metro. Mm-hmm. It's gonna be nice. What are we probably six months away from having the, uh, third lane all the way? I feel like we're always six months away from having our five face actually open. Yeah. Well, and it won't be fixed yet, per se, but at least it'll be better, but Yeah. Well and that's the thing, like people get upset about the, the toll lanes. Yeah. But I don't know, to me it makes the most sense, like just pay to play. Yeah. I'd, I'd rather you can go faster. It just cost more. I'd rather the people using the road pay for it than my tax dollars go to some road that I'm never gonna use. Well, and that allows my general theory of driving to be, cuz I don't think of speed limit science as really being. Limits, you know, as more suggestions and if you want to pay a little more, you're gonna get a ticket once in a while. Yeah. We rented a car, uh, Gina and I went to, uh, Munich for Octoberfest. Okay. And I was like, we're gonna rent a car like the first day year actually auto bottom. Yeah. We're gonna drive around. You know what they gave me? They gave me a Ford Focus. Oh, boo. I was like, I came all the way to Germany to rent a Ford. Like I like Ford. Like that's what the, that's car, that's what I have. But I wanted like some fancy Mercedes that I could just run and gun up and down that no, I had a, I mean it was still a fun, it had the eco boost, like it was still a fast zippy little car, but ah, not the same is it? No, it was not the same BMW or I'll tell you what, they've got it figured out over there. Yeah. No speed limits. But everybody know like nobody's putzing in the left lane, right? Yeah. Like cuz we rode with, yeah, we rode with one of my friends were like, Hey Seb, like why don't you get over? He goes, no, I'm not gonna get over it cuz I'm not gonna go fast enough. Yeah. So he knew like, I'm not gonna get in the left lane cuz I'm not running and gunning. That's a, i I always say speed doesn't really kill so much. It's speed differential that. Yeah, for sure. You know, so that slow car in the fast lane is really just as much of a danger as is the guy weaving in and out of the right lane? Kind of. Yeah, for sure. A hundred percent. Yeah. You get some guy put some 10 under in the left lane is gonna mess everything up for everyone. Totally. So, um, how did we get there? Oh, you're married to an engineer? Yeah, it works for Cedar out and it's not her fault, but she didn't cause any of these i 25 problems. So you guys had, uh, looks like three or four kind of dink years. Uh, dual. We did dual income No kids. And, and now you're settling into kid life. So Yeah, we, we, we make the joke. That's not really a joke that we took multiple honeymoons. Right, right, right. Yeah. And now the next, uh, you know, 10th anniversary would be the first real big one for a while probably. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, we went to, we, we went to Brazil last year for, oh, that's pretty big. Well, and it was with the kids. No. Which. So there was a, an exchange student. Oh. Which you'll appreciate cuz you host a bunch, right? Yeah. So he, he got married last year. Okay. So we went down for the wedding and he's also the oldest of three. Okay. So like my, his mother, my like host brother's mother. Okay. Type of thing. Okay. We're all really close, right? Yeah. Yeah. But she goes, how come you didn't bring the kids? Those are my grandbabies. Like, where are they at? Why don't you inspire Patrick? And I was like, well, Sorry. Cause we, there's pictures. Yeah. We're coming for a wedding. Like we're coming here to Z out party. Yeah. We're not keeping them up till two in the morning. Where, where, what part of Brazil? Uh, Sao Paolo. They, so, yeah. Well, our existing exchange student is from Sao Paolo as well. Oh. Oh, nice. And so was our original exchange student was from Brazil too. So. Nice. We should all, uh, go down there and, uh, do a Brazil tour sometime. Deal. Yeah. I'll say. Yeah. We went down this, this was in the, the Dink life. Yeah. We went down to for Carnival. Oh, wow. Before, and like rented a, like all 10 of us rented out a penthouse in Rio and it was, yeah, it was a blast. Super cool. Yeah. But no, it's, yeah, we let me know when you go, man. We'll, yes. Right. So this is an exchange that stayed with your family from Brazil when you were a kid, or what was that? Yeah. So when, when I was in high school, he stayed with us. Okay. So like, we're. A year apart or something. Pretty much the same age. And then he and I actually lived in Spain together Oh wow. For six months. Okay. So yeah, he pretty much, he said, Hey, I'm gonna study abroad in Barcelona. You should come. Oh, cool. So I went and talked to my advisor at CSU and I said, Hey, I'm, I'm gonna study abroad in Barcelona this fall. She goes, well, I don't know about this fall. Like the deadlines are five, six days away. You're probably not gonna do this. I was like, I don't think you understand. I don't think you understand whether I get credit. We're gonna, we're gonna do this fall. Let me know what I need to do to make this happen. And it wor I gotta like capstone credit over there. