 All right, so my name is Brett Lindell. I'm the CEO of Pantheon Holdings. I gotta say it's an absolute honor to be invited to this. My love of the Mises Institute started just sitting at a table watching something, but I'll tell you, I speak at a lot of business stuff, I speak at a lot of political stuff, and I've never been more nervous than to speak here. And I'm like, okay, well, why is that? And I don't know if you follow Mises on YouTube and stuff like that, but after the Mises University last year, the great Jeff Deist had a Q and A where they talked about men's fashion. And I learned how much Jeff knows about great men's fashion and how you should look and how things should match. And so now I, that's how I'm nervous at a speech. I've gotta speak about something all the while knowing the president of the Mises Institute might be scrutinizing the color of my tie. So now that that's cleared up, and by the way, I was here for like five minutes with my collar flipped up and no one said anything. So maybe the fashion concern was a little bit overblown on my part. Again, my name is Brett Lindell. I am in construction and development. I manage a handful of construction companies. I live up in the Florida Panhandle. I'm a proud Florida man. I'm vice chair of the Walton County Republican Party. There may be some booze elicited from there and that's fine. I played chess while they're playing checkers in theory, right? But I've gotta tell you a little bit about my background just so you can kind of understand the perspective of where everything is coming from. When I graduated high school in 2002, I joined the Marine Corps. When I got back from combat, I went to college and I was an intern for the great Congressman Ron Paul in Lake Jackson, Texas. So I was, now look, I heard people say, wow, and for many years I would exaggerate my role there and say, oh yeah, we did all this great stuff. My biggest skill is that I could unjam the paper shredder when staples would get stuck in there. And that's no lie. And as I got older, for all those years I exaggerated and said I was fighting the good fight on domestic monetary policy, I realized it was actually my ability to find value in an office and get staples out of the shredder that made me valuable. And I kind of carried that mindset. I started to be good by taking some pride in the boring or ignored things. So, and in fact, to bring full circle to the Mises Institute, when I started my business in 2007, 2018, it was greatly informed or there was a part of my business plan that was based on a speech by Jeff Dice in 2014. Secession begins at home. And if you haven't listened to that, I encourage everybody to go listen to it. He kind of breaks out some, how does the session apply to business, right? But there's a good part there at the beginning where he talks about structuring it tax law and structuring it companies appropriately to not only preserve wealth, but take advantage of that. And a big reason why I am good at taking people's money and making money with that is because I know how to structure it. I know how to protect it. I know the law. And sometimes when you know the law, so to kind of counter what Jeff just said about all the calamity coming, my role as the entrepreneur is to understand both sides of the potential impending calamity. What to do when the market's good? What to do when the market's bad? Understand that. And I'm greatly informed by all the great academic scholarship that the Mises Institute puts out, a lone business guy out there reads these books and gets something from them and puts them in action. So I just wanna thank the Mises Institute and all the scholars for that. Thank you very much. So Rachel had said, hey, bro, can you give me a working title for your speech? And you have to be careful when you do that because you can just throw out a title sometimes and it's kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like, yeah, you know, the ostrich edge, leveraging ostrich economics in the business world. And you know, I gave that title and now that's what I'll talk about. And as I started to kind of analyze what people in this crowd might wanna hear, I think we probably have some entrepreneurs in this crowd. We have some people already professionally in business. And you know, to kind of see, as Jeff said, how someone who understood the economics at least to a certain degree would apply that in business. And what's been so interesting is I really have to, you know, COVID was something like 9-11. Everybody talks about what they did before 9-11 and everybody talks about what they did after. It's this seminal moment in people's minds. And I'll tell you, there's really where I live, you know, there's four events. There is pre-COVID where the market was hot and booming. There was COVID, an instant stop of, you know, the economy and the way that we knew it. There was the post-COVID, you know, COVID ending and what we do now and there's even a part now where there's this potentially, or I say, upcoming market correction. So four distinct moments that have happened in the last four years and me is just a small business having to deal with all that. And so I thought I'd kind of walk through my assessment of each of those. So, you know, with the start of my company, if you haven't listened to the Hunter Hastings podcast that I was on, I encourage you to do that. I go a little bit more in depth of how I used economics to assess the market, to, you know, assess my business and where the opportunity was. And if you come up to me later or something I want to discuss it more, I'd be happy to. But, you know, after the 2007 and 2008, 2009 housing crisis, you would be insane to start a business in construction, right? Like, why would you? Because they just kept doing the same stuff they did that made the market collapse. But sometimes, you know, you just have to, I