Wrapping Up the Year: Building a Business, Management, Branding & Vision, Tech Stack, Resources, Updated Thinking, and a Merry Christmas from Building Culture

Austin Tunnell

Hi everyone. I wanted to try something a little bit different for the final episode of the year, which really marks one year of the building culture podcast. And I'm going to try a solo episode. And this is not really prepared. I'm not reading, but I've got kind of an outline of things I want to talk about. And to give you an idea, I want to talk a little bit about the evolution of building culture and the brand and how I think about our brand and how it's evolved business learnings, particularly over the past. year as I'm learning to grow a team and a company. The tech stack that we use that's relevant outside of building construction, think too. Syndication and raising money, what I've learned about that over the past year, year and a half, because that's pretty new to me. And then some of the most interesting, biggest impacts to me over the past year, whether it's books I've read or podcasts I've listened to or ideas, whatnot, some updated thinking, and then even a few personal updates. I hope you find this helpful and maybe encouraging and maybe you take away something useful for your own business, for your own life. I want to start off with the evolution of the brand of building culture. You know, as, as most of you know, I started off at KPMG in 2011 and ended up doing a few other things and went off to the Peace Corps and long story short, you can read about that if you want, or maybe I'll do an episode later. I ended up apprenticing for a master mason and builder, Clay Chapman, back in, starting in 2015. And that's how I ended up in Oklahoma, actually, in Coralton Landing. He was there. And I spent two years working with my hands, learning how to lay brick, know, put roofs on, dig foundations, you know, learning how to build a house, truly. And what had attracted me was this idea of building durably. And the idea that most of what we build today ends up in a landfill in 75 years. And this idea of generational architecture, and that is still very meaningful to me. It's still core to our mission. But what I've seen over the years, and this is partly from personal experience from growing and changing, and also from, circumstances I can't control. would say my vision for building culture has evolved too. you know, if you look at back on our branding back in 2017, when I launched building culture 2017,

Austin Tunnell

It was all about like durability, building things that last for hundreds of years and all about structural masonry. Well, some of you know, at least there were some pretty difficult years as well, particularly starting in 2020 with, with, was moving to Oklahoma city and then COVID hit. And it was kind of a fight, fighting for my life at building culture. And that was before I'd really built a team. And I was on my own. I was doing some historic remodels. So I was already working with other types of houses. and then prices skyrocketed 40 % and, supply chains got messed up. My, my brick was on one year, lead time, stuff like that. And so I ended up pivoting to having to do some stick frame homes, which I hadn't built before. And, know, conventional wood framed homes. And that was a real like philosophical, difficult for me to do, but it was literally do that or literally go out of business and not only not be able to provide for my family, but not even be able to pursue the mission of building culture at all. And even after COVID, the unfortunate thing is, you know, building, I said, mentioned 40%. I mean, that's, that's a real statistic that it cost us 40 % more to build today than it did four years ago. And that's the case for everyone I talked to, big builders, small builders, developers, high-end, low-end. Most people say between 35 and 50%. And I don't see that changing. I don't see that going down. Even if the housing market were to crash somehow, the cost of new construction, I do not think is going to go down significantly. And people ask this all the time, how much more structural masonry than a normal house? And I often say, if you're comparing apples to apples and you're kind of already in the high end market, I'd say structural masonry ends up costing 15 to 25 % more. but that's if you're already in a pretty nice house where you've got solid wood floors and aluminum clad windows and metal roofs and stuff like that. Reason being the brick walls costs the same, whether you've got vinyl floors and vinyl windows and shingle roof, or if you've got the nice stuff. So proportionally, you can absorb the cost of the masonry in a higher end home much more easily than in a, in a stick frame home, or in it, sorry, in a, in a lower cost, more affordable.

Austin Tunnell

home with cheaper finishes, you know, it could end up being 50 % more on a lower end home. And so realizing the limitation that even if the ideal of building cultures to build structural masonry, build, you know, to being bringing durability back into architecture and durability is a whole rabbit hole in and of itself. But realizing one, we needed to adapt. we actually, if I wanted to accomplish our mission long-term, which I really see this as a life long mission. And beyond that, I want to build something that lasts well beyond me. We needed to be able to adapt and be more versatile. And I'll get back to that and a little bit later about even what I mean about the actual need for stick frame homes and kind of like fast and cheap housing and how that's a really important part of city building even, I think. But in terms of our branding and building culture, it started to change from Cause course I couldn't make everything about structural masonry, but between, just experience being forced to build other things, the economy, the personal experience I've had with the rec and building a team and kind of becoming crippled and all that, something that's become increasingly important to me is, why we're actually doing what we're doing. And the answer is people and it's always been people. But it's interesting that you can actually mean that in a deeper and more authentic way. Like even from the beginning, I remember saying it's not about the feature of being brick. It's about the benefit of being, you durable. You you hear that in marketing one-on-one all the time. Talk about the benefits, not the futures, excuse me.

Austin Tunnell

And so I never wanted to be too attached to this idea of brick masonry. Like maybe it could be stone masonry. Maybe there are other things, as in I didn't want to be stuck to brick. Maybe there's other really durable ways of building. And so that was already my way of kind of expanding my thinking beyond like building culture is about brick masonry. It's like building culture is about building durably. And then starting to think about, well, why is durability important? And I think durability is important for, well, a number of reasons. I think it's important for identity. I think it's important for communities to, know, kind of, it really does connect past, present and future. think it's a function of sustainability. think real sustainability is durability, the building that lasts multiple centuries and is used for many centuries. is a truly sustainable building, not just a LEED certification. But ultimately, really getting that back to this idea of human flourishing, architecture, the purpose of architecture is to facilitate human flourishing and the built environment architecture. What is it? It's really the human habitat. Like that's what I've started using this year is we are building the human habitat. And think about how important that is. Like we know when it comes to animals, how important it is to that they're in their natural habitat and that habitats that are not right from them, they can get sick, they can die. And I think it's the case for humans too, but we really don't think about our architecture and our built world as our habitat. So that's part of the evolution of building culture and how I'm thinking is thinking about the built environment as the human habitat. and thinking about what we are doing at building culture more holistically, which I've always wanted to do anyway, moving on from just home building and custom homes into development. Well, now we're finally there where we're actually building neighborhoods where, as most of you know, we're working on talents into one acre infill neighborhood of townhomes and some mixed use. And we're also master planning five acre and 80 acre and 200 acre communities.

