Anna Wittel and Brad Haynes

00:00 Hello?

00:02 Can you hear me okay?

00:03 Yeah, I can. Can you hear me?

00:05 Yes. Turn my volume up just a tick, though, on my computer, but I can hear you.

00:10 Great. Awesome. Well, it's great to finally connect.

00:14 Absolutely appreciate you rescheduling with me. Sorry, we had a bus breakdown that I couldn't avoid. We are kind of a small shop out here. It was in Tulsa, which was about 4 hours out of here, so we had to run another bus down. Chaos ensues sometimes, but today we're.

00:40 A. I have a broken down bus story where I was taking, I don't know if it was Greyhound bus or something, and it broke down and everybody's staying on the side of the road. And then this tour bus pulls up, and it was a band from Latin America that played some event in DC, and they invited everyone on the bus, drove them. I was living in New York at the time, drove us to New York. They were passing out know people, music. It was like, crazy party bus and just so nice. It was like. Like it was a.

01:16 People. There's good people everywhere, I believe so. I think that's a pretty cool story. Our men's soccer team was down there, so there wasn't any drinking, but there wasn't supposed to be. Anyway, I don't know if there was any, but we were on a road trip down there to the Tulsa area, so works out okay for us. I see an avid runner and outdoors person and tech person. So that's all things that I don't do great with. But I'm glad to know that there's somebody else that can help me if I need to.

01:55 There you go. Well, I was supposed to run in eight K. I tore a ligament in my foot, so I actually haven't been able to run or do yoga. Those are like my go to keep myself sane kind of activities. So we have like an exercise bike, and I'm lifting weights, but it's just not the same. I love running.

02:15 Yeah, I do a little bit of yoga, but that's only on the rare occasions where I need to actually stretch out. I feel it. I'm more of a lifting guy. I do more of the strength training stuff. For me, it's just better for what I do, what I need, whether it's stuff on the farm or whether it's stuff in our events that we have here at Fort Hayes, it's very helpful. And I'm not chasing anybody down, but I need to be able to hold on to somebody if I get a hold of them. So it's one of those deals. That's my preference.

02:57 Yeah, I like it. I used to lift weights a little bit before, and then I kind of stopped because I was doing the yoga, which actually was, my back was getting strong. I never had never thought about muscles in my back, but it was good for that. But so I'm not doing yoga. I have my little weights and I do like it. It does good. And I can see, I'm like, oh, I have, like, a little muscle coming in that's kind of gratifying just to actually see it.

03:24 Yeah, I do it so I can eat more, quite honestly.

03:29 I know, right? Oh, my gosh.

03:31 I eat like I'm 20 and I'm 53, so it's one of those deals. Continue to do those things and have the same results. So I got to decide which thing I'm going to do. So I can't do them both.

03:43 Yeah. Oh, I hear you. I feel like I always had a very fast metabolism, and then around 40, it just slowed down and I'm like, what's happening? Why can't I eat like I used to? So I have to be active? I also like to eat. I don't drink anymore, so it's like that is my being social, going out myself. I can't be one of those people that's just super restrictive about their diet. I just want to enjoy myself.

04:15 I'm the same way. And we eat a lot on the run with our sports events. We run our own concessions, we run our own everything. So I'm around all the nasty foods that people eat at events, and so it's like, well, sometimes that's what I end up eating and throwing in my mouth. And it's not the same as when I was, like I said, much younger, as much. What business do you run as far as you're web based with your writing stuff? So were you English major?

04:48 I was an English major, Undergrad. I went back and got my master's in English. I was going to get my PhD. I thought that's what I wanted to do. Then when I was back in academia, I'm like, I don't know if that's it. I don't know. I worked in marketing. AFter getting my undergrad, I kind of ended up in marketing. Didn't really love it, went back to school, didn't know that I really wanted to be a professor. Ended up back in marketing because I couldn't get a job doing anything else. That was my background. So finally, almost two years ago, I quit my job as a product marketing manager. For a tech company, and I started a copywriting business and I mostly write copy for websites. So I'll work with designers and developers and I'll write all the words for the website, and that's my specialty. I do other types of writing, too, but that's what I do for the most part.

05:47 My daughter in law is an English major. She's a high school teacher, so she's actually double in English and Spanish so she can teach both. It's a lot more writing writing than reading. She loves to read, so, I mean, she's a real bookworm on that sort of stuff. I had a hunch you might be an English major with what you were doing.

06:17 Yeah. No, you were absolutely right. I don't know why it never occurred to me to write for a living. I don't know. Even graduating with an English degree, I'm like, what am I going to do? Teach? What else can I do? Nothing. I was like, get this stupid degree. I loved it. But then I realized I graduated and I was like, I don't have any career path. I have no idea what I'm going to do. And I just stumbled into marketing. It's not really what I wanted, but that's life sometimes just happened that way. So it took me a while to come back to writing.

