435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Technological Innovation, Military Tactics, and Regional Development Insights
Join us for an engaging conversation with Brad Plothow, Chief Growth Officer for Intergalactic (An Aerospace Company), as we venture into the future of warfare technology and entrepreneurship. Discover how small autonomous drone swarms are altering military strategies and challenging the dominance of traditional assets like manned helicopters. We also navigate the economic and infrastructural changes in Southern Utah, tackling issues like housing, water, and electricity while examining the role of media in fostering regional growth. Brad shares invaluable insights on how to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit while scaling businesses, emphasizing the fine balance between innovative ideas and structured systems for sustained success. Our exploration extends into the intriguing intersections of real estate and agile development principles. Real estate transactions often carry emotional weight and personal connections, and we highlight how applying flexibility and adaptability from agile methodologies can benefit various industries.
We close with a thought-provoking discussion on the social and economic challenges facing rapidly growing regions like Southern Utah and Las Vegas. The pressing issues of water sustainability, housing affordability, and economic diversification are tackled with an eye towards long-term planning and strategic development.
Guest: Brad Plothow, Chief Growth Officer at Intergalactic
Intergalactic Webpage: https://ig.space/team/brad-plothow-chief-growth-officer
Brad Plothow is also on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brad_plothow/?igsh=MXI3YTU5MXJjeGE0cA%3D%3D
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or visit webpage: https://www.wcdya.com/copy-of-why-how to scan QR code.
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#TechInnovation #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth #realestate #WarfareTech #economicgrowth #southernutah #stg #435podcast
[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:01:49] The Future of Warfare and Entrepreneurship.
[00:07:57] Real Estate Agents and Agile Development.
[00:12:16] Hot Dog Stand and Agile Development.
[00:16:35] Zombie Apocalypse Education Partnership.
[00:26:26] Challenges and Opportunities in Southern Utah.
[00:32:26] Economic Development and Housing Challenges.
[00:43:00] Strategic Play for Housing Market Opportunity.
[00:45:59] Aerospace Development and Economic Growth.
[00:57:23] Long-Term Energy and News Trends.
[01:04:03] The Future of News Media.
[01:16:21] Social Media and Free Speech Challenges.
And then the army canceled the program after three years, or multiple years, and $3 billion of development investment, because what they were learning in Ukraine is these small autonomous drone swarms were taking down manned helicopters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can't put any more money into this. It's the new age artillery. People Like if you haven't been paying attention to this, this is new age artillery. This is unlike any warfare we've even remotely ever had this is unlike any warfare we've even remotely ever had From the Blue Form Media Studios.
Speaker 2:This is the 435 Podcast the pulse of Southern Utah. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in again. My name is Robert McFarland. Today's guest, brad Plutho. He's the Chief Growth Officer for Intergalactic. He's much more than that. He's had a really great track record of success and other things that he's done. We get into that a little bit of history, but we talk about transformation within the local community here in Southern Utah. What are some transformational forces going on, whether it's through housing, water, we talk about electricity, we talk about media. So I think there's a lot in this episode you can get some value from. Jazzy Jeff, the purveyor of hot dogs, is with us. That joins us in the conversation.
Speaker 2:We hope you enjoy this episode and you can see I don't have a beard. It's diabetes awareness month. If you know, my son has type one diabetes. He was diagnosed when he was four years old and so all month long, all of November, we're raising money for the Washington County Diabetic Youth Association. Go into the description. Click on the link. Give us five bucks, a dollar $2. It sends kids with type one diabetes to a camp every year. It helps bring education to the community, to the parents, to the siblings of the families that have diabetes, because I know from my own perspective it's a challenging thing to deal with it within a family, and the Diabetic Youth Association in Washington County does a great job, so hopefully you could donate to that. Other than that, enjoy the episode, guys. We'll see you out there.
Speaker 3:The problem but not a problem with, you know, being in business for yourself or being an entrepreneur is that, like it's like if you, if you don't do anything, you won't do anything. Well, or if you don't do anything, you won't get paid. Yeah, so it's For the most part, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's tough, like even if you're talking cash flow right, like mailbox money, like if you didn't do anything to get to that point, then you wouldn't make any money no-transcript, just kind of on my own volition of like.
Speaker 1:This is how I think, is how I do things, just so we're aligned. And one of the slides was about startups within startups. If you're building a function inside of a startup, you you're you're not taking on the same risk level. Um, although I think any startup has a certain amount of just inherent risk.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, but I mean, you got to build it, you got to sort of be, you know, the founder of that function that function?
Speaker 2:Yeah, cause, as whatever your role is within, whatever organization you're saying I'm signing up for, whether you're the creator of that organization or a participant in it, it's um, as long as everybody shows up to the best of their capability in that job and they still believe in that, that job is worth showing up for every day, like that's how you get the best companies Right. But it's always tough Uh, especially, I guess, for me, cause I don't really have employees. You know all just partners. It's just people like if you want to be in partnership with us, great, if not, that's okay too, and we just kind of keep running forward. But once you start to scale, it gets really tough yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:I mean, tension is always how do you maintain, like the, the grid, the entrepreneurial spirit, um, but like the tenacity that helps you get the, the leverage, initially and then scale it, cause it's just really easy for stuff to turn into. Now we're turning cranks, um, and some of that's probably necessary. You got to build systems and things that can scale, and some of that is about systems and about people who understand how to, you know, take the initial momentum and turn it into something more sustainable. But there's also, you know, you got to have there's an art to that too, because if you do that too early, you really kill the momentum that you build.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it's. It's tough to do and, as we as we think about tenacity, that made me think of the five working geniuses. Have you heard about that personality profile?
Speaker 1:I've heard the concept. I haven't taken that test.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I took that test and I was working with a team at Keller Williams when I was running the brokerage here locally, and I did it with my team and tenacity is where I'm falling short on it and I can see that reality in my life as it plays out. And it's interesting how, when you can see where you're weak, like where your weaknesses there's like the strengths finders and there's a lot of different tests that tell you different things about yourself, but how do you go apply that is really difficult to like actually like show up in your life that way. But when I did that five working geniuses uh test and then I did it with the rest of my team, we could see did we have the right mix, overlap of strengths and weaknesses? Uh, and that's like really critical at that early stage. But to be in tenacious is not definitely not something that comes naturally to me. Nor, yeah, I guess I'm frustrated by it. But are you pretty tenacious? You seem like you're pretty tenacious.
Speaker 1:So I think there are some people who like encoded into their DNA is a certain amount of tenacity, and no matter if they were selling furniture or like building an AI startup, they're super tenacious people. I can see it in kids.
Speaker 2:I can see it in kids, like early on, like young kids. You can see the ones that have like the natural born tenacity. Probably by like six, I bet you, by six you could tell like these, these kids are the tenacious ones.
Speaker 1:For sure, and I think you know there's a certain like segment of people who are just that way. It's inborn and, like some of it can be very, very beneficial. It's really difficult, I think, though, to have some folks harness it the right way. It can become pretty antisocial. It can be. You know you can alienate a lot of people if you're too tenacious in ways. That becomes, I think you know, difficult for you to manage human beings. But I think also like I don't know for most of us like mere mortals, I think some of it is about finding the right alignment of interests and that unlocks the tenacity, like when you have the right opportunity, a vision that is inspiring and motivating, that you can remind people of with good communication, and then you have incentives aligned the right way, people understand, like you get to the mountaintop, everyone's going to benefit in concrete ways.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of times that's what's missing is like some element of that mix is gone.
Speaker 1:Either you know we don't have like the right opportunity, or we don't have a clear vision of, like what it's going to take to get there and belief in the ability to get there, or maybe incentives are not aligned very well and I think there's like it's an underrated exercise to go through that and say let's examine those different parts of the equation and if something's working let's not fix that, but if something's broken, you can get to that if you just like sort of drill down and then you know most of us have like a pretty tenacious piece of us that's waiting to get unlocked, unless you just like fundamentally want to turn a crank at work all day.
Speaker 1:And I think you know most people I've met who work in, you know, fields where you know you're trying to do something interesting or impactful, don't have that mentality. They may not be like just all all the time on go tenacious you know veins in their teeth all the time, but but they do have the ability to go and get into that mode. So I don't know it's it's. It's a very elusive thing for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it is. You seem like you've done a good job at building teams, at least from the outside looking in, um, but I do want to. This is a perfect segue to the agile development. Have you ever heard of the term or like the, the business strategy of agile development or in terms similar to that?
Speaker 1:like in the software world software yeah for sure. Yeah, I came out of the tech sector before getting into aerospace.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Very familiar with that whole concept.
Speaker 2:So that was one thing Jeff and I wanted to just double click on and maybe like, help us understand that. And then, as real estate agents, um, that want to serve the community, cause it's very it's, it's so connected to the actual human real estate is, because it's such a personal transaction I'm going through this one deal right now, dude, that it's heartbreaking for me because it's going not at all the way we planned. You know what I mean, and sometimes we just can't, um, navigate all of the boundaries to get there, but it's very emotional thing. And so, as a real estate agent that actually cares, I really do care about where somebody's headed, where they're going. I don't think there's a real estate agent out there that truly just doesn't care.