Austin Tunnell

to try to shape a more beautiful, resilient and thriving world. And so we're rebranding our website a little bit and I've always had, well, for the past few years we've had built to last on there, but we're actually gonna move, I think, something to like building for the human experience. So I think it's been a really interesting evolution is building culture each year. It's kind of like I've been able to get a higher perspective of what we're actually doing. And I feel like we're starting to really step into where I've always kind of wanted to be and kind of see it going. But at the same time, can, you can kind of see where you're going, but at same time, you really can't see if that makes sense. You almost have this kind of like guiding star or something light and you're, you're heading that way and you don't know exactly where it's going, but you, you're constantly course correcting kind of like a compass and movement is so important because with You know, a compass, you don't know if you're going the right direction and you you're, you, you actually, you can't walk in a perfectly straight line. It's, you're always course correcting. might have to walk around objects or mountains or whatever. And so you're always course correcting. But towards true North. And so I think as building culture, we've been, we've been refining our true North and really heading orienting to that more and more and more over time. And now I really feel good about where we're heading and that kind of like. all about what we're doing is flows from the idea of what creates the most human thriving, the most human flourishing. How can we serve people as building culture? And then everything else can fall into place from there. So that's been a pretty cool evolution that I'm excited about. Let's talk about a little business stuff. You know, I think this is applicable to any business. So some of this, whether you're in construction or architecture or development or something completely different cleaning. or a marketing agency. One of the things I've stumbled across this year or might've been last year is EOS, entrepreneurial operating system. And there's a book called Traction and I would highly recommend building business owners, especially if you're a few years into it, grabbing that book and reading it. We're not fully implemented on EOS. We're not running on EOS. I would like to get there, although it'll probably be

Austin Tunnell

an adapted version of it. But it's a really helpful framework for running a business and really makes you think about. what it is that your business does, how to communicate it to other people. And that's what's interesting because I've been kind of a solopreneur for the first, you know, few four or five years. And of course, worked with tons of subs and stuff, but I wasn't having to build a team and communicate and kind of get a whole team going in the same direction. And that's a much harder thing. It's pretty easy to be just kind of like a solopreneur innovator going and doing things. But when you're, when you're having to work with other people, and get people on board with the same vision, it gets hard. And so I thought EOS was a pretty helpful thing for us that we're still slowly implementing. Something that was helpful very recently in the past couple of months is I hired an executive assistant, Mel, and she's been amazing. And I realized I probably should have done that years earlier, but I kept thinking like, but what am I actually going to have them do? And I decided to just you know, I had a list of some things and it's like, let's just hire that position and then I'll start offloading things because I need to get into the mindset as as, as CEO, as how do I delegate and how do I make sure my time is being spent on the very most important things that my time can be spent on because boy, time is limited. mean, it is unbelievable how limited time is. I've been used to working 60, 55, 60 hour weeks for a long time and spent many years working more than that. Now I'm trying to keep it in that 55 to 60 hours. And that sounds like a lot, but for me, you know, I heard someone else say this, but it's like, it actually takes a lot of discipline to only work 55 or 60 hour weeks. I've got a family, I've got two young kids and I do work a lot. But I also get up in the mornings really early most mornings and get a few hours of work in before anyone's awake. And I might have dinner and go to bed, have dinner, put kids to bed and do some emails after.

Austin Tunnell

And so I'm still protecting my family time and trying to protect my health and the other things that kind of balance, like building culture in some ways it's all together for me. Like I love what I do. And so work and family and health, like those are things I have to think and care about, but they're all kind of like integrated at the same time. I'm rambling a little bit here, but

Austin Tunnell

The hiring, even just having an executive assistant is making me think constantly about what can I delegate? What can I delegate? And also it's so helpful to have someone take a first pass at something. It's so much easier to edit rather than come up with something from scratch. Even if like what you're looking at is like completely wrong or not what you were thinking, I should say, it's not wrong. Someone's trying, you know, come up with a document from scratch. It's like, I don't even know what I want exactly until I see something you're like, okay, I like this aspect, but not this. so it's really helpful. And so I would think about that for young business owners or business owners having a type of executive assistant. Something we've implemented, which is kind of like part of EOS is bi-weekly one-on-ones with team members and Matt, who's a principal and director of architecture and construction and moved down two and a half years ago from New York City. to join building culture as part of the, you know, leading it with me. we started doing one-on-ones with our team members every two weeks, 30 minutes one-on-one and actually let the team member set the agenda. And of course we, and it's not, you know, I have my own people, Matt has his own people and that's been really helpful to, keep, have consistent conversations with our team. They have the opportunity to bring up concerns. of what's going on. And then we also have the opportunity for small points of consistent feedback. You're not waiting for a half year or a quarter or a whole year to give feedback. Every two weeks that's built in. So we might take a few notes about little points of feedback we want to do. And then also the team member knows that they're going to be in front of one of us, you know, every two weeks and doesn't have to let something build up that's frustrating them. You know, that's if something's frustrating, it's let's talk about it. And that's another piece of thing I'm learning as a leader is consistent feedback all the time. And really once you get into the habit of it, and I'm still working on it because it's hard, I'm a conflict, you know, averse person like most people are. But just I can, it's almost like fine tuning. If everyone's on the right page and it's not about berating, it's not about getting mad. It's just about how do we become the best that we can be? How do we become the best we can be as individuals? How do we become the best we can be as a team?

Austin Tunnell

how do we have the biggest impact? We have to fine tune all the time. And so that's what I think about it. I wanna talk about it with my team and it's just fine tuning. I'm fine tuning my behavior every day. And so it can really become part of the culture, that fine tuning into excellence. Let's see, something that came up for me this year that I've heard multiple times and we haven't really implemented this yet, but. from a few really great leaders that I've interacted with who've grown some really amazing businesses is what does winning look like and really defining what that is both for, you know, as a business, as an individual, as a role, as a team, as a department, whatever that is. And, you know, I actually, earlier a couple months ago, I was talking with Don, who's the founder of DLP Capital, which if you look that up, it's a pretty impressive company. I happened to just be at a conference talking to him and They've grown 50%, I think in revenue, 50 % in revenue for the past 18 years straight. They're one of the fastest growing companies in the U S and he said, one of the things he spends the most time on a significant amount of his time on is, defining R R E Ks for each of the team members. So roles, responsibilities, expectations in KPIs and really defining what is the, the roles and the responsibility, what does winning look like? And then actually measurable things, that they can measure so people know they are on track. And so while we haven't implemented this yet, it's been something that I've been thinking about and been talking to Matt about, and we're going to be trying to really incorporate that practice into our business at building culture. And I hope it really ups our game. once again, was just, every multiple touch points of great leaders running amazing companies that talk specifically about literally how important important this is and how so few people do it.

Austin Tunnell

Okay, this is a fun one, Tech Stack. Superhuman, superhuman, which you can just Google. It's actually an email app that kind of overlays over, think Gmail, and maybe it does other email platforms, but I think mainly Gmail. my gosh, amazing. Someone told me to do it last year, and they were explaining it to me, and I was like, what? I don't really get why this is that great of a platform. Well, it is freaking amazing, so. All my email, I've got multiple accounts are attached to my superhuman. It's really shortcut based. So you are always on a keyboard and you never have to leave your mouse. You can schedule things. You can schedule on your calendar. you've got, I can bring team members to comment on email threads where they're not part of the email, but they're there. I've got a conversation with say like Matt and another team member on an email thread where they can see the email thread. but are not part of the chain. So it doesn't like, you're not forwarding emails back to team members. you can book an event in like 15 seconds with Never leaving the keyboard with everyone you want on it at the time. They've got pretty good AI capabilities. I don't really use the AI writing capability, but just even terms of booking meetings and other things, it's an incredibly impressive software and I absolutely love it. It's probably one of the best softwares I've tried out there. I did not do a very good job explaining that, but look it up. And if you have a lot of email, I mean, it probably saves me 30 % of time on email considering, I mean, I get 50. 50 plus emails a day, 50 to 80 emails a day, know? So emails are big. I try to time block my time and not check my email all the time. I've got split inboxes where clients come to a certain inbox, so I'm trying to answer those very quickly. Anyway, amazing, amazing platform. I also started using HubSpot this year as a CRM. I've never really had a CRM, but we interact with so many people, whether it's vendors, contractors, clients, investors.