06:52 That's a similar path to I didn't know what I wanted to do when I got my undergrad in business ed. My parents were teachers and farmers, and so I was like, well, that's what I know. And I was like, well, I wanted to do like, industrial arts building stuff.

07:09 Oh, cool.

07:10 But at the time, that was kind of a dying area. So I went business ed instead because I was like, well, I can always use a business degree. It'll be all right. So I taught for a couple of years and I couldn't put up with the kids. I was going to strangle them. And I was only 22 when I started teaching, so I wasn't like, I was 45 or 50 and these crazy kids type of thing. I was only a few years older than they were and I couldn't deal with it. So I was like, I'm going to go back. Got my master's in sports administration because I like sports and coaching, and then I got into sports administration, have been in it ever since. So for me, it's been a long road of travel. Over the years. We've been in Texas twice. I've been in Georgia. I've been in Omaha, Nebraska twice. I've been in Hayes three times. So it's kind of a winding road, but I'm kind of back here in this part of the cool.

08:10 That's great. I'm not athletically inclined at all, but I feel like I have a six year old, and I'm like, I got to get her in a sport, because I feel like if I had played a sport, I would have built confidence. It was, like, just a lack of confidence. Like, oh, yeah, the rules to games. And my dad was in the military, but he was not a typical military guy. He was a bookworm. He studied German literature. He married my mom in Germany. My mom was German. They were both big readers. My mom actually swam. She was on the swim team, so she was more, like, sporty in a way. But my sister and I, we were like, the Flinchers. Like, oh, the ball is coming. I just never got into sports, but I think it's so good, and I see the confidence you can build and the camaraderie and all of that is so great. Kind of missed out on that in my youth.

09:10 Yeah. In our particular area, everybody played everything because we were a small town, you had to be on the team, basically.

09:23 Yeah.

09:23 My graduating class was 47, and we were one of the bigger classes that come out of that school in quite a while. And so we were all rural kids, and obviously some kids lived in town, but we all just played everything. And there were several of us that went on and played post high school in different sports, and it was a cool experience growing up for us. We didn't have some of the exposures that you would in a bigger place. My nieces and nephews are in the Denver metro area, and they have opportunities to play hockey and lacrosse and things that we never even hardly heard of, and they've got leagues for it. It's so much different nowadays than back then. And the kids, whether they're kids or college athletes or youth sports or whatever, they just got so many more opportunities to do stuff, and they can find something that they like. One of my nieces was a swimmer. One of them is playing hockey and my nephew's baseball kid. So they just get the chance to play all these different things and experience some of that stuff that you're talking about. It's kind of neat to go out and watch them play and see just the fact that they've got this stuff. It's like, oh, this is crazy.

10:52 That's nice. That's cool. Well, I don't know how this is supposed to work exactly.

11:01 I just have conversations with people.

11:04 Have you done this before?

11:06 Yeah.

11:07 Okay. Tell me about, have you done it often? I only sent messages to you and one other person and I never heard from the other person.

11:15 Yeah. No. I've done three or four of them. Some of them I do over phone. Some of them I did in video format. I talked to one lady who was a little bit older. She was probably, I think she said she was 76 and she wanted to do it over the phone because she didn't want to mess with the technology piece of it. And I said that's fine. So we did it over the phone. It was pretty cool. I've talked to a couple of different people. One gentleman out in Oregon, I talked to him and then talked to a lady down just outside of Wichita, Kansas. So one that was fairly close. So this is the fourth one I've done. I enjoy doing it because I like.

11:56 Meeting people veteran of these.

11:58 I just like meeting people and talking to every, everybody wants to learn about something different. The guy in Oregon wanted to learn about my farm stuff and he was more like an environmental guy. And so that was one of his passions. And he was a college professor. He wanted to learn about agriculture and the farming that I do and the things that why I do the things I do in the agriculture sector. The one lady wanted to learn more about from me some of the things that we do with our school stuff and as far as the Hayes and because she's from the state anyway, she's familiar. So we talked a lot about just Fort Hayes type. So it's really interesting. I think just talking to people in general is pretty cool. I like meeting people. I've been to the Northeast several times. I've got friends up there. Been to a lot of different places around the country. And I just like going to local places. Like if I go somewhere, I'll go to a local place. I'll ask the person or the taxi guy or whoever. I'll say, where do local people go? I don't want to go to the tourist places. I want to go where the local people go so I can talk to local people about local things because it's just to me interesting. That's how you learn about an area a lot better than if you just go to the beaten path of all right. Everybody goes and sees this thing in this city.

13:23 Well, right.

13:24 That's the same thing. I want to see something different. I venture out a little bit more.

13:31 That's cool. So I saw an ad on Instagram. That's how I heard about this and was know pairing people from different political ends. Of the spectrum, maybe. And that appealed to me because I feel like we have more in common. Regardless of where you are in the political spectrum, we are human and I feel like people have lost sight of that a little. Absolutely sad. My father in law is fairly conservative, but I love him. It's so funny because we don't talk about politics, but we really are trying to be very respectful and kind of like push the person or just probe a little, but without.

