# Ross Perot Jr. on Why Texas Keeps Winning (#434)

**Channel:** POWERS Pod
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwyOrEoa1cE
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/RwyOrEoa1cE

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Why Data Centers Matter Now
- 0:42 — AI Boom and Industrial Demand
- 2:36 — Texas Advantages for Data Centers
- 5:33 — Sponsor Message and Transition
- 6:19 — Fixing Data Center Misconceptions
- 9:42 — Spec Builds and China Competition
- 11:49 — Texas Politics and Business Climate
- 15:32 — Texas Culture Attracts Newcomers
- 18:13 — Elon Musk and Major Projects
- 21:37 — Taylor Sheridan and Fort Worth Branding
- 23:39 — Planning for the Future Economy
- 27:46 — Early Life and Helicopter Adventure
- 34:30 — From EDS to Alliance Texas
- 42:02 — Why Alliance Cannot Be Recreated
- 47:19 — China, Taiwan, and Strategic Risk
- 52:22 — Iran, Oil, and Global Markets
- 58:53 — Markets, Tax Policy, and Growth
- 1:02:51 — AI, Regulation, and Quantum Risk
- 1:08:20 — Nuclear Power and Energy Future
- 1:09:22 — How Alliance Became a Development Machine
- 1:13:39 — Client-Driven Master Planning
- 1:16:30 — Winning Deals Through Texas Leadership
- 1:19:11 — Ross Perot’s 1992 Campaign
- 1:24:33 — Leadership Philosophy at Hillwood
- 1:29:11 — Monday Meetings and Talent Focus

## Transcript

**[0:00] Speaker A:** Is Texas the best place right now to build data centers?

**[0:03] Speaker B:** Easy. Every community should have a data center. The amount of money it brings into your community is staggering. You want data centers because once this boom is over, there's not going to be around 2.

**[0:12] Speaker A:** What do you think is going on in the supply chain right now?

**[0:15] Speaker B:** We are running out of industrial real estate in the United States.

**[0:18] Speaker A:** If we did never built another data center again, what would that mean for America and security?

**[0:23] Speaker B:** You lose your country because China's not going to hold back.

**[0:25] Speaker A:** Why does a Chinese product ultimately destroy the American?

**[0:29] Speaker B:** Be dominated by China? Your grandchildren speak Chinese, and that's how bad the world will be if we don't compete on this data center. AI world. If we lag, they will pass us and we'll be dominated.

**[0:42] Speaker A:** All right, well, I was going to start somewhere different, but when you sat down, you just said something, so I think we'll just start there. You said, you said the world's starting to happen or things are starting to

**[0:51] Speaker B:** get interesting in our world of. Certainly the world in North Texas and the world of industrial real estate. Yep. I mean, the AI boom is phenomenal.

**[1:01] Speaker B:** And once people focus on the data center part of AI, they're not really focused as much on the supply chain. But the amount of AI data center suppliers that have moved into Fort Worth in the past seven to eight months is staggering. And so we are having a hard time keeping up with the industrial demand, not only in Fort Worth, but across the country. The number of million square foot buildings being taken down is an historic high. And we are running out of industrial real estate in the United States.

**[1:31] Speaker B:** So all of us in the business need to hurry and build more.

**[1:34] Speaker A:** Did you see that coming?

**[1:36] Speaker B:** No, no, no, no.

**[1:37] Speaker A:** Like, we're down in South Fort Worth on a deal, and Google just basically leased every vacancy in the market around us in about 60 days.

**[1:46] Speaker C:** Sure.

**[1:46] Speaker A:** Is that what you're talking about?

**[1:47] Speaker B:** That's what I'm talking about.

**[1:49] Speaker A:** What do you think's going on in the supply chain right now? Because that's also one of the biggest bottlenecks.

**[1:53] Speaker B:** Well, because they're trying to keep up this massive demand for that we're experiencing, certainly in Texas and the amount of product coming online.

**[2:04] Speaker B:** And what's interesting, I think the suppliers want to be in metropolitan areas where you have labor. The data centers are kind of going more and more out in the country. But I've talked to data center builders, and they said they're not bidding on projects if the data center is too remote because we're out of electricians. It's a blue collar boom. Electricians and plumbers. I mean it's a phenomenal employment base. And so right now, if you can't get electricians, you can't do the data centers and there's a shortage.

**[2:36] Speaker A:** Is Texas the best place right now to build data centers?

**[2:39] Speaker B:** Easy. You've got the politics around them.

**[2:42] Speaker B:** We've got to work through the politics and make sure the neighbors are happy. But it is the best spot in the world to build data centers because we have 150 years in natural gas. You can go the Permian, put up a gigawatt, have your own power and really it's unique in the world. And look how cheap our natural gas is. Mayor so my gasoline prices and oil price and it's like, well, yeah, it's up, it's temporarily up, but we're the most affordable natural gas in the world. Our, our gas, when it gets to Europe is five times more expensive. They're paying 11 to 12 in MCF in Europe, two bucks, almost three bucks here.

**[3:22] Speaker A:** So just by nature of just gas prices, we're leading.

**[3:26] Speaker B:** Well, but that's bringing. The data center boom wants power.

**[3:31] Speaker B:** The defense tech wants power. The chip factories want power, every possible part of an economy. We're now having a boom in the state of Texas, shipbuilding on the coast. And I'm not being up here, I don't think about shipbuilding. But when I look at the shipbuilders going on the Navy boom to build new ships for the Navy, the defense tech, the little, the new surface drone ships are being built, that's all happening in Texas.

**[4:00] Speaker B:** And Elon Musk is a genius. I mean, good lord, the chip factory's putting in the state, but for SpaceX, they have 95% of the global launch capacity for the United States to dominate space like we are because of an entrepreneur like Elon and Jeff Bezos, they're both in this state. The state's on a roll.

**[4:22] Speaker A:** When you think about Elon Musk being in Texas, it's kind of like a nation. State is like landing here.

**[4:29] Speaker A:** Capital formation starts happening, talent starts happening, businesses start coming. Like when I say Elon's in Texas, what does that actually mean for our state? I mean, you've kind of been going,

**[4:40] Speaker B:** well, first of all, we're very fortunate Elon left South Africa and decided to come to America, a very successful immigrant in our nation. Then we're fortunate that California drove them out.

**[4:52] Speaker B:** And Greg Abbott, when Elon called, picked up the phone and said, I'll take Care of you. And he got that truck factory entitled as quickly as he did. And that's what started the elon phenomena. Then SpaceX. Now chip factories.

**[5:05] Speaker B:** The boring company. I mean, it is, you know, he is a national treasure is what he. What he's becoming. Then Starlink. I mean the power of Starlink all over the world. And this is all Elon and Elon's vision. And so we're lucky to have him. And he is a. He's a one man economic development show. I might advise him. Stat of politics. You know, your political lane wasn't so great, but stay in your business creatively. How about that?

**[5:31] Speaker A:** He's back.

**[5:31] Speaker B:** Yeah, he is back.

**[5:33] Speaker C:** GPS and LPs, please listen up. If you're in private equity, venture capital, oil and gas, real estate or infrastructure, I want you to listen to this. I want to tell you about Juniper Square, a firm that my company has been working with for over 10 years now. As a GP, your job has never been just about generating returns. It's about building an enterprise with LP partnerships that last.

**[5:54] Speaker C:** And you get there by getting your operations right, not just your investments. Just Juniper Square is the operations partner that makes that advantage possible. Technology, data, and administration on one governed source of truth you actually own. So you and your team spend less time reconciling and more time running the firm your LPs are backing. Visit www.junipersquare.com powers for more information.

**[6:17] Speaker C:** And tell them that Chris sent you.

**[6:19] Speaker A:** Okay, real quick. You said we got to get the politics sorted out. So your family's been in data centers actually quite a long time.

**[6:27] Speaker B:** Whole life.

**[6:28] Speaker A:** Whole life.

**[6:28] Speaker B:** I played in data centers.

**[6:29] Speaker A:** What was it?

**[6:30] Speaker B:** I played in data centers as a boy.

**[6:31] Speaker A:** What was a data center like when you were a boy?

**[6:33] Speaker B:** There's all tape. Have you been through our museum downstairs?

**[6:36] Speaker A:** No.

**[6:37] Speaker B:** I'll show you what the old data centers, the old computers we have is all take drive. We have big tape libraries. And humans had to take the tape from a library to the machine to process the work. And then, then we had punch cards. And so I'd collect punch cards and I don't know what I did with them, but saved them in my room. But I was with my dad every Saturdays. And when your father's in the computer business, you go work in a computer center.

**[7:01] Speaker A:** Okay. And so data centers were never political. Never political, never political. Now they are the hot button. Maybe let's start with like, what is the misinformation out there that needs to get kind of rerouted so that people are Getting the facts.

**[7:17] Speaker B:** Well, the water issue.

**[7:18] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[7:19] Speaker B:** You know, right now it's all internal circulated water.

**[7:22] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[7:23] Speaker B:** And so water's not an issue. Power is not an issue. Because upon behind the meter, and we've done the Facebook data center in Fort Worth. Facebook's now the largest taxpayer in the city of Fort Worth. Not a neighbor complained. We did the Chuck Schwab status center. No one complained. Citibank, aig, Blue Cross, Blue Shield did them all. Didn't bother anybody. And so you can do data centers right. And we do them right.

**[7:51] Speaker B:** And now the issue just, it's become trendy because then people have got a lot of misinformation and you've got, you've got. It's a very trendy political issue and it's one that politicians are now running against or they're running for. And we'll see when things calm down. But the facts are, every community should have a data center. The amount of money it brings into your community is staggering.

**[8:14] Speaker B:** Facebook, 25 million a year to Fort Worth. You want data centers because once this boom is over, there's not going to be a round two. And you want that financial power in your community, but you've got to do it right.

**[8:27] Speaker A:** And it didn't raise rates for anybody.

**[8:28] Speaker B:** No, it doesn't raise rates.

**[8:30] Speaker B:** Matter of fact, if you, if you were. Texas will have the most resilient grid in the world because of the amount of power investment we're making in our grid. So we'll have the best grid in the world, some of the most affordable power in the world because of the data center boom and the manufacturing boom overall. And the leadership of this state is really keeping us on our toes. And after we had that, the, the shortage a couple of winters ago, the potential blackout, we have really gotten on our game and fixed some flaws.

**[9:02] Speaker A:** Do you have an opinion on behind the meter versus grid connected? Like, long term, does it really matter?

**[9:08] Speaker B:** Behind the meter keeps the data center independent from your grid. And so if you want to do that, fine. Policy wise, I'd want generation capacity for the data center, but I'd want the data center connected to the grid so that if the grid needs the power from the data center, the data center could go to its battery power and let its generation power go onto our grid.

**[9:34] Speaker B:** The data centers give you huge backup redundancy on power properly done. But that's where I would go as a policy standpoint.

**[9:42] Speaker A:** And are all of the deals that you're working on right now, are any of them spec or is it tenant? You Always have to have a tenant. Like, it seems like the capital markets haven't quite caught up to being able to allow people go out on spec. And you saw like Elon, what he did in Memphis, he basically built it on specific. Now he's leasing that power out for double triple market as. But nobody can really build it on spec because they're really expensive.

