Ep. 40: Evan Baehr – Founder of Arena Hall & co-author of Get Backed

Evan: Yeah, maybe it's kind of a VFW with skinny jeans. I haven't thought about it that way yet. Uh, we don't, it's not only skinny jeans, there's some suits, there's some dresses, there's all kinds of things, but, um, yeah, so we have four design principles that shape what we're building at Arena Hall. Build, belong, discover, and renew.

Tarek: Welcome to Y'all Street. Today I speak with Evan Baer, serial entrepreneur and the author of Get Backed. Evan, would you like a cup of coffee?

Evan: I'd love one. Thanks.

Tarek: Hey, I got you this, uh, Austin, Texas coffee mug, because this is the first time we're doing a Yallstreet pod in Austin. Amazing. Coffee. Cheers.

Evan: Hey, great to be here.

Tarek: So I want to start, we're going to get into your book, Get Backed, which I loved, I read over the last couple of days. I think it's fantastic. At the back of the book, you have a little intro here. It says, Evan Baer is the co-founder of Able, a tech company committed to growing the Fortune 5 million small businesses around the U S with collaborative low interest loans. He's worked at the White House, a hedge fund, Facebook, and is a graduate of Princeton, Yale, and Harvard business school. There, there's a lot in those two sentences here.

Evan: Well, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of things. Uh, a friend described it with no offense intended as vocational Tourette's. And, uh, it's a serious medical issue. We mean it in a silly way. Uh, so I've gotten to do a lot of things and it's fun. I don't know, 20 years into a career to think back about themes. Uh, some of them seem sort of disconnected, but there were some real themes and competencies that I got to work on building, uh, vocationally for me personally, that have been real connective tissue that are coming together in a really cool way in this latest project of mine, arena hall. Um, I also really like standardized tests. And so I just kept taking them and kept going to schools. Uh, so I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, uh, great family. Pensacola is a very lovely place. Not a lot of people, they're dreaming on sort of global scale issues, military family. No, not a military family. They had moved over from new Orleans, uh, when they were kids. And so kind of a sleepy beach town, uh, growing up there, I knew one person in business and he was a car dealer and I didn't think I wanted to be a car dealer. So business wasn't really something that I knew about a down the street neighbor was Joe Scarborough, our member of Congress. And I knew some lawyers and I had this sense early on, like I wanted to do something that matters. I wanted to shape the world. And the only real path I had shown to me was politics and law. So really spent kind of my time through Princeton summer internships, leaving Princeton, going to work at the white house and on Capitol hill, thinking that if you care about shaping the world, that politics public policy is the way to do it. And then I had kind of a change of heart a little bit later. So growing up then, um, public school, private school, homeschool, uh, private school, K a went to a magnet program in high school, sort of a, a nerd kid program at a pretty rough off high school. Interesting place to really have friendships and sit across the lunch table from people who had no expectation to go to college. Many, some had no expectation to get married out of wedlock. Childbearing was kind of the norm. And so to be around people who you really see, like never had a vision in front of them laid out of like what a path towards college could look like, what a path towards sort of leveling up from their parents situation would look like. So early on, uh, just a front row seat to a lot of people in America have a pretty tough lot right now. And the chance to show them what's possible is just a small little thing, but to have something put in front of them, to give them a glimpse of like, wow, this could be a path forward for you to make money and save money and, um, elevate the quality of your life above what your parents had. A lot of people really need that vision. So that's pretty formative for me in high school.

Tarek: Yeah, I would think so at such a young age. And so were you fairly academically advanced? I would guess if you're getting into Princeton, you mentioned the standardized testing, why, why Princeton was the Ivy league always a focus of yours?

Evan: No. I basically knew very little about it. I was really involved in debate in high school, which is our chance to travel country and go to nerd debate competition.

Tarek: You mentioned your high school teacher in the book actually, um, and how important it was to, to learn rhetoric at such a young age. Can you talk about that?