14:17 Yeah, I think it's good to have dialogue like that because it gives a different perspective of why does that person think that way? I'm not saying all my opinions are right or all of them are wrong or yours. Either way, here's why I think what I think, or here's why I do what I do. If it's farming related or things like that, and this is just another perspective that maybe somebody hasn't thought of before, does that cause them immediately go, oh, well, I'm going to change my mind to doing what that person's doing? No, but it's another angle. And just like you're writing, I mean, you bring different things into stuff to make it more visual, more rich, more immersive. I think opinions are the same way. I think opinions of whatever the topic. Here's what I think about this thing, or here's why I don't think that thing is the way to do it. I think having other perspectives at least gives you a well rounded. You keep the same opinion after we get done, we can still be friends, but you at least need to understand another point of view as opposed to, oh, that's 100% wrong. Well, there's parts of that that are correct in this context or that context and can at least say, okay, well, that makes sense why they would think that or why they would do that or say that. And so I really believe in academics. One of my roles is to go across campus and communicate with all of the folks across campus. In the academic side, it's the residential life, financial aid, all these different areas of campus, and I can't talk to them the same way I talked to our basketball coach or a football coach. Yeah, I can't use the same words. I can't use the same examples. I can't do those things that way. And one of the reasons that I'm here is those coaches are supposed to come to me or to Dixie Ballman, our compliance gal, because we will take what they're trying to say and we can translate a bunch of coach speak language and opinions and animation and kind of. All right, the gist of the message is this, all right, we'll take that message over here, and then we'll see what we can do. That way, we don't have everybody across campus hating us because every coach that's been out of shape that something didn't get done exactly when it needed to get done, they go blow them up, and then they hate the athletic department.

17:00 Right.

17:01 We are the buffer between those two entities to where we're going to say, all Right, we need to have Billy's financial aid. We got to check on Billy's financial aid. 90% of the time, Billy didn't do something anyway. So they would have went over there and made a fool of themselves, pissed somebody off, and then we still would have had to have Billy go. Do know, for me, talking to folks from all different walks of life in all different areas of the country is really cool because everybody communicates different. Everybody has different things. I'm curious to know. I'm conservative in my beliefs and stuff, but I don't have only those things running through my Twitter feed or only those things running through my Instagram. I want to be educated or knowledgeable about. Okay, what am I missing or what's not being told to me from a news source that I may be considered a conservative source versus another one. Now, how much of either of those are accurate? I don't know. I mean, that's one of those things where you never really know somewhere between what the far right says and the far left says is actually what's going on, right. I always try to find out, okay, where are the guardrails? Now, let's try to figure out what's actually going on in the middle to where it makes some sense to me.

18:29 Yeah. Do you also feel like with age, you start to realize that there's nothing that's black and white? It's never simple things. Life is complicated. And like you said, people have different perspectives, and sometimes the fundamental underlying whatever the issue is, it's like people actually agree. They're focused on some little facet of it, and it makes it seem like they don't. But actually, when it comes down to it, like, we love our kids and we want them to be safe. Or when you delve deeper, people get so caught up on kind of surface level that tribal, like.

19:10 I'm not a big talker or big beat my chest about this side or the other, but I believe that you can't tell how many fingers I have holding up when I'm like this, but if you put it back. I've got five fingers holding. You got to take a step back, look at things, and say, all right, what does this whole picture look like instead of just this one little thing, like you said, a little specific item? That's. And the other thing is, I'm not real easily offended. And that's one thing I think being offended is, in many ways, a little bit of a choice to, because it's how I react to whatever's being told to me. I officiate a lot of basketball and a lot of baseball over the years at a pretty high level, and so I'm used to emotion and confrontation and things of that nature. To me, it doesn't offend me. When I'm told something that's kind of eyebrow raising or it's like, that's what they said about that thing or whatever, it's like, okay, what are they trying to say? It's like the coach that comes in, it's probably one of the reasons I'm okay at my job is the coaches that come in here are wound up because they've got a problem that they can't fix, that the kids not understanding, they're frustrated with the kid, they're frustrated with the problem. They're frustrated, all right. They're going to come in here and cuss around and stomp and holler sometimes, and it's like, okay, what's the problem? And then we get through the delivery of the message and get to the actual message. I think that's one of the things that's really kind of sometimes lost is sometimes. And you've been in marketing, and I've been in sales for a long time, too. So marketing is the fun part of the sales process. So we're two sides of the same coin in a lot of ways. If you guys do what you do and get the product name out there, I'll go out there and close those deals. But sometimes the message is correct, but the delivery lacks right enough appeal to be broadly accepted.

21:35 If that makes think.

21:39 I don't know how close you follow, like, Colorado, University of Colorado with Dion Sanders.

21:45 I don't know about sports, okay.

21:48 And that's fine. But, I mean, he's a pretty outspoken guy.

21:53 Okay?