Austin Tunnell

bankers, I mean just all sorts of people, people reaching out to us at building culture and finally getting HubSpot set up where we can actually kind of have these people in there and, I've found it very helpful to take notes about meetings and conversations and things like that. And just to keep track, it's a way of being intentional and I really want to be more intentional. So that's been great. HubSpot seems to do pretty well. I know there's some other CRMs out there, but I like that quite a bit. I use Asana and I say, I mean, it's not a huge team thing, but I use Asana for a lot of business management tasks. I'm keeping track of what we call an EOS, our rocks, like our quarterly goals and stuff like that. Kind of our podcast posting schedule. I still need to probably do more in it. And I'm thinking about switching to ClickUp. I've heard some good things about that. I'm not in love with Asana, but we'll see. We just recently switched from construction specific from builder trend to Rezio. And now I used to be a builder trend and I always found it frankly, sorry guys, kind of clunky. Didn't really. Never really loved it, but couldn't find anything better. Now we switched to Resio and because Matt's kind of director of architectural construction, he's really managing that platform. I'm not in it, but he seems to like it quite a bit more. For our, we use Google Drive and Dropbox for our file storage. For AI, I've been using ChatGPT more. What I found is it's not good for like writing things from scratch or anything like that, but I found it's a good editor. So for example, the playbook that I write, I write the post, don't, you know, have, I'm not trying to generate inauthentic content, is I write the post and I used to have an editor that I paid to read through it and fix grammatical errors, spelling, whatever. What I realized, I can just upload and chat GPT, ask it to point out any spelling errors or major, you know, things that don't make sense. And I kind of have like a little assistant editor and I can run it, my emails through there to check spelling and all that. And also I'm using it,

Austin Tunnell

more and more instead of Google asking AI, chat, GBT to explain something to me or to look up something. Boy, I, that's really been in the past four months. I've realized just how powerful a tool it is. and it really feels like almost having a, like a, an assistant. I hope we can do more with chat, GP T and AI in the coming year. It's not to get away from people. I really think of it as a tool that enhances human productivity. For design, people often ask, but we use SketchUp. I use SketchUp. That's the only thing I know how to use is SketchUp, but it's perfect for 3D modeling. And also really for masonry specifically, I find it really helpful. Matt, he does use SketchUp some, but also CAD. So a lot of times we'll go back and forth where Matt will start with design and CAD and he's doing floor plans and I'm starting in SketchUp and we'll kind of check with each other and then we'll kind of final, we'll. We'll get the concept in SketchUp and then we'll refine in CAD a little bit and then we'll draw it back in SketchUp to really understand the 3D and how it feels and all that and adjust and elevation. And then it's back into CAD for final kind of like architecture and construction drawings and really working on all those fine details. And so far that seems to be a pretty cool workflow for us. Another really amazing app, my gosh, is AppFolio. If you are raising money, and I know I don't know how many people here are raising money. But if you're ever thinking about being a developer or raising money, Appfolio is an amazing way to manage your investors and investments. You get your investors onboarded. You can send out all your updates through there that you know, if there are multiple investments, they're all in here. You can do contributions and capital calls through it. You can do distributions just via ACH. I could just say, hey, I'm gonna distribute $100,000 for this investment. hundred thousand dollars and it will automatically break up my ownership and end up in the investors bank account. After having done this manually for a little bit, even though I was using HubSpot to kind of track all the conversations and things like that, realizing that at folio is just amazing because it's specifically built for, investor management and you know, you can upload K ones at the end of the year and you don't even have to title them. You just upload K ones and the AI will open it.

Austin Tunnell

within that folio and kind of like read it and then assign the K one to whatever investor it is. So I mean, all the documents are there, your subscriptions, your operating agreements, your K ones, historical data, you can send project updates, can send quarterly, you know, annual updates, you can put pictures in there. It really is a pretty, pretty amazing software that we just got it on boarded this year. And I'm excited to have that as part of part of our main thing. Real quick, I want to talk for a moment about what's called City Makers Collective. This is a two week summer school. This is not a paid sponsorship or anything, by the way. These are a couple friends and acquaintances that are putting together a two week program, Matthew Marshall and Will McCollum, to teach about traditional urbanism and architecture for people that are probably out of school. to really refine or maybe even in school, guess, depends on what kind of architecture school you're going to. Actually, let me just read their description really quick. He sent this to me. Are you ready to join the movement, transforming the way we design communities? The City Makers Collective Summer Studio is your chance to dive into the art and science of human-centered urbanism. This hands-on course focuses on designing places people truly love through timeless principles, hand-drawn design, and real-world projects. Over the course of two weeks in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina, You'll learn from industry leaders, connect with passionate peers and build a portfolio that sets you apart. Applications are open now, but spots are limited and the deadline is March 31st, 2025. Don't miss this opportunity to reshape the future of our cities. Visit citymakerscollective.org to learn more and apply today. I'm on the, I think advisory board is what it's called. And they've really put together an impressive group of people that is on the board, but also the actual teachers and facilitators that are going for this two weeks. I mean, it is a really great opportunity for anyone kind of like looking for that to get exposure to new ideas, advance their careers, whatever. I think it's a very, very, very cool summer program. And hopefully, I think I might be teaching at least a short Zoom class session during and hopefully in future years I can go.

Austin Tunnell

Let's talk a little bit about syndication and raising money. Actually, I've got an appointment, so I'm gonna pause here and then I'm gonna pick up in a little bit and we'll finish this up. And I'm gonna look a little bit different because I've got a haircut appointment right now and I did not finish this in time. So I'll talk to you here in just a minute. Okay. I'm back, haircut and all poor, planning on my end, but we'll finish up. So, get jumping right back into syndications and raising money, which I'm pretty new at. so for any other developers or architects or builders or people thinking about this, I know some of you already have raised money. So maybe this isn't as relevant, but a book I found really helpful was raising capital for real estate by Hunter Thompson. And it was already a path I was going down. had already started a newsletter and a podcast and all of this stuff. social media, not the intent to raise money off of it. And he actually talked about using like the modern era of raising money, particularly since the jobs act of 2012 and, the advent of the, five or six C, SEC exemption, that allows you in, in a real estate syndication to raise money publicly. And I had just. discovered the five six C before reading this book. And I, I highly suggest most people, a lot of, you know, small people that are doing, you know, raising for syndication for a single deal might use the five six B. and it allows you to, to raise money from 35 non-accredited investors. And then everyone else has to be accredited. But if you talk to a good lawyer, they'll tell you, if you do the five six B and take any money from non-accredited investor, you still got to do a lot of extra legal work. And so oftentimes it's not really worth it. And then with a five or six B or any kind of private raise for anyone that runs in this world. Well, you cannot publicly solicit a security, without basically registering with the sec or you fall under the exemption. So I can't say, hi, I'm raising $4 million for X development. Let me know if you want to invest. can't do that. You have to have a private relationship. a preexisting relationship with someone with the five or six B. And that's what's so cool about the five or six C is it opens you up. You don't have to have any preexisting relationships so I could meet you tomorrow and say, find out you're interested in investing and then you can invest in a deal and there's no, risk of getting in trouble with the sec. And all it takes is registering the exemption on the sec website. I forget what it was called, but the five or six scene is basically a piece of paper. they have to fill out very easy. And then you have to take reasonable steps to make sure the investors are credited, which is actually very easy.