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Probably lucky, but uh, also sometimes just, you gotta ask for what you need. Yeah. That's it. Well, I mean, it was kind of a scramble to get everything done and submitted and whatnot. Yeah. But hey, we got it done. I like it. Yeah, it was, that was a blast. So cool. So, um, I, you know, according to my timeline, you guys are about ready to. Have a third soon then, right? Like, I think we are done Hurley, so No. Called it two. Yeah, two. Two is a, a good number for us. So, well, we've slipped below the replacement rate, uh, in America now we're at 1.8 children per baby in, I'm still above the threshold. We really need to be at 2.1. So I'll, I'll talk to my sister. She, she's only at one, right? I encourage her to have three. Yeah, she's only at one right now. If she can do three, then you guys together will do 2.5 average. You'd be a bigger job. Yeah, I was gonna say, we're going up, we're going up for my nephew's first birthday. We're, we're gonna rent an RV and road trip it to Wyoming, so. Oh, cool. I like it. So, um, you hit it toward faith with the baptism, but, uh, what's that? Mean in your world? And and is that the same as it has been for your family? Is that a stable force in your world? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I was raised in Methodist and Okay. Gina's, so she's half Italian, so she was raised Catholic Okay. Her whole life. But I made the joke to my father-in-law, which he did not appreciate that I'm Methodist is just Catholic light is twice the singing and half the guilt sounds pretty accurate. Yeah. I, I thought it was spot on, but he, he did not think that that was, uh, quite, quite the right tenor. So, so, um, have you guys kind of introduced your kids to both faith backgrounds? Yeah, I mean we, yeah, we go to the, the Catholic church quite a bit and then, uh, we'll, we'll go to timber lining stuff too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just cuz just to mixed up a little bit. So, fair enough. But, Um, do Methodists, uh, so they do infant baptism, not like when you're ready, kind of baptism. Correct. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's some discre if you want to, you can do that too, but Yeah. But yeah, that's their normal practice. I was baptized as an infant. Same with me. Yeah. Uh, uh, so I just, I'm, I'm keeping a, a spreadsheet of everything I can learn from these conversations. So you probably had to be Lutheran though, right? The upper North? Most of them are up there, but no, it was Lutherans and Catholics, but I was a congregational. Okay. I was kind of a misfit of sorts. Yeah. I didn't, neither one of the Lutherans or the Catholics family would let me date their daughters. Yeah. Well that's so goes. I didn't want'em anyway. I told you there was only five in my class, right? Yeah. That's a small pool. Small pool. Small pool, small pool. Small shallow pool. That's, yeah, that's why I had to get out. No offense ladies. No yet none, none, none. I'm going back for my, uh, it's the 40th anniversary of. The towns of Pingry and Buchanan merging schools. Okay. Uh, and so they're having a big party kind of from all the, the Pinger Buchanan High School classes over the years. Nice. Well, Fowler is getting, they are in the B process right now of building a new high school. Oh, wow. Yeah. They got a lot of the, the best funding. Oh, that's great. I I, I I think that comes from like the marijuana taxes. Yeah. Probably. Um, but yeah, they got a lot of that funding to, to build a new high school. That's cool. Which is Fowler actually on the grow, uh, as a community, is it growing? It's been stable, kind, growing as a bedroom community of Pueblo almost or something, or too far away? There have been some, no, there have been some, like, uh, a couple of my buddies from high school, they, they work in Pueblo. Yeah. Um, and it's. I mean, the one guy goes, you drive all the way from Fowler. And he goes, well, you drive from Pueblo West. Like, it takes longer for you to get here than it does for me. Right. I'm 20 minutes on the highway here and thousands of people drive down from Colorado Springs every day. Yeah. Which is, and deal with that just as hard road, much more of a headache, so Right. Much more dangerous to your life and limb. Yeah. And sanity, but Right. For sure. Um, so, well I imagine that should increase over time, so it's like 40 minutes or something like that probably. Yeah. Yeah. Depending on where you're trying to get to, but Right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's close and it's, it's easy. So Yeah. Yeah. It's it, but the population's