21:53 Former pro athlete, very brash, very bold.

21:58 Okay.

21:58 But the message he's delivering is these kids are going to be accountablE. These kids are going to do the right things. They're going to treat people with respect. But he says it in a way that sets some people off to the side because they're like, oh, my gosh. You can't say that. Well, how he said it probably wasn't the best.

22:18 Right.

22:19 But what he was saying was right.

22:21 Yeah. Valid.

22:22 And so I think that's where a lot of folks, they lose the message in the material and don't maybe accept the fact that, okay, that's pretty accurate. Could he have said it better? Yeah, he could have said it a lot different ways and still got the same point across, but he chose to do it in a more brash or forward way. I mean, I think that's a situation. Know, Donald Trump's the same way. Some of the things he says are pretty accurate, but some of the ways he says it, not probably the way.

23:00 I would have chose to say read because I'm not a Trump fan, but I know a lot of people are. On the one hand, I had a boss that reminded me a lot of Trump. And I can see the charisma. I can see that people feel like he's telling it like it is and that that is appealing. I also like some of these interviews. The things that Trump supporters don't like about him are also the like, actually, that's the kind of picking on people for being weaker. Know some of more juvenile things or whatever. Some of the, with women. But his supporters sometimes those are also the things that they don't like, but they like other things. So that's why I'm like, okay, but what is it that you like? Okay. I can kind of understand, even though I don't agree, I can understand it.

23:58 Yeah. You understand why you would think that even though it may not be something you agree with. And I talk with folks across campus. They're all over the political spectrum as well. And we talk about things that everything from some of the LBGTQ stuff to all these different issues, they're on every campus, including the one that I'm on in the middle of Kansas. I mean, that's fine. And there's people that I open doors. Okay, for people, if I'm coming up to a door and you're Walking, I'm going to hold the door for you. That's just what I do. That's how I do it. But I offended a person one day doing that right here in Haynes, Kansas.

24:53 Yeah.

24:53 As a young person. I was walking up to a door. It was a couple of kids. Hello, ladies. And I opened the door. It was going to union.

25:01 Yeah.

25:02 And it just looked at me with complete disgust and just kind of gave me the, I'm like, you have a good day. I just don't understand. Sometimes, hey, now, they're probably more easily offended. I mean, they're younger. I don't know, but I don't know why I didn't understand it. It wasn't the time to sit there and ask them, hey, why did you give me that reaction?

25:36 Yeah, I know, but you kind of want to know. And also, I can imagine it. I don't know. Doesn't make you feel great for someone to. It's like that little bit of friction, and you're like, why? But why?

25:49 Yeah, exactly. That's why. I was like, I don't know what I did wrong. I just said, hello, ladies, and opened.

25:53 The door, and you didn't. But this is it, I think, my interpretation. I wasn't there. But, like, one, they're young. Young people love to be pissed off about things. And this is true always, right? Let's like to be pissed off about something. The other thing. Well, two, three things. Two, I think young people there used to be. I don't know, I feel like I respect people who are older, and I respect them coming from an older generation that does things differently. So even if I think as a female, I can open the door myself, yes, fine. But you acknowledge this person is doing something that was recognized as being a kind thing to do, and recognizing it was just someone being nice who's not expecting anything. But then the third thing is the identity politics of it, which I think is with young people now growing up on freaking social media, their reaction bonded them together more. It was more about demonstrating to their peers that they have this attitude or this idea about gender or whatever. If it had been one of them by themselves. You're saying it was a couple? Yeah, it had been one of them, they probably wouldn't have done. But this was an opportunity for them to show, like, we're on the same page about this, because we're, like, going to. So it's like, you maybe so identity all of this stuff.

27:32 Because I told my wife about it. I was like, I don't even know what I did. I can piss my wife off doing some pretty simple stuff, but this was somebody I was just holding the door for at the union.

27:44 Yeah, they probably saw a video. They're just figuring it out, especially now with all the gender stuff. It's just a very confusing time, I think. And I don't think people know how to act. They're so focused on the right way to act for how I self identify that they don't think, like, maybe this person was just trying to be nice. Maybe they're just trying to be nice. They're afraid of also being censored by their peers for not having the right. Like, outrage is the reaction of the day for young people right on either side. We're going to be outraged on the right and the left. And it's like, you don't agree with me, then you should die. It's, like, really extreme. The polarization that comes from this sense of constantly performing for social media, for your peers, for the world. It's like that people are so busy performing who they think that they should be that they stop to just be themselves and take for granted that people are just doing the best they can because life is hard. Partly it's just youth, though. It's like the teenager flipping the hair thing.

28:56 Yeah. And I chalk it up to that, but it's like, come on. It was one of those deals where it's like, I probably correctly assumed they were a couple, which was fine. I didn't have a problem with that. Now, I don't know if. Because I said, ladies, one of them got offended or whatever. I don't know. I'm not in that world. I don't try to piss people off. That's not my goal.

29:27 I know.