Austin Tunnell

particularly with, with some modern software, we use parallel markets and it's just a link and I send the investor and they can verify their investor status in a few different ways, whether they're uploading their tax return or a letter from their CPA or whatever. And then I get a letter that says they're verified accredited and it kind of protects me because they have a parallel markets at least has what's called regulatory safe Harbor. So, where it means they take the take kind of take on the liability. Now check all of this with a lawyer. If you're going to do this yourself, don't You know, completely listen to me, make, make sure you vet all of this, but these are some of the things I've learned and the five six C amazing. And then also the Hunter Thompson book is, is really good, especially I would say for, well, honestly, people in this, the more new urbanist movement and looking to do TND is like outside of the institutional world. When you're not able to raise institutional money. Or, you know, kind of normal family office money, you know, for multifamily deals, for self storage, et cetera. and you can find money all day for stuff like that, or, you know, a value add multifamily. It's very difficult for more TNDs. And I think anyone that's done it will tell you that. and so what I like about the 506C and even Hunter Thompson's approach, which was what I was already kind of doing, it just solidified it. is it, he really talks about using social media, newsletters, podcasts, et cetera, to really just get the word out there about what you're doing. And you're not actually trying to raise money in those things that you're doing. You're just creating a platform and then people, people who are aligned in values will recognize that. And if they're investors, they're going to reach out and they can get on your investor list and great. and so I found that very valuable because it's building culture. have people all over the country. who are interested in what we're doing and, by, by, doing the five six C and even announcing a couple of times on Twitter and stuff that what we were doing, I talked to investors and actually raised money from doing that off Twitter. I think like I'm a million dollars being Twitter and LinkedIn. So pretty cool. And anyone can do it. And it also kind of shows you the power of platforms.

Austin Tunnell

And a personal brand, cause people don't want to invest in a company. They want to invest with someone. And, and, and a lot of people want to invest not just in this random thing, but in something they really believe in with someone they believe in and trust. So I recommend those few things. Another interesting thing on the syndication and money raising world development world is, retweet, or X they call it retweet real estate Twitter. And it's not like some kind of official group, but if you're not on X. formerly Twitter, I highly recommend you get on it. If you're a business owner or ever looking to raise money or in real estate, just to learn and create a network. So not just raising money. I got on there a year ago. wasn't having been on X and it's been amazing. There are top operators around the country in the world, whether it's in real estate or other industries that are posting about what they do. And I've learned a ton and only that I've connected with people. I've had people on podcasts and I met a bunch of people in real life back in what was it September? Cause I went to reconvene, which is Moses Kagan, who's a pretty, one of the, I guess you could say like the top, personalities on retweet, who I highly recommend you follow really interesting guy. And so recommend that for building and any kind of development and investing X is an amazing place. And then also, as I mentioned, the app folio thing, I think if anyone's raising money, take a look at it, do a demo. It really is a very impressive software. and then also the whole newsletter media podcast thing, just as an idea to be. Once again, it's about being authentic and being real. It's not like just trying to raise money all the time or generate content from AI or something like that's why I only send out, you know, a couple of newsletters a month, maybe, maybe only one. Most of the time I do a podcast every two weeks because I'm not just trying to generate content for content sake. I'm trying to. curate great conversations that I'm interested in having and hope that I think it can be valuable to other people in the playbook. I'm writing really kind of deep and personal authentic things. And it's just, it helps me connect with other people who share those values and that vision. And I've really had fun with that. so some moving on to, most interesting things kind of this year, biggest impact for me. Well, one of them actually is.

Austin Tunnell

This Moses Kagan guy that I kind of ran across in October of, guess it was October of last year, technically when I first got on Twitter, but, on his pinned tweet, he has this little tweet and it says, our strategy is simply to do what smart families have always done. Acquire great assets and supply constrained markets, leverage them conservatively, steward them well, refinance them opportunistically to return capital tax efficiently, hold them indefinitely. And he has this idea of an indefinite hold. And the moment I read this, and I can't remember when exactly I read it, but I read this and it immediately registered to me, particularly in this TND world, the new urbanist world, trying to create walkable urbanism and anyone that's tried to do it or has done it knows how hard it is, how long the timeframe is to do it, to create the value, even though it creates the most value over time, it takes time to create that value and everything stacked against you. zoning and fire codes and utility codes and trash codes and planning commissions and engineers and traffic engineers and city council and financial incentives. It's all stacked against you. and, but at the same time you create such tremendous value and there's, examples all over the country, the most valuable real estate. it's almost always in a walkable neighborhood. and realizing what if we took that concept, this concept of indefinite hold And Moses does this with value add value add multifamily, largely in LA and California. Although he's kind of spreading out with his reseed, where he's actually helping other people do it, which is pretty cool. You should check it out. tell I'm having him on the podcast and in January. So that'll be really cool. but it's really interesting. He does not tell, he refuses to tell his investors and IRR because an IRR is based on projections of basically interest rates and cap rates. What are cap rates or interest rates going to be in five to seven years? No idea. And he just straight up admits that to investors rather than saying, we're going to hit this blah, blah, five, seven year exit. It's going to be a 25 % IRR. He presents, you know, a good deal, good real estate. He remodels it and does a really good job because he wants to make it last. So he actually cares about the plumbing fixtures and the windows and all sorts of like details that 20 years down the line will still be in good shape. And also what's cool is you can have a really high

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pre-tax IRR and that works for institutional money that's working with endowments and pension funds that don't pay taxes. But when you're talking about individuals, individual investors, or I think even family offices, private money like that, you pay taxes on that. It gets distributed and it gets passed through no matter what investing entity you're doing and you're going to pay tax on that. So if you're in the 40%, you know, whatever it is, top, top percent tax bracket, you're going to pay whatever that is 40 % on that income. It's just ordinary income to you as a, so being able to hold something indefinitely and indefinitely is, know, that's a little bit of an exaggeration because everything sells eventually. But if people are really thinking long-term 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road, and you can actually refinance out and takes tax free distributions to your investors. you know, you're, could wait till interest rates are low cap rates of compressed. refinance out and he, he, think he usually sticks with 60 % leverage or less because he wants to be conservative in case of a downturn. But anyway, Moses has had a really, big influence on my thinking this past year. I'm really grateful to, to, have run across them. And then I actually went to reconvene in LA and met them. And I highly recommend anyone in the space of development or anything to go to that. It's, it's, it's a really cool two day conference. It was in Santa Monica and the next time I think it'll be somewhere in LA or maybe Santa Monica too. so check that out. I also mentioned the raising capital for real estate book. another one, because that really was a light bulb. I was already kind of doing it. And when I read someone else actually like doing it, it was like, this makes so much sense. so very cool. Another good book I read that was like kind of a book, but not, it's like, you can get it for free online. It's called make something wonderful. and it's Steve jobs actually now he didn't write, you know, an autobiography and there's multiple biographies about him out there, but this is a collection of things he wrote. So emails he wrote to people emails. wrote to himself speeches he gave. and I just read it earlier this year and I read it at the right time because I was deeply inspired by it. And a lot of ways I'm inspired by Apple, not really the Apple of today. And I'm not really making any comment on Apple today. I have an iPhone, but