been stable. It's just a matter of kind of the, the high school was one of those from the seventies. Right. Which was. Not exactly the architectural Renaissance. Right, right. Maybe sixties, I think, actually. Yeah, that sounds about right. They're both bad. Yep. But yeah, no, it's uh, that's cool though. Yeah. I remember there was a pretty good blizzard. This is before I was in high school, but it had drifted up to the top. It was just a flat roof high school. Right. And so people were just snowboarding off the roof and it was, it was a pretty good time. Yeah. Good design. So, uh, faith, family, we've talked politics not very much so far. Yeah. Your beer is empty again. Do you want to just move towards the end or do you wanna get one more? We can do another one. Okay. Lemme pause this. Okay. You don't how to be scared. So, uh, by, we were just talking about uh, Sweetwater Brewing Company and the heritage of Fort Collins Brewing and um, red Truck and Yeah. My sense is that, you know, Fort Collins kind of got over their, over leveraged to do that big expansion ski Red truck bought it and then there was some kind of Oh, red truck. Cuz that was a, well they had the pandemic and they were closed for like two years. Correct. Cuz they were in Canada. So they were a Vancouver, Canada based brewery. So, so yeah. So they struggled more than others partly because of that. And then this is an Atlanta based brewery going all the way back to 95, I think. Oh wow. Is where Sweetwater goes. I didn't know where they were called. So they're og Yeah, this is their only, their second location. Okay. But they got like, all their branding is all weedy and stuff like that. They picked a good one. They got a Colorado, they picked a good, they got a Colorado resident brand already. Well that was, yeah, so Gina being from Tucson, she straightened me out on Chiba Hu. Cause I Oh, right. Yeah. I was like, oh yeah, Chiba. No, they're, but I guess, yeah, they've got a big Arizona presence. Well, yeah, yeah. Well that was kind of the Fort Collins and Arizona where the two partners kind of Yeah. So on base. Yeah. Cuz I was like, you gotta try this great sandwich shop. She's like, I've been to Chiba. I was like, what do you mean you've been to Chiba hu That was while we were dating. Yeah. Right, right, right. That's pretty funny. Um, so anyway, brands are, you know, it's a, it's an impactful thing. So how did you choose the Ner brand? So, or, or logo or name or whatever, you know, Derek Coon? Yeah. With Brik. Yep. Yep. So we were all, we were all drinking one day and he, he came up with the idea. He goes, he goes, we need, we need like a better name. Right. And so he slams the table and goes, you know, we need something like doors hammer technology like, Hmm. Mule near. And so after we, he knew that, that term Yeah, he knew. He knew because he had read a book recently, probably somewhat. Yeah. He's, yeah. He hadn't seen the movies, but he's d he probably read the comment book Cause he's always free. Right. He reads everything. I've got six book recommendations from Derek sitting on my knight end of which I've read half of one. Right. Yeah. Like, I always take these recommendations. Great. If I read one third as many books as him, I would be way smarter. I'd be a genius than he is by now. Yeah, that's good. So dark. I'm teasing. So, so he's like, cuz you guys were gonna be like, so we asked his blessing, Zack and Yeah, we asked his black and Sean, we said, Hey, that's a, that's a great name. Okay. Because we bring the hammer. Right. That was the other official tagline. Right. I gotcha. Um, and so yeah, we were like, Hey, so you didn't have a name at all before that? You were just idea aiding and you, you needed some marketing or you were maybe friends with Derek or, yeah. Even he, he was based in the same location where you guys were? Well, he came from Greystone too. Oh, so that's right. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we told'em, we're like, Hey, We're gonna use that since you guys took realty. Right. He says the name, he goes, go for it guys. He was, he was stoked about it. I like it. I like it. So, okay. And everyone's like, well, you're just ripping off like the hammer. Like, what happens when Disney sues you? I was like, well, that's how you know we've made it big. Right? As soon as Marvel gets ahold of us and files a lawsuit, that's how, you know we've made it. Well, way too big. Do you don't have, they don't sell any it anywhere, right? They're not gonna confuse anybody. No. And plus like, it's all the Norse mythology, right? Like it's it's not, they don't own Mule near, right? They a hammer. Yeah. They own Chris Hammer. As long as your hammer looks enough different than their, like styling. Yeah. We made our own hammer, which is based on theirs in the north and south. I think they all look similar enough. Yeah, they're, yeah. Thor's