29:28 And so I wasn't offended by the reaction. It's like, okay, have a nice day.

29:36 I would feel a little bit. I don't know.

29:39 It's one of those deals where I just, okay, fine. But I can see where if that would have been a similar aged kid that hadn't been through the things I've done over the years and been the places that I've been, they could have been like, well, everybody that's that way is that way. Now they're painting with broad brushes again.

30:00 Right? That's exactly right. And, I mean, everybody has that impulse, right? If someone makes you feel bad for no reason, the way human brains work, it's like, it's easier. I'm not going to get hurt again. So I'm going to see someone that looks like that person coming towards me, and I'm going to have my guard up, because that's how our brains work. That's how in tribal times, or, like early man, we had to identify danger. We just say, okay, you look like this, or you seem like that kind of person. I have the same thing. I have to remind know if someone looks like, stereotypical, like, older white man, I don't know, maybe like a Trump supporter in this. Maybe I've had people try and engage me and talk about things very intense where I am not in agreement and kind of like, intense. And so then after that happens, it's like you're on guard for that to happen, and you're like, I don't want to get into this. And sometimes I will say, with the female male dynamic, when you're a young woman, you will get hit on a lot by older men. And if they are lesbians, and they may have been on guard, like, oh, this guy's saying, ladies, but what he's really saying is something like there's some sexual subtext or whatever.

31:28 It's the union ladies. It's okay.

31:31 Yeah, I'm not Buddhist, but I did read. When I quit drinking, I got really healthy, and I started reading about Buddhism, and that's when I started doing yoga and all this stuff. And one of the Buddhist tenets is like, you just can't assume. You can't assume you don't know in the mind and heart of somebody else. And you just treat people with lovingkindness because you basically have zero to lose by doing that. And you have everything to lose by putting a little anger or aggression into the world. It creates a snowball effect. And I try and that all the time. I might look at someone, think, I used to pride myself. I was like, I could tell person second after I met them if they're, like, cool or weird or going to be drama. No, I don't know anything. I know nothing. I try to just not have assumptions, not walk blindly into situations where I.

32:33 Think that there's not, where common sense.

32:36 Can override your assumption and listen to my gut, but also give people the benefit of the doubt. You just don't know if they had a bad day. There's a great example. This guy Tik Naan, who died not long ago. He's a Buddhist monk. And he has an example where maybe your friend was kind of mean to you today and you're really angry at your friend, and then you remind yourself that their friend's father is dying and that they're probably not their best self. That day, I thought, like, what a powerful example, because we all get so caught up in our own heads and we forget that other people are struggling. Life is hard. You just don't know what happened that morning or that day, that maybe they're not their best self.

33:19 Right? Yeah. I always try when I'm walking across campus, especially young people, they're always got their nose and their phones. They've always got headphones in or just staring at the ground or not paying attention and I always try to say hi to all of them.

33:38 Yeah. Sometimes they're probably, like, just to poke.

33:43 The bear, just to irritate them a little bit, and they get a startled look on there, like, where'd that noise come from? I've told people I'd love to walk around with a pool noodle and say, hey, pay attention to your surroundings. Walk through campus and tap people.

33:57 I feel bad. I feel bad for young people. And maybe this is like, maybe we're being, like, showing our age or something, because everyone who's older is like, the young people these days, but that's.

34:07 Right.

34:08 Feel like they're missing the reason that young people are so unhappy and they're so lonely and is that they're just, like, not connected to the world around them. And I feel like your job constantly is connecting you to the world, right? Like the physical world, farming, even athletics, people playing games, like human connection. I struggle. I mean, I work in front of a computer all day, and I work for myself. I don't have a team people person.

34:40 Right?

34:41 It's hard for me. I have to go for walks. I have to be in nature. I need to reconnect. And I just think people are growing up in front of screens. They don't even know what they feel that something is not right, but they don't know what it is, and they don't know how to fix it.

35:00 Right.

35:01 It makes me sad. I'm like, you're not going to find what you're looking for on your phone. Even I sometimes will end up Googling something, oh, I got to go for on a trip. And I start tapping away. Or it's like I'm looking for an answer in the phone that it's just not there. And that's when I have to put it away, far away. But that's why my daughter is not having a phone, or she has no tablet. We're like, no. We send her to a school where they do not have screens. I know that it's a struggle for me. I have to really turn on that part of my brain where I could look down at myself and be like, get off your freaking phone. You've been scrolling on Instagram. I'm jealous of your work. I wish that I was more in contact.

36:03 It's a pretty interesting area. When we were in the pandemic, we were sent home and all that stuff. I lasted about a week. My wife still works from home. She loves it. Yeah, but we were sent home, and about a week later, I was back in the office.

36:25 Yeah.