**[10:10] Speaker B:** You talk about a normal spec warehouse.

**[10:12] Speaker A:** I'm talking about normal spec data center.

**[10:14] Speaker B:** Oh, you're in a whole new. That. That's big. Those are the big guys. No, we don't do spec data centers. Well, those are billions of dollars. Billions and billions of dollars. And you need to be really in that business full time if you're going to do that. And you need a huge balance sheet. We do lots of spec warehouses.

**[10:31] Speaker B:** We're able to do that. That's our bread and butter.

**[10:32] Speaker A:** Yeah, okay. But to finish that loop on politics, we think we can work this out at the state level because it's kind of shocking to hear Abbott.

**[10:41] Speaker B:** No, it is, but you're going to have to because it's too important for the state.

**[10:45] Speaker B:** If you look at the data center infrastructure we could have here, the money that comes out of data centers could start to help replace oil and gas revenue. That'll start to drop in the next 20 or 30 years. Yeah, it is going to be that foundationally important for the state.

**[10:59] Speaker A:** And if I just said if we. If we did never built another data center again, what would that mean for America? And just like security, you lose your

**[11:08] Speaker B:** country, be dominated by China, your grandchildren speak Chinese, and that's how bad the world will be if we don't compete on this data center AI world.

**[11:21] Speaker A:** And that's because China's got. They're not stopping, they're speeding.

**[11:24] Speaker B:** China's 100% behind AI.

**[11:26] Speaker B:** Every Chinese citizen's embracing AI. Every Chinese citizen by 2030 will have access to AI. 1.3 billion people. It is completely being embraced because the Chinese Communist Party sees the value and they're embracing the value they are behind because of our democracy and our creativity. But if we lag, they will pass us and we'll be dominated.

**[11:49] Speaker A:** Okay, and then going back real quick, you said thank you to California for whatever they did that drove Elon here. Maybe we can talk about MP materials for a second.

**[11:58] Speaker C:** Or not.

**[11:58] Speaker A:** But around politics, just the framework, you're bringing some of the best companies into alliance, into the state. What's going on at the political level? Why are we such a great state to do business with? And is there anything in your world that sees that stopping or things we should want as a state that maybe might be headed in the opposite direction.

**[12:20] Speaker B:** Three states are feeding. Texas, California, Illinois, New York, California. Chuck Schwab is the big one. Elon, Illinois, Caterpillar, New York, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. Huge financial boom that's moving into our community. And I'm sure you've seen the charts on financial services job growth in North Texas. It's stunning compared to the rest of the nation. So they're the states that are feeding our state.

**[12:47] Speaker B:** The states are fundamentally broken. They're not well run. And it's interesting. They're losing the business and they don't seem to care. So when these clients are leaving, it's not like Governor Newsom saying, well, gee, what can I do to keep you?

**[13:02] Speaker B:** They don't care.

**[13:03] Speaker A:** Why?

**[13:04] Speaker B:** I'm not sure. Because they're not. They're not operators, they're political and they don't know how to run a business. They don't know how to really run their states. That's why their debt load is out of line. That's why Illinois is on the verge of bankruptcy. But you've got horror stories in these three states because of how poorly they're run. And they're coming into a state like Texas, which has a balance sheet, we have a credit rating greater than the United States.

**[13:30] Speaker B:** We have, we're running huge budget surpluses. We have huge Randy Day fund. If you're a citizen of Texas, you know your state is not going to implode. If you're a citizen of California, with their financial problems they have, it's going to be brutal trying to work out of those problems. That's why so many 80,000 Californians a year coming to Texas, they don't want to deal with those problems. They want to come to an area that is a solid financial future. And that's what we have in north, in North Texas, we got to keep three or four questions in there. So that, that was the reason they're coming. Then the second, you know, the risk right now is complacency. You know, I started alliance, you know, back in the 80s, right before the financial crisis.

**[14:17] Speaker B:** And so when Mayor Boland approved Alliance, Tarrant county was the number one job loss county in the nation. We were. It was depression yet SNL crisis, banking crisis, defense crisis, because the Cold War ended, which is great, but all the defense spending started to slow down and people Forgot the big A12 contract with the GD factory. Big Navy fighter gets canceled, Bell programs get canceled. And so you had. And then the oil and gas crisis. So oil and gas, every industry we had imploded. And that's what we started with in Tarrant county when alliance broke ground. And that's what we've been building out of. And it took a huge amount of work.

**[15:01] Speaker B:** Great public private partnership, Wonderful visionary leaders that knew how to build and operate and knew how to work with the business community. And that's why the state of Texas has had this unbelievable 30 year run. And the risk factor, people don't care. They're complacent and they don't want to fight every day to keep our state competitive. And that's the challenge we have.

**[15:23] Speaker A:** How do we change that?

**[15:25] Speaker B:** Basic leadership.

**[15:26] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[15:26] Speaker B:** Just make sure and remind people what it was like and how good we have it compared to the rest of the country.

**[15:32] Speaker A:** What are people experiencing in Texas if they're moving their business to Texas first, trying to get it even, just by way of permitting, like, what's it like here?

**[15:41] Speaker B:** Versus I'm chairman of the United States Chamber, and so I give a lot of chamber speeches and I'm in Austin talking to. When you talk to the chambers, 95% small business. You got the big guys, but it's mostly real America, real businesses. So I'm in Austin. A young man walks up from Seattle and he had a billboard business, a simple billboard business. I said, why are you here? He said, ross, I can't billboard. I can't build billboards in Washington. I said, is it easier here? He said, ross, it's not that easy here.

**[16:14] Speaker B:** But every time I go to a city, they talk to me, the staff will talk to me. They're nice to me. They want to hear about my business, they want to try to help me. No one in Washington state would even talk to me. That is just so my point.

**[16:29] Speaker B:** We have a culture here that people love, and it's this neighborly, friendly culture. And the number of people moving in to Dallas, Fort Worth today, a lot of them are coming because they said, I can't raise my children in California. I had a man that showed up, big tech guy, moved his family here. I always asked him, how do you like it? And he said, ross, it's unbelievable. I said, what do you like? He goes, well, my son gets back from school and says, dad, I learned a new song. And he said, what was that? It was the Pledge of Allegiance. They didn't teach the Pledge of Allegiance in California.

**[17:07] Speaker B:** Those basic values that we take for granted. Back to my point. Yeah. Other people don't have big Player out of Seattle. Another Seattle guy came in, moved on my block.

**[17:19] Speaker B:** He called me up because, what's the deal with Christmas lights? I said, well, we all have Christmas lights. I said, that's part of it. You didn't have Christmas lights in Seattle. So we didn't have Christmas lights.

**[17:28] Speaker B:** Then on the 4th of July, a couple moved in. He goes, everybody's got American flag. I go, of course we have American flag at Fourth of July. So there's this culture here, this Texas community, patriotic culture that people really love. And it's the new Texans.

**[17:44] Speaker B:** They don't take it for granted. It's the old Texans that don't realize how good we have it.

**[17:50] Speaker A:** I loved and Texans love Texas. You go anywhere in the world.

**[17:54] Speaker B:** They do.

**[17:54] Speaker A:** People love Texas. It's a brand.

**[17:56] Speaker B:** No, people say, where are you from? I go, texas.

**[17:58] Speaker A:** Oh, yeah, it's over. I mean, you go to. I was in Europe and Africa this summer. Like, you tell people you're from Texas. It's just an immediate. It's like you get closer to them.

**[18:07] Speaker B:** But look at World Cup. Look at how. Look at how great Texas looked during World Cup.

**[18:11] Speaker A:** Yep. Okay.

**[18:13] Speaker A:** Would you were just talking a second about Tara Fab. Basically, Elon Steel in Grimes County, 55 million square feet. That's like 1700 football fields.

**[18:24] Speaker B:** Even I can't get my mind around.

**[18:27] Speaker A:** If anybody in the state could, it would be you.

**[18:29] Speaker B:** No, no, I had Elon. I was working to deal with Elon. Okay, I'll tell you Elon story.

**[18:32] Speaker A:** Let's hear.

**[18:32] Speaker B:** I want that battery factory in Nevada.

**[18:35] Speaker A:** Really?

**[18:35] Speaker B:** And American just abandoned their big maintenance base at Alliance. So here's a hangar that holds 7, 7, 4, 7. So I went and looked at it. I'm walking through an empty hangar. I go, man, Elon is going to love this. I mean, Fort Worth will lease it to a big battery factory. He's just. It's huge. I love it.

**[18:53] Speaker B:** So, you know, pick up in. At the airport. We get in a Tesla, of course. I drive him to the hangar, and I walk in. I'm waiting for him to go, man, this is unbelievable.

**[19:01] Speaker B:** He looks in. Looks like it's way too small. I go, good grief. Seven 7 47s and it's way too small. Because, Ross, you don't understand.

**[19:12] Speaker B:** He said, you don't know how big this battery factory is going to be. That's now in Nevada.

**[19:16] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[19:17] Speaker B:** And so I can't even comprehend how big this is going to be. But as I said earlier, I mean, we need to hang on to him because the foundation he's putting into our state is staggering to the extent you can share.

**[19:29] Speaker A:** How does a deal with Elon even get done? Like it seems, again, capital aside, it just seems like when he wants to get something big done, it just happens. Is a lot of it just his reputation at this point that when he's speaking to lawmakers and people at the highest levels, they'll just start cutting red tape. How is he just able to do the big.

**[19:49] Speaker B:** I think the key with Elon is if you spend time with Elon's team, they're incredible.

**[19:57] Speaker B:** He has incredible people around him. He's got the vision. They know how to execute. But now he has performed so well and brought such a big economic impact to our state that if he needs something done, it's like, Elon got it. We will figure out how to get it done for you in the most practical way, in the most practical manner.

**[20:17] Speaker B:** So jump to MP Materials real quick. So Empty Materials has the best rare earth in the world. In California, it's the Saudi Arabia of rare earth. And Jim Latinsky bought it out of bankruptcy because the Chinese, every time MP would get off the mat, they would cut the price of rare earth and bankrupt them. Jim bought it, started to bring him back, but he wanted to do not just rare earth, he wanted to do magnets.

**[20:48] Speaker B:** And so we met Jim, introduced him to Alliance. We built the first magnet facility here, and a groundbreaking. He told me. He goes, ross, I can't believe it. He goes, it took me three weeks to get the air quality permit in Fort Worth.

**[21:03] Speaker B:** It had taken me over two years in California. And so this is why Fort Worth wins. So now you've got a great entrepreneur in gym. He built a great facility. First new magnet building in the country in decades.

**[21:17] Speaker B:** Well, now, fast forward. The Pentagon buys 15% of NP materials, and they tell Jim, we now need a building 10 times bigger, and we need it immediately. Magnus for the Pentagon. So now we're building a $1.2 billion building for Jim. So he had the vision and the courage.

**[21:37] Speaker B:** Fort Worth embraced him. Now a whole new industry is coming, the magnet industry into Fort Worth, in addition to all the other industries that are coming and when. And then like in the phone ones. Taylor Sheridan. We got to talk about Taylor a little bit.

**[21:50] Speaker A:** He's right here on my nose.

**[21:52] Speaker B:** Perfect.

**[21:52] Speaker A:** What are we going to talk about?

**[21:55] Speaker B:** Look at Taylor. Look at what? We now have the largest studios in the state at alliance for Taylor Charity. So here's Taylor, born in Fort Worth, who's got this incredible gift. He can connect with people all over the country, but all over the world. And so the visibility he's put into Fort Worth is amazing. And so Taylor alone, think of the millions of people that come into Fort Worth now.