Evan: Well, some people are cool and play sports and, you know, captain of the football team or whatever. I played some sports, but not very successfully. Um, debate, the policy debate particularly was a really fun outlet for me. At that time, you are carrying these giant boxes of all your evidence and your cards with you. You're checking them on airplanes and going to tournaments around the country. A summer camp is super nerdy. You do speed drills with a pencil in your mouth to limit how much your tongue moves so you can spread and speak more quickly. In some sense, it's actually pretty bad for rhetoric because the goal is to just speak at, you know, X hundred words per minute and bury the other person. So in some sense, policy debate is kind of a weird training ground. I do think it's very helpful to train yourself logically about understanding arguments, thinking about rebuttals, getting, probably speaking too quickly, but being very precise with your words. So for me, that was a chance to travel around the country, meet kids from different schools who had all sorts of interesting life experiences. Their parents did all sorts of interesting things. Uh, so did really well in the SATs, got a letter from Princeton. It's like, you should come here. And, uh, I knew about Princeton kind of really what it was, but also through Carlton Banks on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air who had gone to Princeton and, uh, toured it, looked at a few different schools and it just felt like a special place that I could learn a ton and meet some amazing people, so I land there early on. It's not quite the JD Vance level of experience, but directionally all these kids were like, well, can't wait to be bankers. And my brother had worked as a bank teller. So I was like, why on earth would people want to work at a bank? I just had no idea what this was. So it was kind of a crash course of all kinds of people who'd grown up with parents in corporate law, investment banking, private equity, all these things. I didn't really know what any of that was. So cool to land there and just get exposed to kind of what all the opportunities were. I do think there's something interesting there. The norm is, you know, as a Princeton student, you're going to go on to shape the world. And I love that invitation. I think it has this weird way that it lands vocationally for most people. I think this is still the case for college kids, sort of changing the world. Ask a kid today. So you want to change the world, make a difference. What are you going to go do? I think you'll commonly hear, I want to work out or start a nonprofit. I want to join the Peace Corps. I want to be an investigative journalist. I want to go into politics and those are great. We need great people going into those things, but almost no one, very few people are saying I would like to start a business and that was kind of my unlock, I was for business as a kid. I thought business seemed like a good thing, but I thought it was mostly good because business owners and investors would make money and they could do things with that money and those things were good in the world. So you might own a car dealership and aluminum manufacturing company. You make a lot of money. You give it to your church, you give it to a nonprofit and that's why it's good. And I had some awesome conversations over my life. A really important one was a dinner with Peter Thiel. And Peter was explaining the founding story of Palantir. So he and Alex and Joe were in an apartment in San Francisco when 9-11 happened. So they're watching on the news. The planes hit the towers and they had their own sort of, let's do something for America moment. Uh, many people, my college editor of my magazine was Pete Hegseth. Uh, a number of people in my life, JD Vance had the same story. It was a classmate at Yale. Many people had this story where they saw 9-11 happen and they decided to enlist in the Marines. I think Peter and those guys probably weren't going to join the Marines, but they had this moment where they said a main thing they had done at PayPal was figured out a way to beat the Russians in online payment transactions. So they built incredible IP and great technology to move money around the internet and they said, gosh, what if we built a company that brought the best engineers together to build the best products to find bad guys and keep America safe. And so for me, that was the first time I'd really heard of a frame of like, because I see this problem in the world, I want to go to build a business. Not because the business will make me money and then I can do nice things in politics and nonprofit, but because a particularly a venture backed technology enabled business, I believe is the best form of organizing the brightest minds, the right kind of capital in the right kind of culture with the right kind of investors and partners. And that vehicle of that kind of company with that kind of talent actually builds the dream team to go solve that specific problem in the world that you want to solve. There are probably a few exceptions, humanitarian aid and relief. Obviously things related to how churches operate, like there is a role for nonprofits, but I really love when talking to young people today who care about homelessness or sex trafficking or water pollution, whatever those things are. I think it would be amazing for the world if more people saw entrepreneurship as the right vehicle to go solve those problems. If they happen to make a lot of money, it is a sign that they found product market fit with the business, but much of the fruit of a water desal company, a for-profit technology company that tracks people as pedophiles trafficking and stealing children, whatever cause you're talking about, there's probably a way to build a company that is the mechanism to get the right minds and people involved in solving that hard problem.

Tarek: And that was a lesson that you, you learned from Peter Thiel. That was something that, that he was a champion of you found.

Evan: So I had been immersed in the world of think tanks and nonprofits and policy and PACs and appreciating some of the internal challenges of how nonprofits and how politics work. And so that felt like, gosh, that's going to be a slog. And what Peter opened me up to was that companies can serve this role of organizing the brightest minds around the hardest problems. And I think are actually much more likely to produce the social outcome wins that were motivating for me and many people in the first place.

Tarek: Yeah, that's, I think my takeaway is thinking that so many people look to government to solve many of the problems that you just mentioned. And I have found in my limited experience with government that the government tends to be highly inefficient and often doesn't attract the best and brightest minds. But you went into politics, you left Princeton, you went directly into politics.