been pictured with a thousand hammers over the years. Probably 10 times that, I mean, what? He's 1200 years old, right? So he's, well he's had to go through a few Yeah. Where out. Um, so, uh, politics. Yeah. Um, I was just, uh, sharing with you, I think right before we got into here, started recording that, uh, we've had two major political correspondent casualties Yeah. The last couple days. And my, my brother-in-law sent me a message earlier today about the, the Tucker Carlson one. Yeah. He, he thinks that that a, he, he might throw his hat in the ring for president, president or I, or vp that I, I thought, well, that's what I told him. I said, I was like, no, he's, he's not gonna get the president, but he'll be Trump's Segundo probably. You know it because like he burned that bridge with Pence. Right, right. Like his pe it is not gonna be Trump Pence 2024. Well, Pence is not gonna be on a ticket ever. I don't think so. No. Like he's teased, like he might run for the Republican nomination. It's like, He's like a water down version of Romney. A Romney couldn't get it done. Which like, I mean, you know, bummer for that guy. He came up against Obama on his second term to spiral. I heard somebody listening about, uh, talking about whether Biden, cuz Biden's supposed to announce this week. That was some of the other big political news this morning. And they're like, he's, if the nominee's gonna be Trump then Biden's Itchings run. I mean, I get it right. Like Right. I beat him once. Yeah, I could. That's the thing. When I saw, I saw, I saw some headline. I didn't even read the article cause I knew it was nonsense, but I saw the headline that said 38% of people are fatigued. If it's another Biden Trump. Election. I was like, that's because they've only interviewed 38% of the people. A hundred percent of the people are fatigued by that. Right. That idea. Well, when we were talking about, about, uh, Brazil too, right? Oh, the whole lulu off the podcast. But the, the way it works there, a, first of all, the voting is mandatory. Mm-hmm. If you have to vote. Yep. B it's like wide open. All the candidates and they just keep whittling it. They just keep voting. Yep. Until they finally get down to two. And then it's, so I don't know if that's better or worse, but it, I don't know. It makes more sense because I suppose Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I, I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016, I'm pretty sure. And it, yeah, did a lot of good than nobody, but it made me feel better about myself. So. So what did you do in 2020? 2020. I think I voted Biden in 2020. Oh, I know. Just cuz it's okay. I won't judge you. It was hard. It was confusing. Yeah. Well and like the libertarian bad, the Liber, the libertarian just didn't have a good, like they didn't have have a Yeah, they didn't have a Ron Paul, they didn't have a Gary Johnson who actually had some traction, you know, because Yeah, like Ron Paul came to CSU while I was there and I was like, this guy, he's awesome. Yeah, yeah. He gets it. Like everyone that goes, oh, his foreign policy is terrible. I was like, you know, we don't need to be everywhere. Right. We can take care of home first and that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, so that's your pH philosophy a little bit is kind of that uh, Ron Polish Libertarian leaning. But you said, you just said that you voted for Biden, so that was cuz Trump was bad. Yeah, that was mainly it. Yeah. Like I didn't, didn't voting for assholes kind of thing. Kind of. Pretty much, yeah. Oh, I don't even have that. I voted for Kanye, so I voted for an asshole go. But what I thought was a more. Do you watch Always Sunny? Always sunny in Philadelphia? Yeah. I have. I would say they a while they, they did a 2020 episode that was like a Forest Gump take. Okay. But they're all like, yeah, our guy couldn't get a fair shake and they like, lead up to make you think that they're our guy. Is Trump like Yeah. Like our guy couldn't get a fair shake. Our guy was outed by the media as being an outsider and all this stuff. And then they're like, like, yeah. Trump, no, Kanye Obviously it's a, it's an interesting, like who wants that job? I don't know. Um, I don't know either, but just so you know. Yeah. Um, so one, one of my buddies who I golf with all the time, this is a shout out to Eric Lundy cuz I'll, I'll make you, I'll make him listen to this. But, um, he, he's, he's a little bit older, but he and I have had a lot of philosophical discussions about libertarian views mm-hmm. And, and politics. So, so we've always thought a Lundy Fox ticket was coming. Which can happen in 2024. Okay. So I, I had to look up this, so I, I have a weird birthday, so you gotta be 35 to be president, right? Yeah. So I wondered well, okay, Eric's, he's 38 or 39 or something already. No problem. Yeah, I turned 35 in December of 