lived in the area. Our industries were hospitality or construction. And so what I had to say was, is like, how can I do construction but do it where I protect myself against an economy that I know is heading down the same road? And so, you know, I had to ask myself some very, some very deep analysis, some very deep economic analysis about my area. I said, are the beaches pretty? Yes. Is the sand pristine and white? Yes. Are there people graduating high school who don't choose to go on to college, who are looking for something to do in an industry that they don't currently have access to? Yes. That was my deep economic analysis. Now, there was much more after that, but, you know, sometimes, you know, us being, if we're in this room, we'd probably like to read economic textbooks, you know? And I'll just tell you, you don't have to raise your hand, but internally raise your hand if you sometimes tend to overanalyze things. Okay, yeah, I am too, right? And, but sometimes you just have to pull back and look at the 30,000 foot level. I don't know that that economic assessment was specifically Mzezian or Austrian or anything, but I was just looking at the things that mattered. And so I did start a construction company in 2018. We did 45 houses in a year. That was pretty good. But what's unique is that this year, we will do 2,000 houses this year, next year doing 3,000, the next year after that doing 6,000 because of a thing we have planned out. So, you know, I took this very ignored industry in an area that most companies couldn't be successful because it didn't have the same logistical or support network. And I made it successful just by applying that. And so, you know, that's the start of my company. And pre-COVID, here's what we had. We had a hot market. We had high demand for people wanting to go into houses, very tight labor, you know? So hard to hire people on the management level, on the laborers. Material was in free supply. You could get material anywhere. And you know, a mistake I think that people make in good markets is seeing the good market is the time to make money. And yes, you do make money, but what I did during that good market is made sure that I reinvested and reinvested. And I hired people, though at the time in 2019 when we were doing 2.5 million in revenue, I was hiring the guy who had run my construction department at $100 million. He's with me today. He's the president of the company. I was hiring the CFO from a, you know, a company that was $2 billion in assets and telling them to come over to this small thing. And how do you make that case to someone? Someone who's leaving that security. And the case I would make to them, and this is gonna come up later, is like there's security in what we're doing. The security that you have in these large corporations, it's a bit of an illusion. Now, this is all pre-COPE-ed, okay? So I'm a little bit like the guy who pointed to left field that hit a home run, right? And, but I was doing that economic analysis and I was making that in passion case. And, you know, it's one thing to make an economic analysis for business, but when you're dealing with people's lives, that's an even bigger thing. I'm convincing you, hey, hit your wagon to me for these reasons, and you know they did. So I built up a good foundation and then, you know, March 2020 happens. Completely changed the world, right? Or did it? Florida, and I'm holding all my kind of political commentary to the panel later, but Florida fared very differently, not just in the rest of the United States, but the rest of the entire world. There's something special about Florida. Again, I'll sell you on Florida later. But what changed so difficultly is I talked about, you know, we still had a high demand in Florida. We still had a very high demand for what we were doing. We still had very tight labor, okay? It was hard to find people, but what instantly happened is material went in extremely low supply. So I don't care how well-intentioned you are, you can't build a house unless you have material, right? And it was just like a shock to the system. But another part that I know this crowd will understand that others did not is the lead times of everything. Everything added on a week or four weeks or five weeks. And, you know, believe it or not, there's a lot of people in business who fail to quantify time and its impact and understand like the value of efficiency. And it was a shock for the market, but you know, what I saw COVID was, so I saw the good of it. COVID was a little bit of a stress test before the market correction that's coming, right? And so I was able to see, did some of my analysis work was the way I was building a company built for something that may kind of frictionally and structurally change, and it did. We had some of our best times during COVID. Our competitors who were less built for those chaotic times fell out. Many of those people worked for me today. The builders, they now said, hey, look, we were building in a great market, but you're the only one who's been performing, why is that? And if we care about our business, we need to have you supplying us our needs. And so we grew customers. We said no to so many customers. So it was interesting. Now post COVID, here's what's a little bit different. So this COVID in Florida, especially the Florida Panhandle, lasted about three months, I'm not lying. Down here a little bit longer, but I also do work in Alabama. And when I would cross that border from Pensacola to Daphne, Alabama, I mean, it was a completely different world. And it was just so weird what an arbitrary line would do to business. We had, you know, we do construction. We had guys working on construction and we were having people call on our guys eating lunch in the van together. They were having one sit in the garage and one sit in the van. You know, this is the distance of like 10 