**[22:17] Speaker B:** Tourists, because they watch one of Taylor Sheridan shows. So I was talking to the president of Pakistan. I was at Davos, and he goes, how did you get in? I was in. Taylor mentioned me in Landman in the scene.

**[22:30] Speaker B:** He said, how did you get in, Landman? And I said, Mr. President, you watch Landman in Pakistan? He goes, oh, we all love Landman in Pakistan. I got friends in Africa, watch these shows. All the Europe, they watch these shows.

**[22:42] Speaker B:** Nicole Kilman, she went, came out and filmed an alliance one time, filmed a scene. We had a great week for Nicole. And so, as you know, Taylor films all over town and has had a great and pure economic impact, but then a great branding impact on Fort Worth. That's what I'm saying. Fort Worth is a hot town right now.

**[23:00] Speaker A:** And he has what, 400,000 square feet facility in.

**[23:04] Speaker B:** 700,000.

**[23:05] Speaker A:** And what's in that facility?

**[23:06] Speaker B:** All the. All the studio. All the stages.

**[23:08] Speaker A:** And how'd you.

**[23:10] Speaker B:** You got the Landman stage, you've got the Lioness stages. I mean, it's. It's fun.

**[23:15] Speaker A:** They. They record sometimes in our building. And one day Billy Bob Thornton needed a green room, so they called and said, would you. If you wouldn't show up to the office today, we'll. We'll make it a green room. So there's a picture of Billy Bob sitting in my office. I think it's hilarious.

**[23:30] Speaker B:** You know, everybody. Everybody's got a Taylor story now.

**[23:33] Speaker A:** It's awesome.

**[23:34] Speaker B:** Look at every industry, you know, from magnets to movies. That's Fort Worth.

**[23:39] Speaker A:** And I would imagine when you started acquiring land in the 80s, this was not on your radar.

**[23:45] Speaker B:** We had no idea. Are you kidding? Mike, Barry and I, we're doing industrial. FAA wanted to do a new airport, and we had land and that. We had this SNL bust. I said, well, okay, well, might as well do something with the land, do an airport. And I was an Air Force guy and I love flying, so I like the airport concept.

**[24:04] Speaker B:** But our imagination, we thought maybe we get aircraft factory, maybe an auto factory. We couldn't. No one saw the Internet coming. We never even heard of Amazon, never heard of our biggest clients. We never heard of.

**[24:19] Speaker B:** And so this is where, as a real estate developer, Mike and I were just in kind of receive mode, kind of just catching up with whatever showed up. That's why now At Hillwood, we've got a whole venture capital group and we're now trying to get out in front of where the world is going to go. That's why we're so big on evtol and all the drones, so that we know where this world's going to go and so that we can react to the new world, including autonomous trucking. So if you're in the warehouse business and right now goods are moved by humans that are on a human cycle, they can drive 10 to 12 hours a day. Imagine when the trucks are 724.

**[25:01] Speaker B:** Does your building design change? Does the building location change? The building certainly needs more power. Every building now needs more power because if you're charging either the robots that are coming or charging the electric vehicles that are coming. And so we just want to make sure that we're not going to be surprised.

**[25:19] Speaker B:** And we're trying to be out in front of with these new technologies. So we never saw movies, we never saw magnets, never saw any of this. But we're trying to learn and catch up.

**[25:28] Speaker A:** What are some of the glimpses of the future that you get to see just by being in Alliance?

**[25:33] Speaker B:** Just watching joby flight alliance last week with the big FAA announcement.

**[25:37] Speaker B:** And we know Joe, we've known Jobin now 10 years.

**[25:40] Speaker A:** Okay?

**[25:41] Speaker B:** And so this is one of the flying taxis. And when you look at that product that is starting, that will start flying people here in a year or so, this is. It's the Jetsons.

**[25:52] Speaker B:** It's coming. And we're all going to be in flying taxis. As we land at DFW airport, you'll jump on a taxi. Instead of driving to downtown Fort Worth, you'll fly to downtown Fort Worth. Now we're going to need vertiport. We're going to bring back our vertiport program in Fort Worth. But that's what all cities will start planning for is where do you have your vertiports for all these new tax flying taxis that are going to come

**[26:14] Speaker C:** by the time you're in the room, half the decision is already made. An allocator forms an opinion of your firm long before the first meeting. From your materials, your presence and your positioning. And that impression is worth real money. Collateral partners exist exactly for that one team shaping how your firm is understood. Instead of a dozen vendors each holding a piece, the market pays for what it understands. See how the market sees you@collateral.com powers. That's collateral.com powers.

**[26:44] Speaker A:** And it'll just be a world where there you could look up in the sky and there's taxis going everywhere and

**[26:49] Speaker B:** they'll probably follow the roads.

**[26:51] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[26:52] Speaker B:** And because I'm not sure, back to your community. I don't think people want flying taxis over their homes.

**[26:58] Speaker A:** Right.

**[26:58] Speaker B:** And so I think it'll be quarters. And right now helicopter pilots most of the time will fly over a road. So we don't. Especially when you're doing it all the time, so you don't impact the neighborhood.

**[27:08] Speaker B:** And so I think that's what you'll see around the flying taxi. It'll be years before there are that many, but they're coming.

**[27:15] Speaker A:** What's going on in the mobility, like innovation district?

**[27:19] Speaker B:** It's the autonomous truck. It's drone delivery.

**[27:22] Speaker B:** And so your warehouse of the future will probably have drone landing pads on the roof and you'll have, you know, robots feeding your drone the product. And the drone will then fly out and deliver it, come back and take another load. And if you study zipline, zipline is the kind of the first beginning movement. Google wing and zipline are starting that program and we've been around them since the beginning.

**[27:46] Speaker A:** Okay, I want to go back even a little bit further.

**[27:50] Speaker A:** You said you kind of grew up in the American dream, which probably is where a lot of your business sense started to come. But why did you decide to go to the air Force for eight years? Like, was anybody in your family in the air Force, or was this a you thing?

**[28:06] Speaker B:** Not just I love flying. Go, go back to all this.

**[28:10] Speaker B:** When I was born, my dad's a salesman for IBM.

**[28:13] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[28:14] Speaker B:** And so we lived on Linden Lane, two bedroom home, mom, dad and my sister. And so I watched my father become the top salesman at IBM. He had enough money. We bought our first bigger home in Greenway parks. And so I literally lived the dream with him. And then one day we saw EDS go public and, you know, the rest is kind of history. But I saw my father quickly after he took EDS public. He became a very active patriot and he started working with Richard Nixon and Kissinger to help the prisoners war in Vietnam.

**[28:45] Speaker B:** So here I'm growing up. My great uncle Henry was one of the first pilots in the state of Texas. And my great grandmother used to sew the wings onto his airplane. So I kind of had flying James. So I think I picked up Henry's James, and I go to Texarkana and fly with my uncle Henry.

**[29:01] Speaker B:** So I always kind of like flying. I got out of school, so I grow up helping the prisoners of war. These are all fighter pilots. And I'm 14, 15 years old going to fighter pilot reunion parties when they got back from Vietnam. And these were my heroes.

**[29:18] Speaker B:** And so I've been around fighter pilots. I started flying. I wanted to be in the military. I want to be in the Air Force. I want to be a fighter pilot.

**[29:26] Speaker B:** And I think it's just your role models of who you're with is why I did it.

**[29:29] Speaker A:** Does that experience have anything to do with how y' all pulled the faa, the FAA airport into alliance? Like the relationships.

**[29:37] Speaker B:** It's all relationships. So go back to. We had 2,500 acres of land north of Fort Worth, and we bought it in 1985 when the world was.

**[29:47] Speaker A:** You had.

**[29:48] Speaker B:** You had described earlier every industry had improved. Not yet. Not yet. It's about to turn over. We're buying land. But the land north of Fort, Remember Fort Worth didn't grow north. Goes to the stockyards, and that's where no one want to be north of the stockyards. And prevailing wind from the south.

**[30:03] Speaker B:** And so the Fort Worth crowd didn't go north. The Dallas guy said, wait a minute, here's this whole section of northwest of DFW airport undeveloped. And so we started buying land. And the land was affordable compared to the Dallas side. So we'd done. So we. If you look at on the Dallas side of town, we're coming off of doing legacy, which is the big new downtown, not new the downtown program for Plano. And we put EDS up there, big new urban district for the city of Plano. And we work with the highway department and the council of governments on the 121 bypass. And so we had contact with COG and Council of Governments, and they saw that we did public private partnerships.

**[30:45] Speaker B:** Then in 82, I flew helicopter around the world. And so I became buddies with all the FAA guys in the southwest region. Text Fallujian so I knew Tex Council of government saw that we helped on big projects. Then the DFW 2000 master plan came out, which called for four new airports in Dallas Fort Worth. And we were the North Fort Worth airport.

**[31:08] Speaker B:** So we had the land, had the FAA contacts. We had a reputation for helping the community. So the council of governments came to me and they said, look, would you donate land for this airport? You have the spot. We want to build an airport.

**[31:22] Speaker B:** I'm flying out of Carswell. Love flying. I mean, so the whole thing was the Lord kind of worked overtime. And it's like, here's a guy that loves airports, knew everybody. We donate the land.

**[31:35] Speaker B:** But is those relationships between that southwest region and COG and the land ownership, and we're off to the races.

**[31:44] Speaker A:** And you just decided to fly a helicopter around the world? This.

**[31:47] Speaker B:** How.

**[31:47] Speaker A:** How does you even. How do you even get there?

**[31:49] Speaker B:** Well, I was a helicopter pilot, and then in. In August of 1982, a man named Dick Smith took off to fly helicopter around the world. And he took off from the Bell factory. So he shows up in our backyard claiming, I'm going to be the first man to fly a helicopter around the world. And it's like, wait a minute. This is what Americans do. Australians don't show up in Texas, take our product, and go around the world. And so I'm again, as. I was a pilot, and I saw my dad, and dad said, would you read that article? I said, yeah, I did. He goes, what do you think? I said, we need to go beat him. And my dad goes, great, let's go beat him. So I called my buddy Jake Coburn, who I've been flying with.

**[32:26] Speaker B:** And so August 1st, we thought of it, took off September 1st, done. September 30th. So beginning to end. 60 days. And we were the first man to fly a helicopter around the world.

**[32:37] Speaker B:** And is an unbelievable journey and experience, but we did it because we wanted to beat Dick Smith. If Dick hadn't gone, I never would have gone. And I'm now friends with Dick, and I go to Australia and I fly helicopters with him in Australia.

**[32:50] Speaker A:** So when did he finish?

**[32:52] Speaker B:** It took him about nine months.

**[32:53] Speaker A:** Okay, we won't hold that.

**[32:55] Speaker B:** No, but it's a whole. He did books and movies and. And when we did it, it was just like, boom. How fast can we go?

**[33:02] Speaker B:** And then. So we went around the world, and then I went in the Air Force. So it wasn't. It was a heck of a team. It really worked well, but it wasn't a huge promotion.

**[33:14] Speaker A:** How many people were in the helicopter with you?

**[33:16] Speaker B:** Just two. Jay and I did.

**[33:17] Speaker A:** So you would just land, eat, sleep,

**[33:19] Speaker B:** you know, we had advanced teams. People met us everywhere we were going, and if we behaved and made our schedule, they would be there. Yeah, but many times, schedule didn't work, and you would get caught in the weather. We have to sleep out, you know, some remote spot. But most of the time we made it.