2024. So it'd be after the election, but before the inauguration, which would qualify me. Well, I mean, Obama was born in Kenya or whatever. So yeah, that whole little bit. Cause like you can get a fake birth certificate, it's fine. It'd be fine. You can get one. There's other, there's bigger challenges you have becoming president. Yeah. The fact that nobody knows that Sean Fox is running for prison. Right. That could be a problem. And then you could spend all your money and still almost nobody would know. I could spend all of a lot of people's money and still Totally, yeah. That would be the fun part is other people's money. So I've often thought that I should start a Super Pac too, because there's like no restrictions on those. Right. I don't know if you know, like Steven Colbert, he did this whole started a super pack, got, I don't think I do. Oh, that was, that was before. He was like late night. It was when he was still at Colbert Report. Yeah. Yeah. He started a superPAC. Tons of people donated to it. There's no accountability. Right? Like he could spend the money on whatever tax salary. Exactly. You like there's very little auditing that happens. Oh yeah. I totally want a super PAC then. Yeah, I hundred. If you're out there listening and you know how to like put a super PAC together, I've tried every lawyer friend that I know, I have tried to say, Hey, let's start a super pac. You can do all this. And they said, no, Sean. We're not doing that. Damnit, come on. Well, you just gotta find some more shady lawyers. That's, that's it. Yeah. That's the problem. The people I know are way too upstanding. They're killing me. If you wanna find lawyers without integrity, you go to Washington DC Mister. That's true. They're all lobbyists already, and they're way making way more than super PAC money. Right. They're already charging too much. Yeah. Um, so if you were to describe your, like, political leanings, uh, it sounds fiercely independent at least a little bit. Yeah. So I, I had to change, I, I, I was registered libertarian. Okay. But I changed independent because of the caucusing. Right, right. So because like Colorado did that great thing where you can vote in any caucus, right. And, uh, and so I was like, cool, but as a libertarian I couldn't do that. So I changed my registration independent. But yeah, that, that would be, to sum it up, like I. Fiscally conservative. The fact that we don't have a balanced budget, that we're just borrowing up with the eyeballs is stupid. To me, that makes no sense. Like that's ridiculous. So unsustainable. You're cheering on the Republican thing house right now slash that thing? Yeah. Well, I mean, don't raise the dead ceiling, but you gotta raise the dead ceiling. Like I get it, but slash that thing to the ribbons. Yeah. That's why like Ron Paul, he said, Hey, we'll have a balanced budget in my third year as P Sea, because it's not realistic to curb all that in the first year. Right? Right. It was a realistic approach to a balanced budget. All the states gotta balance their budget. Yeah. I mean the federal government doesn't have to, but then all the like social aspects, I'm more left. Right. So let people be like to wanna be, yeah. Like you wanna legalize weed, like let's, that's fine. Yeah. Who cares? That's not affecting me at all. Okay. Right. If it doesn't affect my life, like I'm not that worried about it. You don't care? No. So how about the like, The, how do I say it? Right, go for it. Like the, like it's been pretty weird to me. I don't have kids, but with the abortion pill and stuff, well, not that so much, but, um, cuz I'm, I think that should be a state's right issue period. Like I think it's good and health, good and healthy for our nation to have a large variety of different states that have different rules for each other. That's we founded, right? That's what we're supposed to be. Yeah, no, the, uh, the, I I was trying to think of how to say it quite right, like there's a, a lot of gender confused kids. Uh oh, like the Florida, like the, the Florida don't say gay stuff and that, all that kind of stuff. And, and should Florida, is Florida right to push against that kind of thing? Or are they not? Because it's a, I mean, what where I, where I come from is a personal experience. Like my friends with 12, 14, 16 year old kids are like, you know, it's like a lot of our class. Yeah. Is they, that used to be she's, and he's, that used to be hers and whatever. Like what? That's not a, it is, it's not a political thing, but it is, it's become one, it's cultural. Right. It, it's become one for sure. Like does the culture lead to politics or does the politics lead the culture? Well, I mean, it, it kind of depends on where, where you're at in the country. Right? Like, I mean, we were talking about the 2024 stuff. Ron DeSantis has obviously made his Yeah, he's claim known. And he's staking