EXPERIENCE 219 | Geopolitics, Russia-Ukraine, Regional Economics, and Competitive Advantage in Business and Life with Constantin Gurdgiev, Ph.D. and Associate Professor of Finance at the Monfort College of Business at UNC.

In this episode of the LoCo Experience Podcast, I hosted Constantin Gurdgiev, Ph.D. and Associate Professor of Finance at the Monfort College of Business. Constantin outlines his work in the fields of economics, geopolitics, and finance, sharing insights from his research on geopolitical risks, tariff impacts, and financial market volatility. He also discusses his teaching and research positions in the United States and Ireland, emphasizing his efforts to integrate real-world applications into academia through internships and student engagement.  

Constantin delves into the complexities of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, drawing on his expertise in Russian and Irish economics. He discusses the historical and geopolitical context that has contributed to the ongoing tension, and critiques the western approach to handling the situation. The conversation also touches on broader themes like the weaponization of economic systems, challenges to U.S. economic hegemony, and the multidimensional nature of modern global conflicts.

Constantin also reflects on regional development issues specific to Northern Colorado, including regulatory burdens, the high cost of living, and the need for regional cooperation between cities to maintain competitive advantage. He suggests practical steps such as reducing state-level taxes and regulatory burdens to foster business growth. The episode concludes with personal reflections on his family and life experiences.  It’s an intriguing journey, and I hope you’ll join me in enjoying my conversation with Constantin Gurdgiev.

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In this episode of the Loco Experience Podcast, I hosted Constantine rggi, PhD and associate Professor of Finance at the Montfort College of Business. Constantin outlines his work in the fields of economics, geopolitics, and finance, sharing insights from his research on geopolitical risks, tariff impacts, and financial market volatility. He also discusses his teaching and research positions in the United States and Ireland emphasizing his efforts to integrate real world applications into academia through internships and student engagement. Stanton delves into the complexities of the Ukraine Russia conflict, drawing on his expertise in Russian and Irish economics, he discusses the historical and geopolitical context that has contributed to the ongoing tension and critiques, the Western approach to handling the situation. The conversation also touches on broader themes like the weaponization of economic systems, challenges to US economic hegemony and the multidimensional nature of modern global conflicts. Constantin also reflects on regional development issues specific to Northern Colorado, including regulatory burdens, the high cost of living, and the need for regional cooperation between cities To maintain competitive advantage, he suggests practical steps such as reducing state level taxes and regulatory burdens to foster business growth. The episode concludes with personal reflections on his family and life experiences. It's an intriguing journey and I hope you'll join me in enjoying my conversation with constant. Welcome back to the Loco Experience Podcast. My guest today is Constantin IV and he is an associate professor of economics, among other things at UNC. And I saw him speak at a Biz West event last fall, I guess, or early in the new year. Early in the new year. Exactly, Kirk. Yeah. So thanks for taking the time to be here. My pleasure. My pleasure. And uh, for probably the most of my listeners that have never heard of you, uh, could you just set the stage a little bit? Uh, it looks like you got your fingers in a lot of pies. Uh, I don't know about whether the, whether they're pies or mouse traps. This is a big question always, isn't it? Uh, so first of all, little correction. Yes. So I'm associate professor of finance, oh, finance. Actually, I Montford College of Business at UNC. Uh, that's my main job. Economics is a part of UNC as well, but they're not part of MCB. I am a economist by trading. So my PhD is actually, you know, for my scenes is macroeconomics and finance. Okay. Theoretical stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I used to study economics. I do some economic analysis these days because I'm kind of in a weird area of finance that a lot of people miss when they are operating in a local economy. Um, I, I work in a geopolitical. Risks and geopolitical uncertainty. Yeah. Yeah. Part of finance. So it's macro stuff. So we look at the, you know, whole country's moving, the whole market's moving, um, wars, conflicts, sanctions, um, all these things. Tariffs. Tariffs, yes. More on, this is more of a trade factor, but then of course, how does that impact finance? In fact, I have a couple of graduate students currently doing some work. So in addition to teaching at UNC, I also have a visiting position in Ireland, in change college, Dublin. And I have graduate students there. So they do a lot of work with me, uh, in terms of the research and tariffs. Yes, absolutely. Like out of 15 students that I supervised this year, there, two of them actually are doing work on tariffs. Hmm. So it's a pretty big deal. It is huge deal, of course. I mean, look, look at the markets. Yes. I mean, uh, we've had an absolutely amazing period. I don't remember who said it. You know, that, you know, sometimes, you know, nothing happens in decades and then decades happen in one day or one week. Yeah. We had that one week. Exactly. Uh, last week was unprecedented by any comparatives. But then again, when you think about the beg from the, the last 25 years or so of our history are very much unprecedented. You have the global financial crisis, which was out of traditional sync for the traditional crisis type of things, or market reactions to things. Uh, it was systemic. It was very deep. Uh, then we went, was financed, uh, deeply. Exactly. Yeah. Not only finance, but real economy. Yeah. I mean, the great recession, um, you have to go back in nomenclature to great depression. Mm-hmm. To see something like that. So it's once in a hundred years event. Then we had covid pandemic. I mean, my God, if you war in my field, supply chain descriptions would actually kind of think like. How can we contrive something that great. This is so good to study. As terrible as it is, it is. Exactly. You're correct. You know, we study things which are dismal, you know, and this was pretty dismal event. And then of course we have geopolitical crisis going on since then. 2022 Ukraine, Russia war, um, you know, you have the 20 16, 20 17, 20 20 periods in terms of the elections. Um, and then we have new election this year, last year, 2024, uh, which are historically unprecedented. Yeah. Whether it is a political science history, it is history, history, uh, its economic policy, history, it doesn't matter. So when we entered the last probably three weeks span of time, there were some indicators of what was happening. Some of the market participants started reacting in anticipation of that. In other words, they took the administration on this, you know. You know, for what they were saying, okay. Mm-hmm. As being truthful and intending to do these types at that roughly speaking scale and all, but by and large, even those market participants who had this kind of, you know, foresight Yeah. Could not expect the level and the uncertainty and the volatility of the decision making that we have witnessed. Right. Oh, and it's on, it's off. It's on, it's on, it's off. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's delayed for 30 days, it's delayed for 90 days. Yeah. If we wore a piece of steel, we would turn into Damascus quality steel, you know, uh, the Epic stuff. Yes. What was that? The Samurai Sword Arian or something like that from the Game of Thrones. Yes. I forgot the name. Uh, that they use there. But we're not still, we're human beings and so we are scared. We are uncertain. We are panicked. Yeah. Um, behaviorally we are imperfect our decision making in kind of circumstances as you can see from markets that go like this. Correct. Absolutely. Yes. And we kind of think of the markets as more rational than the average agent. Well, we kind of saw that, you know, they're not fair enough. I, I was actually listening to Dave Ramsey on whose podcast? Oh, uh, Sean. Sean Ryan Show. Okay. I think, yeah. Yeah. I think something like that. Um, something Ryan. Anyway, uh, and he was talking about how kind of the, the Reagan pull pulling us out of the, the recession of the late seventies a little bit was so much more about. People's mindsets shifting than it was actually about this regulation or this tax or this thing. Um, and he was optimistic that once we can stop the gyrations, maybe people will kind of, you know, sentiment is huge. Yeah. Absolutely. Beyond the doubts, we as humans react to that, that's called leadership. Uh, in fact, most of the politics, most of the political leadership, when you go back in history and look at it, it's not about capability, it's about projection, it's about message. Reagan had happened to have the correct message. If you look back today at what Reagan was saying about, say, for example, immigration policies, uh, what he was saying about economy, what he was saying about the balance and act between the winners in the economy and the losers in the economy. And then you lay the path beyond Reagan because of course eight years of Reagan have been transformative. And they laid the foundation for the kind of what we call compassion conservatism. Mm-hmm. Of the early 1990s. Of course it all dies in the mid 1990s. He has with new Gingrich revolution and compassionate part disappears. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then, you know, so when you look at that progression, Reagan really strikes a great comparative. He is a big transformative type of a president who was mostly not. Not resting on the competency of execution, but rather on the quality of messaging and conviction. Hmm. Um, we Ms. Reagan today. Definitely. Yeah. Um, and I'm not saying that because I would approve of Reagan's policies being deployed today. Some of them are meaningful. Again, remember that Reagan was the last president we had who have enacted substantial enough, fundamental enough immigration reform. Hmm. Which was an immigration reform, which reinforced our ethos of this nation. Yeah. The ethos of the melting pot. The ethos of opportunity land. Yes. Um, and then did it, like, was it restricted from there? Or just too many people wanted to sign up for it over time and No, it's not that. Where did the system break down? I mean, the system broke down because it became, there's no, no perfect system can survive through the test of time because time changes things. Mm-hmm. The flows have changed of migrants. The objectives of the migrants have changed. We needed to keep the system adjusting to that. We needed reforms after Reagan. There was no reform of the immigration policy at all. We had kind of patchwork, you know, kind of in a old where it was clearly broken. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. We were, you know, we were first put in plaster on basically, you know, like razor cuts. Yes. Uh, then on shark bites. Yeah, the plaster didn't change. We still were applying. It just wasn't up for the job anymore. No, no. You couldn't hold that. Uh, we knew that because the entire immigration reform has ended, culminated in daca and you know, it culminated in basically if you use the parlance of the 1990s Bill Clinton's policies. Yes. Don't ask, don't tell. We have these people here. We would like to normalize them. We can't normalize them. They deserve to be normalized. Right. We can't normalize them. They should be here. We can't normalize them, but let's pretend that that's okay. Right. You know, and so, you know, in the end, the dreamers, you know, um, and in the end that was the effectively the nail in the coffin of the, in my view as an outsider coming into the United States of what was the great promise, the shining, you know, city on the hill, um, the torch that has led the countries and societies to transformation, not only in terms of the outward mobility of people sending them to the United States, but also internal mobility of people and internal political changes as well. So. It seems like our populations in the US have become, you know, and maybe it's for lack of recessions and things, uh, but more reluctant to move around for opportunities and to leave the inner city crappy economies. One of the things that's move to North Dakota and working on oil well, you know, whatever. Well, it's not so much moving to North Dakota and working on an oil well. Okay. I mean, you, you are striking something. You're touching upon something that is empirical regularity, which has transformed or changed the balance of economic power and economic dynamism between the continents, uh, over the last say 50 years. If you go back to the 1990s, United States is an example of the high internal mobility of people, as you mentioned, people looking for opportunities. Yeah. It doesn't mean going to North Dakota, it means a doctor moving from, say for example, rural Texas to the urban, uh, yeah. New Jersey. Okay. Bringing Fort Collins population Correct. Up from 50 to 150. And, but, but also when you talk about the population numbers, it is a mobility which was driven by opportunity. Mm-hmm. It was mobility of the younger middle class. Yeah. Lower middle class. Okay. That go west young man mentality. Exactly. Bingo. You've got it. Okay. What happened in this century is that with the Great Recession and even before the Great Recession, with the cost of housing rising mm-hmm. With the pressures in the cost of living, um, pressures of a cost of education. And healthcare. All of those three major expenditures that happen over the life cycle that we have have depressed mobility of people, a depressed social mobility of people and economic mobility of people. Fewer people move today from the lower middle class to the upper middle class than before. Fewer people move today from, say, for example, the one location to the next location. Yeah. Covid Pandemic a little bit disrupted that, but that kind of was very short term. Well, and the ability for remote work and stuff, you know, that's where Covid moved Oklahoma Covid for the cheap living, but keeping their job in San Francisco. Uh, exactly. Um, and that, that was the only part of the departure. When you look at other continents, where you look at Asia Pacific, for example, where the kind of the breakdown, economic reduction of the. Ancy of nationalism mm-hmm. Has led to the greater mobility of people. You look at Europe where the European unification process and the European Union has fostered, it's not just European. Yeah. It adds a lot of liquidity to their opportunities. Bingo. Exactly. But it's also liquidity to ability to move. Mm-hmm. She zone the polls all go to Germany for college. Correct? Correct. And I remember I was in European Union at the time, living, um, when Poland became the part of the European Union and the debate that was happening right before, before that session, uh, before 2004, where the people from those countries come in should be allowed all of the rights of working privileges, ability to, you know, access social welfare nets and supports and healthcare supports and things like that. And I was at the front of that debate as well in Ireland, where we were kind of caught in between, uh, as a society In the end, Ireland made that decision that people coming into European Union should have immediate to all of the benefits of being a part of the European Union. It Great. Gave a huge boost to Irish economy. Sure. And you had so much skills coming into the country. So much. Oh, their standard of living has like Yeah, crazy. Exactly. Increase of course, 30 year period. That's true. But that was, you know, but they were super poor before that. There's a lot of, there, there's a lot of changes that have happened before. So the ES of 2004 and subsequent additions to the European Union and the mobility within the European Union has benefited Ireland beyond any belief. Any belief. Yeah. When you look at actually microcosm of Colorado, in a way, the history of Colorado compared to, say, for example, the history of Wyoming, um, is indicative of exactly the same dynamics you have. Colorado has always been more open to the economic development, to the mobility of people, more welcoming to people coming in. Yeah. Well, the weather's way nicer building here. Well, yeah. Mountains are better. And I look, don't, you know, fly fishing is better. I can talk about that. Yes. That's, there's a reason I live in Colorado as well. Yes. Um, but beyond everything else, there's one thing that you want, you want people to come in on the basis of the merit selection. Mm-hmm. You want people to come in to pursue the dream. You want people to come in to build their own, build new things, add value. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And we've benefited through that in Colorado's history in the past. It's changing today's migration in the last probably say three to four years. Mm-hmm. We can see the pivotal change. We have more over all the community coming in. Mm-hmm. The younger community has been pushed out to the east. Um, and problem people's kids have moved here from California. Yes. And now they have kids of their own. So the grandparents moved here from That's okay. Whatever. That's not the problem. The problem becomes when the people's kids start moving out of Colorado. Mm-hmm. I see. And that is something that we're witnessing today. It's already starting. Okay. We already have it. Say for example, PSD school district there reductions in terms of the kids enrolls, you know, they overestimated the impact. They kind of. Got too cautious in their own planet. So that's a little bit of a correction there, but you can see that trend happening. The problem when that is repeated, when that process continues over, say decade plus, we going to where risk can get to the point like the rest of the United States that we become ossified. Yeah. And when you become ossified, you become less and as competitive and measuring that is hard. Measuring the competitiveness is hard. What is Colorado doing wrong, if I may interject? Oh, oh, well, I mean, uh, okay. Or is it just running out momentum? I it's not so much, I know, I don't think it's so much as something that is what Colorado is doing wrong, but rather from my perspective, what Colorado is not doing. So we were driving from Salt Lake City this weekend. Mm-hmm. It's a long drive. Yeah. Yeah. Should have been listening to the Local Experience podcast. Well, you know, it's kind of my, you know, my better half is kind of my local experience podcast. So two of us were talking about this. She keeps you busy. Um, we were talking exactly about this and she's a professional in marketing. Um, you know, she does strategical marketing advisory in the beverages industry. Okay. And so the two of us were talking about this, I'm a big fan of organic local growth. What we mean by this is that it is growth, which starts on the basis of the demand locally, and it organically finances itself instead of attracting high speed growth rates. Yeah. By bringing in cap capital from the outside, it organically gradually grows, but it grows at fast enough rates to actually. Escape the velocity or escape the pool or the gravity rather. Mm-hmm. To gain escape velocity, to escape that gravity of the immediate local market. Yeah. Yeah. And what I think of Colorado is not doing enough, is that it is not creating the momentum in the core sectors where we can be super competitive and super innovative. Um, and I'll mention those sectors that I think, you know, please. Yeah. Um, in terms of growing internal, local talent and in turn local, um, enterprise. Yeah. Whether it is for profit enterprise, for non-profit enterprise. So the sectors, I mean, I actually AgriFood it's very important. High value added tremendously, big universe of AgriFood. We think of AgriFood as farmers, but it isn't, it's not just farmers. It's, its a processing of food. Yeah. It's the creation of new types of food. It is also research and development. It's associated marketing, it's associated biotech. Yeah. You start going through the lines of enterprises and areas that support the proper AgriFood sector. Again, I fall back on Ireland because I spent 16 years there. Great example. High value added agriculture, high value added food production, the country, which started with having effectively no cuisine of its own to be in a heavyweight in global markets. You can buy Irish AgriFood products today in the shelves. In the, in Colorado. That's it. You can't buy Colorado goods out there. Yeah, that's the problem. Okay, so that's one stepping stone. But there is other associated sectors. So for example then food retailing. Right. And transportation restaurants. Yeah. Okay. Transportation. You right, completely. There's associated things with that. Hospitality. Yeah. Entertainment sector. Okay. Integrating our natural assets such as mountains, for example. Yes. Mm-hmm. And everything that goes with it together with the food sector, with the drink sector, which we have very healthy in terms of beers. Mm-hmm. We are, we have a very nation weak, but trying to rise wine production sector, which is very interestinghmm. I'm fascinated by that. And again, because of my better half, I am blessed to be able to go to the Governor's cup, love and enjoy and meet people who are passionate, who are great. They're trying, they at the very beginning compared to, say for example, the French Italians, you know, the Californians, they're not there, but can they get to that level? Yeah, they can. Because they have passion, because they have talent. Yeah. Yeah. It will take generations. So supporting this type of the organic development, organic growth that starts small, starts locally anchored. Mm-hmm. You travel to somewhere. There, you know, there's couple places. Yeah. Those wine reasons, Palisade. Exactly. They weren't selling anything outside of Colorado 10, 15 years ago mostly. And that's fine. Yeah, that's fine. But now they are let people come in here and that's how a lot of, for example, if you take big production regions, like say Pa Robles in California. Mm-hmm. Pa Robles started by selling grapes to Napa and to Sonoma producers because they could grow great grapes, but they couldn't make great wine necessarily. Mm-hmm. Though, right. A joint in Pastor Robles is Shalon, you know, which was a part of the, you know, um, challenge of the, of Paris, you know? Okay. Um, you know, of course, you know, so you have kind of some individual producers like that. But by growing grapes, they started acquiring the expertise. So by, I would say eighties, they start getting to production of their own wine. They start with small volumes. They start organically selling it at the vineyards and to their own clients lists. You had to travel there to discover them. Once you traveled and discover them, you became the customer. The word of mouth and things like that. Mm-hmm. It's now a multi-billion dollar industry there. Mm. It is a rival to the major producers like Monterey, for example, and Central Coast. It is the, certainly has beat, you know, I think Santa Barbara area. Okay. Um, and it is kind of the third largest producer on the west coast. Yes. Yeah. That's neat. But it's also the quality of the production. So for example, if you think about kind of the scale of things. Yes. Uh, back in the 1970s, you would buy maybe a vineyard or 1980s, uh, a vineyard there for 3 million,$4 million. Okay. Uh, I think last year there was a, Dow Brothers sold the vineyard for$900 million. Oh. And it's not a huge vineyard and you can't even get one for 20 million. No, no, I mean, no, no. Forget it. 50, 1500 you might get like a backyard for 20 million. You know? I mean, you might park the tractor, you know, half an acre. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So it's not, Dow Brothers is not a very big, huge kind of buy if you want footprint, but you can buy their stuff everywhere. And it is a high end wine. It is a high quality wine. It's a rival to the big European producers can. Is there that much margin in it? I guess if you got the really good reputation, it doesn't cost that much more economic, more economics of wine making a very, kind of very complicated, right. If you can sell it for 200 bucks a bottle as well, you know, that does a lot of margin. You can produce some things for 200, uh, dollars a bottle. I think the kind of the bulk of it would be in a 50 60 territory, which is sufficient enough margin, you know? Yeah, yeah. Um, but it is also, a lot of that is based on auxiliary additional sales. Sure. You know, beyond wine, there is events and things like that as well. Um, a lot of it is based on a brand reputation. Uh, brand reputation is important. Brand capital is super important. In finance, for example, we have difficulty valuing those things because we always need to attach the dollar amount. Mm-hmm. Uh, that's something that I love working with my students. You know, own and give them the appreciation and understanding of how complex the forms of capital we really face today. Yeah. It isn't just about a loan. It is about what is the underlying asset supporting network loan. Yeah. What are you acquiring? We used to think in terms of buildings, we used to think in terms of machinery and equipment. Sure. Not really. We now think in terms of the brands, we now think in terms of the access to the capital. Think of Nvidia. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Nvidia is a great example. Doesn't have factories. Yeah. It's entire value. Contractors is in its own designs, in its own patents, its own intellectual property. You can't touch that. Right. You can't really physically move it from one file to another file. Yeah. From one side of the room to another side of the room. You can ship it though across the borders, and you can find locations in domiciles for it. Where you would extract the greatest value. And again, you know, you think of, say for example, Ireland, Holland, Denmark, these are big traditional locations for the offshore and domicile of intellectual property. Mm-hmm. They hold vast amounts of intellectual property for pharmaceutical companies. Sure. For the companies like Nvidia, for other tech companies and so forth. I mean, Colorado, actually, by the way, when going now, from the hospitality sector, from things that we kind of think of traditionally, oh, this is just past services, which is not true, should not be seen as such because it is high value added service. It can be high, not just high margin, but also significant volume. So the revenue streams from it can be significant employment effects. We can go also to the more modern economy and we can look at where Colorado is really successful and so far has been competitive, but it's been pressured. Mm. Airspace, for example. Mm-hmm. Okay. Um, in the aerospace area, we're competing with the likes of Texas. We're competing with the likes of, say, California, how we're going to compete when the scale in those two locations alone. And then of course we also have the Washington State of Washington where the scale there is so much greater, bigger Right. Than it is in Colorado. And that gravity just kind of draws those Exactly. Smart people to that place. Yes. Partly that's true. And they also have policies to do so. Well, California, less so Texas now. Much more so of course, you know, we have Georgia for example, which is trying to incentivize that Alabama. Yeah. You know, you have, there's a heat and competition Yeah. Around the United States. Well, like I just came back from Hollywood. I was in Orange County over the weekend and we went up to Hollywood for the, or LA for the day. Yep. And walked the, the, the boardwalk there and stuff. And it was like, just thinking about how. Hollywood can keep its mojo at this point in time. You know, you got states like Georgia states, like Montana and Idaho bidding to have films and crews there. Their actors are a lot cheaper and a lot more eager to sign on for nondescript roles and stuff. And so the, the monopoly of Hollywood is, seems like it's at least being threatened. Hollywood doesn't make money by shooting movies. Right. I mean, Hollywood makes money by having intellectual property in those movies. Mm. This is why Hollywood doesn't make movies inside Hollywood anymore. They're all over the place. From our point of view though, it's really great to see that finally we're starting to recognize that the idea that we have the Rocky Mountains in the movie, but it's really in Canada film. Right, right. It's really something fundamentally screwed up. Yes. So I'm really glad that we're bringing, trying to bring more and more incentives, more proactive incentives in terms of supporting film production here in Colorado. Again, a great sector which can be again scaled if you just a location for production, that's one thing. Fulfillment. You need to have production. You need to have studios. You need to have compute. Compute. People know how to do that. Facilit. Correct. You need to have talent. We have computational facilities. We have ability to bring more of those. So for example, things like data centers. Data centers, we always think of, Hey, that's it. Yes. But without data centers, you cannot have processing. Yeah. Shipping it, sending it across the satellite networks is time consuming, lag dependent. Mm-hmm. And expensive. So having the support of the backbone of the infrastructure here probably is a good idea. And if you start with the, with that, you start going down, of course, how do we provide water for cooling? Mm-hmm. Okay. How do we provide energy? What sources of energy we're using? Yeah. What the cost of energy. So all of a sudden these traditional sectors were always thought of, Hey, you know, like this is a dirty industrial stuff behind the scenes. It becomes closely aligned with modern sectors of production and investment. Yes. So it is a part of the economic development that is very hard to crack. One of the things I've, uh, said a, a number of times over the last few years is that in, in these days, especially during like Covid, when they created so much money, you know, flooded the system almost with it to keep the liquidity going and whatever. But energy is more like money than money is like money anymore. Because you can't just print energy, you gotta pull it outta the ground or suck it outta the sun or whatever. And all those data centers and things like that, you know, computers sound nice and clean and stuff, and all the little stuff that happens behind the screen when I push buttons. But it's really, you know, a bunch of coal and natural gas mostly being burned so that those data centers can spin. Tremendous. Yes, absolutely. And the, uh, energy mix in, uh, here in Colorado is very problematic. Yes. Because of course, us using. To reduce the cost of energy using coal, um, is definitely questionable. We have natural gas, one of the very big producers, we should be using that. More of that. Um, there's a big concern from our point of view that the scale of the, say for example, AI quantum computing, um, and general computing as well. Mm-hmm. Uh, scale of use and demand for energy is so much higher Right. Than anything we have experienced before, that really you're looking at the base generation, which has to rely on nuclear. Mm-hmm. You can't use either fossils or intermittent, you know, kind of need to bring more base. You have to bring big base and you have to bring nuclear problem. From our perspective for nuclear is cooling. Yeah. And that is, but that is something that we are overcome as a technology develops. Yes. So, for example, things like small modular reactors, much less, uh, scaled, you know, cooling. Cooling, you can have coolant, which is based on the basically reservoir. Yeah. As opposed to the traditional cooling. You have to have a massive river or you have to have a massive supply of ocean water or something like that. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. So, um, that gives us a little bit of an advantage. So we should start thinking about. How do we integrate the modular reactors into the energy production and grid here? If you look for example, also at the other sources, like say water again. Yeah. We should start thinking more proactively how do we create the water sources and access to water and quality of water, which is filtering of course. And bringing it up to standards that can support modern technologies. For example, fab manufacturing for the processors, microprocessors chips and things like that. Yes. Yeah. It require a lot of equivalent. All of them. A lot of them are going into Arizona. Mm-hmm. Where there is no water. Yeah. Why? Well, I mean because of the incentives, they have very strong incentives and because they now have developed the processes where it's almost like sealed loop use of water. Okay. So you do not have to rely on a continuous. Well, and I suppose evaporative cooling is actually pretty efficient there when it's a hundred degrees and Exactly 6% relative. So we should be at that race as well. We should be at those games as well. We got the quantum computing corridor here, which is awesome. Which is great to have. Okay, great. Win to the governor, great win to the people in Denver. Fantastic. But we now need to branch out of it to provide the support for computational facilities, for not just quantum computing, but all of their a joining and related industries. Yeah. Yeah. So you can see how many opportunities we have. Yeah. Exploring those opportunities is, we're blessed with them. Okay. Exploring those opportunities requires certain way of changing the way we do things. One of the things that I observed here, and I observed that on the relationship between, say, for example, within the northern Colorado, between the cities mm-hmm. Within the northern Colorado. Yeah. Um, we were exploring a possibility of getting an NSF grant, uh, to support the kind of ideation stage of the policy formation for the integrated development of infrastructure systems within the northern Colorado. Yeah. And, uh, the whole thing came to a screeching halt because the different cities don't wanna talk to each other. It's almost like we want to build our own little empire. Yeah. And then the little empire becomes, I used kind of the example of Pueblo, uh, used to be a larger city in Colorado is Colorado, is that right? Yeah, it was, it was actually bigger before than, um, Colorado Springs. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Um, and it kind of decayed over a period of time due to internal and external neglect effectively. Okay. It became a kind of, you know. Uh, kind of a spot for high unemployment, for example. Yeah. Um, it also became a city where there was much less of the different diverse development in terms of the economic development. Yep. Um, more linked to the combination of the kind of, you know, traditional sectors. Mm-hmm. And then the Colorado Springs took the wind out of it completely. Right, right. Okay. So, well, and do you think being closer to Denver helped Colorado Springs anyway? Of course it does. Yeah. Beyond the doubts, but can you pair that? Can you respond to that? Yeah. Through the more coordinated, I wasn't actually suggesting that Puebla should have competed with Colorado Springs directly. I'm saying Colorado Springs and Pueblo should have cooperated more. Mm. We are beyond that kind of economy where you can have a very competitive, adversarial relationship. Yeah. It is more about the economy, where you have to find mutual ways to build added value, create added value. So my argument has been, for example, that in order for the northern Colorado to thrive and survive into the next, say couple of decades if not longer, beyond that, we have to compete with Denver. We have to compete with Denver Boulder corridor. Yeah. In order to do so, we can afford not to cooperate across the border with Cheyenne. Mm-hmm. We cannot afford not to cooperate with the likes of, between the Fort Collins, Greeley, and Loveland. Okay. And we need to start building concerted cooperative channels of infrastructure. Transport, infrastructure, roads, infrastructure. Sure. Yeah. Okay. But also energy infrastructure, water infrastructure, and also intellectual property infrastructure, intellectual mobility, infrastructure. Mm. We need to have a high quality connectivity between the different areas. We need to have the interlinked and coordinated policies between the universities here, community colleges here, all the way down to middle schools. Hmm. We need to have, we need to stop building little empires and start focusing on the region. Yeah. Yeah. Overall, I think the, my sense is that the chambers of commerce like each other quite a bit within those three cities, but that the, the city, the government authorities are a little different game in some ways. It's very interesting. Yeah. I kind of, I get that feeling that there is a bit more cooperation when you start talking to, say, for example, people responsible for economic policy. Yeah. But that's because in every textbook they know cooperative game comes zero with a better outcome than non-cooperative game. Fair enough. Yes. Fair enough. I mean, you don't want to have prisoners dilemma. Yes. And we have enough common, if you want vocabulary to kind of say, yeah, we don't, we know what prisoner's dilemma leads to. Yeah. We rise together. Yeah. But when you take politicians today, and this is very interesting, I think it's very astute observation because I think it also is the mark of our times, which you are putting your finger on, is exactly that, that politicization that we have. Yeah. In a policy spectrum comes from the political spectrum polarization and the political spectrum polarization is evident all the way to the Washington dc. How much cooperation does the Congress today achieve? Almost zero. Exactly. When you go back in history, has there been a transformational president in the United States history who has not become transformational president by achieving consensus and achieving the, you know, or leading the majority within Congress? Yeah. Yeah. Of course not. Would think not. Yeah, exactly. So we can't do anything because we have these kind of politics of extreme polarization. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I want to, we've spent a fair bit of time on Northern Colorado, which has been super interesting, but Cool. I wanna zoom up a little bit. Okay. Um, your, your LinkedIn profile suggests you're kind of an expert in, uh, Russian and Irish economic factors and things. And like, I wanna talk about like financing war, financing economies. Um, you know, part of what I've said, I'm an, uh, libertarian minded guy for a long time and, uh, one of Reagan's old quotes I think is, you know, tax what you want less of and subsidize what you want more of. And, and I generally abide by that notion. And so if we could get to a, a less, um, income tax financed economy, government function in the US and do so through some combination of tariffs and, uh, I've been a fan of the fair tax fair tax.org. Okay. Kinda a consumption tax'cause we kind of want less consumption anyway, according to all the, you know, the climate. Uh, people and stuff like that. And so like, instead of trying to get people to hide their income or not make any income, like let's just tax consumption. Yeah. That's, you know. Okay. Look, there's a, there are different ways of taxation. There are different, uh, tools for taxation. Uh, it, some of it has been tried in different jurisdictions and generates different results. Consumption tax is very interesting. Yes. We have a sales tax in the United States. Sales tax is non-discriminatory in so far as it is applies to say, for example Yeah. Where you manufacture mm-hmm. The goods or services Yep. Where you produce them. Um, it is also non-discriminatory in so far as you know, which components you use. Okay. Mm-hmm. In the production. Yes. So it is more of a tax on the actual consumption rather than a tax on the value added. True. Okay. In the European Union, for example, in the rest of the world, it is mostly the value added tax. Mm-hmm. Which is again, not as discriminatory on the basis of where the things are made, but rather on the basis of who adds value pays the tax. Yes. Yeah. So there's a lot of interesting things which go with both of those. There's some advantages, disadvantages for those things. Okay. But when we go towards greater automation, when we go towards a greater contribution to, of technological capital in the production mm-hmm. And in the value added, you are right. We want to go away from the idea of income tax because income tax penalizes work. Yeah. By us. Yeah. Whether it's work when we invest in ourselves. Our parents invest in us by educating us, or it's a work that we pursue ourselves. Yeah. Turning or whatever. Or it is a physical work that we do, literally spending hours on the job doing whatever we do. Okay. It's, it's the effort which you actually want to reward rather than penalize. Yeah. So I would be all in favor of moving away from the income tax based economy. Okay. The United States is not quite an income tax based economy. It's mostly debt based economy. Right. So we're not taxing Yeah. Good thing we don't tax our people. What it takes takes, I would be in favor of shifting completely towards the consumption, taxes and wealth taxes and the reason why wealth taxes are important Okay. Is'cause you have to realize that a lot of wealth at the high level, not the level that you and I are familiar with. Okay. But at the level of say billionaires Yeah. And multimillionaires, a lot of that wealth is the income. These people don't need to pay income taxes at all. Right. Because they're living off or leveraging their wealth. Yeah. Okay. So we can introduce a tax on wealth, which is not prohibitive to the general upper middle class and below. Mm-hmm. Part of the population. We can tax the 1%. I'm not saying I'm not in a territory of the, you know, Sanders kill the rich, you know, Bernie Sanders or anything like that by any possible means. I come from the libertarian traditional thinking as well. Um, just like yourself, especially on economic side. I mean, you know, you know, have background studying under the, you know, university of Chicago School of Economics. Um. So I would be in favor of that. Let's also add to that another tax, which is, you know, I've done some work in an Irish context because it was a part of the International Monetary Fund, uh, review of the Irish taxation policies after the global financial crisis and so forth. And that's the tax on land. Hmm. Site value tax or land value tax. Mm-hmm. Practiced in some parts of, say for example, Pennsylvania in the United States, some other parts as well in the United States. You know, and it's a very kind, this is different than property tax. It's different. It is assessed against the value of the site on which the property sits. So you and I can make an effort for the land, not the improvement and improve the land. Okay. Mm-hmm. But our own improvements are not gonna be taxed. Hmm. What will be taxed if, say, for example, a local government decides to put a school nearby the, you know, nearby your site and that increases the value of the site without you doing it. Hmm. Interesting. That value then will be captured in the value of land. Sure. Not in the value of the structure that you have with the garden that you have there growing or whatever else. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So alternatively, of course, what happens when the government decides to put a highway next to your, your house, right? In which case your value of the land drops and you get effectively partially compensated through the lower taxation. Yeah. Interesting. So, I mean, again, you know, there has been research done in the United States on that, primarily actually on the Georgia society and the likes, you know? Okay. Um, and there's a lot of interest in that. So go, go back to, uh, the wealth tax with me. Mm-hmm. Is that something that would be. Like not, not on a transfer of wealth, like an inheritance thing, but more like a pay 0.5% every year. Yeah, no, it would be actually based on the actual value of wealth, uh, you can have it on an annual basis. I think inheritance tax will already have that. Right. Fine. With me. I think, you know, you have, just like with say for example, flat taxes, you have a very generous upfront deduction. Mm-hmm. So again, you're not snaring into the net. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People who are, if I've got a$300,000 house, I shouldn't have to pay an extra$5 a year. No. Yeah, no, absolutely. Of course. Or you have, you know, if you inherit a house, which is, you know, family house, which is$2 million, don't pay anything. Right. Right. That's fine with me. Okay. You don't use this taxation in order to generate revenue alone. You use this taxation to reorient the society's values. Yeah. Yeah. You want to have the value in a society where people not accumulating houses as well, but rather accumulating other things like businesses, like, you know, ideas like human capital. Um, so when you think about it, do we want to encourage formation of fixed capital formation in this economy? Probably not so much, right? Yes. We want to have good infrastructure. The high level of course, at a high kind of, if you aggregate level, yes, sure wanna have good roads, we want to have good communications and so forth. But, you know, apart from that, we want to have usable real estate that we live in. It doesn't require a huge amount of the parts of GDP invested on an ongoing basis. Some of our policies, like I was just thinking about the interest deduction on your home mortgage or your rental property, mortgage or whatever, you know that's an incentive to carry debt, correct? Really? Yes. And they, I don't know why we should have taxes that necessarily incentivize that. We do that, not because we want to incentivize the carrier of the debt where it's originated from, but today it's because we can't abolish that because if we abolish that all of a sudden doesn't wreck a of affordable houses. Right. Are going to become unaffordable instantaneously. So we in a way kind of create, it's, it's, you know, if you go back to the philosophy, you can't really white sheet it. Yeah. Like in the physics. Yes, yes. In the old days, you know, in the, you know, uh, kind of world. Yes. You had to draw these weird things called epicycles. Yes. The force fields, which didn't exist in order to counterbalance the planets so as to make the earth the center of the universe. Yes. And sooner or later you started to come to the point where those epicycles are the descriptors of everything and you know, they don't exist. Right. So you got a problem the same without tax and subsidies policy. And this is a painful day to day. Of course. Yes. I mean, because we're talking on the 15th of April, you're talking about, it's a great example. Okay. You can have a middle class family like my, my own where your tax forms amount to about 170 pages. Yeah. It is insane. It's literally hundred insane. Right. So taxation system in the United States, and I'm not kind of, you know, the burden of doing your taxes Correct. Is almost as bad as the taxes that you actually pay. It's, it's a total industry and it holds us hostage once a year. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're in business, it holds you hostage more often. Every quarter. Yeah, exactly. Every, every payroll. That's right. Yes. So, I mean, the insanity of it is that we don't even think about the fact that we have all of this infrastructure that creates no value. Yeah, and we can have a simplifying reforms and we can have a change, as you said. For example, a good example would be moving towards more consumption based taxes. Uh, a good example would be to remove as much as possible and flatten out the, after the structure of say, income tax. Yeah. Maybe a 12 page tax return. Yeah. Well, we shouldn't, you know, like if you are working, say for example, if you have one source of income, active income, and maybe one source of passive income, you should not be filing the form, you know, more than say two, three pages. Agreed. Who the hell needs all of that stuff? Who the hell actually checks? All of that stuff? Who manages all of that stuff? There's a lot of jobs reliant upon having all those pages to check. I guess to, to be honest, personally, I think that most of those jobs are pretending to do the job. Oh yeah. And in the end, there is an outcome and everyone is sitting and praying that nobody will check, because to be, to be frank, I don't think there is a possibility of, you know, fully completing those hundreds of pages of tax forms without missing something. Yeah. Somehow. I mean, it's, but then that's tax fraud and they can throw you in prison. Well, of course, if it is intended, if it seems like you tried it. Yes. Yeah. If it is intended, it's tax fraud. But I mean, again, the separation between what is the tax fraud versus the tax mistake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is kind of, you know, a little bit more arbitrary than I would like that to be. But I can tell you that, you know, I was talking to a colleague of mine who is a professor of finance here in the United States, not in this state, uh, you know, today, and we were both, you know, kind of was supposed to be working on the paper, uh, that we are supposed to review, and both of us can't actually review the paper because we are both mired into taxes completely. I mean, this is, you know, these are two people with the PhDs in economics and finance who are struggling. Yeah. And we have advisors hired for that. Right. So it wasn't like, you know, struggling, you know, by ourselves, you know, doing it. So there's something fundamentally wrong. With a system that we have. Yeah. It is not incentivizing things we want to incentivize. Yeah. It is penalized quite often effort by people. Mm-hmm. Um, it is penalized and it over decades and generation, that translates into the change in culture, in preferences. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And once you get to that territory of kind of change, you know, the Roth is so deep that changing it and the reversing it is not impossible, but so daunting that a lot of people give up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of young kids right now even that are like, no way I'll ever buy a house, you know? Correct. Yeah. And you know what, if you save 10% of your income and live like a coyote for a long time, that's a lie. Yeah. You'll be able to eventually, you know? Yes. No, I mean, again, it's hard to, first of all, we, we expect the young people. I have two kids, you know, one is 18, uh, another one is 14. Um, and you know, it's very hard to expect from those kids to behave the way we want them to behave. Yeah. Because we, our generation has created for them the trappings of social media, of peer pressure, um, of kind of, you know, of high expectations, compliance, you know, they're all carrying thousand dollar phones in their pockets. Correct, correct. Uh, right now. Um, so you can say things like, you know, you shouldn't be doing that. And they turn around and say, but dad, you work for that. You create that, you use that yourself all of the time. So in a way. It is very hard to see how we're going to get out of this, you know, the problem and predicament that we have that has grown over the last, say 25 years or so. And I'm using Millennium as a breakpoint, but started of course, before the millennium. Yes. Uh, how we're going to go, not so much back but forward towards the values that we have lost mm-hmm. That we would like to have. We know we should have. And yet we have worked so hard to dismiss. Talk to me about, uh, by the way, I didn't even ask you, you've got an accent, it seems. You're from somewhere eastern European. Yes. I would guess. Oh, I like, I I'm a mix of pretty much everything under the sun. Very trying to be very quick. You know, just tell you the story. I I, I was born and raised in Soviet Union Okay. In Moscow. Um, I'm of, um, Russian and Armenian descent. Okay. Um, I immigrated into the United States, um, in 1990. So like Armenian because your, one of your parents like got Yeah. Pushed out from the genocide there in Turkey and stuff, or is that, was it common for people? People go It was a little before. It was before, yeah. It was common. Yeah, of course. Because, well, and there's a little enclave of Armenia up there in. By Lithuania or something too, right? Or somewhere. No, no, no, no. You think about there's you, Azerbaijan, there's a, that's a whole war, but that's, that's the Soviet created that mess. Uh, okay. So, um, yeah. You know, there's a war going on there, of course. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, Armenia always kind of had link, link ups Okay. With Russia because of the orthodoxy, because of the religion. I see.'cause of course, you know, cultural as well. So my, you know, predecessors from Armenia moved to Russia proper back in the 1840s. Oh, okay. Gotcha. They, hence my last name is ified. Okay. Back in the days, if you went to Imperial University, you had to rectify your name and accept Christianity. Of course, they already were Christian and they crucified the name. So that's kind of the Fair enough. The etymology of it. So I was born in Soviet Union. I grew up in the Soviet Union, and, uh, in my. Year 21, uh, of my age, I moved to the United States Oh, wow. Uh, to California. And I spent 1990s in the United States. For education, or No, I first even, no, I moved venture because I had a, yeah, I had a business. Okay. I had a business that was started with two American, uh, uh, partners. Okay. Uh, from California. They registered in California and then sooner or later, because they had their own businesses, they had to run. Um, I had to come to LA to run the business. Okay. I was kind of managing it on the Soviet side of first What kind of a business? What? It was a brokerage company. Okay. So we were trying to broker joint ventures between the, and investment flows mm-hmm. Uh, between the Soviet enterprises and the US based companies. Sure. Um, and it was successful on the side of finding the projects and then kind of, you know, of course the recession of the 1990s killed us off. So I moved in 1990 to the United States to run the business and it was actually very easy to do back then because. There weren't really anyone else moving from Soviet Union doing any business. Right. So, um, and then I ended up closing the business when we became kind of, you know, we run into basically cashflow problems and then, you know, we had investors lined up, we couldn't, you know, get over the hump. Yeah. Um, and so in 1993 I figured out that I have to go and finish my education and I started engineering back in the Soviet Union at the time. Um, so I went to UCLA and I said, you know, I'd like to finish my degree. They looked at my transcript, uh, back in the days it was before computers. So it was a very big book that I actually found my school in Moscow, uh, translated my grades into the UCLA scale or whatever. It was interesting. And they kind of said, what would you like to study? And I said, you know, I always wanna do something international. So I said, you have too much mathematics and physics. Oh. In order to do international studies, but there is an economics degree and you can do, you know, basically international specialization in economics. Mm-hmm. So I knew nothing about economics, I knew it was international. I always wanted to study something international. So I said fine. So I came in, into the third year into UCLA, finished that, um, went on to the master's, then went on to do the PhD at Chicago. Both or so? No, no, uh, no. First, um, actually at U-C-L-A-I did my master's in mathematics there. Um, and then I went to Chicago, to University of Chicago to do the PhD. I see. Um, wasn't a happy time for me. It was a bit personal, kind of tough year. So I transferred from there to Johns Hopkins. Um, and I was in Johns Hopkins. Um, I met in Chicago, my partner currently my better half. Um, and we moved to Baltimore and I was into my second year of PhD there. Um, and I got effectively just opportunistically, uh, you know. Had haunted. Okay. Had haunted into Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland. Ah, um, you know, through the network of Good Andfor comes the, uh, Irish economy expert. So in the year 2000, you know, we moved, you know, Ireland for a couple of years when times were hopping kind. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was great. Absolutely it was right peak of the kind of second wave of the Celtic Tiger, uh, before it became what I call Celtic Garfield afterwards, um, it was boom time, it was.com boom and everything. Um, and we moved for a couple of years, 16 years later, two kids, a dog houses and everything else, you know, Irish citizenship and everything, you know. Um, we kind of came back in 2016 for, I was in business a little bit for a while there in Europe. And then, um, I sold out of business there and, uh, decided to go back to academia. So we moved to California. Yeah, back to where I started from in the United States. Um, and I spent four years there in Monterey. Um, and then course, oh, not a, not a terrible spot to, uh, no great place. Absolutely love it. Still go back there all of the time. Uh, a lot of friends. Fantastic place. Um, pandemic hit, I lost my job. Uh, and I was on the market, so, uh, did not land you here. Northern Colorado gave me an offer I couldn't refuse. Yeah, yeah. Um, so we moved here. Um, you know, so it's kind of, it's very interesting because I mean, I'm, you know, I became over the 1990s period, in particular a mountain goat. So I love climbing. I love, you know, being up in the mountains. I love hiking. I love fly fishing. Yeah. Yeah. I love foraging. So even though we lived on the coasts in California and in, um, in Ireland, you know, our house in Ireland is literally on the sea front. Um, and you know, I always kind of drawn to the mountains and my wife comes, you know, her family comes from Northern Italy. We have a house in Alps there. Alright, so moving here was for me a very natural move. Yeah. Um, you know. I'm kind of maximizing that. Awesome. We spend the entire winter fly fishing, uh, because you can't do it in California because they have seasons. Oh, really? Um, here you can go, you know, any, your river, you know, as long as it's, anytime there's open water. Exactly. You have a little bit of an open water, you can fly fish. We spend all of the winter, you know, up in the mountains as well. So I'm pretty much every week, you know, after. So you're happy? I am happy. I'm happy, uh, in a different way as well in terms of my life as well. Um, when you grow older, you kind of discover things that more matter that are more important. They become usually slower things, and for me, that's exactly what's happening, you know? Yeah. I'm kind of, you know, decided that, uh, all of the media, um, you know, I've done that, not interested that much anymore. Uh, public engagements don't really need them either that much. Um, being able to do quietly research without the rat race that a lot of universities engage in. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that, the pressure to publish and all these things, well, we have Yeah, of course. But the pressure, say one of the best part of, uh, UNC from my point of view is that I can do my research there. Yeah. No one tells me which areas I should be specialized in. Go into the likes of a CU Boulder, you are forced to actually be specialist in very narrow area. Mm-hmm. You need to pursue publishing to the point, not just publish pairs, but publish in the top. Yeah. Than journals, uh, in a discipline and come up with the conclusions that are in line with our general philosophies too. Correct, correct, correct. Exactly. That Don't dare expose those, our thoughts. Exactly. Yeah. So, um, in, in my world now I have the luxury of basically saying, I'm interested in this. Yeah, let's do that. Okay. Um, and to give you example, like, I mean, I have a coauthor, for example, who comes with an interesting data set, you know, quite recently and says, let's do that. But the data set on Indonesian banks, fine. Sure I can do that. You know? Exactly. And my colleagues would appreciate that. Yeah. And you know, you know, in terms of my job appraisal and everything else, it counts as much, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and there's a luxury to that of course. You know. Well, and you know, I think it, it seems to me anyway that the Montfort College of Business is really an interesting opportunity. You know, it's, it's fairly well funded and supported. They're, they're savvy. They've recruited a bunch of smart people into the program, and not just as an economist, but you've been in business at least a couple different times as well. And so you kind of appreciate, not that just the academic. Instinct, of course, of your field, but actually putting the rubber to the road. Of course. And we do that. And that's, that's very important as well. So I mean, like one of the very big things, and I have an 18-year-old who is going to college right now. Yeah. And the decision making is in a local college. So we have current three right now. Uh, cost is very important, of course, consideration because, you know, don't wanna be prepped down with a bunch of debt. Sorry, salary. You don't really Exactly. You know, I'm actually not a person who likes debt. I mentioned organic before. Yes. Organic growth. Mm-hmm. I'm a big fan of funding things from the cash flow you generate. So I don't want him to graduate with any debt at all. Yeah. Uh, there's a bit of a tug of war because here of course doesn't understand that yet. I mean, hey, we're all been there, you know, and when you look back and you say, oh, my mom did say that. Yeah, that's true. You know, I should have listened. You know, we all like that, you know, but we learned from our own bruises. Yeah. I have some, uh, some advice from my own background. My, so my dad started a farm, he was a motorcycle mechanic going back to 14 years old. And then he started farming evenings and weekends for 14 years or something. He farmed evenings and weekends, but he eventually, the farm was working about the time I was going to college. And, uh, dad said, well, son, you know, the farm's doing good enough now we could help you with your school a little bit. Um, but I think you get a lot more out of it if you pay for it yourself. And That's amazing. Yes. He was right. I mean, at the time I bet you, you were going like, what the No, he was right. I mean, everybody I knew that flunked out. Yeah. Their parents were paying for it. Yeah. So have'em be in for at least a little bit. Uh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, like we learn d of course things game, so Yeah. I mean, but when you think about one of the advantages that, of the, um, UNC and Monfort College in particular is that we are actually laser focused on the idea that all of the people going through the program in business, it doesn't matter whether you're study in marketing, you're studying management, you're studying in finance Okay. Will have a full portfolio of internships. Hmm. And those internships can be structured in so far as they can be repeated over the period of, of time we want to place in or like you sample a little bit, a few different things. So even like people like myself, we are running around all of the time trying to find new opportunities for internships. Cool. Okay. So for example, we, I was talking to a big healthcare provider Yep. In the area here now in, in the state of Colorado. Um, who is going to come on board with offered internships for our students. Nice. Pretty awesome. There's sometimes you get students who are, who want to do international as well. You try to find for them opportunities international. Yeah. Challenging out of Greeley, but nonetheless, that's our job. Yeah. We want to do that. So everything we teach has to be aligned, not just, we don't, unlike other universities, unlike what we call R one level universities, research focused universities. Oh yeah. We are not training kids to go, or kids or young adults to go into a PhD program down the road. Yeah. We don't disadvantage them in that sense as well. We give them the ABCs, but if they want to do a PhD, they probably should either look at different university or look at a career path to PhD. So in other words, you graduate, you go to the find an employer a little help you pay for your PhD. Exactly. But also who will give you a frame for what you want to study. Yeah. Because of course the PhD by itself should be Yeah. Where do I point it? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So from that point of view, we're much more applied. Our view is, and we constantly do that. I've served, for example, on the curriculum committee, I'm on a graduate committee nowadays as well. Um, we constantly looking at it from the point of view opportunities. Hmm. I had, um, international affairs for the MCB. Um, and part of my job is explicitly, even when we talk about the exchanges for the faculty international exchanges, we always condition them as to what's the benefit for students. Yeah. What doors does it open for students? What opportunities it opens for students. Okay. Uh, we trying to structure the programs where we bring students out. We try to support them. We have scholarships for that. Not only we have scholarships, unlike other universities where you have the student body, some of which can afford additional two, three, 5,000 for a trip abroad to study. We actually structure it on a basis. There should be no additional cost for student Wow. Compared to what they actually incur in their normal semester. That's cool. So most of our programs are like that. And you know, since I joined, we had this big debate with the, uh, international affairs office, for example, uh, who wanted to structure more of the traditional study abroad education opportunities where you go for a semester and it is a third party provider. Yeah. You screw around, hold your hand and everything else. No, no. It's a serious program. Don't take me wrong. I mean, they're great as well, but they're much costly. Sure. So we kind of managed to restore that balance. We want our students to go. Irrespective of the income, irrespective of their financial opportunities. And we want them to do that because it opens doors. Yeah.'cause it opens different horizons because the companies internationally, trading companies, even based in Colorado, will look at your CV or your resume when you are graduating from college and they will try to identify those students who have that experience, who have that exposure to international dimension in their classroom and so forth. So cool. Yeah, absolutely. We do. If there's somebody listening and they might have internships available for their medium sized business out there in the northern front range, uh, can they just stalk you on LinkedIn or something like, like that? Absolutely. Any channel. I mean, you know, first of all, you can, you can bloody Google me. Okay. Um, and you can get my email. If it's private email, use it. Whichever way, if you see me at any event, you know, stop me. We are looking for that. Call me at the office and it's not just, don't call me at the office because I don't answer phone in the office, but call me on my, uh, cell phone. Call me in any way, shape or form. Okay. Sounds good. Um, and it also applies to other colleagues of mine. You can reach out to anyone if you go on Mc B's website. Okay. You have all of us with our email addresses. Email any of us, and it will be the same support as well. Okay. We want to see that more. We will, in fact, actually in other programs, in other universities, you would have probably an administrator dealing with you. Mm-hmm. If you want an intern, if you reach out to somebody like myself and you say, I'm looking for this skill set. Hmm. An intern, we will, I will reach out to my faculty, you know, the 23 people are looking well, or whatever. Not 200 people. Okay. 200 people. Like say, you know, 400 people. We have an hour in finance, we have about 200 plus students. Wow. Okay. Um, so, but we know them. Right. Because there is about, you know, say 10 of us who are teaching, uh, them and I can email all 10 of us and somebody will come up with a list of different students. We can discuss them and we can then offer them as your interns. That's the level of work we do. Fair enough. And it's totally normal from our point of view. And it's totally expected from our point of view, because when somebody says that we are student centric, everyone says that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We actually genuinely have to be student centric. Yeah. Because A, we have to compete with the bigger universities and better funded universities and there's a lot of competition in Northern Colorado territory. Of course. Yeah. We also have to. Work with students, which come from so many different diverse backgrounds. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Who are interested in so many things. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine some of your students are, they're, they're a first time college student in their whole family and they're coming from Kansas or over 40% or sterling. Yeah. And it's a stretch for them to afford the tuition that UNC charges. Absolutely. And a lot of the other ones are like. Uh, it's half as much as CSU, so I'm, I'm gonna go there instead.'cause it seems just as good. Absolutely. Or it's too big. CS u is scary and big and I would rather just go to a school where I'm gonna know what, there's a lot of legacy things. There's a lot of pool into UNC from students who know somebody who graduated. Mm-hmm. In, maybe not in their family, but in the neighborhood, in the area as well. Um, that's one of the things. There's another attractor as well. So at UNC in our school, in MCB in particular, we expect our students to be fully ti full-time working. Oh, so we accommodate them. Oh, is that right? We don't, we don't require them. Right. But we expect them of them have time of at least. Yeah. Well, all of them will have part-time jobs guaranteed. Okay. Most of them have more than part-time job in a traditional way, its more than half load. So as a result of it, we tried to accommodate them as much as possible. So one of the things we did, and that came in in fourth this year, and it's continued rolling out as well. We have switched from the five day teaching to four day teaching. Oh. So we now have Monday extra full day. You take day, you take Monday, Wednesday in person, or Tuesday, Thursday in person. Hmm. And then Friday is remote. Hmm. So it's down to myself and my students to decide how we want to work that day. Hmm. I'm, I usually just post some material for them. I'm available if they want to reach out and we can have one-on-one. Sure. We can have with a group meeting. It's kinda your research time and different things like that too. Not really. It's still a student time. Yeah, a hundred percent. It's student time, so I'm available to them. It's just that when we work together, we work, say for example, on a project. Mm-hmm. Okay. So again, hands-on experiential learning is facilitated through it, but if you are working. Or if you have to commute back home for the weekend and so forth, you can do it. Yeah. Yeah. So we try to accommodate as much as possible, those type of flexibilities. We're offering now a completion degree online, which you can finish degrees online as well. Oh. Um, so there's a lot of different modalities. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is successful for us. Okay. So one of our most successful programs in the MBA, for example. Mm-hmm. And our MBA is fully online, fully remote. Mm-hmm. Right. There is no requirement for synchronous, but again, we have the flexibility. So do I get to know my fellow MBA students or anything? It's up to you. Projects. There are, yes. A hundred percent. So my class, so I'm teaching one class now. I'm going to teach two classes in the program, uh, starting in the fall. Um, my classes all require group work. Uh, I also hold, not synchronous, but kind of, you know, you know, preset hours. So once a week I have two hours where I'm available. Anyone can in, can come in on Zoom at any moment in time during those two hours. Mm-hmm. They can come in to discuss the questions, they can come in to discuss life. Yeah. Yeah. Quite often actually that happens more than they the technical questions in finance. Um, and it's uh, an opportunity also for students to talk between themselves. Sure. So even though they're physically separated, of course it can be anywhere located and a lot of them allocated in different states as well. Sure. And even in the Colorado they're distributed as well. There's somebody who is up in the mountains, you know, somebody who is in the Western Colorado. You know, you have an ability to have a forum. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yes, I mean, the answer is we would like to have much more community. We would like to have much more building of a traditional interaction between the students, networks and so forth. We are working on it. We have created, for example, a student, uh, advisory body. So there's a alumni body which is advising us, which is pretty large. It started with I think originally five people. This is a second year that it is in existence and I think it's now about 20. Oh wow. Um, of course there is alumni network, which is kind of formal and traditional network. Sure. But that's kind of managed out at the university. Yeah. These people are giving their time directly. Oh yes, absolutely. And this event is now we're going to have, I think the second event where it's coming up, uh, we're going to have in Denver the meeting, and we're trying to scale that up as well. So, you know, going down those five more of those past graduates, whatever, yeah. Oh, and the jobs in region and stuff. Ultimately every couple of months we would have a network and event. That's the hope that we are heading and, uh, towards and the networking event in the bigger areas like Denver Metro, like say for example, Boulder again. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so forth. So yeah. Very cool. My, uh, my alma mater is, uh, North Dakota State. Okay. Uh, which back in those days was a rival with UNC in division two football. Oh, okay. Yeah. They, they traded titles a few times back 20 years ago. I don't know if they are still, you know, I honestly don't know. Oh, North Dakota State moved up a level. Okay. So they're division one FCS now, and they, I think they've won like 12 out the last 15 championships. Okay. Oh, alright. They're ballers. See, I, I'm pretty ignorant about those sports because none of my kids are in, uh, in them. So, well, we call football is in football around here. Yes. Yeah. But no, look, I mean, you know, it's fine. Of course, you know, it's locally, you know, um, I mean there is also like, you know, if you think about different levels and types of football mm-hmm. Uh, and we think about soccer versus American football, I'm starting to think about say Irish football. Yes, sure. And then Australian rules as well. And all of a sudden you kind of get the Oh, way completely. Yeah, exactly. Which looks totally different. Yes. I mean, uh, yeah. It isn't rugby B it isn't o football football, but it's something like football. It is, it's true. Um, I wanna take a quick break. Yeah. Potty break and then we'll come back and, uh, I wanna talk a little bit about the, uh, kind of risks in the world. You know, what can we look forward to in the next six to 12 months, both economically, but also conflict risks. Oh, right. Yeah. Fun. Cool. Okay. And we're back. So one of the reasons I first reached out, uh, back a few months ago was I thought with your name, you might be kind of an expert on the Russia, Ukraine region and insights about, you know, is it really about the rare earths, is it really about nato? Is it really about poking the bear until the bear had to claw back? Uh, what, what are all of these things? Yes, it's complicated. You don't, you don't poke the bear for no reason. Yes. I mean, there is a bear there, you know, if you hike it through the mud, don't poke the bear no matter what the reason is. But you know, the way you, it's kind of is the allegory. Yes. Don't poke the bear. Um, there is a history. Yes. Yeah. There's a long term history. There is issues. Um, Russia sees itself for whether it's right or wrong, um, as a, you know, not necessarily a superpower, but perhaps a power to be reckoned with. Yeah. Somebody be respected. Correct. At least. Um, and to regain that respect by, you know, hard effort. Not always the most constructive effort I. But nonetheless, from the Russian perspective, it is constructive act. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very important effort as well. It's a geopolitical power, which kind of sees, uh, you know, kind of similar to America in that sense that it sees itself as a messenger, as a, um, as the dominant player in the region, if not globally. So, Pok in the Bear was ill-advised, like the acceptance of Lithuanian, all these No, not so much actually. That was okay. No, this is a very interesting thing about this. You know, we kind of, we first originally when the process of the breakdown of the Warsaw Park. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And a kind of Soviet empire started, we actually overestimated the extent of sensitivities that was involved from a Russian perspective. The Baltic states were never naturally a part of Russia. Mm-hmm. They were more like Finland or whatever. Exactly. Bingo and e because Finland is a great example. Yes. Finland was incorporated into Russia as a basically fully autonomous entity with its own parliament, with its own government, with its own rules, laws, and everything else in the Soviet scene. No, that was before. No, it was way before in the Russian Empire. Yes. Okay. Yep. Uh, so when the Soviet, sorry, when the Russian Empire itself dissolved, when the Czar. Abdicated. Mm-hmm. It, it dissolved the connection because the czar was never the czar of Finland. Right. He was basically our Duke of Finland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, in a way, Z disappearing. There was no other connection between Finland. Nobody else else kind came into that agreement, if you will. So there, there, there was no base. We've had a student with us from Finland. Right now my wife and I are hosting an exchange student. That's awesome. So I've learned a fair bit, like, you know. Exactly. And it's an amazing nation, by the way. Yeah. The history of it is amazing. The ability of that, you know, society and that culture to survive next to this giant, you know? Right. Russia with a history of the end, also by the way, being wedged between Russia and Sweden. Sweden has, yeah. They were assholes too for a long time. Well they, they, they had their aspirations. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and the aspirations is a nice way of saying that. And so and so did, of course, Pauls Yes, sure. And Lithuanian, Polish, Lithuanian Kingdom, them and adult. So that whole neck of the woods had been very much contested. Of course over the centuries as well. But apart from the history itself and the history doesn't form who we are. Sure. Beyond the end doubts, there is a lot of kind of insecurity in Russia as well. NATO presents that insecurity and presents that pressure. Um, you know. Ukraine conflict really started way before 2014 even. Okay. Mm-hmm. There was a constant pressure and pool within Ukraine, which in modern Ukraine is the Soviet creation. Yes, sure. It bolted on the western Ukraine, which was never really, really a part of the old traditional Ukraine. Oh, okay. Or the eastern Ukraine. And this kind of dichotomy, the difference Yes. Creates a very tremendous, you know, force of kinda like a north versus south element, like in the US less so, but more like say north versus, you know, Republic of Ireland. Gotcha. Um, like the say Protestants and Catholics. Yeah. More like that. And you have the religious difference as well there. Yeah. You have a Catholic, Western Ukraine and you have the Orthodox Eastern Ukraine. Oh yeah, of course. And then you have also other minorities as well there. Yes. Yeah. Well, probably a lot of non-religious Western Ukraine then too. Uh. Probably actually, or Catholic identifying, but not too active. Neither one, you know, that's more like Central Ukraine. Okay. Which is administrative Ukraine, like Nepro area. Okay. All the way to kyiv, non-secular. Okay. Much more kind of modernized. Yeah. Much more, you know, industrialized urban or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, um, I mean this is all of course very much, you know, we, we wear curtain, uh, on the side of much more complexity Sure. Than this. Okay. Um, so I'm trying to do it in seven minutes here, so Yeah, no, it's true. Oh, good luck. Luck. Maybe got 15. I'm a wrong person. That question. Um, so there is a lot of history there and then history goes back. There's some good. Things, there are some bad things between it, of course. Um, so yes, the West has played a less than smart role in the process that doesn't absolve Russia. Sure. Exactly. Absolutely. Um, it played less constructive role rather than, you know, like the West played one. I was terrified when, when Biden shot the long range missiles into Russia after losing the election. I was like, what are you doing? Like, I'm not sure that was allowing that. Yes. But, but on the other hand, of course, if you take the position from the point of view of supporting Ukraine, right, and that is intellectual. This is what they need position, they need more than that. Right. And where do you stop? And that's the whole problem. Yes. Right. So in a way, I'm actually in line with Trump administration on the fact that that war should never have been started. Yeah. A hundred percent. The problem is that the wishful thinking doesn't work forward. Yes. Yeah. Well, and the argument I hear about, you know, giving Russia a piece of Eastern Ukraine and having an agreement that's signed and forces done and stuff is that, you know, after Trump has gone next, uh, crappy president we've got in the office, Russia's gonna take Ukraine and then they're gonna take Poland and then they're gonna take the rest of it. I don't think that Russia will take poll. I don't think they will either. I don't think Russia has any ambition in terms of the additional territory gains. I don't think it wanted this to Ukraine either to begin with. Um, but now you had a bunch of people dead, but now it has. Right Eastern Ukraine. Yeah. Um, I would be of the view that from my point of view, Ukraine is an independent nation. Mm-hmm. And sovereign states should not be attacked. They no matter what, if they do attack, then defense is justifiable. Yeah. Okay. But non defensive war is not justifiable. But this is my personal