Speaker 2:But I want to build the foundation of my real estate business not on how many we can sell, but how many can we do really good, right, because you talked about in your presentation at Rise like transactional and transformative type businesses, right, and so it's a tough balance when you're still in a transactional business like real estate, but I think, for somebody listening in applying agile development to other types of industries and other types of modes of work other than just software, I think be an interesting conversation to have. So maybe if somebody's listening and doesn't have any idea what agile development is, do you know? Can you give us a summary?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can give like the kind of layman summary. So I'm not a, not a program or a product manager for in the tech sector it was always on kind of the marketing and growth side, and so you know there's certain limitations and also a certain level of depth there that I think is probably best reserved for, like, the tech sector. But the general idea if you imagine that you're going to build a product, a technology product, software product, and you say we have a pretty good idea of what the customer wants and we're going to break that down into a whole bunch of requirements and then we're going to execute against all those requirements on a schedule and then we're going to launch that, there's lots of different ways you can do that and one of the ways that you can do that is to understand and recognize that there's a certain amount of just unknowns and lessons to be learned that are going to come on the fly. You've got to have a plan. You can't just be making up as you go. But you also want to be flexible enough with a plan in place to say when we have a learning or we run into an unforeseen variable, we want to have the right, reserve the right and have the ability as an organization, an engineering organization, a product development organization to change some things, to iterate. And so Agile is essentially saying we want to institutionalize in our development, our product development and go-to-market process the ability to iterate quickly, and so that can manifest a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch of different frameworks and you know mentalities and ways of managing that that may come out. You know scrum mastering and all that kind of stuff in the development world. But you know, as that relates to running a business and especially within the context of what I was trying to speak about at Rise, you have kind of transactional and transformational opportunities. One of the things I talked about with transformational opportunities is that if you recognize an opportunity for a transformative event to take place in your career, in your business, in your community, whatever it is, there are several ways to go about that. You can try to do that all at once in like one large kind of transformational event, and sometimes those things are really opportunistic. The window just opens for you. You really have to understand the windows open.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of luck. There's a lot of luck involved in that.
Speaker 1:The timing, all the dominoes just lined up perfectly right, yep, and when that happens if you don't recognize it, window closes, it's over. But also, when the window is open, do you have to do certain things to take advantage of that? Because, again, you don't control when the window opens, but in, in regard to, like, the transformational drip over time, where you're saying, each day, the effort that I put into something, is it leading toward a transformational future? That's where I think agile as a concept is maybe a relevant way of thinking, because what you're saying is look, if I run a hot dog stand in Manhattan every single day, I'm probably going to continue to have a hand to mouth existence forever, right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2:The market forces just dictate the market forces in that window of time. Just dictate that this is what you're going to get, and there's going to be some times that you're going to sell a ton of dogs and there's going to be some times where you don't sell any dogs. Right, jeff? I want to be a hot dog salesman. Dude, I forgot to say I was going to bring this up.
Speaker 3:I you know. I just find it interesting that Brad brought up being a hot dog salesman in Manhattan.
Speaker 2:That's what I wanted to do I love hot dogs, man.
Speaker 3:When I was a kid I'm not lying when I was a kid, I wanted to sell hot dogs.
Speaker 2:I love it, dude. I wanted to run my own hot dog stand.
Speaker 3:Here we are talking about hot dog stand.
Speaker 2:And then I brought it up on the podcast the other day. I was like were you listening to Brad Cause we weren't sitting next to each other. And he's like yeah, I heard that. I was like that's so funny that you want to be hot dogs, and that was the analogy he used, which is so good.
Speaker 1:I cut you off.
Speaker 2:Keep going, because this is brilliant.
Speaker 1:So I was in Manhattan in the spring and, like I, have a ton of respect for the street vendors, because those guys truly do hustle and they do it every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's that's. That's a way to make a living for sure.
Speaker 2:And they probably have a pretty good living. They probably it's not probably like a miserable existence, right, or they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't keep doing it, right.
Speaker 1:But it's a. It's a useful analogy because, like, if you think about the most basic way that you do, that you have a certain amount of time and a certain amount of like just raw material, right, you're able to serve into the marketplace every day and you don't have a ton of control over who's coming to your, to your stand right. It's like literally about who's passing by. You might be able to like work a different block from time to time, but you have some limitations. So you know, unless you affect one of the variables in that transactional way of life as a hot dog purveyor, you're going to continue to have expect kind of more or less the same results for a long time. And so you know, I think that that's part of like the framework that I was trying to get out with this transformational concept where, if you said, look, if I'm going to put a certain amount of effort in every single day into selling hot dogs, is there anything that I can do at least?
Speaker 1:on the margins that would potentially build something that could lead to a transformative way of life for me or transformative outcome for my hot dog business, or whatever. The case might be right and I think in some regard, this is where, like agile development or agile as a concept, a way of thinking, can like link into this.
Speaker 2:Because if you said, look the outcome that we want with launching this product or building this business, or building this P&L inside of our business, there was an example you used about like a production, like they were going to roll out some production of something and you did all the marketing and then they forgot about it or something like that Is the walking dead. Can you use that as this example in kind of where you're headed right now? Can you use that one, this example in kind of where you're headed right now? Can you use that one?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So that example was I was working for a marketing services agency and we had a bunch of clients in the technology sector. One of them was an education technology company in Utah called Instructure. That company now provides the learning management software to most k-12 districts and universities in the country, but they started here in utah with byu grad students, right um I think one of those guys bought a house down here everybody's got a house down here.
Speaker 3:But, brad, I think one of those guys bought a multi-million dollar massive second home down here what was the name of the?
Speaker 2:what was the name of the? Education in structure, in structure, in structure?
Speaker 1:I gotta remember that if anybody knows any of your kids or you know nephews, nieces that use canvas oh, canvas primary school got it.
Speaker 2:Okay, I okay, I use canvas.
Speaker 1:All right, all right so before canvas, everybody used this learning management system called blackboard, and it was the dominant I remember blackboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah see, I had blackboard when I was a kid same.
Speaker 1:That's what I used when I was coming up too, and it was, you know, this, this clunky, like on-premise, like take the software out of a box and but they were just the beast, the 800 pound gorilla in the room. And then kind of a classic disruption scenario and structures coming in and saying we're going to like leverage usability and like just the kind of customer service angle around how we build the software and how we go to market with it to just displace blackboard um and, but there's a lot of challenges to getting there, and one of those was at the time in 2013, the the dominant storyline in education was these massive open online courses.
Speaker 1:so like, institutions like harvard and mit, mit and Stanford were opening up these college courses for free for anybody in the world to take them, and they were getting, you know, tens of thousands, in some cases more students from around the world to take these classes, and they thought people were. The New York Times is writing about this every day, saying this is the future of education. Of course, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that things have not quite turned out that way, but you had to have a seat to that table to have that conversation to be taken seriously. Instructure had a learning management system that had a massive open online course portal called Canvas Network, but they didn't have a lot of exposure for it. No one knew about it, and so everybody, everybody was talking about this phenomenon and they were being left out.
Speaker 1:So we said how do we like sort of like, crash the party, come in on the chandelier, make some real noise around this so that we can become part of this conversation and generate some mind share around this part of the education debate and we thought, well, what if you modernize the literature review with some current pop culture? And at the time, the most popular show on um in the world, uh, was the walking dead. It was entering season four and we thought, well, what if we created a course with some university professors about like things that you can learn academically around the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse this is such a cool idea to me too.
Speaker 2:like this was like I would totally sign up for a class like that. That that is awesome. Right To actually learn that thing. That was so so perfectly Cause if I would've heard about it cause I missed it. I missed your marketing memo on it, but I probably would have done it at that time, probably. So keep going. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the long and short of what we planned was with with our friends at Instructure, you, what we planned was with with our friends at Instructure, you know, they got UC Irvine, four professors there to create a multidisciplinary course where they said let's look at, you know, the mathematics of pandemic modeling, let's look at the physics of things like does a crossbow bolt actually go through a zombie's head or would it get stuck? That's crazy. How real, how true to life are those things? Anyway, multiple disciplinary courses within this kind of like massive open online course construct. And then we pitched it to AMC. I spent a lot of time working around trying to find the right people there because we didn't want to go the licensing route. They were all trying to push us down the licensing route. We don't want to do that. We want nobody to change hands. We want this to be an organic experience.