Austin Tunnell

the idea of Apple and the idea of Steve Jobs with computers back in the seventies when he's doing this in the eighties, what he recognized is that computers were highly technical and like engineering driven. were like by engineers for engineers kind of thing and for, you know, industry and kind of like really serious stuff. And he was like, how do you make computers for the everyday man or woman? And, how do you blend this, this technology and this engineering with art and with beauty. And he was obsessed with making these computers that were being made by IBM and these other people that were ugly. And he wanted to make these things beautiful to interact with. And so really that blend, I think he used the, the, term, blending, fusing the liberal or blending the liberal arts with, with technology. And, and I really think about that as building culture, because we have this kind of hyper siloed and segregated industry in the building industry. Now, as I've talked about many times where you've got architects who come from the arts department in a school and you've got engineers who came from the science department and you, you've got, GCs, know, construction managers that came from the business department and developers who generally come from the business and finance world. And a lot of times, none of these people really know what the other person does. And I'm not really trying to critique individuals or anything. It's just a commentary on how the world works today because we live in a very complex world, but at the same time, and so I understand the need for specialization, but I also think it's important to think about the built world holistically from all these different perspectives. Cause you've, if you solve for one, if you solve only for beauty, but not for engineering, you know, so it can last. Or if you solve for acute, you know, engineering for acute failures in an earthquake, but not longevity. Or if you solve for the financial model, but not the architecture or the beauty or the human floor, whatever, you know, you're gonna, you can solve for that and you can build something, but you're gonna miss out. You're, gonna have a, it's not going to be everything it could be. and so I found that book really inspiring and also just kind of as building a business. I think it's really interesting to read and, and read his evolution and how he talked to people.

Austin Tunnell

And how he inspired people really, really nice book that you can Google and download for free. a few podcast episodes. I've talked about these before, but three of these are actually Andrew Huberman. I don't actually listen to him that much. just listened to, you know, episodes here and there about something I'm interested in the dopamine episode. And he's got a few at this point. I'll put the one I listened to in the show notes. My goodness. It really helped me understand dopamine is really about how you feel, you know, it's kind of a feel good home hormone and your motivation hormone. And I'm probably going to butcher this a little bit, but it really helped me understand how we're motivated in life. And it's, I'm going to talk about this in a minute, but he talks about dopamine, how, how you kind of have this baseline level of dopamine. And when you start desiring something, say I think about a cheeseburger and I'm hungry. So I want to go get the cheeseburger. Your dopamine actually spikes. for the desire of the cheeseburger. But then it actually drops below baseline. And that is actually the motivation to instigate going to get putting that effort in to go get the cheeseburger. So it drops below baseline. Then as you are in pursuit of that cheeseburger, you get in your car, you're driving, whatever you're doing, you're ordering, your dopamine is slowly kind of like moving up as you get closer and closer and closer to achieving your desire. And then when you eat, That cheeseburger, that's where it peaks again. And what's interesting, and if I remember this correctly, the desire and then the actual consumption of that cheeseburger are generally about the same as long as the cheeseburger actually fulfilled your desire is what you imagined it would be. Now, if the cheeseburger was terrible, you can actually have a lower than your desire. Or if it was just the best cheeseburger you ever had, it could be above. But I found this really interesting because. The higher and faster your dopamine spikes, the harder and faster it falls and it falls below baseline. And so you can apply this to drugs or alcohol or kind of cheap pleasure is really easily where you understand super high spike in velocity of dopamine and you feel amazing. And then the crash is actually your dopamine falling not just to baseline but well below baseline.

Austin Tunnell

And the problem with that is it actually makes your moat. only do you feel bad, your motivation's gone to do anything to make it better. And he talks about these kind of, forget the words, but high frequencies of the, if you imagine a wave pool and all of, if you've got like these big spikes and drops, you kind of creating all this churn and you will actually lose water out of the wave pool and your, your baseline actually goes down and goes down and goes down. so By make by choices we make, we can reduce our baseline dopamine and also have these big spikes and troughs. And it makes it really hard to do any, to feel good and to pursue a goal. And so then he talks about what are the sustainable dopamine spikes and, this is just so cool that science I think is like religions. I've been telling this for a long time about like how to pursue happiness and meaning and all that in life, but not like science is kind of like proving it true, but

Austin Tunnell

The best, the, Pursuing hard things is actually what leads to the best like kind of like I don't know what he would call it. It's been a while. So I listed it like the healthiest spikes and dopamine's dopamine. That's the most durable that over time also increases your baseline. And what's cool about increasing your baseline is it not just that you like kind of feel better. You're actually more motivated and and so you can actually pursue more and more things and this is what's so cool about, I don't know, think just being a human is like our choices really matter. They really deeply matter. And that, that episode, even though I'm having a hard time kind of articulating all of it really had a deep impact on me. And it's something I think about regularly. And it's like, when you're in a trough, the best thing that you can do is to do kind of the hardest thing that you can imagine doing. you know, so if you actually feel terrible, go work out and like, that's the best dope. If you, if you say like, I feel terrible and so I'm going to drink a six pack, you can do that and you're going to feel fine for a few hours. And then not only the physical hangover, just the dopamine loss, you're going to drop well below and then your baseline drops and, then you feel less motivated and you want to drink again or something like that. then hard drugs like methamphetamine. my gosh, those are like 10, a hundred times spikes compared to like other things. It's, really crazy. It helps me understand kind of opiates and other kinds of drug addiction. Great episode. His episode on alcohol is. incredibly depressing. Because you know, there have been studies out since I've been alive. I'm 36 just saying like a glass of wine, two glasses of wine is good at night. And I've always kind of been in that camp of, yeah, like, that's fine. Well, the science is in and it is unequivocally clear. Alcohol and inequality is terrible for you. It is poison. Now, Huberman, Andrew doesn't try to talk you out of drinking and I don't I drink too still I drink alcohol.

Austin Tunnell

But I'm drinking a lot less. and I'm really trying to be intentional about when I do it and, and, and, and, and trying to limit it to very little, but basically his message is two drinks or less a week. You're probably fine though. Zero is actually better, but two or less you're fine. anything more than two a week and, and you're going to have actual real negative health consequences, which is crazy because of the recommendations through, don't know, whatever the, whoever puts out the recommendations, all these scientific studies and maybe even the government. And it's like, I think it was. six, seven, eight drinks a week or something, as moderate and, and yeah, that's just not true. And so it's helped me really think about alcohol and using it as a tool for fun and social stuff. but also really trying to reduce my consumption and I want to reduce it some more in 2025. I might like take some random months off or something like that. Like, I don't know, every few months, take a month off. another great one is he had Rick Rubin on who as a producer, know, produced a lot of amazing musicians. And he's really talking about being an artist and what it means to be an artist. And I found it deeply inspiring and, almost like gave me permission to think differently about myself and the world. And, it really talks about meaning too, and pursuing, pursuing something and finding something you care about and pursuing art and really the We're all artists in a lot of ways. We actually allow ourselves to be really recommend that one. And then last one, here's a business one, Brian Chesky, who's the CEO of Airbnb. was on what's called Lenny's podcasts. listened to him. Some of you might know this. He gave this speech at a Y Combinator and Paul Graham wrote a short little essay called founder mode. And it went viral this year. And, he kind of, and I. I listened to him talk about that with someone and then on Lenny's podcast, he kind of breaks down a lot of his message from that because I don't think that was actually recorded, but he breaks down a lot of it. And for any business owner, very, very, very good episode. It helped me think about a lot of things, but one of them was he talked about great CEOs and he got talked out of this. So, you know, when he first started Airbnb and he scaled it was a great founder. but then when he kind of started to transition into CEO mode from founder mode,