36:27 I couldn't take the fact that I was in a basement in my office, at the house and trying to solve all these different problems. But within two weeks, we were back, a lot of us in the office, because we're social creatures. And then at an event, we've got a few thousand people at our events. And so you have emotion, you have competition, you have sometimes alcohol involved. So, I mean, there's things that are factors that you have to address, and you can't do that again from a screen. I tell my own kids, and I tell the kids that I teach in my class, you've got to talk to people. You've got to talk to them and know that this is the first time you're talking to them. But you've got to have a conversation, be able to have a conversation with them so that you can learn about them, what they do, why they do it, how they can trend toward that profession, if that's what they want to do. All that stuff has to be done.

37:35 So why do you think? I feel like we have this in common, maybe that we want to get to know people and connect with people. And I feel like you're someone who, it sounds like you're able to kind of help others communicate, right? Like, you talk about translating the message and make it more palatable. And I feel like I do that a lot, too. I did it in marketing when I was an account manager, but then I do it now as well, like translating something highly technical and making it accessible or like this. Do you feel like there's something in your life, like your childhood, that made you the way that you are? What made you.

38:16 I don't know. Like I said, my dad was a teacher. My mom was a teacher. My dad farmed. And so I grew up in an educational setting like that. In other words, my dad would. He taught math at junior high, which probably like caging animals at that level. He did it for 22 years. And he was one of those teachers. If I go back home, I went back home last week. It's about four hour ride, and I still run the farm for him. My dad passed away several years ago, and so I farm the ground for my mom. She's still out on the farm. And so when I go to town, there will be somebody that my dad had taught that's older than me. I really liked your dad when he was teaching school, but he was a hard ass. Everybody knew he was a hard ass. He said he's not going to teach his own kids, so he never taught my brother and I, and so that was the one thing. But we heard all kinds of stories, and we had it at home, too, so we kind of knew we had a pretty good idea from being at home.

39:33 He was a hard ass on some stuff on this.

39:37 Yeah, but the respect, I think, is one of the things that he helped each kid and their area or what they were able to do and made them as good as he could make that kid. In other words, he didn't expect all the kids to do the math at this level necessarily. But just because you couldn't do it at this level didn't mean that you couldn't put in the effort to get your stuff up to a certain level and yield that person just as accountable as the kid that was doing a lot at a higher level. And he held everybody accountable at the same level relative to their ability. And that's where he was not afraid to tell somebody that was good at math that they needed to do better, just the same as somebody who wasn't. They needed to do better. He didn't care who you were or what you did. He just expected the best. For me, that was one of the things I think maybe I learned. I expect the kids that I teach in class, or I teach either marketing principles or management principles, 301 class here, or I've got a freshman seminar class, business of sports, that we started. It's a learning community deal, and that's the first year for it. And the learning community is a situation where there's a dozen kids, they take a couple of classes a semester together, plus their own majors, and they're all majors, but they all have an interest in sports. So we go and we have guest speakers. We zoom with. We have trips we take. We went to the Royals and KU a couple of weeks ago to introduce them to some alums or connections that I have that are at those venues and got them some experiences. And every one of them was a little different because one of them is construction management, one of them is accounting, one of them is marketing, one of them, I mean, they're all over the place, entrepreneurship. They're from all different kinds of backgrounds, and so they're all getting exposed to different, the same things, but they're going to take it at a different level based on what their interests aRe. Interesting.

41:40 So you're talking about, like, you kind of learn from your dad to meet people where they are, but also. Yeah, but to have standard. For me, I don't know. I think growing up, my sister's bipolar. My mom is maybe bipolar. I don't know. It's always been kind of like, what's going on? I felt like I sort of learned how to be able to. If somebody's a little extreme or somebody's a little intense or somebody, I can have sympathy or find out. Sometimes people just. You're like, what is underneath all of these strong emotions? What is under there? I guess I always said that I have a high tolerance for crazy. I've had friends who are out there. I don't know. I can see the good in them. I try to see the good in them and I try to see, like, it help working with clients. Right. Because sometimes you have clients who are. I have a client right now who is very intense and she can come across as pretty rude, but it's like I almost see that there's like a sadness there, that she's not happy in her life and she's not feeling like maybe she doesn't get the respect or whatever. I don't know. I have sympathy for her. I can find the sympathy. I don't know. And when I decided to do this, I just felt like, I believe that people have reasons for why they think the way they do, and maybe those views are different, but I like to find that common ground. I acknowledge that people have reasons for feeling the way that they do and thinking the way that they do.

43:22 Yeah. I think in my background, my dad and my uncle, who was his twin, they farmed together for a long time. They raised cattle. They did all these things. My brother and my two cousins, we did that growing up. And you learned that, okay, you played a football game on Friday night and you felt like you got run over by Saturday morning, but you had to get up and do these certain things. It built a resilience. He wasn't going to make me get up at five or six, but he wasn't going to let me sleep till noon. And so, yeah, you just had a long game and it was a road game, and so you got home at midnight or whatever. Well, yeah, you can sleep until seven or eight, but you're going to get out of bed, you're going to do some stuff. That was what we did. I guess my background is always, okay, well, let's get out and do something. I'd rather do something and do it wrong and know that I'm trying than to just lay in the bed and.