Speaker 2:An educational, like a clearly educational goal, like connected. It's like I'm not trying to their brand's big enough and we're not trying to sell anything ourselves. We're legitimately just trying to educate, which is kind of funny to me. That that's a weird barrier we have to always battle. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Well, this is where the alignment of interest that I think we were talking about at the top comes into play. Like we made some educated guesses about what might motivate them and we ended up you know being right enough about that, you're not always right but we said look, they have the most popular show in basic cable history, but they're also trying to keep it fresh and interesting and find new levels of engagement. This is when they were starting to launch the multi-screen experience so you could have, like you know, chat rooms going on your phone or your iPad. So we can see they're trying to do some different things. And no one at the time had said let's actually integrate a legitimate academic experience into pop culture. So we pitched it that way and we said look, we'll do all the, all the PR marketing, we'll take all that you know, which is really.
Speaker 2:Which is really the biggest cost really on their end, right, like that would be. The only thing they would need to do would be that. And if you're taking that off their plate, why wouldn't they do it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we, you know, we got the university all lined up, We've got the marketing ready to roll, we had a plan for them. They said cool, a whole bunch of other shows at the same time. So that was kind of how we got to that point. And when we launched it was like it truly did, like catch um, you know, kind of lightning in a bottle from a media perspective. There were over a thousand unique um press stories on that. Jay Leno was still doing his thing at the time. He mentioned it on his monologue, which was kind of cool um. And then there was a ton of additional chatter just kind of kept spreading. This was when social media was still, you know, I think, early enough in kind of the viral.
Speaker 2:It wasn't quite pop culture yet, like I think social media hadn't reached like the zeitgeist, at the pop culture level like it is today. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a different time, and so you know it was a truly like a viral campaign, and so we ended up having, you know, pretty strong results from that. There were 65,000 people who signed up for the course, and it really did put things on the map for Instructure.
Speaker 1:So anyway, there were lots of things going on in Instructure that were transformative, like that, but that was one of the things that really did help them. It gave them a nice propulsion of momentum and credibility in the marketplace. Good things happened to our contact at AMC she got promotion. You know, good things happened to my agency. We had a lot of credibility that we were able to leverage and move into Silicon Valley and generate a lot of traction there. So you know, everybody kind of benefited from that.
Speaker 2:So the funny thing is they AMC forgot about it. Right, is what you said.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I have to dive deeper into that. I got to understand that more. I know it's kind of off track of where we kind of started, but where did it go wrong and what does that mean? Because in the presentation you kind of just said it offhand and then you didn't go back to it. But what does it mean? That they forgot about it, like what?
Speaker 1:Well, so the dynamics of working with a company like AMC is that you might be working with a vice president who's never met the president or the CEO of the company, right, they've got all kinds of these siloed divisions and so the contact that I had worked with initially was a vice president over promotions and activation and you know, she clearly had some clout inside the company, some decision making authority. She was great to work with. But it's one thing to say, hey, we're going to do kind of promotions and activation within the realm of what we typically do, and another thing to say, hey, we're going to do something experimental that comes with some risk and also some upside, was actually to their advantage to say let's do this experiment but let's limit kind of our engagement in it. Um, so part of it was they're just too busy, they're running activations for multiple important shows. I mean, at that time amc was really dominant.
Speaker 1:They had walking dead in full glory madman was still going, breaking bad was still going. It was kind of like the heyday for amc and so they had to run all these activations and they couldn't focus on this but also it. It was really not a great thing for them to say, hey, yeah, let's do something experimental and put all of our internal credibility into that basket. That's why, again, we were going to be, with their guidance and blessing and some constraints and parameters, running all the marketing for it. So I don't think they totally forgot about it. It was just that they had multiple things going on and it was not their priority. It became something that got their attention internally. I think it was a testament to the strength of the execution of the campaign and that, again, some things that were lucky also lined up for us.
Speaker 2:So it was more. Like so what I hear you saying is it was more not necessarily that they forgot about it, but they were like wait, what did we do? Oh yeah, oh, that's right. Like like there was just such a small group that knew about it and then the rest of the company was like Whoa, look at this Holy cow. We didn't even realize this was going to be like this, right, which is kind of a cool you know, a cool twist to it.
Speaker 1:It does make a good sort of can create a little shorthand for some of this stuff, and that's that's one of the things that helps the story, you know, digest well for an audience that's new to the story. But you know, the the president of the company was, I think, at the time I don't know if he's still there Charlie Charlie Collier was his name, and and he wrote a blog post about this, called Zombie School, and he did it out of his own volition because he consumed the marketing from his own company and learned about this for the first time by being exposed to it in the wild which was a great testament to the success of the campaign, for our contact to AMC and for an audience like him.
Speaker 2:As the marketing team goes, it's like make sure the CEO gets this marketing Step one. Make sure the CEO sees everything we do, make sure you don't miss that guy.
Speaker 1:But that's good Well and the best case scenario is that you know that person the CEO, the president, whoever that person is actually consumes it in the wild. They don't have that served up internally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:We had another company where we published a story about analyzing small business data for Hurricane Harvey when that hurricane hit Houston, and our CEO didn't know that we were doing that until his in-laws, who happened to live in Houston, sent them an NPR story.
Speaker 2:Oh crazy.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that's always the best case scenario when they find out, you know you're doing a good job as a CEO.
Speaker 2:When that stuff happens, though, right, because you could see the team's all behind you in a specific way and you can trust that they're going to execute at a high level, so those are always good things to see in that, in that executive level level. So I want to take a step back, though. Do you want to add anything to that? Are you curious more about?
Speaker 3:no, I just looked up Charlie Collier and he's the president of Roku okay, even I want to go back to transitional, the transactional.
Speaker 2:I was trying to go back to where we were Do you remember where? Where, before I got, I was like let's tell this story right here, cause we talked about agile development.
Speaker 2:So so now, one of the things that I stopped you after rise to chat about this, this topic, we talked about a lot all at once, but I'm thinking about these transformative moments. What do you think within? Like the local if I was to take this all the way down to St George I'm like, okay, this market it's a really small market, but do you see some windows of opportunity for transition, like transformative change within our community, whether it's media, whether it's housing, whether it's like electricity? Do you see that there's some windows here that that, from the outside, looking in, you you've just noticed? Is that something you've thought about?
Speaker 1:yeah, in fact that was the whole basis for why what I was thinking about when I was invited to um present at rise. So I've spent three years on the chamber board of directors in saint george, um, even though I live in lehigh, but I'm I'm really from saint george. I went to Pine View Middle School and High School, did my first two years of college there before transferring to Utah State and for me, I didn't know that I was ever going to make my way back to St George, even though I love Southern Utah and it feels like home to me because the economy there didn't have the kinds of professional opportunities that I was looking into pursuing when I was at the age of trying to pursue that right, going to college and looking at what I was going to do next, because it's really dominated historically by you have hospitality, you have building and real estate and then you've got, you know, the medical establishment down there.
Speaker 2:You've got like government jobs. Yeah, Like you know, government jobs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and some government jobs, right, and so you know, if you want to work in like a marketing and growth for 15 years, I recognize some things that have happened here that seem like you know there are some themes I see playing out in Southern Utah. One of those is growth. Is is something that you can only partially plan for and influence. Um, places that have something to offer will grow unless you like you truly you know kind of aggressive things like putting moratoriums on growth and building permits and that kind of stuff. And if you're not going to do that, you can't control if growth happens. You can only control and influence kind of how it's going to happen. And I live in a place in Lehigh which has so much to offer. But growth has happened to Lehigh and I see that happening in Southern Utah. Growth is a good thing if you can harness it and you can plan for it and you can try to account for the ways that growth can benefit everybody. And if you have economic growth, for example, you have to make sure that you're accounting for the ecosystem that helps that economic growth to be sustainable, the policies that help it to be beneficial to everybody that's involved. And that does take coordination and planning.
Speaker 1:But the main opportunities that I see for transformation in Southern Utah one is broadening the economic base with new industries that are going to complement and augment the core historical legacy industries down there.
Speaker 1:You need more building jobs and real estate jobs, you need more jobs in healthcare, you need more jobs in hospitality, but you also need different kinds of jobs in the kinds of companies that attract outside capital and outside revenue. So you're not just sharing the same pie internally. You're bringing dollars from outside into Southern Utah and that's what the technology sector can do, that's what aerospace can do, that's what AI companies can do. And I know that technology as a sector gets a black eye because there are some bad actors, as there are in every sector. But the positives and when you're evaluating the trade-offs of that sector, technology companies have most of their customers from outside the community, which is a good thing, because those dollars are not just carved up in a pie inside the community. They attract investment, they allow investors to bring dollars to St George to fund new jobs that pay a lot of money, and then, when those companies exit, the money made in those exits is recycled into the community in really important ways and you build an ecosystem. So I think that's one thing.
Speaker 1:The other thing that you alluded to I think a bit, robert is there's some resource and infrastructure challenges that are coming for St George that are really already in play, that have to be accounted for to make it sustainable. I think it's really easy to think water never runs out, or, you know, electricity is always going to be sustainably and like, reliably provided. I think we've seen in other places that that's not necessarily true, especially when you start to have extreme weather events that wreak some havoc or whatever the case is.