Austin Tunnell

which I think was 2014 and he started hiring professional managers, professional managers doing the Harvard business law, you know, kind of recommendations and everything started falling apart and became miserable. And ultimately I'll let you listen to the episode, but some of the takeaways for me were you've got to be in the details, even as a CEO, it doesn't mean you micromanage, but how can you manage anyone if you're not in the details? So you actually need to be in the details and he uses an example of Steve jobs, especially later in life. Where most of his time was spent reviewing work. And not only that, Brian Chesky had all these different departments at Airbnb at some point. I forgot how many he had and everyone started competing for resources and not really, you know, just kind of coming up with their own product and having their own agenda. And that's very kind of common in large companies. And he reduced it down to three. I don't know if you call the departments or teams maybe, but he has engineering product marketing. And design and what's interesting, and I'm not going to get into each one of these because you can listen to the episode, but you know, the head of engineering and the head of marketing, head of product, product management in a sense, they call it product marketing, product management, which is the whole interesting thing in itself, which I'll let you listen to that. And then head of design, each of those, like you would think head of design, maybe, reports to head of product, product management. No, those all report. directly to Brian Chesky, the CEO, because he is the common thread that keeps everyone going in the right direction. And he meets with them, has a regularly scheduled meetings and they, he sets the goals. Then he's meeting with the teams to make sure they're in line with the goals. And if engineering saying we're not in line because we're not on time because the design team, blah, blah, they can stop and go talk to the design team, work it out. if none of this makes sense to you, might be, you know, maybe the, just the way that your business works. doesn't, it doesn't really matter, but I'm thinking about how to grow at least a decent size company. don't know how big that is going to be. You know, we've got like five, six people right now, but as we grow, I want to think about how to be highly efficient, and, really be a team, but also you do kind of have to specialize some. You can't just have a team of all general. Well, you can be, you can't, it's very difficult to scale like that and to have the very best people. Cause the very best people are very good at a few things.

Austin Tunnell

So how do you keep everyone going in the right direction to create great products? And I thought it was a very, very, very good episode. Okay. and this is the last thing, I want to talk about, it's some, some of my updated, thinking for the year.

Austin Tunnell

been a lot of talk over the past few, as I mentioned, I'm, I'm, 36. I never thought in my lifetime, it never even crossed my mind as a possibility that free speech would have to be something I had to think about or fight for. And, you know, then 2020 comes about, or maybe it started before then I wasn't paying attention, but you know, the words disinformation and misinformation started popping up everywhere and People I know and people like that run in my circles are talking about how we need to censor this and that. And I think it's utter insanity. and, and, and just, just a little quote from Mark Andreessen, who I really like, he's an interesting follow if anyone's knows who he is, from Andreessen Horowitz of VC. And I recently just read a quote from him he said, all new information is heretical by definition because it's a threat to the existing power structure. So all new ideas start as heresies. So if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end up in complete stagnation, which goes straight into decline. And I agree. remember reading this, you know, that the ACLU, I forgot when this was in the seventies or something. They defended the right, not that they agreed with it. They utterly did not agree with it. They defended the right of, think some like neo-Nazis to do like a A march through town and I'm to get the details wrong. So please don't get mad at me, but something like that. And, frankly, I'm a pretty become a pretty free speech absolutist, my tell self when I'm saying like some updated thinking on my end is like, I don't think there's any other option. There's plenty of things I don't like. There's plenty of things I disagree with. And I think the way to handle that is to have conversations and to point out where I think people are wrong and to fight for what is right. It is not to, censor people. think that is a devastating solution that will have horrendous consequences. And, I really think there's no way to have a free society without free speech. And it's been shocking how many people, like I said, in my orbit, particularly it seems younger people, I don't know, are very much okay with the idea of censorship. And anyway, just, just something I've been thinking about.

Austin Tunnell

And I'm very committed to and passionate about something interesting that happened to me earlier this year, kind of shifting gears a little bit is talk a lot about why is, you know, housing so expensive and, and I'm pretty ticked off at the government policy during COVID because, there's different statistics, but something about, you some people will say a third of money, was printed, like a third of money in existence was, was printed during the, you know, the three or four years of COVID. and I think the estimates are somewhere between six and $10 trillion, depending on how you measure like M2 just got skyrocketed. And you can look into how the government actually prints money. It's pretty interesting through quantitative easing and, selling off bonds and stuff like that. but I read the Bitcoin standard earlier this year. Now the Bitcoin standard is not about Bitcoin. and someone recommended it to me, so I just read it. And three quarters of the book is about the history of money and what is money and what is the purpose of money. And I'm, know, CPA from an old life. not like I'm, I understand like basic economics and even some money theory, but it had been a long time since I looked into it. And this book, particularly the three, the last quarter about Bitcoin itself was actually the least interesting part. Cause it was the technical part. And mean, don't get me wrong. I think that's interesting too, but really what I'm talking about is money and inflation and how like hard money, why it's so important to a flourishing society and what was fascinating to me, I'm not going to get into all the details of it besides recommending you read this, is he traces money throughout history, and the rise and decline of empires based on inflation, the Romans started clipping their coins, literally gold coins, they started clipping them as in like each coin is worth less because it's less cold, literally. And, and that was around the time of the Roman empire falling. And then I can't remember. I'm going to forget. I won't get into those details, but I do remember he points to the Renaissance and I believe Florence and maybe Venice. What did they do? They came up with their own currency. That was like a, a pure, I forget the word he uses, like a pure currency or a hard currency or something like that. And that was the foundation for civilization.

Austin Tunnell

to be able to, to sprout from and flourish from. And when you read that book and start like understand, you know, see what's now the combination of kind of that more academic part with what I've seen over the past four years and what's happened. Like I said, it costs us 40 % more to build today than it did before. Yes. There's problems with supply and zoning and that, that, that all of that. Yeah. But I am a big believer that a huge part of this is our monetary policy in the U S and it's completely unsustainable with our $36 trillion of debt at this point. we're adding, gosh, how much a year or so that's something I'm becoming increasingly convinced of and passionate about. Something else interesting that I've, I've really updated my thinking. think this probably started a couple of years ago. Building culture were about durability and, and, and I really do believe not brick masonry per se. Brick is a form of structural masonry, but what we are for is durable building. But not everything should be durable. And here's where I've updated my thinking. I actually think fast and cheap housing is super important to the evolution of durable communities. What I mean by that is you, it's very difficult to build a place, a city, a neighborhood to 100 % completion and expect it to never change over time, especially when it's new, because you need something to be able to evolve. So it's really nice to be, that's the whole idea of food trucks and these little temporary stalls and stuff like that. Cause it's these little stepping stones to more mature and permanent. brick and mortar places and even be able to have a throw up a stick frame shops and things like that that might only last 30, 50 years, but it's getting activity going. It's getting culture going. It's getting people involved. It's getting money flowing. It's creating a sense of place. It's a drawing money and attraction. But, here's where the issue for me is, is that in the United States is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. As we have increased our wealth. What we've done is we haven't transitioned to a better building system or more durable building system. We've just built bigger and packed more luxury finishes inside while also making our construction more complex because we're really obsessed with energy efficiency and other things, which I'll not going to rant here. I'll save that for another episode, but