**[33:35] Speaker A:** Do you take off headed east coast or west coast? Which way do you.

**[33:39] Speaker B:** What you want to do? You want a tailwind?

**[33:41] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[33:42] Speaker B:** So if you want a tailwind, you go east.

**[33:43] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[33:44] Speaker B:** So we took off and went northeast. Landed 56 times. It was a Bell Helicopter Jet Ranger, a Long Ranger, not the Jet Ranger. The whole back seat was a fuel tank and we could fly eight hours at a stretch.

**[33:57] Speaker B:** The normal long Ranger is about 2:45 to 3 hours. So we put a lot of extra range into it. The helicopter was so heavy it couldn't hover. We're about a couple hundred pounds over gross weight, but it's like all it had to do is get around the world. It didn't have to do much.

**[34:13] Speaker B:** We wore it out. And we did a lot of things you probably never should have done. But we thought we're on a mission from God and all those human rules. Who says you can't fly under a bridge? We flew under bridges and power lines and every other thing.

**[34:28] Speaker B:** It was a great trip.

**[34:30] Speaker A:** Okay. Why did Dallas not accept eds? It just seems like a huge whiff what was happening in Dallas at that time that they would say, sorry, but no thanks.

**[34:42] Speaker B:** Well, the story goes, we're on Forest Lane and we built a beautiful tech, first big tech campus in the region of the country.

**[34:49] Speaker B:** Bought an old bankrupt golf course. So we had golf, we had tennis, swimming pools. We put auto repair, gas stations, and we put everything there, dry cleaners. It was perfect for a tech campus. But then we wanted to start growing. We wanted to build another data center. And this is the old. The data center. Believe it or not, the neighborhood groups around the EDS campus went to city hall and complained that our data centers hurt their over the air reception for television. And Dallas didn't give us permission to build another data center.

**[35:22] Speaker B:** And so dad goes, okay, watch this, I'm going to Plano. And that's what kicked off legacy.

**[35:29] Speaker A:** So, so legacy happens. And then the 2500 acres in North Fort Worth starts right before the RTC start all that.

**[35:37] Speaker B:** Then the RTC hits.

**[35:39] Speaker A:** Okay, and so when you first started buying 2,500 acres was the initial vision just, hey, cheap land, good area, let's just buy it.

**[35:48] Speaker B:** Pure land speculation. I was just a land investor. I was not a developer.

**[35:55] Speaker A:** And you had no intention.

**[35:56] Speaker B:** No, we had no, no intention to develop. We're going to buy it. And then we might subdivide. And remember, we had all these great developers in town. You had Trammel, Crow and Lincoln and Ulick. And you know, and I literally thought we land, develop land, sell a site. But then what happened is we did Alliance. We didn't have any clients.

**[36:17] Speaker A:** What do you mean? You did alliance at the.

**[36:19] Speaker B:** Built the alliance airport, which is the industrial. Industrial airport.

**[36:22] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[36:23] Speaker B:** So we had airport road, water, sewer.

**[36:25] Speaker A:** No rail yet.

**[36:26] Speaker B:** No rail yet. But there's no one to buy. Because now we're in the Great Depression. There are no industrial developers. There's no one going to come up there and buy land and build a spec building.

**[36:39] Speaker B:** I mean, it was Depression. And so Mike and I, we're industrial developers today because we had to. We were forced to become a developer because we didn't have any clients. And then on residential, our big residential projects, I really thought we were going to be selling land to Trammel Crow residential, but they went broken. And so we hired people from Trammel Crow to come work for us. We became residential developers. So we became a developer because we had to.

**[37:06] Speaker A:** Where the 80s.

**[37:07] Speaker B:** Brutal. Brutal.

**[37:08] Speaker B:** It's a great time to learn, if you're a young developer, to learn, then you get lifetime lessons on how bad this market, how bad it can be and how tough it can be. And so, if you notice, we've been pretty safe for 40 years. And when I saw all the men that I admired go broke, I told myself, no, I could too, if I get over, if I get carried away. And so we've been very slow and very methodical. We kind of pay as we go and we develop when we can afford to develop, and we don't take extreme risk.

**[37:42] Speaker A:** And Mike was your roommate in college?

**[37:44] Speaker B:** We were literally roommates in college. But I've worked them hard because I knew, because he was over at Woodbine, John Scoville. And so I said, mike, you gotta come work. You gotta come help.

**[37:57] Speaker B:** Because I needed a Fort Worth guy. I'm a Dallas guy.

**[38:00] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[38:00] Speaker B:** And now my grandmother was from Fort Worth. My Aunt Betty taught school in Fort Worth. I spent my weekends in Fort Worth. So I had, you know, I knew. I knew Leonards, my new Leonards, in the subway, and I knew old Fort Worth. Did you know the subway?

**[38:13] Speaker C:** I've seen.

**[38:14] Speaker B:** Did you ever ride the subway? Okay, so you're the young guy. So I knew Fort Worth, but I knew we needed Mike Barry because we need somebody really that the community knew that the community trusted. Mike's got great integrity and has done an incredible job of building out that program.

**[38:30] Speaker A:** So you're like, hey, airports built. We own 2500 acres. It looks like we're going to have to get into the development business.

**[38:38] Speaker B:** But the phone's not ringing.

**[38:41] Speaker A:** The phone's not ringing.

**[38:42] Speaker B:** I mean, Mike. Mike Baron, Bill Burton are making cold calls. I mean, we're trying to do anything to find business. I mean, I can't tell you how hard it was for how long.

**[38:52] Speaker A:** How long was that period? Years?

**[38:54] Speaker B:** No. Well, we got lucky.

**[38:55] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[38:56] Speaker B:** Because we broke around the airport, we started building it and then our first deal, and we were so pumped up, had a big press conference, announced it to everybody, was the railroad auto distribution center. And here the whole world thought we're doing an airport.

**[39:14] Speaker B:** And our first deal is a railroad deal with the Santa Fe railroad. And of course we're tickled to death and people go, well, what about the airport stuff? I saw that's coming. But you know, Santa Fe, but that how strategic. Because the Santa Fe became the BN Northern Santa Fe when they merged.

**[39:31] Speaker B:** And then they had to build that new intermodal yard. And we never envisioned an interval, a rail intermodal yard that most people don't even see because you don't see it off of 35. But you know, the larger railroad yards in the country right next to that Runway. So the Runway in the railroad yard, that's two pieces of very unique infrastructure that has not been duplicated in the country.

**[39:55] Speaker A:** If you had to pick one, the rail yard or the Runway, which would you take?

**[39:58] Speaker B:** It's the rail yard.

**[39:59] Speaker A:** Really?

**[40:00] Speaker B:** Yeah. Which pains me as a pilot, why so much business is driven off that rail yard. You look at that huge industrial boom we have.

**[40:10] Speaker B:** Aviation's important, but aviation is very high end freight. It's 5% of maybe the total freight market. The bread and butter is railroad. And so that's what's driving that big industrial boom is that railroad yard. And you put them together.

**[40:26] Speaker B:** It's magic.

**[40:27] Speaker A:** Okay, so the rail deal gets done, the airport gets done. When?

**[40:31] Speaker B:** So then, then American Airlines, okay, and so the airport opens in 89, summer of 89, we announced the American Airlines maintenance base because Crandall needed a new maintenance base. So all of a sudden here's an airport not even open.

**[40:52] Speaker B:** And we got a $500 million investment from American. So now we were proven and we had credibility. And so that early in the cycle, pre opening to get something like that gave us a seal of good approval.

**[41:08] Speaker A:** They didn't want to build it at DFW.

**[41:10] Speaker B:** They don't want to be at DFW because if you're doing your maintenance, come out of DFW, you don't want to wait 30 minutes to take off.

**[41:17] Speaker B:** You want to get the plane on the Runway, fly it up, do all your checks, come back, get it back into service. A DFW is not efficient for in and out traffic like maintenance or freight.

**[41:27] Speaker A:** And explain, you were saying before we were recording, how does the industrial airport work?

**[41:31] Speaker B:** The industrial airport is only for non passenger clients. So normally a non Passenger client is a second third class citizen.

**[41:40] Speaker B:** Everybody's focused on the airliners and moving people where they should. But the freight manufacturing, that's not part of what a big commercial airport does. We take all of that. So the strength of DFW Airport and the strength of Alliance, 15 nautical miles apart again is unique in North America. That's why you have so much synergy between the two.

**[42:02] Speaker A:** We're going to keep talking about alliance, but I'll skip to the end and then we'll get back. Is it pretty much easy to say it would be impossible to recreate another alliance anywhere in the country? Given the political climate today, how hard it is to develop things Public, private, private partnerships are harder. Is, is some of this just a byproduct of the time that it was done or could this ever be recreated?

**[42:24] Speaker B:** You never say never, never.

**[42:27] Speaker B:** But in my lifetime I don't see it happening again. I just don't see where it's going to happen because it it landed. Alliance works because it's in Dallas Fort Worth. It's in the fastest growing region of the country. Adding a million people every seven years.

**[42:47] Speaker B:** 450 people a day are moving in. That ain't going on anywhere. And so to have 27,000 acres, which is how big alliance is today, in the middle of this level of growth, it's a miracle. And so other, you know, governors come down, senators come down, they all look at it, they oh gee, you know, bring it to my city, bring it to my state, they're always nice. But it's like your city adds, you know, maybe 100,000 people every couple of years. I mean, you don't have the engine we got in front of this huge engine. And DFW is 8.3 million. Now hopefully I can get to 12 million people before it's time to move on. Another 4 million people moving in. Am I active?

**[43:29] Speaker B:** Hopefully I'm active another 20 years. I mean that is an incredible opportunity to do what we did with the city of Fort Worth.

**[43:39] Speaker A:** All things considered, is DFW about as good as it gets? Is there another part of the country

**[43:44] Speaker B:** that you can make an argument that this is the best spot in the United States to operate today and you can say for sure it's the best spot in North America.

**[43:55] Speaker B:** You look at the North America trading block, you know, we are at the population center for North America in a pro growth, positive, optimistic market with huge drivers, with every kind of industry coming in. It's not just, as I mentioned, you've got the white collar In Dallas, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Scotiabank, the stock exchanges, huge drive. Then we had Chuck Schwab at Circle T, Wells Fargo at Las Colinas, JP Morgan up at Legacy. All this financial services growth is coming, but then you have all the blue collar growth coming. We, we, we. Mike Barry in the past 12 months at alliance has generated almost 10,000 high quality manufacturing jobs, not distribution manufacturing jobs from every kind of industry you can imagine. That is amazing to get all that occurring at the same time.

**[44:51] Speaker A:** Now we'll just plug in near shoring for a bit. Tariffs, near shoring, we can talk about it all. Okay. To bring 10,000 new jobs also is in line with manufacturing's coming back to America. Is it fair to say We've realized, like Houston, we have a problem. We cannot manufacture everything overseas.

**[45:08] Speaker B:** You have. For national security reasons, I'm a little bit broader.

**[45:12] Speaker B:** If you manufacture in North America, that's good for the country.

**[45:16] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[45:16] Speaker B:** It's the Chinese manufacturing base is where we're at risk and the pharmaceutical manufacturing base in China. And that's where President Trump said, basically you got to get back over here and if you don't start manufacturing over here, you're going to be penalized. So that's one reason you're seeing now we need it, national security, we need it, but we need it also for the jobs and the economic impact and the industrial boom in the remanufacturing.