Speaker 2:I mean just like yeah, like just the energy grid, but even water. You know the climate is, is it change? You know there's some, there's some elements that we can't live without. You know, food, water, food water, shelter. You know energy is one of those things we can. You know, Southern Utah would not be here without air conditioning. Right, we wouldn't be the size we were without air conditioning. It's just, there's no question about it. And so, yeah, I think, I think this is a big point.
Speaker 2:So do you think that obviously, water is always like the primary thing? What would you say is like a secondary Cause? I think housing is a big. You know, shelter is a big concern for a lot of the community. We are a food desert. So like thinking about, you know, agriculture and being able to actually provide some stability within the food section of it, that seems like such a hard battle to tackle because inflation is already going up and those things cost a lot of money. When it comes to food, what do you think? Transformational window being open, what else? So business growth opportunities for allowing businesses to go. But what would you say is the secondary one?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think water's the clear number one resource challenge and, you know, I think I'll leave to the experts, like, exactly how you handle that, but it is absolutely true that, like some assumptions were made with the Colorado River 150 years ago that are challenging you know, the growth that we've seen across all the States that use the Colorado river, um, for its water needs, right, and so that's, I think, a challenge that has to be addressed with, like, very clear eyes, um, and I think we got a lot of great people on that problem, by the way.
Speaker 2:I think we got a lot of great people. I think we have a lot of great people on that specific issue, I think. I think I feel pretty confident. I've talked to a lot of people about it and I feel pretty confident that, um, if there's anybody in the world that could help us with this, we got the right people in the place. Yeah, At least that's my feeling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and you know we have some good models for that. I mean Las Vegas. You know, say what you want about Las Vegas, but on the topic of water, they've actually done a really good job on a per capita basis of figuring out how to be pretty sustainable with what they have. Now they still have challenges because that city is growing as well.
Speaker 2:Gambling provides a lot of income into that community, though that helps them do that because what they've done does cost a lot of money and our economy isn't that economy, truthfully Right. So there's, there's definitely some apples to oranges. You know, they're both fruit, but they're a little bit different, you know. Um, but I do think that we're, we can use that model to say, okay, what's the next best step with where we're at within our economic mix, and what can we afford and what can't we?
Speaker 1:So I think that's good, and you're I think you're you're thinking about this the way that I do, which is, when you have an economic base that gives you more flexibility and more resources to play with, you have more options, and you know, if your options aren't limited by resources, uh, in the same way that they would if you have an economy that's a little more limited, then it does open up new opportunities for you, right? So water's, I think, a huge thing, and then housing is clearly a challenge, and that's a challenge not just in St George. It's a national challenge, it's a challenge across Utah, but maybe no place in Utah is dealing with that in a way that's more profound than Southern Utah, just because I think part of it is. You've seen such an influx of people looking, identifying St George as a place that they didn't know about before, and saying I want to move here and spend my time here, especially, you know, when everybody went remote, but also you do have. This is.
Speaker 1:This goes back to the economic challenges of like you've got an inverted economy in some ways, where extremely sharp increases in housing costs, but maybe not the industries that help support the wages for everybody to afford that, and so you have people who are trapped in their homes or maybe looking to upgrade, but they're really stuck because you know they have.
Speaker 1:They face higher interest rates for mortgages now and much higher prices for homes and there isn't a career ladder for them to work into higher paying jobs to afford that, and so what that leads to is more people who bring money from outside into southern Utah to continue to exacerbate that problem. So yeah, I think there are some structural ways to deal with the housing problem with. You know there's going to have to be a mix of. You know, not everyone's going to get a half acre. There's going to have to be a mix of not everyone's going to get a half acre, some people will still. But I think every community realizes at some point that you have to have different mixes of density and different models as well. I think that's just a reality that makes it more sustainable.
Speaker 2:The other thing is you really can't fully unlock housing until you figure out the economic mix as well, and specifically paths for better jobs for people, yeah, and being able to facilitate an economy or some kind of it's. Like what can we provide those tech? Like, how do we grow that tech industry in different ways than what we've already been doing? Because I feel like we're all headed in the same direction, At least a lot of the decision makers, the colleges on board. We have Dixie Tech. We have big, big companies like you guys even though you're not necessarily, I would probably call you guys a technology company. Do you guys consider yourself a technology company? It's just not software, right, and so like there's-.
Speaker 1:Software and hardware.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right Exactly, and so when you think about, you know that type of business, is that something that's just going to take time to do? Is there? There's not really a whole lot of jet fuel that you can put onto it. Cause, what my thought is when it comes to this housing thing, it's the top issue, and I'm worried that as decision makers, like legislature, legislators, they're going to make too reactionary of a change. They're going to try to force something that sometimes it's just time needs to help heal it right. Does that make sense? So, I wonder, is there really anything more that we could do from your perspective to increase that um growth in the private sector for technology type companies?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, so I'm not. I'm not like uh, I'm not an urban development expert, but I can just tell you what I've observed. So I spent a lot of time in San Francisco, um company I worked for, from you know, 2012 to uh, from about 2012 to about 20, um 2020, I was working with technology companies that were uh in St Drew or in Utah and also in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area and seeing, you know, they have a tremendous economy there. The economy of the Bay Area is bigger than most countries' GDPs. It really is significant and I think we forget about there's kind of an oversimplified narrative of California and of San Francisco as just being this like total failed state.
Speaker 2:And you can't. I, when I was in college sorry to stop you one more time, but just this is such a powerful point. When I was in college, so it was probably 10, 15 years ago, um, california had the eighth largest economy in the world, in the whole world. Just california had the the eighth largest. And like, when I heard that stat, it was just I, I'd backpacked Europe. You know, like I, I'd seen the world. It's a huge place and the fact that that's the eighth largest and it's just one state in our country is wild to me. People don't realize how powerful it is.
Speaker 1:California has lots of problems, um, but it has also lots and lots of advantages that has exploited very, very well, and one of those is that it has built a totally dominant technology ecosystem. So if you want to have a technology sector that really does well and sustains itself, you have to become a place where great talent clusters. So people who found companies go to that place to found a company. People who can help build the companies, that have experienced building and growing companies in different functional areas are willing to go to that place and work for companies in that place, and you have to have people who will put money into those companies, and they have built over the course of decades all of those things on a worldclass level in the Bay Area. However, their policies around things like housing and transportation have been really really poor. Their policies around how they manage crime in the city have been really really poor, and they're paying the price for those things, and in Lehigh I've seen some of the same things.
Speaker 1:So housing is a major challenge in Lehigh, where I live. It's a major challenge in San Francisco Bay Area, and now it's a major challenge in Lehigh, where I live. It's a major challenge in San Francisco Bay Area and now it's a major challenge in Southern Utah. So it's a common challenge. The difference is that to your point right now, it is so much more acute, I think, in St George, because they don't have. If you're not working in one of a handful of areas where you haven't figured out how to become an entrepreneur and make money on your own terms which is not most people and you're, you're really looking for a W2 career, your options are fairly limited and you're going to have a challenge when you know you can't refinance, for example, maybe interest rates stay high for a long time and people are banking on refinancing to get into another kind of home, a better home, a bigger home, whatever. That's just maybe not in the cards right now.
Speaker 1:So I think you know there are certainly like housing policy, questions that are for people who specialize in that world. Those are the policymakers, the city council, the state legislature, those kinds of folks and I think that there's a parallel path to that, which is how do you make sure that in parallel you're creating an environment that is very conducive to growing and building companies that can scale and bring the kind of job opportunities and the scalable impact, the economic impact that recycles real money into the economy and does it again and again somehow through the Southern Utah economy, and that does take some time, but it also doesn't happen inevitably. You have to have catalysts to get there. It's not a matter of the economic development agencies are going to make this happen by themselves. It's not a matter of you know, isaac Barlow at Tech Ridge is going to make it happen by himself.
Speaker 1:All those folks are doing good work, but there really has to be a concerted vision and like a bunch of people in the community who see this as a beneficial thing for them and they're willing to lean into it and embrace the things that are necessary. So getting more people to take the track of founding companies in St George and bring more companies that want to put seed funding and growth funding into those companies. More people who have been through the whole growth stage of these kinds of companies and seen how you get from seed stage to Series A to Series B and D and on through the exit and then doing it again and building those companies and then staying in St George to do it again. And so I think those are the things that take time and those are the things where, if it takes more time than it has to take, you delay all those benefits and you exacerbate all the problems that come with things like housing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think we're in this moment too. Do you want to say something?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't know this guy personally, but it just kind of reminds me of I think his name is Josh James right Like he started Omniture or I can't remember all the companies. One of them now is Domo. It's like he's taken three, four, five, whatever companies, built them, taking them public, made a massive exit, done it again. It's like who's gonna be that dude or dudes in saint george that stay in saint george and keep you know those tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in the area and just keep doing it again.