his, he's planning his flags the ground he's trying. Anyway, what do you think, is he a legitimate candidate against Trump in the, I think he's legitimate, but I don't know. I saw some tweet the other day that some he, he went to DeSantis, went to DC to kind of round up some support. Yeah. And some Texas Congressman, I don't remember who it was. He, uh, he tweeted, he was like, had a great sit down with Ron DeSantis really positive. I wanna throw my support for Trump 2024. I was like, oh, ooh, snap. That hurts. Oh, that's Savage. Oh, right. Yeah. Just, oh man. Cool. Burn, I think is what they say there. Yeah, for sure. Well, and that was, that was, I think I was watching the Daily Show or something, because he goes just like a Florida history book. You've been burned. Right. I, I thought the, one of the funniest I I've, I got back into Twitter recently and so, well that's dangerous. As with everybody, I think, uh, seeing Elon Musk post, I think everybody has to watch Elon Musk posts. Yeah. It's required following required. Right. Whether you follow mandatory following. Right. But, uh, what's his name? Stephen King was busted him the other day cuz he's been whining about a lot of things. Stephen King does. Yeah. But, uh, he was like, maybe, uh, at Elon Musk can donate my$8 a month to Ukraine. I recommend this particular foundation that deals with such and such and, uh, you lot of replies to him. I've donated 100 million in free Starling services so far. How much have you donated put up or shut up Steven Gain. Right. Well, and that's the thing, like, like, like the Elizabeth Warrens and the Bernie Sanders, the world, they're like, we'll just tax the rich and that'll, that'll solve all our problems. Like, no. No, that's not how it works, man. Like they, like, I get it. It looks like low hanging fruit. Right? Right. But it makes a lot of things worse down the road. You think those people are idiots though? You think they're just going to take that one on the chin? Right. I mean, maybe the Warren Buffet's the world will, you know, cuz they got too much money. Right. You know, because he, he said one time he should pay more. It's not fair how much he pays in taxes. He should pay more. Like, well you can pay more. Like they'll take a check. But he also said back in the earlier days of his rise to prominence, that, you know, I'm not donating much to charity right now cuz I think I can do more to grow it. Exactly. Right now. Yeah. He can, he can grow it to a point where, yeah, then he's donating a 10 x number Where? Right, right. I think that's a challenge of, you know, whether it's, you know, some of our members at local think tank, they might have. You know, millions of dollars of personal net worth, sometimes tens of millions. And you know, do they want to keep growing their business? Do they want to, you know, donate, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to charity every year? Should which, which is the better place for them to make a bigger impact on the world? You know? And most people choose to give some Yeah. While still reinvesting and growing their Well, I love enterprise. I love that you talked about, we talked about the, the macro economics, and I love that, but I love the micro too, like just asset allocation, right? Of, Hey, I got a pool of money that I can put to work, but how exactly am I gonna put it to work? Am I going to donate to a political cause? Am I gonna donate to a charity? Am I gonna invest that in an etf? Like where, where's that going? You've got so many choices of what I can do. So many choices. Well, not just your money, but also your time. Exactly. Yeah. You know, I would say we've, we've done recently like quite a bit of pro bono work for non-profits, which Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's. I mean, you, you get the request and you're glad to be in a place where you can do that. Yeah. It's, it's, it's like, you don't want to say no obviously, because it, it's you, you see a nonprofit that you believe in, they're doing good work. Yeah. And you say, Hey, I've got some expertise that can help them get to where they need to be. So it, you know, it's, it's a, it's a really easy answer. Do you have favorite causes, favorite nonprofits that you have, you know, supported over the years, or that you really, well, I mean, this, this is like a double edged, uh, double edged answer. You don't wanna cut anybody out by No, I don't want to cut anybody out. But like, I mean, it's, it's, it's nice having the ones like the, to, to bring it back to the faith, the, the Catholic charities. Mm-hmm. Cause a lot of those also have a tax credit associated with it. Sure. Yeah. Right. So, you know, it's like, Yeah. Hey, can't take the finance. Yeah. Yeah. I can't, I can't do it. You get, you, you see that, oh, hey, you get a 25% tax credit for donating this. Okay. That's a slam dunk. Right, right, right. That's