view. Sure. Yes. Um, we are, as they say, where we are. And this is a big problem because how do you resolve, how do you get out of here? Um, the difficulty we have is less logistics of the, who controls the ground, but more of the logistics. Who has the trust? Nobody has the trust. We don't trust the Russians. Russians don't trust us. Yep. Ukrainians don't trust the Russians. We don't trust UK Ukranians and nobody, they trust UK Ukraine. Um, yeah. Even poll except for the Europeans seem to trust Ukraine. Even poll. No, I mean even Europeans. Europeans say that they trust Ukraine, but to be honest, you know, do you really anything that the French Trust Ukraine or for that matter, French trust anyone but the French Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean if you look at the, for example, Italians and you look at Maloney. Sure. Um, you know, she comes in from the point of view into the political realm today, the leadership. Right. She's the MAGA of, uh, she's worse than maga. You, I mean, you know, like it was before MAGA got accused of being fascist, you know, she was accused of being fascist. Yes. And now she's one of the leaders. Of the, you know, kind of freedom movement and Well, and France would have that leader too, potentially. Yeah. If, except for the funny right. Businesss they pulled with the election. That's right. So I mean like, and Germany too, you know, you go everywhere. The only countries like Ireland are the ones which are saying, we don't have the right wing. But then you have the, you know, conman, McGregor, you know. So I mean there is, the paradox of that is that we're in extremely complex environment. Yeah. We are not only environment where we deal with risk, if you use the proper terminology, we deal with what, in the 1990s US military, the US Army has labeled vuca volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Hmm. And that is an environment where things don't just happen, as kind of unpleasant events. What happens in this environment is a systemic crisis. Mm-hmm. Big things, big wars. Not just small skirmish, not some kind of stable, relatively balanced conflict that happened in 2014. Yeah. In Eastern Ukraine, but actually full out wars. And that's 2022. Yeah. So from this point of view, even devising any sort of, the response has to start with the proposition. What's the worst case scenario that you're going to get? And up until what? 2022 we had, the worst case scenario is we're going to have a lot of people dead. Now we have the worst case scenario of the nuclear World War. Everybody's dead. Effectively everybody's dead. Okay. And, uh, if you go historically, who normalized that reality, it wasn't the Russians, it was actually the first idea of the winnable nuclear conflict. So-called limited nuclear conflict came out in the United States and it was codified in early n by the likes of the Atlantic Council. Mm-hmm. Or the council Foreign relations. Yeah. Okay. In the United States, the advisors to our policy makers, the advisors to our national security heads in Congress, in the White House and everywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. So in a way we are now, is that because of the pressure of profit from,'cause you, you sell moms, is it military industrial complex? Yeah, that's a very interesting thing. So military industrial complex. I did some research on military industrial complex and part of kind of, you know, there is very surprisingly for the size of the military industrial complex, if you go into finance and economics literature, there aren't a lot of papers. Nobody studies, not a lot of direct evidence of Oh no, it's not that. It's just nobody really studied. Not a popular subject. Yeah. It's not a popular subject. It's like studying the cool next. So when we wrote, you know, when I had myself and a couple of my graduate students, uh, back I think around 2013, started research on that. And it took me until 2023 to publish the first paper on this. Okay. Uh, because nobody wanted to take it. Journals are not interested. And what's the punchline if, I mean, so the punchline is the following. The military industrial complex doesn't make money out of the direct immediate wars. I. What they make money out of the two things. One is kind of pipeline of ordering the budgets. Okay. So the budgets of war are more important than the wars themselves. And a second thing, when things become really uncertain, when things not just blow up, okay. But they blow up in an unpredictable way. So again, it's not the risk. Okay. So there's two things that investors in military industrial complex, like they like the steady pipeline of orders that they can program into the future. And that's, you know, something Yeah. Just keep making this many parts. Yep. So that's how you regular budget, but the wars themselves, the spikes, the moments of this acceleration in the uncertainty about the future demand, it always kind of leads to the promotion or the support of the military industrial complex stocks. So in a way you can see now, oh, and they just like to see their, their stock price going need, why we constantly need this kind of, you know, drive towards being belligerent. Yeah. Ose, um, United States is in a way, Jimmy Carter was correct in saying that in its history, this is probably the most war in nation on face earth, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even though we've haven't fought really a war on our own soil. Right. For quite a long time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, blessed we are by that, but we have supported whether directly or indirectly, um, vast numbers of conflicts. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it is unfortunately a. Um, it is the geopolitical reality today. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to see more of it. I think one of the biggest risk points of this and you know, like seeing, uh, Chinese and North Korean troops joining the Russians on the fronts and stuff like that is like, that's the last thing they want. Not so much Chinese. Chinese are staying cool on that. Okay. They've got, you know, not yet. There's, there's some argument, there's some, you know, kind of reporting coming out of Ukraine, uh, that they have traced some Chinese, um, conscripts. Okay. Not conscripts, but the contract soldiers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but that's not the not significant reported thing. Yeah. Uh, North Korea is different story. So Russia has signed a, you know, basically a common defense clause with North Korea. Oh, is that right? Okay. That happened, uh, in 2023. Okay. Um, and um, you know, as a result of that Russia actually yeah. A win for North Korea.'cause they're like, Hey, those huge, huge win for North Korea. Absolutely huge win for North Korea. Korea, and plus a great export for like, they got a bunch of starving men in North Korea. They do like better to get a nice paycheck. Uh, they do sent to the homeland. The numbers of them are limited. Yeah. I mean you're talking about five to 10,000 as far as we have the credible, actually trained information. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, that actually went in. Um, all of them, as far as I understand, have stayed within Russia property. So it's the Kors region. Okay. Where Ukraine had the country offensive, remember? Yep, yep, yep. Um, that's where they fought. They haven't crossed, as far as I know. Into the Ukrainian territory. Yeah. Uh, which of course would be, you know, kind of probably an act of war against Ukraine by North Korea. Right, right. Um, it's very hard to even trace what exactly is the act of war these days. Okay. Right. How far we moved back in the days it used to be you send a very stern letter to the leader of the other country. Right. Oh, that's, and then you send, you know, you know, at night, you know, with a bill of, you know, where you ask for things and demand the things, you know, and then there's, you know, kind of the war, the buddy thing, you know, a little slap with the glove. Exactly. And bingo. Exactly. It used to be like, and you go back to the 19th century, the history of warfare. I mean, you have the first event of the so-called barbar or modern war happens in 1812. In Russia, Napole, Napoleon's, uh, campaign in Russia. And it was the first time when they encountered the concerted resistance. Organized resistance by the non-combatants. Mm. The partisans. The locals. The peasants with pitchforks. Yeah. Yeah. It shocked Europeans. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It shocked the refined European. European because we were professional armies. Yes. And we fight army to army. We don't touch the peasants. Yes. Right. I mean, and here's the peasants touching you. Right, right. You know? Um, so that changed the modern warfare. Yes. And since then we kind of evolved. Well, and even the Revolutionary War with the Americans, where the British are like, we line up and we stand this far apart, we shoot each other. You guys are hiding behind trees and shit. That's, that's not fair. That's right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, I mean, like, you know, and that kind of Nobel structure of the campaigns and military campaigns has disintegrated over period of years. So we now, today are in the. War environment where it is you have the non-human actors involved. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the drones and stuff. Uh, not only drones, Roberts. Sure. Um, we effectively turn the war field or the battlefield into the constant test and lab mm-hmm. For new technologies. Mm-hmm. It's happening on the western side and on the Russian side as well. Um, so in this environment to kind of go around and kind of scream about the North Koreans, I mean, it's almost like, you know Yeah. Not that significant compared to all the rest that's going on. Yeah, exactly. Well, and if you start thinking about this drone technology, like do we, are we, can we keep up now? You know, very interesting question. So, I mean, Russia has managed to, and this is goes to the, my profession and kind of my field of expertise as well. Um, you know, we were all taken completely unprepared by the ability of the Russian economy to switch to the kind of military industrial complex. Um, Russia had really not a meaningful military budget expend before the war, and has retooled its economy very successfully and has managed the ways to bypass tremendous sanctions, which have never been deployed in the history against any other country in a past. Yeah. Um, it is to the point where it almost like to me was a. A risk of devaluation of the dollar. Like if you could just take somebody's money. Right. So they're not driving the devaluation of the dollar themselves. No. But the risk of a another currency replacing the dollar, you know, bricks or something. Yes, correct. Yes. Yeah. We just took a few billion dollars, you know, we've started that process, what we call that, you know, in my profession we call that weaponization of economic systems. Yep, yep. Uh, they can be financial systems, they can be trade systems. The United States over the last say, and it's really started with the late 1990s onwards. Okay. Iran sanctions. The very big move was of course the, uh, second Gulf War. Sure. Um, and there, after it's accelerated tremendously by now, we have weaponized absolutely everything we have. We have weaponized aid, we have weaponized humanitarian assistance, we have weaponized health. Provision. Um, anything that is outward looking in the United States, you know, from our treasury department to our health, again, to our food supplies is all weaponized. When you do that, you create incentives, both push and pull incentives for the nefarious or adversarial actors, whether they're Russia, Ukraine, yeah, sorry, no, Ukraine, China, um, but even Ukraine, Poland as well. They're not adversarial, but they're competitive in many ways. Okay. As well. Um, all of these different players have used to some extent, the United States weaponizing its systems to resist that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea of, say for example, digitalization of the economy, a global economy, we think of it as the kind of, you know, juxtaposition between Russia plus China and maybe other bricks. Right, right. Against the United States. The biggest challenger to the US dollar in the last 25 years has not been Yuan ruble or gold. It was Europe. Oh yeah, sure. So when you think about it is Euro are Europeans, our lives well, but we create an opportunity for them Right. To effectively benefit from what we benefited for decades of the, you know, post Bretton woods structure of the economy and Bretton Woods structure of the economy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe they can carry that torch for a while and be the, there is a, there's a world advantage to it, but there is also a huge burden to that. Sure. You mentioned being policemen to, to the rest of the world, which creates a draw on our own resources. Yeah. Because we we're almost obligated to that because we're the ones that money invest more in the global if you want security than we invest in the roads and railroads in the country. Sure. We certainly invest more in Pentagon, which is an outward projection of our power mm-hmm. Than we invest in healthcare in this country. Sure. So, I mean, yeah. There's a burden to that mal investment. Huge burden. Massive burden. Yeah. So yes, there are benefits to having this dominant hegemonic position in the global economy, but also in military industrial space. Uh, it's a heavy yolk to bear, kinda, but there's also Correct, yeah. Is there is also a cost. There is no free lunch. Yes. Um, so in a way, you know, the challenge that we're witnessing today, uh, to the US economy, US dollar, US hegemony is so multidimensional. It's very different from the Cold War Challenge when you had the literally juxtaposition of two superpowers. Sure, yeah. Yeah. Um, and the, there was. More tension to that. Sure. But the change was how we would see magazines all the time comparing the size of our nuclear stockpiles and stuff. Right? Correct. Yes. That's where we got at. You know? Uh, but the tension was almost one dimensional. Hmm. Now it is so multidimensional mm-hmm. That you have the challenges to the United States. How, give you example, the predictability is real hard. Tar. They take tariffs. Yes. The tariffs have triggered the reaction between and kind of, if you want trade war, of course he has it for tat between China and the United States. Sure. But behind the scenes, I think it was yesterday, there was a conversation happening in PE in Beijing, uh, about the need and the projecting that it's public. Yes. Projection of that conversation, of course, that we get on our end, uh, about the need to have a closer relationship, uh, in terms of investments flows, in terms of trade, in terms of diplomacy, in terms of all cultural links between China and Vietnam. Hmm. Vietnam has drifted towards the United States orbit far enough that it is now an alert from the Chinese point of view, and the Chinese are going to deploy whatever soft diplomacy they usually deploy, which is usually involves investment and trade. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but also cultural exchanges, also educational opportunities. Well, because Vietnam was one of the first countries to respond and be like, we're in, we're talking. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yes. So there's a very interesting, these type of challenges. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the Cold War era would be happening way before the actual confrontation takes place and they would be much more stable. Right. Right. Now they're multidimensional. The president would send emissaries four months before a deal was made. Of course. And stuff. Instead of Trump just going, you know, we're gonna Texas shut outta those. And once they're in our orbit, we can rely on them being in our orbit. Yes. With exception of, of course, know non aligned states like say India, which always kind of threaded both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dimensions, you know. But in by and large, there was either my camp and your camp. Yeah. Now there is my camp and one thing. Your camp. Another thing, and I'm playing an independent one for now, you know, in a third thing. Well, and yeah, the Europe is really a hard thing to figure out. How does that fit in with, that's another Spanish Ukraine, for example, foreign minister today coming out with a statement that he believes that Europe should be in alignment with the close alignment with China. Oh yeah. So I mean, here we have the president of the United States who is trying to, you know, kind of both country China. But I mean, at the same time some people say that he's building the, you know, alliances between the, you know, or he's incentivizing the Europeans to kind of join United States in a position to China House, you know, taking over Greenland and, you know, screwing Denmark fits into that. I'm not sure you know this well, is it really screwing Denmark though, or would it be a, a burden lifted from them that we would gladly carry So far, they're not given us indication that they would be party lifted. No, they don't talk like that. But when I look at it like from a big picture, it almost like they have to send a bunch of money to Greenland every year. It's like, no, it's kind of, you know, Vladimir Putin probably has made an argument at certain point in time that lifting off the Eastern Ukraine from the rest of Ukraine would lift the burden from, yeah, you don't wanna have to finance that. Uh, fair. But yeah, I mean, no, I don't think so. I think, you know, I think the notion that, uh, president Trump is playing, playing some sort of a seven dimensional chess game here is a little bit straight ahead of, you know, more He's President Trump, is he, he's a, a projection map, and so how big Greenland one is, he had to have it bigger than Texas. There's, beyond that of course, you know, he's also, he's clearly is a president who is driven by the desire to be put in the textbooks Sure. In history textbooks and what biggest thing you can do other than add territory on major scale. There's other things. I mean, the, the whole, you know, north, the, uh, Arctic Ocean, uh, the access to the Arctic Ocean. Sure. Uh, United States only has that through a small part of us, uh, Alaska. Um, you know, we can't really be players Yeah, yeah. In the Arctic with just that. Yeah. Canada is clearly kind of, you know, very hesitant as well. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, so you have this, you know, there is, there is incentives. Yeah, of course. Um, but I mean, you know, would you go about it by the way? You've got his gun. Yeah. You, no, I mean, um, yeah. You're certainly not attracting Canada to join the United States. No, I know. I don't. Do you think Canada should be, uh, uh, a state or 10 smaller states? That's, that's a question which I think is so esoteric at this stage. I think the United States needs a North American, um. Customs and uh, yeah. Labor market union. Yeah. We need to have the relationship with our neighbors that are again, cooperative and constructive. Yeah. Yeah. To the point of being similar to the European Union, that would be free mobility of labor. Yeah. You can preserve ident. You can preserve, I mean, look, Canada has multiple identities itself. Sure, yes. Quebec versus, you know, oh yeah. The rest British Columbia versus the rest. You, well, in all the Midwestern ones, right. The, they're, they're basically North Dakotans. Well, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba and stuff. Yeah. There might say that there's North Dakotans now, but Yeah, so Exactly. So you can have that. We have tremendous diversity within the United States of course as well. We have the south, we have Florida, which is different from the south. Sure. I mean, you can narrate different world. Why, uh, why is Canada so focused on, um. Carbon credits and preventing global warming when it's so cold up there, they benefit from a little warm up over time. This is interesting, in, in, in economics there is a kind of subfield of, uh, environmental economics, which looks Yeah. Yeah. At that, you know, um, at kind of, you know, what are the REBA effects? They could raise corn up there instead of just wheat. Um, and interestingly enough, so a former student of mine took his first job, um, you know, years ago, um, working for a big family office in Europe, and one of the deals that he was working on structuring was the purchase of a large chunk of permafrost land in northern Canada. Okay. Um, and the premise was that it will turn at certain point in time, into arable land. In a hundred years, this will be farmland. Yeah. I mean, you can see for example, like say, you know, you know, wine makers in Southern California moving father and father North. Yeah, yeah. We have now wine being made in Canada, you know. Yeah. Uh, we have wine returning back to the British Isles, you know, so, um, you know, not since Roman times. It was there produced really at scale, you know, so yes, there are of course gains to be had in certain areas. Okay. Um, the problem becomes is that the problems of the south will be imported into the north. Right. One of the big drivers is the whole migration, for example. Yes, totally. We have that at scale now, starting to happen in the likes of the Middle East, in the likes of parts of Africa as well. Yeah, yeah. Where there is a combination of conflicts plus, you know, searing heat, violence and then heat and then impact on soil. Yeah. Impact on quality of soil, impact on water livability and so forth. So when you think about this in the past, we always, we are comfortable with saying, for example, things like energy has driven wars before there were wars for oil. Yeah. We know historically there were wars for salt. Sure. Because of the importance of salt in preserving food. Yes, sure. In the past, why we having difficulty thinking in terms of the geopolitical crisis. Right. Being driven by mass scale changes in the livability of different parts of the world. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't mean that you have to believe in a completely uh. You know, cataclysmic. Yeah. Apocalyptic type of the environment. Uh, change, you know, scenario. So do we have to be more open to changes in sovereignty or boundaries or alliances or unions then I think we have to be more open to how we define sovereignty. Hmm. Yes. Um, it doesn't mean that you have to give up on your ability to control your own borders. It doesn't mean that you have to give up on the ability of having your own identity. It doesn't mean, uh, that you have to give up on trying to pa to chart your own path. Yeah. That suits your specific culture, your history, uh, into the future. But it does mean that we have to be more comfortable with change. Yeah. Yes. Fair. Um, um, I'm gonna call a time out because we've got a couple more segments that are mandatory. Uh, and I do want to get, uh, Ava outta here in time, so, alright. Um, first we have the ping pong ball challenge and uh, I'm gonna have you draw three balls out of there and I'm gonna ask you the question from my list that's associated with those balls. Okay. You can grab the whole thing over to you if you'd like. Okay. Let's do that. Alright. So, and uh, so just grab any three numbers out of there and then you can set that back over. I'll take care of it. Let see if any of the numbers actually that they're all good. I find lucky. Alright. Okay, so, so, uh, yeah, what's the first number you'd like me to, um, I'll start backwards. One, the. Number one. Yes. Number one, exactly. Oh, this is fun. Uh, first time this question's been asked, I think. What's your favorite childhood memory? My favorite childhood memory, um, probably is a set of memories that form me. Okay. I, I'm a big fisherman. Okay. I like fly fishing. Okay. I'm a big forage as well, and I grew up on a, um, in the city of Moscow. Yeah. When you said foraging earlier, I meant to ask, but like for mushrooms and things like that or, oh, edible mushrooms. Uh, edible berries, you know. Okay. Herbs, you know. Um, my last foraging was actually in December, back in, uh, on the central coast in California. Okay. And it was, uh, portini that I brought the whole box off back, fresh. Nice. And I had some herba. This is in Italy mostly, or sometimes? No, that was, uh, California right here. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Also in Italy as well. In Alps we do that as well there. Yeah. Um, so I forged pretty much for everything I, including for the firewood, for my, uh, little barbecue pit. Okay. So I like barbecue with a natural wood fire. So I forage for the, uh, wood as well. So that favorite childhood memory. So my favorite memory would be my river I grew up on, because I grew up in Moscow City and we had a property outside. We still have that property outside of Moscow. Um, and it's a nice, you almost like a little country home or whatever Exactly. Like the would have Exactly. It's a summer house. Yeah. Summer house with a couple of acres of land right on the river. And I grew up there and I spent that. And so that river is my, probably. Yeah, you are kind of most treasured memory. You can always call up that sound of that river almost. That's right. Yeah. That's cool. Absolutely. Thank you. You can feel it. You can see it. You can smell it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Never leaves quite. Yeah. Um, next question. Oh, yes. Uh, 2020. Um, what's your go-to excuse when you want to get out of plans with someone other than saying, I'm Russian, I don't make plans. Yeah, exactly. You know, you don't want to make plans with me. Yeah. Uh, what's my favorite excuse when I get to get out of something? Uh, usually it is a work thing. Yes. Sorry. Just gotta work. We always, yeah, exactly. There's so much stuff I have to do, you know, I can't go to a concert. That's my, usually my wife actually goes like, you know, let's go to a concert. You take bought tickets. You know, no, no, no. I'm, you know, I'm working now. Take Suzy. Um, so, um, yeah, that probably would be pretty banal, but usually, yes. Fair enough. I don't like relying on things like say health. Right.'cause it's kind of almost like a bad omen. Yeah. You know? I guess so. I don't, that's fair know. If I say to someone, if I tell someone that I'm genuinely, you know, that I'm sick, I'm usually probably genuinely sick. Yeah. Fair. Uh, but if I say like, I have to work. They probably will kind of know in me, they will say, is it workout or is it work? Or is it work? Like doing research because they know I like doing that. Right, right. You know, or is it literally grading papers, which I hate. Who doesn't? Oh, exactly. True. Um, last one. Oh yes, number seven. Number seven. How do you define happiness? Um, I define happiness and I experience happiness on a small scale. I don't define it on a big scale of big events in life. Yeah. I define it on an everyday experience. Yeah. For me, happiness is when I am up in the mountains and I'm actually just free. Yeah. Free from bullshit of everyday life we have. Yeah. Don't think about nothing free from things like thinking about taxes or thinking about how I'm gonna pay for the tuition of the kids, or how I'm going to afford volleyball fees or you know, what, even free from the idea of what I'm going to eat. Yeah. You know, today. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it is literally, you know, kind of a friend of mine, no Decisions to be made. My mountaineering partner, uh, here, you know, he actually says that, you know, I have religious experience when I'm in the mountains. Yeah. Uh, when I'm in a forest, you know? Uh, and it is like it, you know? Yeah. It is something where you encounter something bigger than yourself, more pert than yourself, and something that doesn't judge you. Yeah. Doesn't fair enough make any view of you. Yeah. Yeah. You don't even exist for it, you know? I think that I, uh, I was reflecting on a, a phrase, I think my dad's custom combiner in Texas, uh, told him this phrase, but he's like imagining on a rocking chair sitting in front of a house and sometimes I sit, some thinks I. And sometimes it just sits. Yeah. Uh, and that notion of just sits, you know, even if you're hiking through the woods. Exactly. You know, not just moving through the space and seeing the things completely different of things. See Right. Listen to, to the birds or looking at the clouds or, yes. Like, you know, like, you know, I'm going to go on Saturday for example, up into the mountains and, uh, you know, there's, I know that trail. I know the river there, I know the waterfalls there. Last time I was there, you couldn't see the river. You're actually hiking over it, but you can hear it. Yeah. And that experience, every diff every moment is different. Yeah. Every, every time you take that trail, it's a different trail. Bingo. So this no such thing is common in who said that? I mean, one of the Greeks, you know, said you can't step into the same river twice. Yes. Yeah. You know, and it's probably, it's the most acute observation of reality. You can't step into the same time twice. Yeah. And the only time you experience that and you know, that is when you are fully free. And that's it. Hmm. I dig it. Um, we, uh, we bribe our listeners to listen to the whole show. And so, uh, so the lucky listener that writes in with the answer to that first question, uh, the favorite childhood memory, um, that being the summer cabin, uh, outside of Moscow and the river, especially around it, uh, will get you$25 from Chiba hut, from Loko think tank. Um. We didn't really talk about your family too much. Your kids or your, your, your spouse, your partner, um, care to talk a little bit about that, uh, influence in your life and a huge influence. Of course, the family is probably the most important anchor we have in life. Yes. That's the only thing that we have that physically connects us to time. Which is an important dimension for us as human beings. Um, and also to spaces. Okay. So, um, I have two wonderful kids, completely different character wise. Okay. My oldest one is a golfer. Okay. I mean, was on a team for the, um, fossil Ridge High School, um, competitive golfer. He is kind of like a person who can go and play 18 halls without blowing up. Hmm. My 14-year-old will blow up. Okay. Can't play golf. She's a volleyball player. Uh, she played rugby before, so she's a very kind of Sian strong, uh, but also is kind of amazing to watch her evolution as well. She is becoming, you know, she moved from being kind of a very strong personality to being a strong personality, but also a kind of feminine balance to personality. Yeah. Self restrained a little bit. Yeah. Both are very good students. Okay. Um, both are kind of, you know, not academically minded. They, hopefully they're gonna go into academia. Okay. I'm really happy with that. Uh, my oldest is kind of currently looking at, you know, doing finance because of business. Yep. Dimension. So applied finance, my youngest one is still kind of having big dreams and she wants to do kind of medicine slash biology, um, in her kind of studies. Um, and she's oriented towards that, which is always amazing. Yeah. From my point of view, it's really great to see, uh, my partner, I call her my better half because she's a better half of me. She's more balanced than I am. Okay. Uh, she's, what's her name? Uh, Jennifer. Hi Jennifer. Um, so she's, hopefully you'll listen to this one. Absolutely. Amazingly beautiful human being. Okay. Uh, we've met, uh, now. Yeah. Where did you grab her? I forget you. So we met 30 years ago. When, where were you then? In Chicago? Oh, yeah. Okay. Uh, we met 30 years ago this year in Chicago. And uh, you know, we spent those 30 years so far and, uh, I mean, it's, was it, was it a romance right from the first Yes, it was instantaneously. We have a lot of very interesting and strange connections for the Russian versus, you know, she's, you know, of course she was born in Michigan, uh, but she is half Italian. Okay. Uh, almost half Cherokee. Oh. Um, and, uh, she works in a completely different field. Yeah. She comes from advertising her, you know, degree is in sculpture, so she's an art major. Uh, we've met, uh, randomly through kind of third party friends. Okay. Um, and the first time we met, we had a fight. Perfect. We had an intellectual debate discussion, which was very heated, uh, where she was trying to convince me that there is such a thing as an American art. And I was trying to convince her that all of the American art is really European art and is derived poor copy from European art. Uh, not necessarily no. Fantastic copy, but I mean, it's very different. Uh, so we had a art history debate. Interesting. Um, her view was, uh, you know, sadly that what the hell does this economist from University of of Chicago know about art? Uh, and my view was, uh, kind of probably around the same kind of Look how cute she gets when she gets sassy. Yeah. Oh, no, absolutely, totally. Uh, hot. I mean. But anyways, um, so we hit off right, right away. Um, her background growing up between the United States and Italy kind of matched my background growing up in other, totalitarian in, in my, okay. I'm kid Of course, yes. Uh, in Soviet Union, but also having very strong connection with Italy. Yeah. Because I had family members in Italy. So when I grew