Speaker 2:And I can't. I can't help but think, like, okay, so a venture capital, like okay, if we had a venture capital company that was based here in St George, you know, and you want to deploy money and wanted to specifically impact this community. You're like the venture capital company of Southern Utah and you're you're going to go out and seek, uh, small businesses, tech companies that can be mobile, and you're like you reach out to those companies and you say, hey, we want to help you build that business, but I want you to do it in St George. You got to move to St George as a caveat. I think that could be a good way of of bringing some of these you know these one-off guys, because a lot of times it's just one to 10 people Like some of these tech companies that have massive financial impacts on communities are.
Speaker 2:It's not like they have dozens and dozens of employees. They're small, small companies. But when they get that influx of money into their world, their sphere, and they want to continue to grow it, it goes back into our community and our economy. Right and so. And then it goes back to housing. It's like, well, we could try to attract these companies, but then they don't have anywhere to live while they're trying to build it right. And so we're in this window of time as we the looming recession that they've been talking about for three years is like it's like a train that's never going to arrive at the station. Everybody's just, but we keep waiting for it.
Speaker 2:I can't help but think when we see pullback, we see inventory and housing rise, we see demand staying fairly stable but definitely not climbing, we're in this window like the window of opportunity for us to like implement something of a of a strategic play. I think we're in that window I do with the housing, but then it's like how does everybody come together and execute? Cause I had the housing action coalition. It's a coalition of business owners, community members that are like, hey, let's try to come up with some solutions. There's a lot of solutions in in play right now. There's a lot of parts moving that is making progress, but I'm I can't always help but thinking, well, what else? What else are we missing? What else can do it? Because we have such a small window of time?
Speaker 2:This agile development thought process to me is like we kind of need to take that thought process into this moment of time right now, knowing that this might not last forever, whether it's zoning or whether it's letting certain regulations be pulled down for a shortened period of time to infuse the supply into the market, which will really help stabilize and slow down the housing costs and the appreciated values of homes.
Speaker 2:Homes are still going up. We're still appreciating. So we pulled back about 15 to 18% countywide from 2022 until last year and about halfway through last year we started climbing again and we climbed all this year with all the uncertainty and all the you know uh, you know fear in the market, high interest rates why we had 7% interest rates at the beginning of this year, almost eight, and we're still chugging along with growing home values. But as soon as something changes and the window we don't know when the window is going to close it seems like I want it to be a little bit more frenetic. It doesn't feel like we're making enough momentum at the moment, but maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I think part of it might be just the state of the economy that we're in. I mean, I know that's kind of an easy answer, but when we're talking about these massive or big scale opportunities, even in a smaller market like St George, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and again it goes back to time. Right, it's like the window time. Hopefully all the dominoes line up at the same time, but you can't force it right.
Speaker 3:I want to see all of the buildings up on Tech Ridge Up now, right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, Exactly. I'm sure you guys want to see the Intergalactic building go up right now, you know, but it just takes time. Do you have any insight onto that? Where are you guys process on that? Do you have any idea?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so within a galactic. So we're an aerospace company and the aerospace sector is interesting because it's a little different than what I've experienced in the tech sector and the tech sector If you're working for an enterprise technology company like Domo, for example. Josh James founded that company after he founded Omniture, which was sold to Adobe. I can look at my window right now and I can see this big, sprawling Adobe campus with thousands of employees. And that happened because Josh James, who is a student at Brigham Young University, started a technology company that turned into that entire business unit for Adobe.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so you know whatever you think about the tech sector and the founders in the tech sector, and you know the kind of tradeoffs that come with that sector, just like any sector. It has been a massive benefit to the state of Utah, especially in northern Utah so far, and what I would say is you know that kind of benefit coming to southern Utah is going to probably follow a similar trajectory around. You know what comes first For us as an aerospace company, we are totally beholden to moving through the program milestones. It's not like there's an 18-month sales cycle and then, once you sign a contract, you're off and running with a customer.
Speaker 1:We have to prove through initial development that the proof of concept works, then we have to do low-rate production and get a separate contract for that and then, if that all goes well, then we get into full-rate production contracts and those can take five to 10 years to mature right Because of the timelines in aerospace, and so our timing to get up on Tech Ridge is based on programs that we have very little control over, how quickly they move.
Speaker 1:We can do our part to make sure that we hit all of our milestones, but then we've, for example, spent years building a thermal management system for a next generation Army scout helicopter and we did what was called environmental testing and qualification of that unit to make sure that when you shook the crap out of it, that it could survive that, then when you strike it with lightning and all these other things, these very aggressive tests, that it passes those tests before you fly it. And then our customer installed that on the aircraft. They were ready to fly it and do what's called flight qualification before they sent it into the field. And then the army canceled the program after three years, or multiple years and $3 billion of development investment, because what they were learning in Ukraine is these small autonomous drone swarms were taking down manned helicopters and they're like, yeah, we don't put money into this.
Speaker 2:It's a new age artillery. People like if you haven't been paying attention to this. This is new age artillery. This is unlike any warfare we've even remotely ever had.
Speaker 3:It's crazy if you haven't paid attention, there's some videos out there.
Speaker 2:They're terrifying. Man like you can hear them buzzing in the air and the soldiers are like where's it, where is it?
Speaker 3:you can?
Speaker 2:You can hear it, but you can't see it. Oh my gosh, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:I was. I was in a meeting in DC with some, some folks who are very uh clued in on some of these intelligence, um, some of the things that are happening in intelligent community, and they said look, one of the one of the real challenges now is that we live in a world where you could conceivably, with AI, uh take facial recognition technology and you could have, you know, priority targets with drone swarms and you you take out a Congressman just by identifying them walking the streets. You know, in Georgetown, for example isn't that Eggman from Sonic?
Speaker 2:Eggman from Sonic. He like has all these drone swarms right and, oh my gosh, I can't believe that's real. It's so crazy, that's real.
Speaker 1:So I mean, in our world, we have real externalities that we have to work through in addition to building a company. Right and that's true for other emerging industries too, like software is you can't build software companies the way you built them 10 years ago, because ai has changed everything. And so I guess what I would say is, when it comes to tech ridge, like, if you, you need founders who are like, recognizing market opportunities and building companies from the ground up. That's one layer of the ecosystem that has to happen, and that's one of the things that happened in northern utah with guys like josh james, with ryan smith, with qualtrics who now owns Utah Jazz after taking Qualtrics public, selling it to SAP and then you've got a whole bunch of other guys Aaron Sconnard and Josh Coates and just a ton of people who built companies up here that started in Utah.
Speaker 1:At the same time, you had companies that were larger companies, more mature companies, that were saying we want to just build out a sales and customer support team. Where can we do that? And that's where the economic development folks can come in and say we want to incentivize you to take advantage of Utah's sales and customer support talent base and build some kind of a connection and a division of the company that comes out to Utah. That can certainly happen in Southern Utah too If you can start getting multiple lines of effort like that, that line up, that's how you accelerate things. It's going to take time anyway, but you shorten the timeline to say how do we get to impact faster? So if you could, for example, just build a sales career inside of the technology sector in Southern Utah right now with one of three dozen companies instead of one of four companies, that would be a game changer.
Speaker 1:And then later on maybe the same company say look, we think we can actually build up a marketing department here or the HR department here, we think there's enough talent to do that, and then maybe you have a mix of opportunities that starts to grow. So I think all those things have to start to come together and be much more. They all have to be accelerated for this to to to move more quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, I could ask 50 questions. Yeah, we could keep going. Well, so my thought is um, the housing thing, I, I, I think there's uh, the single I kept thinking about like little strings. Right, you know, the, uh, the a rope is stronger if you have individual strings. Uh, you could build buildings taller if you're lining up sticks right, that's how they built the burj khalifa is it's like individual, like, uh, it keeps getting taller as you get closer together. You have these individual anchors and and this what you're talking about is we just need some more strings. Like, if we just keep adding little straws into the economy, we're going to catch, we're going to catch lightning in a bottle and some of these opportunities. It's going to help keep us going. And so, keeping keeping it top of mind, I think for me in this podcast, this platform is kind of what my thought is like keep this kind of a dynamic going.
Speaker 2:Is it agile?
Speaker 2:We have to be more agile with development of the city in this age, because I think sometimes we're too short-sighted and we also get in fear of too far away, like we're so scared of what's really far down the road and then we're also so close, you know, with, especially with somebody.
Speaker 2:It's like a development next to your house. It's too close to home, right? It's too short term of a dramatic, you know, upheaval of our life. And it's too close to home, right, it's too short term of a dramatic upheaval of our life and it's hard to find that middle ground. It's like, hey, we have to build for the future generations, like that's. I mean, at least from my religious belief, god wants us to serve and grow the community and like take care of the people that are here and going to follow after you, right. And so if we're only thinking about ourselves and not saying, okay, in this moment, are we going to be agile and and watching the city develop and grow and not be so stuck in just having to do it this way, cause that's the way we've always done it? I think we're in another moment in time. We've got to take that to a different approach.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I want to, I'm trying to go ahead and go ahead, not to go deep on this, but like. So in my religious culture there's this concept of like turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers, and it's usually talked about through the context of, like, lds temple worship, and I think that's one way to think about it. But another way to think about this is when you have the hearts of the children being turned to the fathers. This is understanding that there are some principles that are pretty timeless. And if you build a community or a business or an industry on certain principles, that's kind of like what you're doing in agile development. You're saying, look, there are some core values here, some principles that have to be true. Agile development. You're saying, look, there are some core values here, some principles that have to be true.