**[45:42] Speaker B:** So we got the industrial boom that I've talked about, AI supply chain. Then we have the defense tech boom. All the new defense tech startups, they're starting to come into Fort Worth, which is a natural. We're a great defense community. Then you've got the reshoring boom that's starting to come in.

**[46:01] Speaker B:** And then you've got Taylor Sheridan in the entertainment. So Fort Worth's got all these drivers and they're all hitting at the same time. So it is a very unique time to be here. And I think truly this manufacturing boom that we're in, I'm not a big tariff guy, okay. Tariffs need to be very surgical.

**[46:24] Speaker B:** And around China, it's a whole different issue around China because China is so overproducing that it's almost economic warfare with China. They're destroying industries all over the world and you can't let them destroy your industries here. And I think Europe will catch on and not let them destroy Europe because they've really hurt Europe quite a bit. So I think the tariffs, ideally we wouldn't have them with sophisticated partners, but you're starting to see a Lot of that business out of China come back. And it needs to come back.

**[46:55] Speaker A:** He said, ideally we wouldn't have them like ever.

**[46:58] Speaker B:** You think we could have US And Europe? US Europe, Canada. First world economies should be minimal. Because we're all highly paid, we're all highly educated. They're all very sophisticated. And we need good competition to always keep us on our game. To deliver a better product for the consumer.

**[47:19] Speaker B:** Now, the China threat, they don't play by the rules. And so that one I put in a different category.

**[47:25] Speaker A:** I know you're never running for president, but if you were, how would you deal with China? Like as we're dealing with them now.

**[47:31] Speaker B:** I've worked in China and I've. If you remember, back in my career, I owned the Mavericks, the basketball team.

**[47:38] Speaker A:** We're going to talk about Victory park in a bit.

**[47:40] Speaker B:** Okay. We won't get there, but I mean. But own the Mavericks. And so we drafted the first Chinese basketball player they ever play in the NBA. Wang Zhu Xu.

**[47:47] Speaker B:** Before Yao Ming went to Houston. And so within. It's kind of weird, but within China. They asked me to come over and be part of the Communist Party history for the senior fifth anniversary. Because drafting a Chinese player of the NBA was huge in China.

**[48:04] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[48:04] Speaker B:** Over here, no one paid attention to it. But over there it was like. I met everybody. I met Xi, I met. He was vice chairman. Then I met all the leaders of China. Because I drafted a basketball player which was. I took my boys over there and we were. My boys were shagging balls for Yao Ming in the Chinese Olympic team. So we. I know China and I. And I'm. And I've done a lot of work in China. The Chinese, you've got to give them great respect.

**[48:31] Speaker B:** But you've got to be extraordinarily hard minded. And they have their game face on. And they're doing everything they can to compete and to win. And their economy is weak and their economy is in trouble. And so this over manufacturing is a desperation move on their part to try to keep the economy up.

**[48:54] Speaker B:** Now you think we have a debt problem. The Chinese debt problem is far worse than ours. And so you've got to give them great respect. You need to be very transparent. You cannot be naive.

**[49:05] Speaker B:** And you have to clearly any critical product you need that you rely on China for. You've got to have a backup. Because you've seen now the Chinese will leverage every card they have against us if they can. When they started to leverage the rare earths. And they're still using rare earths against us.

**[49:22] Speaker B:** Now we have jet engines, we have avionics, but the press doesn't talk about is all the things the Chinese need from us. We need their rare earths, but they need a lot from us also. They need our airline. They can't make their own airliners yet. Airbus and Boeing.

**[49:39] Speaker B:** Imagine if we cut off Airbus and Boeing supply chains into China right now. No more Boeing parts. But we have the leverage. But we need to be smart. You need to be careful and you cannot be naive.

**[49:52] Speaker A:** So is that the relationship ongoing is like just maintaining this leverage so that we just kind of behave with each other in the room, but we're never going to be.

**[49:59] Speaker B:** And then you've got to be very, very careful.

**[50:01] Speaker C:** In Taiwan, every operator I know hits the same wall. Eventually your best people are doing necessary work instead of their best work. That's why I like Relay Human Cloud and it's why I brought them into all the companies that I run.

**[50:14] Speaker C:** They took the repetitive accounting off my team overnight. So we showed up to work. That actually moved the company forward. Pre vetted global talent fully managed up to 75% less than hiring locally. And they weren't a vendor. They were part of our team. Go to relayhumancloud.com powers. That's relayhumancloud.com powers.

**[50:34] Speaker B:** You've got to protect Taiwan. You've got to defend Taiwan and make it so difficult that China won't try to go to war.

**[50:42] Speaker B:** Because if Xi goes to war in 2027 like he says he will and he said he wants Taiwan by 2027 and you need we should believe him if he goes to war. The damage to the global economy is staggering. You know, tens of trillions of dollars of economic damage. We're all thrown into depression. If that war starts well, because so much of the product of the world comes from China.

**[51:08] Speaker B:** 40% of global manufacturing comes out of China now. And so the disruption is huge. And so that's why you've got to be strong. If you're strong, you maintain peace. And with peace you buy time.

**[51:22] Speaker B:** And time is on the side of democracy. The Chinese Communist Party has broken the demographics of China. The one child policy, which will go down in history as the worst possible policy you can have because the Chinese labor market is now shrinking and China is now dying. In the next hundred years, they go from 1.3 billion to like 500 million. So.

**[51:47] Speaker B:** And then they don't. And you don't have immigration. People aren't flooding into China. Like people want to come to the United States. People don't want to go to communist countries, they want to come to democracies.

**[51:59] Speaker B:** And then if you look at North America, you do full integration in North America. Mexico keeps us young. And so we have the best demographic. North America's got the best demographics in the world. The best economy in the world, best energy story in the world.

**[52:13] Speaker B:** The greatest entrepreneurs in the world. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell. I mean, you look at what we have, the world won't touch us.

**[52:22] Speaker B:** Our issue is will. Do we have the will to continue to protect and build our nation?

**[52:28] Speaker A:** I want to go run through that.

**[52:29] Speaker B:** We jump. We jump. We don't know how many topics we covered there, but that's back to China. You maintain solid professional relationships with China

**[52:39] Speaker A:** and the war being China is going to go attack and try and take over Taiwan.

**[52:43] Speaker B:** You look at how they're harassing Taiwan all the time.

**[52:45] Speaker A:** What can we as America do about it?

**[52:47] Speaker B:** Because you have to, you got to make it really, really clear that we, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, all the neighbors around China will defend Taiwan. And when you put us all together, China won't win.

**[53:05] Speaker B:** Many of the reporters talk about U.S. china. Well, it's not a U.S. china fight, it's U.S. japan, South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, China. You put that together, we're going to win. It's going to be bloody and it can't start. But if you let, if you sell Taiwan the weapons packages they need and you encourage your internal weapons production, which we have, the first, I'm told the first week of a China Taiwan war is all going to be drone warfare.

**[53:36] Speaker B:** It's all going to be robots chewing on each other.

**[53:39] Speaker A:** Is that every war now?

**[53:41] Speaker B:** Every war but that one, especially because two very sophisticated countries. So the goal is strength, maintain status quo. Weakness and appeasement will bring the war.

**[53:53] Speaker A:** Can I keep going a little bit? America's, I'm assuming, made it really clear with China, don't do this. Trump will be a president then. 2027 is the year before an election year. Is that strategic of why Z is saying I'm going to do it?

**[54:09] Speaker B:** No, there's some reason the charts say that his navy in 2027, his navy becomes larger than our navy. And that's why when you talk to top deck leaders, they put 2027. And he said 2027. And then the other thing I've heard, she will take Taiwan on his watch. So that is part of his goal is to fix that problem for China.

**[54:34] Speaker A:** And what do they gain other than chips?

**[54:38] Speaker B:** It's just ego.

**[54:39] Speaker A:** It's it's ego.

**[54:40] Speaker B:** It's just ego, pride, national pride. I mean, it, it's really, if you put your American mind on it, it's like, why would you do that?

**[54:47] Speaker B:** Why would you risk your economy? But that's the same logical use of Putin in Ukraine. Why would anybody invade Ukraine? Why would you try to do this? And look at the damage Putin's done to himself.

**[54:59] Speaker B:** I mean, we, we don't, we don't understand the Iranians. You, why wouldn't the Iranians take the deal that Trump offered them, you know, billions of dollars, you know, and just behave and don't build a nuclear weapon. But they can't. They're zealots. And we, as America, we don't understand that.

**[55:17] Speaker B:** Read, read the letter the Iranians wrote the American people last week.

**[55:20] Speaker A:** What?

**[55:20] Speaker B:** They write that 14, 000 word letter. The new York Times summarized it. Okay, so you can read it in the New York Times.

**[55:26] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[55:27] Speaker B:** It just shows how delusional the IGRC really is.

**[55:32] Speaker A:** I sometimes get so lost in what's reported is like, the war is clearly going on longer than we thought it would. In Iran, maybe. I mean, when it first started, it was like, this is going to be seven day thing, just like Venezuela.

**[55:46] Speaker A:** Are we in this one?

**[55:48] Speaker B:** So first of all, Trump made the right decision.

**[55:52] Speaker B:** The Iranians are getting so close to a nuclear weapon, we need to go ahead and stop it.

**[55:55] Speaker A:** Right.

**[55:57] Speaker B:** The mistake we made is we didn't finish what we started.

**[56:01] Speaker A:** Why?

**[56:02] Speaker B:** Yet another 10 days of bombing.

**[56:05] Speaker B:** And if we had done the full target list in the 10 days of bombing, the IGRC couldn't have gotten back off the mat because you've got an appeasement crowd in the White House. So you've got a group of. You had hawks, then you got the people that try to appease the Iranians. Well, the appeasement crowd won and they lost. Clearly, you cannot negotiate with Iran. Clearly you can't make peace with Iran. And clearly when we allowed Iran to get off the mat and dig their missiles out of the caves that we had just bombed, then they got their missiles back, but we had them so beat back they didn't have the missiles. If we'd finished that program, they'd be in a lot worse shape than they are now. But now we gave them another six months of life. But the Straits of Resort is almost back to where it was.

**[56:49] Speaker B:** Oil at $90 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate. That's not expensive. Inflation adjusted. Oil is cheap.

**[56:58] Speaker A:** Oil is cheap.

**[56:59] Speaker B:** It is cheap. And so now people complain about gasoline price, et cetera. 399, a little bit under 4. Most gas stations in Dallas, it's not that much.

**[57:12] Speaker B:** And so what the President needs to do is basically let the American people know we really have won this war. We have decimated the Navy, the Air Force and most of the Iranian offensive systems. We have now the streets of Hormuz are basically open. And when I was talking to leaders in the Middle east last week at the UN the oil's getting out. And you now can read it in the paper how the oil is getting out. So the oil is coming out. There's a huge reworking of the networks around Hormuz. Huge amount of oil now goes across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. A lot of oil now going across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea. So the oil is getting out, the products are getting out, and the Iranians are truly out of money and inflation is out of control.

**[58:03] Speaker B:** And so that society is slowly imploding. We could have sped it up, but now it's imploding. And you'll see there's so much oil in the world. When this Iranian issue is fixed in a couple of years, we're all going be complaining how cheap oil. If you're in Fort Worth and old man, you're not going to be happy because they're going, look, all the Venezuelan oil is coming out.