Austin Tunnell

Insulation actually causes a lot of problems because of air quality and mold and other things and moisture. So to do it well, you really have to do a very, very, very, very good job. and by the time you do a really, really, really good job with stick framing, becomes very expensive to, actually build a well-built stick frame house. and sorry, I'm getting off topic a little bit. Let me get back to my point, which is that. I think at building culture, we're, we're, we're building some stick frame stuff now just because of the reality of the world. I also think you can build quality stick frame as long as you get the details right. But ultimately I still believe that a masonry based construction system is the best way to go for low seismic areas and as places mature. So maybe not for single family detached houses and low density subdivisions. I'm not saying like everything should be masonry, but as an area, especially city centers and districts and things like that are evolving and maturing. suddenly they're turning into four or five story buildings. I do think those transition to masonry is kind of like the, mean, what happened in the Renaissance all over Europe, you had these shacks cobbled together, you know, around Florence. And then as they rebuilt in the 15th and 16th century, 17th century, they rebuilt out of masonry. When London burned down, they built out of rebuilt out of masonry in Chicago burned down. They rebuilt out of masonry masonry. One of the reasons that lasts so long is it has so few vulnerabilities. And if you want something to last a long time, you want to have as few. failure mechanisms as possible. So when I say structural masonry, the first reaction to people is what about seismic? And it's like, okay, maybe don't do structural masonry in California. Outside that, let's talk about structural masonry. Also, there's a lot of ways to reinforce it where you can still, you know, it can handle a decent bit of seismic. But what I want to say to the people that critis critique it because of seismic, I say, yeah, but what about fire and rot and mold and wind and termites? masonry performs much, much, much, much better. Also, can withstand substantial periods of neglect. So if you want something to last for 500 years or longer, you know, it's not always going to be a wealthy area. Empires rise and fall, cities rise and fall, they decline and have a Renaissance. So you want something that can withstand substantial periods of neglect and the masonry can do that. We're restoring a masonry building right now that's been neglected for

Austin Tunnell

I don't know, 50 to a hundred years. And if you were to do that to a conventional modern stick frame building, it would be destroyed because the moment the paint starts peeling and water starts getting behind the walls and it gets trapped in the insulation and starts rotting the wood because it's vulnerable to moisture. You know, it degrades very, very quickly unless you upkeep it well. And so that's what I like about masonry is while you do need to maintain it, I'm not saying you shouldn't maintain it. It performs better over time. So some updated thinking there. and then. Also, which I've written about kind of last thing here is just, you know, and this has been a largely driven by this whole wreck and becoming crippled. And thankfully I'm walking now. Like I walk without a boot, at least the past, I don't know, a month in and out of meetings, but I don't, haven't gone on a walk. Like I don't go around a walk at the neighborhood. If I go through the airport, I have to put on my boot, kind of medical boot and it gets very uncomfortable after a while. And it's completely changed my life because I don't know how to travel anymore. I certainly can't play sports. I don't go on walks around the neighborhood with my family. and you really have to start digging deep when you lose something so precious as the ability to walk. Cause every step I take is painful too, like literally painful every step, ouch, ouch, ouch. and it gets worse. The more I walk is what is, what's happiness? and I wrote about this a lot. So I'd point you to the playbook if anyone's interested, but It's interesting that this past year has probably been the quote unquote happiest year of my life. And, and I don't know happiness feels different to me than what I used to think. Cause I don't wake up jumping out of bed going whoopee. there's a lot of hard days. I love my work, but when I say love my work, I love the vision and mission of what we're doing. A lot of what I do, I don't like it's hard. Like it's, it's work. And over time I hope to get. to where I do more of what I love and kind of reduce the things I don't. But if I could even get to 50 50, that would be an amazing win. and, and really it's kind of the combination of going through this personal, you know, losing my mobility, having really some rough years and building culture, some kind of, guess, personal development and spiritual development and, and even learning about like the dopamine, how the dopamine works. It's kind of coalesced in this idea of like, and I,

Austin Tunnell

I've always thought that life was about being happy or just kind of grew up being taught that just culturally like, yeah, you're supposed to be happy. Like that's the point of life. No. Because what happens when you're not happy? Happiness is an emotion and there's going to be weeks, months, years of your life where happiness is nowhere to be found. At least for most people I talked to, I'm certainly not the only one. Life is tragic. Life is difficult. People die, kids get cancer, you lose a foot, your spouse dies, you lose a job, you go bankrupt. Horrible things happen. They're not just gonna happen once, they're gonna happen multiple times. So what's gonna get you through those times where happiness is nowhere to be found? And I think it's gotta be something so much deeper. And I think that's meaning. And I think meaning comes from pursuing... The highest. goal you can think of, and pursuing something difficult. And life is hard either way. Life is painful either way. So it's kind of like choose your hard. You can expend yourself on a worthy cause. And when things go wrong, you still have a purpose because you have a purpose. If your life is about trying to feel happy, that's not a purpose. and also learning about that. I I've heard this recently just from like some health people, like aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort.

Austin Tunnell

And it's really interesting because in America, the whole idea of retirement is like, me work really hard and then retire and play golf and drink martinis. And like, that doesn't work. That's never appealed to me any. Well, maybe it did back when I couldn't stay in my job or something, but now I like never want to retire because it's just like your life changes over time.

Austin Tunnell

I'm rambling again here, but I'll kind of end with this on this thought of just the desire to be comfortable is very real. Like I want to be comfortable and I think about that a lot, but the more I learn and the more I pursue hard things and the more meaning and purpose I experience and a lot of this is relationships too and people. The, the, I want to continually choose not comfort, I guess is, is what I mean. And that's, I think that's probably part of the danger of people getting wealthy. When you hear about people being wealthy, being so miserable as they think it's the lack of, they think money can buy comfort at all times. But the problem is perpetual comfort makes you miserable. And I I'm kind of actually like convinced of that now. And, so it's just something, it's not like I figured it out or I just, you know, always do hard things or something. It's just more. something that continually think about, and I want to continually grow in that area.

Austin Tunnell

A couple personal things, some personal growth things this year, I started this podcast. mean, technically it was 2023, but I only did like two episodes. I'm really counting this year as the first episode year of the podcast. And it's been awesome. It was really scary at first kind of doing this. And now I really enjoy it. It's led to some wonderful conversations and it's grown quite a bit, which I'm excited about. And this is my first solo episode like this. And, well, did one 30 minute one last year, but I'm going to try to do a few more of these sprinkled in here and there about specific topics that I care about. This is just kind of an end of the year wrap up one. The writing and the playbook has been a big kind of personal growth thing for me. Cause I was terrifying to start like writing and putting it out there. And I started intending to try to do really technical stuff, but then ended up started writing about my story, how building culture came to be. And then it started going into. how hard it's been, and then I started going to my rec and working through that. And the interesting thing is it's helped me process. Cause I don't sit down and say like, here's what I'm going to write. Here's what's in my head. Let me just write it down and send it out. It actually is sitting down and be like thinking that's what it is. It's thinking in the writing actually helps me think in depth and work things out in my own head, whether it's a very kind of like personal thing, like an emotional thing I'm working through or a problem about why is housing so expensive? I can think about it, but I'm going to actually start writing it down. It makes me think much harder. and workout problems. So I've really enjoyed it. And it's the first year of the, the playbook. And I started with, well, zero followers are, you know, subscribers. Now we're at over 1200. So that's really cool. And I appreciate everyone that's listening and following. another kind of personal wins. I've just been drinking less alcohol. As I said, I still drink alcohol and I like hanging out and having beers and great cocktails and good wine sometimes. but I have reduced that and I tend to reduce that, try to reduce that some more this year. which is hard because I do like drinking. but I, I want to just become more mindful and intentional about that. a couple of kind of like health things. If anyone's interested, got a bed.