a slam dunk. Totally. I just met a guy at, actually at Sweetwater Brewing, we were just talking about the other day, and he, they sell a, a solar shingle alter alternative to Tesla. Mm-hmm. And it's a fair bit more affordable. And with a 30% tax credit, it only pencils out to like 1.5 times high strength regular shingles. So I can use solar shingles on my carriage house project that we're working on for not, you know, a few grand more really? Are those rated to be because we just got solar panels on our house. Yeah. But are those rated, because I know Fort Collins is weird about the shingles. Mm. They gotta be rated to like a certain strength. He said they were perfectly good for Fort Collins. I don't know, but Cool. Then yeah, that's 25 year warranty. Yeah, no, it's just like cuz of the hail. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They gotta be rated to some like class four because we had a three year stretch there where hail was really regular. Yeah. Followed by four more years after with, so I'm in a leads group at the Chamber and there's a roofing guy in there. Okay. Mike Montoya with Ethos and they, yeah, they, yeah, that was Mike. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, he, yeah, I wanna say he, he knows all the answers, but I couldn't remember his name. But, um, yeah, no, Mike, yeah, he, he knows all the answers I've watched, I've learned so much about roofs. Right. He, he is pretty expert. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, col four Collins is weird about what they require for Gotcha. Roofing. So. Well, I'll look into it a little more before we go forward. Well, and I guess about the, uh, all the new. Regs that may or may not pass for your carriage. Oh, right. Well, I'm already, I should be on that, down that road you're already in. Yeah. Grandfather. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Well, and we have a 10,000 square foot lot, so whether or not we should be Okay. You're over the threshold now? Well, kind of, well, I've already complained about it in this show, but like the, the, the change, because we only have a thousand square foot house, we were actually only gonna be able to build a 600 square foot accessory dwelling unit. Okay. Because of an arbitrary number of our existing house. But, um, thankfully the, the old regulation is what our permit is applied for under, so, and we have a big lot. Good. So I don't even cross my fingers plus two thing, but yeah, that's, yeah. We could spend a long time probably. Yeah. That's a whole, that another podcast probably. Yeah, that's true. Um, so from a, from a local politics standpoint, is there anything that's, uh, that's really an issue for you or your family, your firm? Nothing for me. I mean, I think the ranked choice voting that they're gonna do, yeah, I think that's solid. Okay. Like, I, I, I, that makes sense to me. Don't have to cook home back to the polls and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me. Like, Hey, you were last, you've been stricken. Now everybody moves up a Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I get it that it's more complicated, but I mean, the IT guy, the AI should be able to figure it out. I was gonna say, the IT guy in me says like, there's an algorithm that'll take care of all this. Like, yeah, yeah. You just code the algorithm appropriately and then boom, it's, it's done. So I don't know. I think the ranked choice voting makes sense cuz I think, I'm pretty sure it was my district for council that was like, nobody got over 40% of the vote. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Cuz I'm Southeast Fort Collins. So that was Kazinski. No, it was, uh, Trisha. Oh, okay. Yeah. I, I think, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. But, um, but yeah, like there, there were enough candidates that nobody got over 40, 40% and, you know, right. Like somebody should get a majority, or at least Right, right. Or at least the least offensive one. Right. Like, that's what the ranked choice voting's supposed to do. Like, everyone's like, well, I'm okay with this one. Okay. All right. So, yeah, I think, I don't know, I think it makes sense to me. I understand that it's confusing for people, but I'm trying to think about some of the other, uh, local politics things are, there's some talk about a higher minimum wage for Fort Collins. Yeah, I, I don't love that. Just cuz like, so I, well I think that, um, Well, I think the economy will sort itself out, right? The the market will take care of things. Yeah. Yeah. If the, I don't know, hardly know anybody that hires people at minimum wage anyway. Yeah. That's the thing. Like, I mean, you got Burger King hiring people at 18, 19 an hour Right. Plus a signing bonus of 500 bucks. Right. That's the, the standard as far as I'm concerned. Um, but I, I, I, I wa I read some Wall Street Journal article