**[58:25] Speaker B:** Then once you get a regime change in Iran, all the Iranian oil is coming out. The Syrian oil is now coming out. The more Iraqi oil is starting to come out. The Libyan oil fields are getting back on their feet. All this oil that's been discovered that not has not been produced.

**[58:40] Speaker B:** The politics is changing. That oil is going to get out and OPEC will have to go back to their quotas to try to keep a decent price because so much will be coming and Gasoline will be 253 bucks.

**[58:53] Speaker A:** You're for sure not running for president.

**[58:54] Speaker B:** I'm not running for president because of what president? President Trump's controversial and he does a lot of things that creates huge static.

**[59:03] Speaker B:** But you look at underneath, what the press doesn't pay attention to, the fundamentals are staggering, how much it's improved the world.

**[59:10] Speaker A:** So you are happy with the direction like you think market wise, we're in a moment in time where it seems like interest rates are up, inflation's technically up, the war in Iran's going on, which again for Trump was kind of like, I'm not going to get into wars.

**[59:25] Speaker B:** Let's finish it in a year. In a year. I think you're going to be shocked.

**[59:29] Speaker B:** And remember that after every midterm election,

**[59:31] Speaker A:** we can do this again in a year.

**[59:32] Speaker B:** And we're going to do it a year. If you want to. If I have anything new to talk about.

**[59:35] Speaker B:** No, but after every midterm election, markets are going to boom. So the odds are, if you look at history, November 3rd, here go the markets again, going up. You've never had stronger markets. 65% of the American people are directly, indirectly tied into the stock market. This Trump account, which no one's paying attention to, 60 million children now have a Trump account with $1,000.

**[1:00:03] Speaker B:** And now you saw Michael and Susan Dell put money into the Trump accounts. And now you're seeing entrepreneurs and businessmen around the country put money into the Trump accounts in their city for their kids. Some of the greatest charity you're going to do is give money to Trump accounts for the children in your community. And it's stunning. And so you put, and so you run the math on it.

**[1:00:25] Speaker B:** You put four or five thousand in a Trump account and put it in the stock market with a normal history, you know, children could be 20, 25 years old with a million dollars in their Trump account. Imagine what that's going to do for society. It's one of the more creative things that Ted Cruz really pushed this hard in the tax bill. It's going to have a huge impact on society. You know, the 100% depreciation for manufacturing equipment of the tax.

**[1:00:51] Speaker B:** That tax bill was so loaded. Everybody listens to this show. Should really go reread that tax bill. It's the biggest, richest tax bill probably in the history of the country. And it's so many things are in it. People forget about school choices in the tax bill, Trump accounts from the tax bill, rebuilding the Coast Guards in the tax bill. I mean, all of these things that people forgot about. 220Americans got a relief on their taxes. No tax on tips. And so, so this is pretty stunning what it's done.

**[1:01:23] Speaker B:** Then you read the Wall Street Journal this morning. You know, revenues to the country are up already 3%. And the revenues to the nation are very strong because of the economic growth, the underlying economic growth that's going on in this industrial boom I've talked about. There's a huge boom here that people haven't seen or felt yet. They're starting to feel it now.

**[1:01:42] Speaker B:** And you saw it in the numbers. You saw the inflation starting to come down, employment numbers have gone up. So there's a real. And then there's even talk about now not Raising the rate again because the inflation number came down. So that's why I'm thinking you go into November, you could be in a heck of an economy.

**[1:01:59] Speaker A:** You think rates the 10 year like as I walked in here, was it like five and a quarter? Is that our new normal? Is it spike?

**[1:02:06] Speaker B:** I think the 10 year at 5, it's the average.

**[1:02:10] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[1:02:11] Speaker B:** When I got started it was 14, 15. Go back in the, in the. When we had to, when Reagan had to break inflation with Volcker. So if you, you look at the 40 year average or the 10 year, it's like five. We're back to normal now. People that have gotten used to cheap money don't think it's normal. But this is a normal rate and so far it hasn't slowed down any economic activity.

**[1:02:36] Speaker A:** So you think we're at the beginning. So what? To summarize what you just said, we are at.

**[1:02:40] Speaker A:** What we will start seeing in your opinion, is the beginning of just a massive growth market.

**[1:02:46] Speaker B:** We have the potential for a massive growth market if politically we don't blow it.

**[1:02:50] Speaker A:** Blow it.

**[1:02:51] Speaker B:** You've got to keep the free markets, you've got to keep free enterprise, you've got to keep optimism in the system and you've got to allow the American people to build and grow their families and their businesses.

**[1:03:03] Speaker A:** Do you know Scott Bessant?

**[1:03:06] Speaker A:** How critical is he to the current administration?

**[1:03:09] Speaker B:** Very critical.

**[1:03:10] Speaker A:** Every time I hear him talk, not that he's so confident, like blind confidence. You can just tell he has been studying the world for 40 years.

**[1:03:19] Speaker B:** We know how smart this guy is.

**[1:03:20] Speaker A:** I mean, it's unbelievable.

**[1:03:21] Speaker B:** He's a genius. You look at his career and what he's done, he's extraordinarily talented. Then you put Kevin Walsh with him. I mean, these are the finest men you could have at treasuring the Fed and they are extraordinarily smart and they're bright and they really understand the markets.

**[1:03:38] Speaker A:** What's. If I were to ask your chairman of the U.S. chamber, which focuses mostly on small business. Correct. What comes to mind? If I just said what are some things that you see or some data points that you see that get you really excited that maybe we don't hear

**[1:03:53] Speaker B:** about small business formation? Three years in a road it's been going up and the small businesses are truly embracing AI and a lot of the new startups are AI based. And what we like at the Chamber is the job growth with the AI startup companies. The concept that AI is going to hurt jobs, we're seeing the opposite. We're seeing AI is generating a lot of job growth with the entrepreneurs.

**[1:04:17] Speaker B:** So that, to me, is the most exciting part. And our small businesses were hurt by tariffs because they were surprised. And we lobbied hard to get relief on the tariff package, give people time. Now they've kind of adjusted, and they're used to it. So the small businesses in the country are doing pretty well.

**[1:04:34] Speaker A:** What do you want to see? If you. I know Trump just had a big AI summit. Like, what do you want to see

**[1:04:40] Speaker B:** happen with AI you need smart, fair regulation like we have around nuclear power.

**[1:04:47] Speaker B:** I would let all the entrepreneurs. First of all, they have their own liability. If Anthropic develops an AI agent that creates a lot of harm, they got huge legal liability. So they're going to work really, really hard to protect people from a rogue AI agent. But then you've got national security and defense.

**[1:05:07] Speaker B:** So the national security, defense establishment has to work with the AI crowd, and they've got to build the wall around them so that it protects the nation and doesn't hurt the nation from a security standpoint.

**[1:05:19] Speaker A:** Well, because when you listen to Dario from Anthropic, sometimes it sounds like he's saying, like, we need regulation to protect y' all from myself, you know, maybe, maybe.

**[1:05:32] Speaker B:** But you listen to the other AI crowd.

**[1:05:35] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[1:05:35] Speaker B:** You kind of look. I mean, Dario's generates a lot of attention.

**[1:05:39] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[1:05:39] Speaker B:** And these are very smart people, and they know far more about it than I do. But I go back to fair, smart regulation with the industry on board with that national defense security overlay is what I'd press for.

**[1:05:54] Speaker A:** And back to what you said at the beginning, we have to win this

**[1:05:57] Speaker B:** race because China's not going to hold back. So if we hold back because we're all afraid of something and China doesn't hold back, and China creates the product that then destroys the American system. You can't have that.

**[1:06:07] Speaker A:** And describe, why does a Chinese product ultimately destroy the American system.

**[1:06:12] Speaker B:** If their. Their AI products. If they. If their AI products have the ability to break all of our encryption before we can find holes in our encryption. And so China goes in with AI products, and they empty out half the bank accounts of JP Morgan. All that money is moved to China one night.

**[1:06:33] Speaker B:** That would have an impact. And that's what these AI tools can do. If they don't. Now, AI offense, you have AI defense, so you can build great AI defense to keep AI out. But if AI gets better, you've got to get better.

**[1:06:46] Speaker B:** And if we stop, they'll get better. And then on top of AI, you put quant computing, and quant becomes really alive in 28. And Q Day, they say, is in 28, 20, 28, that's the day that quantum can, in theory, break all the encryption currently in the system around the world.

**[1:07:04] Speaker A:** World.

**[1:07:05] Speaker B:** So imagine every home in America you know how to lock on your door.

**[1:07:11] Speaker B:** Every car in America you can no longer lock. I mean, that's what happens when AI quant get together and break all the security systems in the Internet.

**[1:07:19] Speaker A:** Wait, let's stay on that for a second. We're building quantum computer, you said. I was listening to it or reading it. It's the biggest thing nobody's talking about

**[1:07:29] Speaker B:** because there was so many AI and they haven't put the eight, the quant. So the quant guys told me, they said, look, AI, you go to the library and you check out a book at a time really, really, really fast. With quant, you're checking a thousand books at a time out really, really fast. Now, quant and AI, the overlap is not completely. What I'm told is not completely overlap. AI is better. Quants better. They're. They're symbolic of each one will do.

**[1:07:59] Speaker B:** But you put them together, it's a very powerful tool. And we in America are doing great at quant. Got great entrepreneurs around quant. And so again, we're leading that race also.

**[1:08:11] Speaker A:** Is that as big of a user in the data center world as the AI, or is it different?

**[1:08:16] Speaker B:** A lot smaller.

**[1:08:17] Speaker A:** A lot smaller.

**[1:08:17] Speaker B:** Yeah, that's what they tell me.

**[1:08:18] Speaker A:** What do you think about nuclear.

**[1:08:20] Speaker B:** It's the future.

**[1:08:22] Speaker B:** We never should have stopped nuclear power development in the 70s. The environmentalists were too extreme. Everybody listened to them. We shut it down and look at the problem they created. We could have had clean nuclear power for decades, but we stopped.

**[1:08:42] Speaker B:** China didn't. China's got nuclear power. 20 nuclear power plants going in right now.

**[1:08:50] Speaker A:** Are you all able to do that in alliance?

**[1:08:52] Speaker B:** We'd love to, but we're waiting for the small nuke and get the smaller nukes to bring them in.

**[1:08:57] Speaker B:** So we're a little. We're a little while out.

**[1:08:59] Speaker A:** Is that because of, like, regulation or permits that y' all have or just.

**[1:09:05] Speaker B:** We can't take a whole lot of land for nuclear power. I mean, you actually analyze proper. You don't really need it. You know, four or five miles to the west would be a great place to put it and put it into the grid.

**[1:09:17] Speaker A:** You've thought about it?

**[1:09:18] Speaker B:** Oh, yeah, yeah. We talk about a lot of stuff.

**[1:09:22] Speaker A:** Okay, can I go back again? Okay, so you built the intermodal, you built the airport. You've gone from like, we need to just keep this thing alive. Mike's joined the fight. When did it shift of, okay, we need to start acquiring land because you own 27,000 acres now.

**[1:09:39] Speaker B:** We buy all the time. And so we had maybe six or seven thousand acres prior to the SNL crisis.

**[1:09:46] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[1:09:47] Speaker B:** Then when the SNL crisis occurred, we started buying more. Because in theory, if you have an airport with roads, water and sewer all done, land value should go up.

**[1:09:57] Speaker B:** But because the SNL crisis, land values went down. So we're buying land cheaper after the airport was approved than what we bought to acquire. I mean, that which you'll probably never see that again in, in the market.