Austin Tunnell

cooler this year. Like there's the sleep eight that costs thousands of dollars. but I bought a $200 version one that pumps water through the bed. And if you get night sweats or something like that, or get hot in bed, excuse me, this thing is awesome because like now I don't sweat at night and actually sleep better. I forget what it's called, but I mean, you can just find one on Amazon for like 200 bucks. I've got an infrared sauna that I've been doing that I really like for doing the evening stress on, Friday. I do a sauna with my brother-in-law and Matt, and we kind of debrief on the week and talk and it's, really fun. I got a sun lamp. That's weird because I know in the morning it's ideal to just go out and like look in the sun. you, don't well be exposure to sunlight and Andrew Huberman's big on that and a lot of other health experts now, that's not always possible for me. So I've got a 10,000 lux sun lamp that you can get off Amazon that a lot of times I just wake, roll over in bed, turn it on. And, kind of like wake up to, it helps me wake up and it's supposed to help you through circadian rhythm. And I've liked that. also am using red light glasses at night for blue light blocking. And I turned my phone to black and white at night. And the last thing, this is really the last thing I keep saying that this is the kind of last thing I want to talk about is, ending on just one little story from, from the rec and earlier this year when I was getting my, believe fifth surgery and gosh, I don't know, March, April, may, excuse me. still have a cold. Well, I was checking in with the, the, lady for the surgery. And she remembered me from my, you know, multiple other surgeries and she was like, you've been in here before we were chatting and asking about my story. I was just telling her about it. And, you know, that's really tragic. I'm so sorry. And she started telling me about her father who's in his eighties, who, when he was 30, he lost an eye and it kind of ruined his life. He lost his job, all sorts of terrible things. And it was through like negligence and he never got a penny from it. And it was super unfair.

Austin Tunnell

Every single one of you listening were to hear the story. You would be like, that's horrible. he should have been compensated. And for any of you that know the story with the city bus, I mean, the, the, the state of Oklahoma caps the liability, matter what they could have chopped off both my legs. They kept the liability at $170,000, which was a law made in 1978. So that's worth $850,000 today. But anyway, so $170,000 by the time you pay your 40 % legal fee and all my medical bills, I'm actually not sure it even covers all the medical bills. So I might actually be coming out money for being crippled and going through three and a half years of sick surgeries, pain and suffering being crippled the rest of my life because the city because the government they can do whatever they want. Anyway, super unfair. I asked the lady I said, said, that's awful. And I said, did he ever get over it? And I'll never forget this. And I hope I never forget this. She looked at me like this pained look in her face and just said, no, he's an angry, bitter old man. And that moment was so, profound. stuck out of my mind. It was scary too, because I was starting to get over the whole thing of how unfair it is and the lawyers and the insurance and that I'm all this stuff I've been through and I'm not even getting compensated for it. And it just felt so unfair life, God city, whatever. But I was starting to like, figure out I had to let go of it or you know, I was getting there but when she said that, you know, I went right into surgery so it wasn't like an immediate thing. But like that week, I just realized this is something like I only have two options. I either let go of this.

Austin Tunnell

let go to my claim to what is fair or you know, whatever this my concept of fair is and I can live a great life still or I can hold on to it and I'm to end up like him and like I wanted to like having middle ground where I kind of like held on to it a little bit like no, no, no, it's really freaking unfair but like I'm still going to go do this but I just realized I don't think I could do that. Like I had to make a choice and I think it's something you continually let go but I really it was kind of this fork in the road and What I recognized was that man created his own hell. Like he literally created his own hell through his own choices. And he had every right to because what happened to him was awful, it terrible. And everyone had said it was terrible and unfair. But by not being able to let go of that idea of fairness, he created his own hell and ruined his own life and was miserable. And not only that, he made everyone around him miserable. And I have compassion on I'm not like throwing stones. But just going like, my gosh, I don't want to end up like that. I don't want to end up like that for my own happiness. I don't want to end up like that for my family's happiness, for everyone around me. But it was a couple of days later that that turned into a really inspirational thing for me. Because I realized if you could create your own hell, and I'm 100 % convinced you can now, like you, you can do that and it can always get worse. That's thing. There's not bottom. You can get worse. You can make worse choices and make things worse for yourself and for people around you. Well, If you can make your own hell. Well, it follows that you can make your own heaven too. And I get that this is like symbolism or something. It's hard to talk about. have to use these words because it's the only thing that makes sense to me. I don't mean the physical heaven or what happens after you die per se. Although I wonder how connected all of this stuff is sometimes. But if you can make continually make bad decisions in kind of your own pride that make your life worse. And it's almost like a path downward.

Austin Tunnell

And it can just go down even farther and farther and farther and farther and your life can get worse and worse and worse and worse. You can also make decisions and let go of your pride continually and continually move upward, especially if you are kind of in pursuit of that higher purpose, that higher goal, that higher meaning. And it's kind of an infinite journey. It's an infinite path. And that's also the whole idea of it's not about the destination. It's the journey, which boy, that's been a decade long lesson for me of just always wanted to get here. I made the hard decision. I did this thing and then my life should be happily ever after. It's like, there is no happily ever after because there is no, we're not meant to be happy at a destination. We're not meant to be happy in stagnation. We're not meant to be happy in comfort. Literally, we're not built for it. No matter how much we want to be chemically, physically, we cannot be happy without pursuing goals, without movement, without pursuing something. And All of those realizations, I feel like I'm kind of late at 36 years old figuring all these out, but maybe this is helpful for someone else out there too, that is going through something hard. Doesn't mean I feel like I said, I don't think I have it all figured out by any means. I'm just sharing some of the things that have meant a lot to me over the past few years and really the past decade of, kind of. Exploring, pursuing, pursuing the highest purpose, pursuing. the best that I can be pursuing meaningful relationships, pursuing God and really trying to do something good in the world to restore it, to inject beauty, to serve other people. It's really like, and it's not just about other people. It's also about me. It's also about you because it's, think in becoming all that we can be is the greatest gift that we can offer our families. that we can offer the world to God ourselves. So I'll end with this quote. It's a quote that I read a number of times over the past couple of years because boy life has fought hard a lot. And, it's Theodore Roosevelt, 1910. Some of you might've heard this. It is not the critic who counts.

Austin Tunnell

not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming. But who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause? Who at the best knows in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope wish you all the best in 2025. I appreciate all your support for building culture for me, for listening to this podcast and gosh, I'm so annoyed because I forgot to bring this up earlier. Some people I'm really grateful for. Brian at one source windows and Sierra Pacific who ended up sponsoring this podcast is actually really helpful and it means a lot to me and I appreciate it. And I'm not going to kind of do a. a spiel on them right now, but I just want to say, I really appreciate them. And if you are on the market for windows, check them out. thanks so much, everyone. Thanks for everyone who supported and I will see you in the new year.