Speaker 1:But then when you think about, you know, the hearts of the fathers being turned to the children, you're saying, look, we're going to have to adjust and adapt to make this world a better place for those people who come after us. We can't just try to optimize for what's best for us right now. We have to understand that, you know, the things we do right now will have an impact on the next generation, the generation after that. And that really is the agile part of that saying look, what lessons can we learn and apply, so that we're not so rigid and draconian in our thinking that we believe we have every single answer. It's instead of being a playbook that, because this worked 50 years ago, it has to work now. You recognize and differentiate between the principles that worked and the practices that may be out of date, and maybe you need to apply some new practices to those same principles and say what does it look like now? And I think that's where you really can start to get some progress.
Speaker 3:I think a good example of that is when you go to probably pick any single one in any city, but you go to a city council meeting and it's just a whole bunch of people that think they know everything about everything. And this is the way we've already done it and this is how it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they tend to be the loudest because they feel like we're going to make mistakes. There's fear in the future. We've seen too many mistakes be done already and because that happened to us in the past, we don't ever want to get even close to that again. Right, and there's a lot of that fear that comes into play with it. And that's where political will it takes political will, business will it takes the will of that.
Speaker 2:That core, um, those principles make and reaffirming those principles too, within the community, right, it's like being consistent and reaffirming and saying these are the principles that we're unwavering on, and and also this is how we're going to keep moving forward. You know, and if you don't like it, I you can vote me out, right, and not be worried about that thing. To me, it's just kind of crazy that, um, we got to this point where it's like we're making fears. You know, huge decisions out of fear, even at the, at the government level, is like that's we. We need the fearless people in there to say I think this is the right direction and I don't care if it's popular or not. That's why I got elected, because you were supposed to trust that I had the right vision and and and the right feeling at heart when I made this decision and like even incorporating like energy, for example, like what's the energy?
Speaker 3:what's energy going to look like in southern utah in 10 years or 15 years? People that are in the government now, the local government, that care enough about that to make decisions that will impact what you know, what their kids and grandkids and so on and so forth, will, um will be doing in southern utah. Right, I mean, there's a, there's a there's a chance that energy could be triple the cost in 10 years down here in southern utah and it's like, okay, well, what are we going to do as a community to-.
Speaker 2:Rocky Mountain Power has already. That's their plan to triple the costs for Rocky Mountain Power. So if you're on Rocky Mountain Power in Southern Utah, they've already proposed tripling the costs.
Speaker 3:Right, and that's right now. And if you're on Dixie Power, where you've got the cheapest electricity essentially in the country, do you want your power bill to quadruple, or 5X or 6X? Yeah?
Speaker 2:because they get their power from a coal plant up north. And that's the thing is. That's the diversification. So we could talk about power, because we talked about power a little bit and I've tried to get more educated since we've spoke last about that but I think there's a transformational opportunity that might be coming about to invest in that infrastructure. But I think this is one of those things where we have to look way further down the road, like this. This is one where we're like, okay, yeah, there's problems in the next three to five years, but there's nothing we could do about that stuff. Like, a lot of that stuff is out of our control.
Speaker 2:But what's the best decision? So that when I retire right, I'm 37, going on 38, when, when I retire and I expect to retire here because that's the plan right, I want to make sure my power bill isn't insane. How do I do? I got 40 years. So, like, what's the plan in 40 years for our power grid? And how do we collectively decide? Like, I want this for me and it's a really long time and it's also going to help the generations behind me? I don't know if that kind of a conversation is even one being had in the county, but I think it's definitely an important one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know, just going back to something you guys mentioned earlier, I think part of the psychology around this entire conversation is that you tend to get it tends to devolve into like two binary camps. And one camp is saying they're romanticizing the past into something that really wasn't and saying, you know, 50 years ago or whatever, life was so much better and we should have life be like that again or forever. And you know it ignores progress that's been made in the meantime that's benefited everybody's life. That's positive. And also new challenges's benefited everybody's life. That's positive. And also new challenges that we're dealing with that need to be dealt with, that are not solved necessarily by applying the same thinking and practices from that time.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's some principles again that make sense, but the practices and the particulars have to adjust to the times. And then there's the other camp that says, you know, the shiny city on the hill, the, you know, everything we have now is terrible, everything we have in the past is terrible. But if we do different things, only then the future will be great. And I think both of those are wrong.
Speaker 1:I think that there are, you know, things that you carry forward, that are substantive, that mean something that can can carry forward in spite of the inevitability of change, forward in spite of the inevitability of change, and that you can have those things translate and inform the practices, the policies that you bring in. And that includes things like how do you, how do you, how do you set the expectation for a community around what it wants and what and what? What meets? The expectation of like this is this is good governance for our community, this is good progress for our community. I think that conversation is is not very productive right now in Southern Utah. It's not very productive, you know, naturally because of just the way politics are. I think it's hard. Yeah, I do think it's a systematic.
Speaker 2:I think it's a systematic issue too. It's. It is. We're dealing with a system that has broken parts and also limitations that just are baked into the thing that we can't control too Right, and so it's not just unique to us. I think it's system wide.
Speaker 1:No, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's endemic right now. I think I think we're a little, a little spoiled and we we've had the privilege of saying we're going to pick fake outrages to focus on and fake problems to fixate on instead of and at the expense of dealing with real problems. And I would love to get to a place where, instead of everybody trying to own everybody all the time and just retreating into these tribal you know, you know, dunk sessions, it's like let's identify a real problem that everybody benefits from solving, or a real opportunity that everybody benefits from capturing.
Speaker 1:Let's like agree on a common set of facts, and some of them might be inconvenient facts, they may be challenging facts, they may force us to like squirm a little bit and let's start a conversation about solving that problem. If energy is a problem and I agree with you I think that if you look ahead to when I want to retire and when I want my kids to have a life that's at least as good as mine, there are problems that we take for granted today as being solved. That will not be solved for them because of changing dynamics, and I think energy is one of those. Housing is another one.
Speaker 1:Looking forward to, you know, turning your mind to generations that are coming to benefit them, because also the work that you do to benefit that generation in 10 years, in the future, does create immediate benefits as well. You'll see benefits next year and the year after that and three years down the route, and so on and so forth. But you don't get those things if you know we're constantly spinning on. You know kind of identity spinning on. You know kind of identity politics and you know people like having culture wars. I really think that that is part of the mix. It's not just about getting policies right in the abstract and making sure that, like entrepreneurs are starting businesses here. You also have to get to a place where there is a healthy you know alignment on like hey, here's what we want for the community and it's based on something real.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, for sure, you, you got a jam. I wanted to talk one more topic with you. Do you got? Do you got like 30 more minutes? Okay, Jeff, jeff's going to say sayonara.
Speaker 3:I got a jam. I got, I got a football practice from three to five and then five to seven.
Speaker 2:Davis high school hall of famer. Jeff Watkins is going to go help the kids with football. Dude. Way to go, dude.
Speaker 3:I'm still on the 200-meter dash record book.
Speaker 2:You're in the top 10? I'm number six. Top five Still number six.
Speaker 3:I was number three at one point. Can you believe that?
Speaker 2:I can't believe that I beat you in a race, though. So no, I didn't. No, I didn't race though. So no, I didn't. No, I didn't. I keep challenging to him a race. I challenge him to a race, and then I just don't show up. I'll race you, I'm faster than you, and then I just don't show up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, man, I'll do the same I'll tell you to race, and I'll show up too.
Speaker 3:Jeff, let's do it.
Speaker 1:Let's do like when go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Okay, we'll see you in a minute, man, um, so, uh, so I think I think energy is one. I also it's another huge topic right that you can kind of tackle. But I am curious your thoughts on this from your marketing perspective and your background perspective. I I I'm curious about your thoughts about the podcast, right, and what is 21st century news like? Marketing and news? You know we've decentralized information, especially news information.
Speaker 2:When the newspaper died, the television is dying rapidly for their news, you know, as far as getting their news from, I heard a huge percentage of, like the Gen Alpha is getting their news from TikTok, like huge percentages. And so when I think about those, we're going to always go through these waves of. I can't imagine we're not going to continue to go through these waves of social media platforms that catch on and are popular. I'm hopeful that we've just been done. Can we just not have any more? Like, do we need to have any more of those social media platforms?