**[1:10:14] Speaker A:** See what?

**[1:10:15] Speaker B:** Land values drop that much when you've had that much value created with infrastructure.

**[1:10:18] Speaker A:** Oh, right. When did you put the first master plan together?

**[1:10:21] Speaker B:** Parkland was the first and that was done also in the late 80s. Our first homes we sold at Parkland were 78,000 a home. And now their average home was 3, 8, 400.

**[1:10:31] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[1:10:33] Speaker B:** I wish we could get the 78 back.

**[1:10:34] Speaker A:** No kidding. Um, but so you're, I mean this is such a big question, but it's like, how do you build a 50 year city? Are you, you said there's plans that you make for 40 years and then there's plans that you make for 90 days or how you plan your business. But I'll, I'll break it out first with just planning. When did you start realizing, okay, we're no, we are a developer and this is a forever project per se.

**[1:11:01] Speaker B:** I think late 80s, it kind of dawned on me. And then I, then I, if you go back earlier, 1981, I went and had dinner at Trammel. Crow.

**[1:11:11] Speaker B:** Okay, so I'm with Mr. Crow, which is unbelievable. So here's my real estate hero. I said, you know, I said, Mr. Crow, you've built everything, every product type, trade centers, informart, everything. I said, so what's your favorite real estate product type? He said, warehouses. He said, just build warehouses. It's the best product type to build. So I got back and dad goes, what'd y' all talk about? He goes, Mr. Crow told me to build warehouses. And so that concept, when I saw that opportunity that we had to become industrial developers, Mike and I embraced it.

**[1:11:46] Speaker B:** And we said, look, this is really what we're going to do. And we started to get into it and it really started to work. And so that's when we knew, take that Crow idea. We had to become Developers. We jumped into it, became industrial developers.

**[1:12:02] Speaker B:** And then we start. We grew the business across the country and throughout Europe.

**[1:12:05] Speaker A:** That was the industrial business. Then when did you start doing all the other asset types? Was that falling into a master plan you had put together?

**[1:12:12] Speaker B:** That was the. That's the Alliance Texas master plan. And Mike Barry's got the industrial. He's got a multifamily team and he's got a residential. Residential team.

**[1:12:21] Speaker B:** Is that separate group because it grew off of alliance and then a retail. Retail, multifamily and industrial. Mike does inside Alliance. We do office. Little office, too.

**[1:12:31] Speaker A:** Are you still working off the original master plan or does it get redone every 10 years?

**[1:12:37] Speaker B:** It evolved all the time. The Circle T Ranch, I swear, we've planted 30 times. We've owned it 33 years. And we were always trying to figure out this. I mean, if you go back to what we originally thought we're going to do, to what, what where Chuck Schwab is today was going to be a regional mall. I mean, that's how basic we were. And thank goodness we didn't do the regional mall because malls went out of favor and we had the land and that's where Chuck Schwab went. And so we are so radically different than what we thought. The key, though, we had the zoning and we had patience and we're very flexible and we, you know, and we really take our time.

**[1:13:23] Speaker B:** As I said, we're very careful financially. You know, the land doesn't have any debt. We're very patient. And with that patience and that safety, financial safety, it gives you a chance to really optimize the best possible use.

**[1:13:39] Speaker B:** We never thought of Deloitte University.

**[1:13:42] Speaker B:** I mean, one of the top training centers in the world shows up at Circle t Ranch. When Mr. Johnson came from Fidelity and says, I want to build the largest Fidelity campus in the country on the ranch. When we did Vaquero with Mike Melman and Discovery Land, we never thought of a high end country club. So these great users came in. We had the lane, we had the flexibility. We took advantage of it. And a lot of times we just wait, you know, wait to see what the market tells you to do. Don't try to predict the market. The market. I never thought we'd do NASCAR Speedway.

**[1:14:15] Speaker B:** Well, you know, here comes the NASCAR track. We had a thousand acres. We could grab nascar.

**[1:14:19] Speaker A:** In a world where you can do everything, where you can do anything, but you can't do everything. And you said, we're going to wait. And then you said, we planned this 33 times, maybe. I'm kind of moving into. I want to talk just about how you run your organization and think about leadership. But what has to be true for something to end up going because time's at your side, you're in no rush. So what has to be true when you're sitting in investment committee or however you all get to a final approval to say, okay, it's time, we're going to do this.

**[1:14:52] Speaker B:** Well, clients will drive it. I mean, Deloitte shows up, everything stops. We take care of Deloitte. I mean, that's a client you really want. Chuck Schwab shows up.

**[1:15:03] Speaker B:** By golly, we're going to take care of Chuck Schwab. And then. So that's on the Circle T ranch, which for 33 years is very underdeveloped. You go to Core alliance, we're building warehouses all the time. We have. We have millions of square feet in planning. We've got. It's a machine. And so that decision is pretty automatic. If the buildings are leasing up, we keep building.

**[1:15:27] Speaker B:** Now if you have a recession, they don't lease. We'll stop. But we have, we have our issue at alliance for our client base is we always have product on the shelf. So bread and butter, warehouses, retail, multifamily. It's a machine.

**[1:15:43] Speaker B:** A thousand multifamily units a year. That pipeline we're planning for, when you get outside of that and something unique. Taylor, Sheridan, of course, we want to take. Have we ever done a studio? Hadn't done a studio.

**[1:15:56] Speaker B:** So we found people that did studios and they helped us. We put together the studio deal, but again, that was driven by Taylor. We didn't say we're going to be in the. We're not going to. We're going to build a studio.

**[1:16:06] Speaker B:** Let's hope we find somebody. Taylor came to us, we built a studio for Taylor. So we're really kind of client driven. And we can do anything in alliance except Seaport. Any other. Think of all the activity that could occur up here. We can do anything that would occur in North Texas. We don't have. We're not next to the ocean, so we can't do ships and all that stuff.

**[1:16:30] Speaker A:** How many more years do you have?

**[1:16:31] Speaker B:** Well, hopefully I get another 20. Well, me, me, me personally, the lines will be done in 20, 25 years. But we keep buying land every year, so it keeps getting bigger and bigger.

**[1:16:42] Speaker A:** I'm sure you've talked to all the adjacent land landowner.

**[1:16:44] Speaker B:** So they just say, oh, they all know. Yeah, we just wait. We're Patient.

**[1:16:48] Speaker A:** So you just get to walk in a lot of days and say, who's called in the last couple weeks? Oh, Chuck Schwab, or. I mean, you're just living through this world.

**[1:16:55] Speaker B:** I mean, we're the brokers call us and their competition. There are three or four competitions going on right now. A major client's trying to move to North Texas, and we're in the middle of them trying to win.

**[1:17:06] Speaker A:** How do you even lose with what you have at this point? What?

**[1:17:09] Speaker C:** Why?

**[1:17:10] Speaker A:** Let me ask that question. Why would somebody not come to alliance and go question.

**[1:17:14] Speaker B:** Who have you lost? Correct.

**[1:17:16] Speaker B:** Who have we lost to within the market? It's a very good real estate market. They'll move around. But we. North Texas.

**[1:17:24] Speaker B:** In Texas. I can't think of any deal that we wanted that we've lost in the state. Yeah, because also we. We've got a very aggressive governor, very pro economic development. And again, we're taking. People take it for granted that you got a governor that's this involved. Many governors are not this involved.

**[1:17:43] Speaker A:** What do you mean? How. When you say he's really involved, what does that mean?

**[1:17:46] Speaker B:** No, Scotiabank shows up and their team calls me. And so the chairman is going to come. We're looking at Dallas and we're looking at Charlotte to put our global North American headquarters. I said, great. I go, let's go to Austin. So go to Austin and we take the chairman down to see the governor. Then we see lieutenant governor, then we see the speaker. And that all happened very quickly, and they gave him a great sales pitch. And then the team said, can you. Can we come back to Dallas and have dinner? I said, sure. So we brought everybody back up. They go, could you get President Bush to come by and visit? I go, I call President Bush. So the greatest closer is when President Bush shows up and the chairman is like, odd.

**[1:18:31] Speaker B:** He's never met President Bush, and the whole team is odd. And Bush looks at him. He goes, so why are you here? Because I'm, Mr. President, thinking about, you know, moving my operations to Texas. And he goes, well, where else you looking?

**[1:18:43] Speaker B:** He goes, charlotte. And Bush looks at him. He goes, no, you're not. Bush just called his bluff right there. And Sarah goes, yeah, you're right. We're going to come to Texas. So when you have a closer like Bush, but that's what you have in our state, not every state has the whole top deck, including your retired president, that'll get on the field and help you win business. But that's our. Go back to our earlier Conversation of culture. Everybody helps to build our community.

**[1:19:11] Speaker A:** Okay, I wasn't going to ask this, but now I'm just going to ask it. What was it like to. What was the 92 election like through your eyes?

**[1:19:20] Speaker B:** It was big surprise.

**[1:19:21] Speaker A:** You weren't expecting.

**[1:19:22] Speaker B:** No, no. My dad didn't tell anybody. He goes on that Larry King show, and Larry keeps pushing dad, he need to run for president. And dad goes, look, Larry, if the American people want me to run, you have him call me. And my mom didn't know I'm in the Philippines working on a deal, and I'm watching CNN tape delay.

**[1:19:42] Speaker B:** And I call him up. I go, dad, what's all this about? He goes, ross, no one wants me to be president. Don't worry. My dad doesn't tell my mom.

**[1:19:51] Speaker B:** He gets back to the hotel room in D.C. and my mom goes, what's this about? It's same thing, Margo. You know, Larry's pushing me. No one wants me to run. But my mom will say, because I knew he touched a nerve, because the next morning, all the envelopes pushed under our door from the night shift at the hotel asking Ross Perot to run.

**[1:20:14] Speaker B:** So these are security guards and the maid saying, would you run? And that's when she thought this might have a lot more energy than what my dad thought. I get back from the Philippines. In my image, going into the building is, you've got phone men dragging phone lines through the building, which I thought was kind of odd. I go in and see my dad. He goes, ross, this thing's kind of taken off. He goes, so many people have called. We shut down the switches in this part of the country, and they have to bring more phone. Phone capacity to the building. And he gave me a list. He goes, he like, he had like, the top Hillwood people. He goes, can I borrow half your team? I said, date you borrow anybody you want.

**[1:20:53] Speaker A:** Oh, my God.

**[1:20:54] Speaker B:** And so I had to ship over a lot of talent to him to try to figure out how to run a political campaign.

**[1:20:58] Speaker B:** So it was a complete cold standing start to run for President of the United States. And it. And so my eyes, it was stunning to watch him build a team. Only he could do it. He had the energy, he had the charisma, and he was tough enough to do it.

**[1:21:19] Speaker B:** And he started to build that team. And it took off. And he told me, he goes, look, I'll do the politics, you do the business, you keep things running, and I'll go do this. I said, okay, great. So that was kind of what I Did is. I took care of stuff. Then he. Then he. Then, of course, I went to the debates.

**[1:21:35] Speaker A:** He was so great.

**[1:21:37] Speaker A:** I've watched those.

**[1:21:38] Speaker B:** It was. They're incredible. But, I mean, we literally. We land the airport here, the volunteers pick us up in the rental cars. We all drive to the debate center or the arena. And here's Republican Party with their army. Here's the Democratic Party with their army. And we're like the Bad News Bears showing up at the Super Bowl. And it did. Two armies, and we show up, and we barely even have a room to prepare. It's like a little. It's like the women's volleyball team. They gave us that room.