44:29 Know that nothing's done. I feel like there's too many young people and maybe, I don't know, maybe a lot of young men in particular, but it's both. They don't feel like they need to get out of bed or they don't know why they're getting out of bed. That does make me sad. People feel lost and they didn't grow up. My parents were relatively. I don't think they were strict. They were just like parents. That's what parents were like, go do something, and you did it. Mom was kind of like, she's the German mom. She's very like, let's do it the right way and all of that. But I think that was good. It gave me structure, and I knew that they loved me. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like compared to other parents, we are maybe more strict with my daughter, but we're not as strict as my parents were. And it's just that we want her to understand that you have to do the right thing and you have to think about other people, and it's not just what you want. And it's not just like I feel this way. I'm like, life is not like that, okay? Life is just do what you want. So if I don't teach that to her and some people, I don't know if they're teaching their kids, like, immediate gratification, I'm like, that's not going to serve you well as you get older.

45:51 No, not at all for people.

45:53 But sometimes I wonder.

45:55 Yeah, my wife is German as.

45:58 Ah, from Germany?

46:00 No, her great grandparents.

46:03 Okay, okay.

46:04 Both of her parents are. She's. There's a high German population around here in Ellis County. Well, our school for October Fest will cancel classes at 1130, and the president of the university taps the cake.

46:26 There you go.

46:27 On Friday. So they have a real High German population. I know exactly what you're talking about with the. It's got to be this way. I'm not that way. I am not that way. I'm going to go do it and it'll be close enough because I'm trying to do more things, but they want this thing done exactly like it needs to be. That sometimes gets me in a little trouble with her, but we've got a basic understanding of my abilities to do things exactly right, which is what she's expecting. We've developed that.

47:10 It'S good. My husband being in a relationship with someone who's different from you in that way, I think is good because I've had to accept that there are other ways to do his thing, let him do it. But I think I maybe motivate him a little bit. I'm like, let's do it. Let's get on top. I'm very like, let's get it done. And I got that from my mom. One of the things that my parents thought about when I was growing up was my dad is a procrastinator, and my mom was always, ow. And she's like, high energy. I am like her. My husband is like my dad. But I do think you can balance each other out a little bit.

47:59 Yeah, I believe that's the case with us. Because this is one of those deals where on the farming world, it drives her nuts. Because I think I'm going to plant this crop, but then the rain doesn't come. So now I'm not going to plant that because it's not going to grow. So I'm going to push it back and I'm going to go this. Well, you said you were going to do this thing. I can't now. I got to do it this other way. And so if it deviates from the plan, it's sometimes a little bit hard. But I've got a situation right now. I got 200 acres of sunflowers that the guy that was going to cut them for me, his combine burned up, and so he's out of commission. So I'm trying to find somebody to cut 200 acres of sunflowers. Well, I thought they already would have been done, but work out that way. So you scrounge around and you find somebody and you talk to people, and eventually you find somebody that will cut them for you.

48:53 Yeah.

48:53 Just little problems like that. But it's interesting. I think it's cool that she's got that structure piece. I haven't balanced a checkbook in years, and she balanced it to the penny. And it's one of those deals.

49:09 That's great. Yeah. You bring your different skills to the table.

49:13 Yeah, I agree.

49:15 Well, I know the clock is ticking down on us.

49:19 Oh, yeah, that's the clock. But you can go past it. It doesn't matter.

49:24 Okay, good. I didn't know if it was going to close down. I do have a meeting at 1230, so I have like ten more minutes.

49:31 No, that's fine. We've got kind of, I think, a common denominator, you and I, as far as some of the things that we experience. And I think it's pretty cool. And that's why I like this program. It's cool to see that type of stuff and learn about it from my perspective, whether it's out where we're at. We farm in a very obviously rural area.

50:05 Yeah.

50:05 So I've given tours on my farm from other people from back east or wherever. They'll come out and see what we're doing or what we're trying to accomplish with COVID crops or different methods that we use to try to be more sustainable, be more responsible for the resources that we've been given, those types of things. And so we'll have people come out and to have that experience and see the scale and see why we're doing it the way we're doing it is really important. I think some of those things that you have in your part of the world, they're mind blowing to me. So when I go back east, I always like to look at those things in different ways and see the people locally, how they handle stuff, because everybody's community is different, everybody's individuals are different. But there's also a pretty common thread that everybody has that we want to be better than what we were before.

51:10 Yeah, absolutely. I feel that way as well. And I think it's fascinating, the idea of farming. Like I said, I'm envious because I wish I could do something other than what I do. Sometimes I can do nothing with my hands. I'm not a handy person, but I've looked at crazy stuff. There was like, become an FBI agent or something, and I was like, I don't know if I really want to do it for. And I was like, but the idea of not working in front of a computer, and then I found out I was too old. I'm like, well, 37 is like the. I'm too freaking old to even do that. But I was just desperate. Like, sometimes I'll be just searching for something that's not sitting in front of a computer. So I think it's great. And I feel like we don't have a lot of time to talk about this, but farming seems like a really difficult industry, that it's highly industrialized, and a lot of farmers struggle to compete. When you've got all this automation, you'd like the technology.