Speaker 2:But I'm curious to think what, what do you think news looks like in the next five to 10 years? Like, are we going to continue to see the same trend? Um, I'm I'm trying to figure out how do we navigate this and how do we expand on getting local stuff and talking about local stuff but being able to actually get buy-in from the community, to get on the same page, cause I think that's one of the things that we're struggling with is getting on the same page. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So this is like.
Speaker 1:I'll be disciplined about not going too deep here, because I have a ton of thoughts about this. So, having spent a lot of my career, you can talk as long as you want.
Speaker 2:Man, I got nothing going on, so you can talk as long as you want.
Speaker 1:Well, let me try to summarize my thoughts here. So my dad spent almost 40 years in journalism, in local print journalism newspapers primarily. I started my career in journalism and got a journalism degree at Utah State before getting into marketing.
Speaker 2:So you're a perfect person to ask this question to. I didn't even realize it. Thanks, man.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, here's what I think. One of the things that has happened over the last 10, 15 years is the unbundling of cable, where everybody said we're so sick of cable and so we're going to instead, I'm going to sign up for HBO Max, I'm going to sign up for Disney Plus and you get all these individual subscriptions Netflix is. We've come through a cycle where now people are saying I have too many subscriptions to manage and there's a lot of redundancy across them. Can I consolidate them? And we're basically reinventing the bundle.
Speaker 1:We're like reinventing cable, and I think that these things are cyclical, and I think right now, with media, one of the things that's happened is, generally speaking, if you look at any data set that touches this topic, faith and trust in institutions generally is very, very low.
Speaker 1:Whatever the institution is, whether it's big business, whether it's the church, whether it's the media, faith in institutions is very low, and so people are fairly jaded and I think that what they've done is they've retreated to the democratization of platforms. So podcasts, you know, anybody can create content now, and so anybody who is sort of popularity contest. If the idea feels like it resonates, people tend to gravitate toward the purveyor of that idea and that's not a bad thing in a vacuum, but it does create a problem of like. There's not a shared reality because there are not incentives to gatekeep information based on a rigorous interrogation of facts. That's one of the things that like the news, the legacy news media or not, for at least a period of time. You know, there's always been kind of yellow journalism and there's been quite a bit of differentiation between institutions in the news media that actually took their journalistic responsibilities seriously and put rigor into the process, versus those that were really trying to masquerade as being objective but just pushing an agenda.
Speaker 2:That's always been true, like me. Like me, no, because I'm not an expert, I fear, because, as I've watched podcasts, I'm like there's some things that I don't know what I'm talking about. And then I'm talking about it but I'm pretending to know that I know everything. As best I can, I'm trying to be, you know, objective and just be exploring this curiosity along the way. You know it's it's a difficult balance to to to do, because the journalist to do that rigor and that work, it's expensive, it's a, it's a very passion oriented because there's not a ton of money in it. Period, there's just not a lot of a lot of money in it.
Speaker 2:So it's interesting to see this balance and then, like you said, it's cyclical where we're going to get all these individuals out there, like myself that's just trying to do this. But I'm not a journalism major, I'm not, you know, a news guy. But I want to give value and I see the value in the conversation I've had and I've got a lot of good feedback from the listeners of the show, and so it does keep me wanting to go do it. But I can't help but think what direction as we continue to grow? What direction do we go? Do we expand in other things or do we just? What do you think?
Speaker 1:So I mean on your show. I think I won't speak for what you want to do. I'll just tell you the things that I think about that matter to me and I'm one person I think that I tend to anchor toward like I really want to have a high degree of faith and confidence in the underlying facts, that we agree on the facts, and then there can be there can and should be like a wide distribution of opinions that emerge from those facts and that's a good, healthy debate to have. I mean, if we said I mean COVID is a good example, there is not a shared reality around that problem from the time that it started to now.
Speaker 1:And there are thousands of additional problems that are just like that right now, and that's because people are taking information from different places where there is a continuum of you know, of commitment to fact and you know you're in one place on that continuum and other people on a completely different continuum. So I think it's a challenging time right now because media consumption really follows like algorithmic patterns. Algorithms reward certain things that are not necessarily congruent with truth, and then you also have people who are getting dopamine hits that you know self-reinforce consuming certain kinds of media. I do think that at some point I don't know when this point is there will be a turn because people will realize they've had too much sugar and they're going to like, crave a little bit of substance and some meat again and they're going to start saying, just like we did with bundling up our subscription services, hey, I really crave institutions in, you know, news and information that are based on trying to get to some kind of systematic way of like getting to truth, Even if, like, the opinion piece of that is left to other people that decide. I want just facts and truth. Yeah, I think we'll get to a point where people feel starved for that, but I don't know when that happens and when the appetite for that starts to turn, but I do think it'll happen.
Speaker 1:But right now we're definitely in kind of a trough of disillusionment when it comes to, you know, media as an institution. So what people do with that and at what point people start to say, hey, I don't want just people to tell me what I, what, what I think, what they think. I want to hear, I want to know something. That's true. I think that I don't know when that happens, but I think I think we're there.
Speaker 2:I'm going to, I'm going to disagree that I don't think. I think we're already ready for that. I think from the millennial generation, so the, the total population that is the millennial generation, through Gen X, the boomers, the rest of the generations that are left, that's a big enough population that are. They want that. I want that. I used to get the newspaper when I was a kid. When I was in high school, I picked up the newspaper every single day and I read the newspaper and I think it's so crazy to me that there's a generation of adults that never did that. Yeah, I think it's crazy to me, and so I think we're already back to that where it's like man, I don't know what a trusted source is. I really could, I could use one of those right now and so, yeah, that's one of the things I've wanted to implement and I'd be curious your thoughts, but I I'm obviously gonna have to do more research and in building it out.
Speaker 2:But I saw on youtube there was a uh, I saw what's his name. Um, charlie Kirk did it. But then who owns Daily Wire? Shapiro Shapiro. He did a debate where he debated like 25 Kamala Harris voters or liberals or whatever. And what they did is they ran like a real-time fact-checking talking. It would like real time, do a fact check on it, and it's this organization that's like basically an AI type thing that does fact checking all along the way. So, like any statement of fact that's made, it'll like validate or invalidate what that was said based on some criteria or here's some nuance here. And it was interesting. It was hard to follow the debate because it was so fast paced. It was hard to follow the debate and then also try to jump into the facts. It was almost going too fast because it was a bunch of information. So I didn't really get a good opportunity to like dive in and see is that fact checking actually all that good or cause I think there's still going back to the algorithm. There's still a lot of fishiness going on with what, what we get out of that AI thing.
Speaker 2:But as that progresses and as that gets better and the reliance on the journalist to have to do as deep of a dive as they're thinking through the story, it could shorten up that timeframe. I think the research portion of it, I think that timeframe is going to shorten up and if they can shorten that up, I think there's more profitability in it. But I think it's also a way to in real time communicate to the audience that we're willing to say where, as fast as we can, do a correction to ourselves, cause in the newspaper they'd issue corrections. It'd be like on the fifth page or the seventh page of the paper but there's no. There's no corrections anymore.
Speaker 2:On media right, there's not really, especially video. Video has zero corrections, you know, issued about what was said in that video and if you could, even if you try to attempt to find one, I doubt you'd even come across one. It's probably a page 35 on Google or something like that. So I think there's an appetite for that and that's one of the functions I kind of wanted to add into this at least this podcast and stuff that's going on in town. I think that'd be kind of a cool thing to do.
Speaker 1:Well, like you, I share, I share your, your appetite for, like um, media outlets that are trying to get it right and not just trying to push. You know what, what they think people want, cause I think you know we do live in a time where people are are wanting to be told what they want to hear, and you know inconvenient truths are difficult for people, and you know debate is usually about ideology and feelings as opposed to about you know what to make of certain facts. So, like there are things that can be done there. So one of the things, one of the things that we've lost, with newspapers really folding up their business models, were destroyed by Google because these newspapers were started putting their content online and you know they weren't gatekeeping at all, and so Google just aggregated them and then you were trading digital pennies for the print dollars that they were getting before. It just destroyed their business models.
Speaker 1:And your point is expensive to do real journalism, and even real journalism gets things wrong. But when you get things wrong and you get things wrong and you're willing to admit it and you hold yourself to a published standard, One of the things that a lot of very good journalistic institutions have done for a long time is they have a published kind of ethics guide that outlines here are the things that we care about from a core values or principle standpoint. These are the standards we hold ourselves to in our reporting. This is how we try to arrive at truth as much as possible, and when you have that published and people can look at the rubric for what you say you're trying to do, and then they can hold your journalism accountable to that, there's a layer of accountability there. It's a self-correcting mechanism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's actually really smart. So I think those are the things that are missing. Now. It's almost like the. The way they do scientific papers and scientific studies is you publish, you publish your findings and then the rest of the institutions could go in and say did you get that right? I'm going to fact check you on that. And there's this self-correcting system within science that does that and just news doesn't really get it, doesn't get that right, it's not even remotely close to getting that. And so I think that's an interesting idea is how we, how could we get a collaboration of individuals that do that self checking mechanism without, without real singular institutional over, you know, over an overseer but Google's still the overseer Cause they're a monopoly right Like those. There's a bit, there's a bunch of, there's several very big tech companies that control what we see on a regular basis and there's going to. There's definitely a gap in there and and fixing that, I don't know. I don't know how you do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and people who've had feelings about you know what to do with that, which is, you know, a bigger problem to solve. Uh, I think the most compelling thing I've heard is that you probably should treat um social media companies as publishers, where they actually are. You know. They're liable, like if I were, if I were, they got that pass, I think.