**[1:22:09] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[1:22:10] Speaker B:** And the other teams had the big locker rooms, but dad didn't need it, you know, and all the. Everybody else is doing debate prep and training and on and on and on. I remember one debate, the Sunday of the debate, you know, dad was playing with his grandchildren. He said, okay, let's go. Well, a lot of them took off.

**[1:22:27] Speaker A:** Wasn't prep.

**[1:22:28] Speaker B:** Wasn't prep. He didn't need to be prep. I. He knew who he was, what his issues were. And so what you saw to Ross Perot was true. Raw Ross Perot. And it is that. Genuine Ross Perot, I think, is what voters liked. They didn't like the highly polished politician. They liked just the man.

**[1:22:48] Speaker A:** So 92. Was that like a. Were you distracted that year? Was it. Did it. Did it fire you up? Like, what. I mean, it's surreal, insane. So if he doesn't.

**[1:22:58] Speaker B:** We're not a political family.

**[1:22:59] Speaker A:** If he doesn't go on Larry King, does it happen?

**[1:23:01] Speaker B:** No, no, no, no, no.

**[1:23:02] Speaker A:** Really?

**[1:23:03] Speaker B:** No.

**[1:23:04] Speaker B:** He wasn't planning on running for president. There's no organization. There's no one there.

**[1:23:09] Speaker A:** You're for sure?

**[1:23:10] Speaker B:** No, no, no. My dad is a focus group of one. If he looks in the mirror and he liked it, he was gone. It was up to us to catch up to it, including my mom. But we're not a political family. And so the whole thing was incredible.

**[1:23:27] Speaker B:** You go into these conference rooms or these media events, you know, 400 reporters from all over the world, and we didn't have anybody to take care of them. When dad went to number one in the polls, we didn't know what to do. I mean, Dad's still driving himself back and forth, you know, to work. Dad really thought at the end of the election, he'd go back to normal. And so, you know, November 92, you have presidential election, December 92, he goes Christmas shopping.

**[1:23:55] Speaker B:** He goes into north park to go buy something for my mom in the whole mall gridlocks. And the police had to come and take him to try to get him out back to his car because the crowd, the fans, are so nice, they wouldn't let him go. And he also said it's very interesting when you run for office and people vote for you. He said, I've never had so many people touch me. In business, we don't touch each other a whole lot. He said, in politics, if you vote for you and your supporter, everybody want to touch me. He says a very interesting phenomenon that he hadn't experienced before.

**[1:24:33] Speaker A:** Okay, we'll bring it home on this topic. So I kind of would frame it as you're kind of a CEO of CEOs, so we can just take it however you'd like. But the way you talk about the business often and what I've learned and heard from others is everybody kind of runs their own business, right?

**[1:24:56] Speaker A:** So maybe we just start with, did you build this philosophy over time? Like, how did the Hillwood enterprise build itself?

**[1:25:04] Speaker B:** We're very distributed in leadership. We don't like bureaucracy, don't like memos, have minimal meetings. And so the goal, my goal was to have a lot of great entrepreneurs, like a Mike Barry.

**[1:25:21] Speaker B:** Mike has his business. He runs that business. And then I help Mike run that business. If he needs something, I help, and I keep up with it because I love it. And so we're entrepreneurial. We're starting new companies every year. We bring in great talent. We had a great team this morning. We're backing on a whole new senior housing program. And so we find them, we back them, and then we leave them alone.

**[1:25:42] Speaker B:** And if you. This is not. I do not micromanage. And I'd like to joke with everybody, the way I control the business is, if you need money, you got to come see me. But other than that, you can kind of do what you want to do now. You got to follow the rules, you got to be honest, etc. Kind of can't hurt the reputation, but that literally how I watch the business. When you need money, I'll go through your deal.

**[1:26:04] Speaker A:** So if people come to you over time with new ideas and then you say, how do we turn that into a business unit?

**[1:26:10] Speaker B:** Or whatever, the whole venture capital group, and all we do is look for young entrepreneurs, young or old, but great new ideas to back.

**[1:26:18] Speaker B:** Because I want to avoid what Mike and I had round one where we had to wait for. We didn't see Facebook or. Or Amazon. Now with Venture capital. I like to think we see them and we're going to see them early, and we're going to see them early.

**[1:26:33] Speaker B:** So when they need space, we can take care of them. And that's happening in the defense tech space. We're now leasing the great defense tech companies. We just leased 45,000ft to Joby for one of their contracts. And so it's really starting to work.

**[1:26:48] Speaker B:** But I hope we're not. There's. You'll always be surprised a little bit, Tom. I'm just hoping we're not that surprised on what's going to happen out there in the future. So we're distributed, we're lean.

**[1:26:59] Speaker B:** You've got to perform at the top deck here.

**[1:27:04] Speaker B:** Mike Barry's salary hadn't changed for 30 years. He in here for salaries, not here for bonus. He is completely tied to the profitability of alliance. If it isn't profitable, he doesn't get paid.

**[1:27:17] Speaker A:** Is that. Is that how everybody.

**[1:27:18] Speaker B:** Everybody. It's eat what you kill. If you think you're going to hang out on welfare here, that ain't going to happen.

**[1:27:25] Speaker B:** If you don't perform, you're not going to be here. You perform and you're a great entrepreneur. My goal is to have a platform that'll keep these great entrepreneurs here because everybody, all of our top deck, could go out on their own and start their own company. So what do I need to do to keep them here? And so part of it is I really try to leave them alone and let them run their business.

**[1:27:47] Speaker B:** And we have a great back office. Do you really want to go start your own company? They have to rebuild hr. Rebuild it, Rebuild finance. Most of them go, no, Ross, you handle that.

**[1:28:02] Speaker B:** I'll go run. I'll go out and have. I'll do all the fun things in a business. You handle the back office. So you've got this great platform you can plug into.

**[1:28:10] Speaker B:** You've got a great plant brand you can plug into. Then you've got financing you can plug into. We've got a whole finance team that'll find debt. If you want to go build a building, our team will go find it for you. So if you're a great developer, you'll make more money here than you will on your own. That's my goal. And then we throw in good stuff. We have airplanes.

**[1:28:31] Speaker A:** You've got this office.

**[1:28:32] Speaker B:** We have great office, but also airplanes. They are airplanes. Because I like flying, so love those airplanes. But they are phenomenal tools. And we're putting 600 to 700 hours a year per plane, going all over the country with our deal team, taking care of clients, taking care of investors, and anything we need to do. So our planes are on the road building a business.

**[1:28:59] Speaker B:** And so if you run a company here, you got access to an airplane. If you got on your own, it might take a while to get that airplane. So, again, I'm trying to make it really easy. Don't leave us.

**[1:29:11] Speaker A:** You hiring?

**[1:29:13] Speaker B:** Well, always hired great talent.

**[1:29:16] Speaker A:** And you've got a.

**[1:29:17] Speaker B:** We need a podcast. Officially. That's what we need, a podcast.

**[1:29:20] Speaker B:** Here we go.

**[1:29:22] Speaker A:** Do you have, like, a meeting that you run every week?

**[1:29:25] Speaker B:** Every Monday.

**[1:29:26] Speaker A:** Can you tell me how that meeting.

**[1:29:27] Speaker B:** I mean, what I do every Monday, and I was doing every Monday.

**[1:29:33] Speaker B:** We were meeting all the time. When we got started, we did Monday meetings, then we did a Saturday meeting because we didn't have children. So we brought her in on Saturdays. We worked and worked and worked, and finally dawned on us that what we did on Monday, what we did Saturday, that wasn't that big a break because we're young. We're kind of running in circles, all full of energy.

**[1:29:50] Speaker B:** When you start getting older, you say, okay, we can be more efficient. So we had a standing Monday meeting, which I now do. I have everybody in the company coming together every Monday and review every project. And even if you're not involved in alliance, I want the residential team to hear what we're doing so that everybody at least has a feel for what the company's doing, big picture. And I think it helps keep Hillwood culture.

**[1:30:16] Speaker B:** And now I go, I've eased off every Monday. And so the big meetings every other Monday, on the. On the Monday in between, I go through all the deals. Anybody's got a deal they want to go through, any topic, want to talk about, we'll do kind of a special meeting. And that's how we do it.

**[1:30:32] Speaker A:** What's your role in the big meeting?

**[1:30:34] Speaker B:** Well, I run it. And everybody, if you're in the. If you're in the meeting, whoever's in the meeting gets to talk.

**[1:30:40] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[1:30:41] Speaker B:** So some young guy shows up in the meeting. I say, okay, Joe, what do you got? And they're stunned because, like, why did I supposed to talk? I said, you're here, so you know what's on your mind. So again.

**[1:30:52] Speaker B:** And they. And they get. We. We go off some pretty deep rabbit holes. You know, we'll get into AI. We'll get in the impact of AI we'll get into the. Because we have the IT team with us. It is their Security is there. HR is there. Accounting is there.

**[1:31:07] Speaker B:** The insurance team is there. The tax team is there. They all know they need to hear what's going on, big picture, to make them more effective. And so it helps us all. And we cross pollinate ideas.

**[1:31:21] Speaker B:** The venture capital guys are there. So the venture guys will maybe see an opportunity for one of our companies to help another one of the companies that we have.

**[1:31:30] Speaker A:** Is this an in person meeting now?

**[1:31:33] Speaker B:** Some people phone in, yes, but ideally it's more effective if it's in person. And it goes for three hours, three and a half hours.

**[1:31:41] Speaker A:** Do you do in the morning or the afternoon?

**[1:31:42] Speaker B:** In the morning.

**[1:31:43] Speaker A:** What time do you start?

**[1:31:44] Speaker B:** Start. 8:30.

**[1:31:45] Speaker A:** Now I'm just taking notes for my. So you start the week with a huge meeting. So everybody knows.

**[1:31:52] Speaker B:** And that's the Hillwood meeting. And then the afternoon we have the energy meeting with the energy company.

**[1:31:57] Speaker B:** And then on Friday, I have the big family investment meeting. The pro family investment meeting.

**[1:32:02] Speaker A:** Yep. All right. What's the hardest thing going on in your business?

**[1:32:07] Speaker A:** Every business always has a something going on.

**[1:32:09] Speaker B:** I think it is probably the answer for every business. You know, how do you find the greatest talent?

**[1:32:19] Speaker B:** And I've been reading about President Eisenhower, General Eisenhower.

**[1:32:22] Speaker A:** Okay.

**[1:32:23] Speaker B:** And you look at what Eisenhower did in World War II and what Eisenhower did as president and how Eisenhower was such a deep pick to run Normandy. But here's this young general that Marshall basically found and promoted to run Normandy. I'm talking to a top consultant. He said, look, your challenge is your. He didn't know I was reading Eisenhower. He said, your company is filled with Eisenhower. You've got all this incredible talent around you. Do you see it? Do you appreciate it? And then can you attract it?

**[1:33:02] Speaker B:** And so that's my main focus because we've attracted incredible people. And the people I'm interviewing now for new jobs, they're getting more and more unique and more impressive.

**[1:33:17] Speaker A:** Ross, this has been awesome.

**[1:33:18] Speaker B:** It's been great. A lot of fun.

**[1:33:19] Speaker A:** Thanks for sitting down.

**[1:33:20] Speaker B:** Thank you. Are you kidding? Great questions.

**[1:33:22] Speaker A:** This is awesome.