miles. So, you know, it was rather interesting, but what changed in post COVID is that labor began to become available. Material was not fixed. Now, Brett, where did all this labor come from? What we have seen is a flood of political refugees and there's no other word to call it that. You know, I sit in a quarterly meeting though I have 19 full-time employees and about 150 laborers. I'm partnered with companies and there's over 400 employees. So every quarter we have a new hire training. And everybody in that room is not from Florida or Alabama. They're from St. Louis or Pennsylvania or New York or California. And I used to be scared to death when I heard they're from California. But I'll tell you, they understand it. The Californians come into Florida, at least from my experience, are the good ones. They completely get it. And it worries me about the people in Florida. They're the complacent ones because we've had it so good so long. So, you know, that's been very interesting. And when I look at this future market correction, you know, we use economics to sometimes assess business but I'm gonna tell you where I've used economics is to assess people. You know, the biggest commodity right now was great people. And I'll tell you when we sit in that quarterly meeting on our, go to our website, 68Ventures.com. That's part of the group of companies I'm with. One of the things we have proudly listed on our website is faith. You know, it was like a foundation. And I'm not kidding. I was so shocked because you go around the room and say, hey, why do you join here? Why did you come here? Because people saying things like faith and gratitude. You know, so jobs are no longer about a paycheck anymore. Whether it's COVID or woke-ism or whatever. And so to me, that's a market opportunity. I can be the coolest person to work for. We can be the best company. We can have values that are more than just some throw away card that you get a, you know, introductory packet on when you start the job and it's never upheld to. You know, there's a whole market of those people out there who are fleeing here, who are not just fleeing here. They understand like if I work like at any place I used to work at, I'm at risk of this happening again. So it really matters who we're surrounded by. And similarly, I don't have to work around people. I don't want to work around either. So I can only hire those good people. And so it's a great win-win for everything. So, you know, I'm gonna kind of summarize here with a little bit of call to action. You've heard a little bit of my analysis and I'll be walking around, I'll be at the event later. Please come to that and talk to me or ask me more. But, you know, the Mises Institute is, in Austrian economics is clearly the powerhouse in the academic field, right? And I didn't look at the political field. And, you know, we've had Ron Paul and people like that who've expressed it. But, you know, just a few months ago the entire conservative movement was brought to its knees in hopes that an eccentric billionaire would buy Twitter for $44 billion and give them free speech. So now I just wonder like, how effective is politics really? So then, okay, where is it effective to be? And I would say business. I would love to see that it's the Austrian economist of the world that take over the business industry because why not? We know all the right answers, right? We have the answers to the test. So why aren't we the ones out there doing it? And I think we are. And I'm speaking to people out there who are thinking about that. I kind of paraphrase Luke 1248, which is too much as given, much as expected. And who much is given, even more will be expected. And like, I'm not just saying, let's take this Austrian perspective and go out and do business. I feel like we have a responsibility to. We're the ones with the cheat code, you know? So I take that as not only a privilege, but also a burden as well. And so, you know, I'm speaking to a large varied crowd, but I can't not recognize that I was a young, want to be entrepreneur in the crowd. So I'm gonna say something to those people sitting here who want to start a business. And I am young, you know, you can, it doesn't matter what age you are to start a business, but you know, to quote the late Pope Benedict, you know, he says, the world offers you comfort, but you're not built for comfort. You're built for greatness. And to add my own comments to that, it's, I think you find the greatness in this chaos. We understand the skyscraper curse indicates malinvestment in an economy, right? And I'm saying like, understand that when the skyscrapers go up, we own the scaffolding company and the labor company and the office furniture company. And when that skyscraper goes down, we liquidate all the office furniture and we take all those labors and take them to a different segment. We know how things are going bad, but we also know the opposite side of that. And it's never a time to turn off. I'll say the most abhorious comment in this entire speech, Peter Schiff was wrong. Okay, he wasn't wrong. And I love Peter Schiff to death, but what, you know, a lot of people thought after 2007, eight and nine was, hey, let's hide, let's hunker down, buy gold and guns and hide. And I'm saying, Austrians, this market correction, the time is now, we're the ones who understand the dynamic, we're the ones who can take advantage of it. And so, you know, I don't know that we have the greatest light bulb today, but I know that the person behind the light bulb had a lot of hustle about him, okay? And so if you're that entrepreneur sitting out there, all the ideas in the world are great, but ideas without action are absolutely meaningless. So please, if you have something in your heart that you wanna do or think you can do, go do it. The world will be better for it. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.