Speaker 2:I think Zuckerberg was saying how he's like if, if I was liable to what was posted on the media, the on Facebook, he said they would have never grown, it would have killed them instantly.
Speaker 1:I think. I think that's probably an exaggeration, but because, again, one of the things that makes those, those outlets, grow is that they are able to generate an algorithmic response that does create engagement, and they thrive off of engagement, and engagement and truth are pretty antithetical to each other. Because it's the same thing as like if you, if you take a, you know, ayear-old kid and say I can give you kale or I can give you sugar, um, that child does not know how to differentiate between the two and just going to pick the one that gives, you know, the greatest initial satisfaction, and you're going to eventually, without having you know the, the immediate feedback loop, poison that child. And that's happening to our brains with social media, because we're constantly getting things that create a dopamine response and we get into these vicious cycles and our brains are not trained evolutionarily to deal with that, and so we're in very uncharted territory with all of this. And so you know, I'm not saying that we need to just like choke ourselves on spinach, but there is perverse incentive baked into those systems, and part of it is engagement being the primary.
Speaker 1:If you, if you told the New York Times engagement was the only thing that matters to you, you would get a different New York Times, especially if you had legal contracts, contracts that said, like you can publish libel and defamation and you're not legally liable for any of that. You'd see more libel and defamation of the pages of the New York Times. Yeah, and so I think you know there's a lot that goes on there and this may be like a little too far afield for what you want to do here, but I do think that that's part of the challenge we deal with in getting to shared reality and it affects things like what we're talking about with St George, because you know, again, people get very, very strong cognitive reward signals about focusing on things that they know probably in their heart of hearts don't really matter. But that's fun to fight about. Meanwhile, real problems and opportunities are kind of like taking a backseat.
Speaker 2:So and this is where the interesting I think you touched on something too. That's also so difficult because we we quickly slip into. If we're talking about public treating social media as a publisher and saying you have to be accountable for what is found on that platform, then it goes into a freedom of speech thing. Right, it slips quickly off into this wait, you're telling me I can't say something and another person is telling me I can say this and not this, and I can't accidentally get something wrong without having some kind of accountability to. Yeah, but then so I'm even thinking through it, even live, but I can see how it's. It slips into this it's a freedom of speech issue, but there is a disconnect there. But it's easy that that would be the general. Nope, you're trying to eliminate free speech. That's what I. I can't help but think that would be the pushback on creating these social medias as publishers.
Speaker 1:I think you hear that from people who either don't have a very strong understanding of, like, the legal constructs that constitute free speech as we define it in this country, or you know in some cases there's some bad faith there too. Where people are, they have a financial interest and economic interest in trying to, like, distort the meaning of free speech. Free speech has never meant, you know, even with the first amendment, that you can say anything you want without consequence. So, for example, free speech does not mean that you have to be platformed. There's no guarantee for platforming. So if a social, if the going back to the New York times or the wall street journal platforming? So if a social, if the going back to the New York times or the wall street journal, they don't have to publish anybody's words.
Speaker 1:Cnn or Fox news or MSNBC, they don't have to put anybody on their show to demonstrate that they're, you know, fulfilling their requirements of the first amendment. They can make editorial decisions about who gets the airtime or the print, the print pages, or the time or the space on the internet, and that's true for algorithms as well. They get, they get to decide what goes into the algorithm and what they reward, and it's all, it's also true that there's a whole bunch of legal, legal precedent and actual like you know law and policy that's that says that you can't, for example, Financially benefit and you can't find also financially benefit and you can't find also financially benefit from this thing that you you may or may not have said on purpose, right?
Speaker 2:you can't. You know if if you're constantly setting I'll use alex jones as an obvious example right, it's like you said all this stuff and you were financially benefiting from saying this lie and now you're going to have to be liable for that, and to me, I don't think that that's wrong. I think I want that function within the justice system to say somebody can't financially benefit from willfully or even unwillfully, like if they've done it on accident spreading something that isn't factually accurate, and also that what's factually accurate is moving target, going back to the different, you know, periods of time.
Speaker 2:This is tough.
Speaker 1:We're going to tackle all the we're going to totally figure this out.
Speaker 2:You and me, we're going to talk it all out and totally figure out how to do all this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'm sure, I'm sure we will. Um, but yeah, I mean, I mean nobody, I think. I think we've agreed as a society, for example, like you said, it's in nobody's best interest except for you know, it's really, it's really in society's best interest to make sure that there are laws against defamation. So that is a constraint on you know, this idea of unbridled free speech. You can say whatever you want. You can't. You can say whatever you want.
Speaker 1:Really, freedom of speech is about saying the government is not going to proactively muzzle your speech. It does not mean that that speech doesn't come with consequences. Some of it is social consequence, like if you say something that upsets people, you may suffer social consequences. You can lose your job in an at-will employment environment because you say something that the company thinks was not a wise thing. It didn't demonstrate judgment on your part. That is taken to an extreme with things like cancel culture in ways that I don't think is helpful, but it's still something that we recognize as being a facet of free speech. Right, there is consequence. There are also things that we've said. This facet of free speech actually comes with legal consequences If I were to say something untrue about someone that damaged their reputation in a material way, it would be totally within their right to sue me for defamation, like what happened with Alex Jones, right? So there's a lot of caveats to that that I think get missed sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a big problem to solve. I want to keep thinking how do we keep driving important information to the community? And thinking of clever and different ways to do that. I have a wild hair that I'm like we could just bring the newspaper back. I'm sure we could figure out a way to make it financially work, but it's probably not reality. People maybe they just don't want a piece of paper.
Speaker 2:I was thinking like, how do you double click on topics like that? Going back to like the live fact checking is like, let's say, we touch on something agile development but having some kind of interactive ability to be like, oh, agile development, and it's like on the screen you could tap on that and you can learn more about it. Right, and then, or the fact checking might say he may be not right or wrong, or he's partially right or partially wrong, find out more. Here and now you get a collective of sources that validate or invalidate what was said, and I think that would be thinking of a tool for me, especially for AI to actually be productive instead of robots is do something like that. I think that could be something that would be cool. So hopefully we can see, or somebody figure that out for me. If you're listening in, will you guys figure that out for me? I think it'd be awesome. Yeah, I love the creative thinking and also the. If you're listening in, will you?
Speaker 1:guys figure that out for me. I think it'd be awesome. Yeah, I love the creative thinking, also the problems you're trying to solve, which are around. How do you actually get better, good information more easily, which is what technology we would hope would do for us, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Last thing. What's your hat? Well, it's I-47G.
Speaker 1:Just 47G, this I-47G, just 47G this is part of their mark. So 47G started as an aerospace association for the state of Utah and now has grown into an industry association for the deep tech sector for Utah, with kind of an emphasis on aerospace, but it's a public-private partnership with the governor's office as well, so they're doing a lot of good work to try to build some momentum for the deep tech sector in Utah.
Speaker 2:Deep tech is not affiliated with deep state. Hopefully Is that right.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't know if it is a lot of government contracting going through that world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is, but it's an important business and the government does need to be a part of it. I had one of the mayors of the cities on and I was asking about AI and they're like, yeah, we'll probably be the last one to adopt anything AI within the local government. I was like, oh, you might want to start thinking about it. You might want to start looking at like, what is the options? What are the safest, most useful tools out there in the industry, out in the artificial industry? The cities probably should be looking at that. There should be a task force somewhere doing something to help cities, especially smaller towns. How do we utilize this? How do we stay in the game and not let it go to like, oh, we went from filing papers, we totally missed all of MS-DOS, got that late, and then now we're resetting our systems over and over again. I think there should be a concerted effort on that Another total sidetrack. But was there anything else you wanted to chat about?
Speaker 1:No, I appreciate it. Great, great to chat with you. Love the way you think, appreciate what you're doing for the community, and just a good conversation. So I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks, man. What are you? You're going to be back here in a couple of weeks. You're coming back down to St George.
Speaker 1:Yeah, timing still TBD. I'm trying to get a couple of things going with, um, uh, some partners that we're trying to bring into town, so I'll definitely let you know once I get that secured.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, thanks. Thanks for jumping on on a Friday. We'll see you out there.
Speaker 1:Thanks, man Sounds good. Thanks, Robert.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue.
Speaker 3:We want to. You're going.