this from years ago. Yeah. About, it was a, I dunno if it was Cedar Rapids or where, somewhere in Iowa, but it was, uh, one of the college towns there real similar, I don't remember if it was Iowa State or University of Iowa, but their unemployment rate was 1%, which you think like, Hey, great. We're almost max. No. Like restaurants specifically. Right. Right. Could not hire back a house people. And so they were either closing their doors or banding together. It'd be like multiple restaurants saying, Hey, right, we're gonna share this. We'll pay you 20 bucks an hour, but you gotta wash the dishes for every place. Oh, wow. And they'd have to go like out one door into the next place. Yeah. Because they couldn't afford it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because otherwise you're charging 20 bucks for a hamburger. Well, it's been rough. Like even just, you know, going out to restaurants and stuff now. Yeah. Like when's the last time you were at a restaurant that you felt like was fully staffed for the night? Yeah, I, I mean, Haven't, but it's been a while. Yeah. Also we order out a lot because we've got two young kids. Yeah. And we're not taking a three year old to a restaurant. Thank you. God bless you. Yeah. You could take to the exchange this summer. Well we've been there a lot. Yeah. We've been there for sure. This is the place where parents don't feel awkward having their kids. Exactly. Yeah. I'm like, that's great. They're gonna run around. That's on you for coming here and like dig it. You want to I dig it. Stay inside at Penrose. So, um, I'm gonna take a look back to the love story for just a moment cuz you had like this uh, you know, unexpected encounter and it just kind of turned into something that's, uh, durable ever since virtually. What was it like, if you were gonna ask Gina, especially like what was it about that, those first few conversations that really connected the two of you? Well, I, I kind of, I kind of, uh, disparaged Ford for their. For their, uh, Ford focus in Germany. Okay. But it was my F-150. They, they got the job done. Oh, actually, yeah. Cause so when, when I actually met Gina, she was like, she had all the hookups, like she knew DJs in Vegas and stuff, and she was gonna take us out. She's like, Hey, let's go out. And my buddy Kyle, who was the one that introduced us, he said, no, no, no, no. We're just gonna go back to Fremont Street. Like, we're fine, blah, blah, blah. We'll take the bus back. So we didn't, we didn't go out with her that night. I was like, well, that's annoying. Yeah. Like, I thought we were, I like, I was ready to, I was ready to party. No. So, but she, so she was working, the reason she was in Vegas, by the way, is she was, she had an internship at Hoover Dam. Oh, wow. So civil engineer, she had like the coolest job. Yeah. She, she, she was smart right from the start. And she would've loved to have been there, but they told her like, you gotta get a PhD and it's gotta be from U Nlv so you can keep working here. So she said, all right. Yeah. Took the private sector. I go, but. Maybe three weeks, a month after we met, she had a, a gig in Boulder, Colorado. Oh. To, to come do some trainings. So I said, all right. I'm on my way back to Fort Collins from Fowler. I'll swing by in Boulder, we'll go out to Avery Brewing and have a date. Picked her up in my black F-150 With the EcoBoost as well? No, no. This was a, this was a beater truck. This, this was a little, it was a manual transmission, single cab, like this is what I could afford at the time. Right. I've got a nice EcoBoost now, but at the time it was just some little black single cab that I could afford. So, but she goes, she, she still tells me, she's like, wait a second. Like, was it, was this guy attractive? Like, I don't, I don't remember him being attractive, but I, I showed up. Not in a, like fedora ready to go party in Vegas. Right. I, I was just my normal self. Right. Right. In pickup truck picking her up to go to brewery in Colorado. Right, right. And that's, that's what trick, that's the man that, that the real authentic self. Yeah. And that, that made the, made the impression that lasted So, made it easy for you guys just to be authentic with each other. Seems like almost, yeah. And that, that, that was it. So that, that first day to Avery Brewing, it was like both of us felt super comfortable and it was like I didn't have to put on airs or anything. Yeah. So it was, I like it. Yeah. So I just kept calling her after that until she finally Succumbeded goes, it sounds like goes, you call me every night. I was like, what? Yeah. Am I supposed to do? It's right after she goes. But at the same time, cuz I'd watch Daily Show and Colbert rapport and then I'd call Gina because it wasn't anything good on that night. Yeah, no. I was like, all right, well, Colbert Rapport's done. I'll just call Gina. Awesome.