up living in the Soviet Union, I was able to travel to Italy all of the time. In fact, my Italian was better then than it's now. Um, so we actually hit off very well from the very beginning. Um, and it's been, uh, absolutely up and up and up in that, that sense. Oh, and you had 10, almost 12 years, uh, just the two of you before you started making littles too. So that's venture time. Absolutely. More than that. Uh, yeah, no, um, yeah, so 18 years versus, you know, 30, yeah. About 12 years. You're right. Yes. Uh, so we had tremendously productive adventure together. Yeah. We, there was a period when we painted together and exhibited, um, and, uh, of course there was a period when we were building the family as well subsequently. Sure. Um, you know, genuinely what works for us. Yeah. Very interestingly enough is that we retain our differences in the fields that we're work in, in the interests we pursue, and we can bring those differences every day to dining table. Yeah. And we can share them, learn from each other Exactly. From different things. You're learning that learning process, like as I said, we spent seven hours on the road, me and her talking. Yeah, yeah. Um, and the youngest one sleeping because she was competing in Salt Lake City in a, uh, volleyball tournament there versus I was, of course, I took some time off in the mountains myself, um, you know, did a bit of a climbing there and, you know, yeah. We wore for seven hours on the road and we were having a conversation with That's neat. Me and her after 30 years, after 30 years. And that's why, you know, like, I mean that's, there's, there's a way of saying that you find your soulmate. Yeah. Uh, she's certainly my soulmate. Awesome. Yeah. Well, glad to hear that. Um, our final segment, the closing segment is the Loco experience, and that's the craziest experience of your lifetime that you're willing to share with our listeners. Oh, okay. Anything as in like, local, local, crazy. Yeah. Oh, I local. Crazy. Could, I mean, growing up in the Soviet Union and having gone to the Soviet military, you know, so the Soviet army for two years, you can't have a menu of choices of crazy, I mean, um, when I grew up, you know, if you think about it, kind of rite of passages, was it intense at that time in the Cold War and stuff too? It was very intense and so far is that I was, of course, you know, I grew up in the 1980s, um, and um, there was this. Break in point of very, what we call inflection point. Yes. Yeah. Um, of the change that Gorbachev brought in as well. Um, I mean, there is a lot of crazy experiences, you know, I mean, we used to, when I grew up, for example, when we would go to the proms equivalent of the proms, for example. Yep. Uh, we couldn't buy alcohol because Gorbachev has banned alcohol sales in the evenings. So, I mean, I remember we were drinking pretty much anything that burns, you know, so like, you know, underage drinking in my background, in my childhood would've involved, you know, I mean industrial alcohol. Oh dang. Um, yeah, Robin alcohol stuff that, the stuff that makes you blind kind of thing. Bad things to you, you know? Um, so crazy experiences. And even though, even though the rest of the Russians, the older people and stuff had trouble getting vodka or whatever. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. That's why that during, during that period in the like 19, mid 1980s. Okay. Yeah. Um, there was tremendous amount of deaths. Amongst the, uh, kind of older generation Russians Mm. Who would be addicted to alcohol Sure. Who had to basically consume or war consume and things. They were drinking a quarter of vodka day and then they got, had to stop. Yeah. Correct. Yes. So they switched to break foods, you know. Oh, damn. Um, and you know, we didn't do that as teenagers of course, but, uh, we witnessed that. Hmm. You know, so, I mean, there was. You know, we used to go, for example, um, fishing in the wilderness area outside of Moscow and you couldn't get a train there, passenger train because there's no stops there. So we would actually pay off under the table to the, um, you know, the train, the conductors, train conductors, uh, to drop us off there and we would get on the cargo trains. Yes. Yeah. Um, so, you know, stopped freight or us off, slow down, they would stop for us. You, and then they would pick us up on the pre-prescribed day, you know? Sure. Uh, like a week later. Uh, and uh, one time we were going and we left and we did our fishing and we did our camp, and then we got picked up and they told us that the day we left was a big holiday. Um, half of the crew, uh, of the whole depot there was about 50 people. Okay. Uh, basically ended up in the hospital and, uh, you know, quite a few of them died from drinking break, break flu, and you know, like if you want crazy, you know, we were teenagers sitting with them when they started. Whoa. And they were offering us to drink. Of course we had, you know, yeah. We had the whole week of backpack and camp. You don't want to do that. Maybe just one bottle for the road. Yeah. Like, you do not want to do that. You know, even with teenagers, you, you, you headless chickens, but you still, you don't want to do that. Interesting. So they, they're kind of experiences like that. Okay. Um, so was your family middle class throughout this. Season kind of. Yeah. Yes, of course. Yeah. So my, my original family, my parents come from the mostly medical background. Okay. Um, so doctors, uh, my grandmother was a professor of medicine. Um, I mean I, part of my family on my Armenian side, they died way before I was born. So as a result of that, I only know my father from there. Um, and you know, but from my mother's side of the family, most of them were in the medical field there. Some of them were professionals, you know. Gotcha. You know, in administrative side of as well. So a little more upper middle class, at least when there was a middle class. But you have to remember that in the Soviet Union, things were upside down. Yeah. Yes. So if you are a medical doctor in the Soviet Union, you earned less money than if you walked at a factory. Mm. Versus if you walked in a factory, you made more money than the medical doctor did. So kind of, if we think about here, medical doctors are upper right, right. Plus, yes. Well, the education we require of it, well, yes. Requires it. Well, of course, but you also, you know, your earnings as well and your wealth that you accumulate. So it was exact opposite of that in the Soviet Union. So, big contention, for example, between, and that influenced me as well in terms of my current career as well. Of course. Uh, big contention was within my family, between my grandmother, who was the academic medical doctor. Mm. So she was a professor of medicine. Um, she was a surgeon and so she kind of, you know, chose that career. And my father, who was originally a research doctor and then switched because of the low pay that research doctors had, uh, kind of started his own underground practice. Hmm. So he was getting Oh, interesting. You know, he was getting private clients. Yeah, yeah. And they would pay him, you know, additional because the weight was too long or things like that. Otherwise,'cause no, because there's no income. You couldn't make ends meet. You couldn't afford anything, you know, if you just Oh, you couldn't regularly be a regular doctor. Yeah. So, yeah. Being a professor of medicine, your salary was back in the days Ah, well it wasn't like, you know, suppose associate professor of medicine, uh, the salary back in those days would've been a quarter of what he would earn if he worked Oh, wow. Privately. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that influenced me as well because my grandmother drove my family. She was the power figure in my, in my family. And she actually kind of instilled that idea of research focus into me. So for me it was kind of, even though I started my career in business, yeah. I always gravitated towards a. Life. And your dad kind of started more in research, but got entrepreneurial because he had to. That's right. Yes. And that was a big reef between him and my grandmother. Interesting. Yeah. Any questions for me? Constantin? This has been a fun conversation. Yeah, of course. I mean, look, I mean, we started the conversation with a kind of, you know, local Northern, Northern Colorado. Okay. And you ask me, you know, what can be done in terms of how can we move Northern Colorado to, can we like that to be stronger and stay competitive? Uh, yes. But also more resilient, not just stronger, it's more resilient, more being able to adapt more, being able to put forward the value addition that actually can be translated outside of Colorado as well. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What, in your view, can do that? Hmm? What do you think? We are not focusing enough? Huh? That's a good question. You know, I think, um, regulatory burden has increased a lot on business. You know, I was a banker for 15 years before I started Loko Think Tank. So that's 25 years. It, it has to be twice as time consuming to, you know, and then the family and medical leave act if you get five employees and then you got this, if you get 10 and you gotta do this and that, and it's just kind of daunting. And especially for those little companies, the 1, 2, 3 companies that are, or the 49 person company that once they hit 50, then they're gonna have to do a whole bunch more expensive things too. And so that, that. That burden at, at every level, uh, is definitely one of the challenge. I think, um, you know, certainly for Fort Collins, uh, we don't really have like industrial sites and things. We've got a a, a staff of 12 economic development people, uh, but there's really not very many places for them to bring companies from outside into, and so I'm unclear personally why, uh, it should be such a large staff in that space. They're doing a lot of business engagement and you know, things around utilities and stuff. So that's kind of the real ground level stuff here. Um, you know, being a libertarian minded though, I think, you know, reducing state level taxes I think is gonna be a competitive advantage for states. I, I think I heard two or three states just announce that they're moving toward, uh, getting rid of state taxation on business, um, no, on personal. Okay. You know, tax other things instead of income tax, um, because that's been a big driver of people moving to Florida, people moving to Tennessee, things like that. Absolutely. And so I think at least trying to get into the middle sector of the state income tax burden would be good. Um, yeah, it's a good question. I think, you know, in whatever can be done, uh, which mostly is regulatory of the cost of housing, and it's not mostly regulatory, but probably 20% of the cost of a house is, you know, R 57 insulation when really our. Climate doesn't really require anything more than 30 or something. Mm-hmm. But you gotta put the 57 in.'cause we, the 57 is better than the 30. Well is it really, you know, uh, what if you can't get the 57 or if it's five times as much? So there's just a lot of building code obligations that, that are good in theory, but end up making everybody's rent$300 a month higher. Um, so those are probably things duction come to mind. Um, okay. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's where workforce things, so people don't get quite as big a shock when they come here for some jobs. That's true. Of course. I mean, the, the problem is that you wouldn't be coming in for the jobs anymore in Colorado. Right. Because the cost they're of living is so high already. Right? Right. Unless you are working in the sectors like say, you know, computational sectors or the Yep. Higher margin type jobs. Uh, yeah, technology, jobs and even manufacturing things. And we talked about agribusiness a little bit. You know, there's gonna be low end jobs there, but there's also gonna be higher end jobs there. And manufacturing is also always great. Absolutely. Manufacturing, especially robotics and so forth. But again, you know, that is probably not so much driven by the cost of living, but rather by the availability of sites. Yeah. Availability of energy, availability of, you know, access to the transportation networks and things like that. And I think that's where Greeley has Fort Collins and, and Loveland to an extent beat. They got so much more water, they got so much more green space, you know, to the south and east especially, but also elsewhere. Um, call it that's suitable, but yes. Well not green, but that's suitable for industrial development, call it. Yes. Yeah. Um, so I think that's a competitive advantage for, you know, east of I 25 realm. But then on the other side, you know, it doesn't have that great connectivity, right? The roads connectivity is not there, so transportation is going to be harder. True. Um, you, well, regional cooperation, like that's probably the number one thing for Northern Colorado is regional cooperation. Yes. We need a clustering effect, you know, and it's clustering effect also means that you have places with higher quality of living like Fort Collins, and then you have the places which have the ability to create the green sites, as you said, for development and so forth, which can be not just Greeley. Um, Loveland is a natural development for the extension of the, for Collins. Yep. As well. Kind of, so you have this natural corridor with, to that extent. Um, Cheyenne is probably more on industrial and energy. Yeah, yeah. Intensive side, you know? Well,'cause they have, especially with the Air Force improvements going on up there, there's gonna be a lot of critical mass. Correct, yes. Of systems and connectivity and data centers. Probably ab Absolutely. So there is an idea for that, and it's a good question why, you know, what eight, uh, economic development officers, I think in Fort Collins, 12 and 12. 12, there's a few that are more in the small business sector, they're gonna be on in a few weeks. So I shouldn't, uh, I shouldn't, uh, shouldn't before. I'm not going to force you too hard on that one. Yes, exactly. But it would be, it, it's actually quite interesting because, um, in being here for three and a half years now, um, you know, and being an economist by train Sure. And being involved before with the things like say policy development, you know, you know, excise taxation, law development in Europe, um, I actually find myself completely not being, you know, in any way, shape or form engaged here. Um, I'm not making an effort myself. So not to say Yeah, yeah. Um, at all. But, uh, there is no outreach from the 12 in economic development, you know? Well, there's maybe somebody like, you know, no. Out outreach from the likes of Greeley either, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So it's very interesting that, uh, to me it is indicative of this idea of the siloed thinking that we have in a corporate world. Yeah. Uh, and having worked at IBM. Um, you know, I am familiar with a giant corporate siloed way of thinking. Sure, sure. Where everyone builds their own empire, right. We build the walls around our own empire. Right. And we still have this fortress mentality. One of the challenges with, with government employees, I've been told, is that everybody compares themselves to one another by the size of their staff. Yes, that's true. By expenditure. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's the IT department. Oh. What big of, how big of a department do you oversee? Yep. It's, it's like the, it's the curse of the IT department in the corporate world. Equivalent. Yes. Yeah. They, uh, you know. Their CVS look, or their resumes look and read. Like I, I was in charge of installing$150 million system. Yes. Sure, sure. You never really read what the system was supposed to do. Could have been a$30 million system that worked better. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This is also why every purchase and, you know, kind of decision favors large companies like Microsoft and BM, it's because you can't really go wrong. Yeah. Yes. You spend a lot. Yep. You know, and you have gotta make support. Well, it doesn't really, that's a big question, you know. Doesn't work. Yeah. Constantine, I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for making time. Thanks. Thanks, Craig. Absolutely. Yeah. Hopefully you get a bunch of calls with, uh, companies that wanna have interns from Montfort College of Business. Would love to. We would absolutely welcome that. Absolute. Oh, not phone calls. Yeah. Uh, messages. Phone calls. Phone calls, emails. Anyway, slow mails passenger pigeon. Absolutely. We'll take it in anything. Right, in any form. Godspeed young man. I appreciate you being here. Thanks. Cheers.