52:22 You would like the technology that I have.

52:24 Yeah.

52:26 I have auto steer on my tractor. I push a button, it drives it in a straight line for me. I don't touch the wheel until the end of the field. And I turn it around, it does variable rate fertilizer, variable rate seeding. There's a lot of efficiencies that come with that technology. So in technology, since you like that sort of technology stuff, you'd get a kick out of some of that stuff. Yield monitors. And it tells me how many bushels it's making when it's coming into the combine, it's pretty cool stuff. If you're ever in Midwest, you let me know. Yeah, glad to take you guys out there, let you run around on track, drive around on tractor or whatever you want to know. I don't know. What does your husband do?

53:09 So he was a teacher, and he did that for a year. It was like a program where you agree to teach at like a city school, low income, in exchange for them paying for a lot of your masters. And so we're at a neighborhood that is transitioning, gentrifying, whatever you want to say. In Richmond City and the school, it was just too intense. Like, it was 30 kids, so it was a ton of kids in one class, some with special needs that had no support, and he just couldn't teach. It was crazy. And then he found out he had a brain tumor, which is benign and not growing, but the stress of everything. And then COVID hit. He stopped teaching. Now he does instructional design. So he works for a company that develops kind of like interactive e learnings to explore different career opportunities.

54:09 Okay.

54:09 Not just college track either. He did one on HVAC. He did one on agricultural business. Actually, John Deere was a sponsor of it. So sometimes they partner with companies that help. So he builds these. Yeah, it's basically programs to help kids figure out what they might want to do. He's also in front of a computer, also researching and writing. We have that in common, for sure. I started out as a journalism major. I switched to English. But he did get his degree in journalism. But we like to dig deep and learn about things and just cram all the information in and then have it come out in some form.

54:52 Okay. Yeah. So he's the one who's making my instruction manuals and stuff like that on there you go.

54:59 Probably, yeah. But he grew up in a rural area where he, like, I grew up in suburbs. He talks about it, how he dreamed of living in the suburbs when he was a kid because he didn't have friends that he could walk to their house and play with. He was like, I don't know, maybe in middle school or something. He was old enough to bike, and he would bike a distance to meet up with his friends. But the part of Virginia that he was in was more rural, for sure.

55:36 We learned to drive out there. Our kids will start driving at ten, 1112 years old, driving cars.

55:43 Yeah.

55:46 There'll be kids that are twelve years old driving tractors.

55:48 That's very different then. So he was telling me he taught fifth grade. There was a kid that stole his uncle's car and drove it to school and was in fifth grade. I was like, what? Very different kind of, like, driving thing.

56:01 Driving.

56:02 Funny one got hurt. That's kind of funny. But, yeah, I can imagine there's some freedom and independence that you get living in the open where you're not going to run into space.

56:19 It's definitely different. Definitely different.

56:21 My father in law, he's like, I lived in New York, so to me, Richmond is not a big city. It's, like, barely a city. And my father in law talks about Richmond, like, oh, I don't know how you live in that big city, and it's just all relative. Right? Yeah.

56:39 Distances as well. Where we're at, Hayes is the hub of Western Kansas. It's got a regional medical center about 100 miles radius as far as how far people come to come in and do shopping and things of that nature.

56:54 Oh, wow.

56:54 Where I grew up, it was 50 miles to Walmart.

56:58 Wow. Yeah.

56:59 McDonald's is 50 miles. You were pretty self sufficient.

57:04 How did that feel? Did you like that? Or were you like, I wish things were closer or just what you knew or. I don't know.

57:11 It was just what I knew when I went to college. I went to Colby Community College for two years and was playing there. And they had a McDonald's right up the road, like 2 miles. Awesome. Walmart in the.

57:25 Exactly.

57:26 Exactly. And then I moved to Haynes when I came and played here, and they had two McDonald's and a Walmart, and it's like, oh, my gosh. But I've lived in bigger places. I lived in Savannah and Omaha and Lubbock and Midland, different places, so gotten used to bigger fun. I don't want to make you late for your meeting.

57:48 Oh, I know. Yeah, I got. Well, thank you so much. This is cool.

57:53 Well, you got my number.

57:54 Yeah. Hit me up.

57:56 Well, I'm in leadership sorghum, so we'll be in the DC area for a few days, and I think that's the end of January. So I get up there periodically to talk to the folks in the agriculture world, too, so I kind of split my time.

58:15 What an interesting.

58:16 Oh, yeah. I always try to stay busy with stuff. So you've got my number if you want to visit again, we set up another one of these. I'm glad to do it. Anytime.

58:24 All right. Thank you so much, Brad.

58:25 All right. You have a good day.

58:27 You, too. Bye.