Evan: So I met Peter after the political stint. So there's a little chronology. So I spent summers at some think tanks. I worked on Capitol Hill. I worked in the White House. My time on Capitol Hill does validate there are certain things that are necessarily the realm of government. So I had the privilege of being the staff director for the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which is 250 members of Congress are part of this caucus. And so issues like house churches in China, internally displaced people camps in Darfur, the Xinjiang Uyghurs, Tibet, Colombia, these sort of niche human rights issues, they're really not niche. You could have a IDP camp of a million people. These are massive humanitarian issues. And the United States is has a huge possible role to play in those things. So it's an observation about government, particularly in questions of foreign policy, is a unique actor where a spicy written letter signed by the Secretary of State sent to the mayor of some province in Darfur that can really save people's lives and really change situations. So I think there's some realms, human rights realm, foreign policy realm, where government is obviously a clear actor in that. And then picking up this bug of like, wow, business is good. Business organizes people to solve these problems. It's like, I like that frame. Also, it's a lot more fun. You're getting to be in build mode. And that's one of the things I appreciate about for profits versus nonprofits. Sort of hot take is that a challenge in nonprofits and government to some extent is that the customer of a nonprofit really is the donor and your product to the customer is your marketing material. It said in a little bit of an extreme way, but something I really appreciate about building for profit companies and running equity roadshows, trying to hire people, et cetera, on equity roadshows. I get a lot of nose. I mean, maybe I'm six, 7% yeses when raising an equity round, the nose and the yeses, but particularly the nose are incredibly helpful because you get to, in some cases, sit across from some of the smartest people in the world who have amazing pattern recognition. And so the reasons of their, no, your acquisition cost is too high, no defensible moat, your IP is terrible, whatever the risks are, you learn so much from these really smart people who tell you, no. A challenge in the nonprofit world is often a lot of the donors that you're raising capital from may not bring subject matter expertise where their input to the thing that you're building is really helpful for getting smarter. So wherever possible, I try to surround myself with the smartest people I can find, whether they are on my team or advisors or investors who said yes, investors who said no, and just being around people who are really tip of the spirit, whatever kind of functional challenge that I'm working on in the business and nonprofits create a structural reason that make that really difficult.

Tarek: And so you transitioned from the white house and you go to Yale. What do you study at Yale? Why did you choose Yale?

Evan: Yeah. So I go to, started the divinity school plan was to do divinity school and law school. Uh, initial take was I thought a few years learning Greek Hebrew would be kind of interesting. Uh, there was an angle to that where I wanted to work on us foreign policy to majority Muslim countries. So that would involve deep dive into international law, uh, the tradition of Sharia law, understanding how I guess now probably 1.8 billion people in the world live in majority Muslim nations. And there's going to be a major existential challenge to think about how do majority Muslim countries develop practices that become directionally consistent with democratic capitalism? Uh, lots of reasons that those nations are regressing, uh, particularly under COVID, which was sort of a license for authoritarian regimes to continue their suppression of free speech, assembly, et cetera. So that heading in the play was, all right, let's go become a lawyer. Let's learn a lot about how different religions think about democracy and capitalism, and I'll go be a lawyer.

Tarek: Was your faith always important to you?

Evan: Yeah. So I grew up as a Christian, Christian home. Uh, when I got to Princeton, I was involved in a group that sort of showed me a pretty different level of what faith meant. So grew up in the South, um, Christianity in the South is social, it's a ritual, it's a source of community, rummage sales, bake sales, choir, basketball. And that's an amazing piece of societies where this is sort of the civic and cultural hub. Arriving at Princeton, I was around some faculty, including Robbie George and a bunch of peers where the, the intellectual seriousness of the claims of the Christian faith, uh, became more front and center for me. And so the CS Lewis line, Lord, liar, or lunatic about who you think Jesus is. I think everyone should really have to wrestle with that. And if you go the liar path, that could be your thing. If you go the lunatic path, that could be your thing. Um, but if you go the Lord path, it's not something you can kind of accept halfheartedly. It's a pretty big claim. Like, maybe it's a bad analogy, but thinking about, you know, do you believe in aliens? Like if you really do believe in aliens, or if you've met an alien or feel like you've had an encounter with an alien, you're kind of like all in. And so to be sort of like halfway on the sidelines of like, aliens might be real, not really sure. I think it's a little bit similar to like, yeah, the whole God thing, like might be real, Jesus might have been a moral, interesting figure. I'm not really sure what landed for me. It was like, you should really figure this out. Cause if you're about to own these truth claims, everything is different.

Tarek: So you invested heavily in those relationships there and came out of that on fire. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And that, and that thread remained through your political career, your political assignments and into ultimately wanting to study divinity at Yale.

Evan: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's the right story. Um, Yale was interesting. They, uh, joke Harvard divinity school. This is kind of weird, but this is true. Harvard divinity school. No one believes in God is actually true. Essentially among the faculty, um, Yale divinity school, everyone believes in God and they know she's awesome. So there's weird political flavors happening in the American Christian church. Um, it sort of politics, gender, sexuality, race, all these things. It's really messy. What was great about that was to actually sit and think deeply about church history and patristic fathers and the historical side was really cool. The interesting piece also was beginning to reflect on, and then spend a lot more time over the next 20 years of my life thinking about, um, what are the conditions of heaven, what are the conditions of the garden of Eden and how would we as entrepreneurs begin to create more heaven, like Edenic experiences on earth, I'm not trying to make theological claims that I'm ushering in the Eschaton, but I think as a proxy to design food and beverage experiences, residential real estate, social media apps, uh, Being something like you might get a taste of with heaven on earth is a interesting frame. So that's one. So how do you design ambitious Edenic like qualities? Um, the other angle that's kind of interesting to think about is. So if we are created in God's image and have sort of a unique ongoing experience of the Holy spirit, some transcendent forces, um, how would you tap into those resources as part of your creative act? So I get to work with some really amazing people that are much more sophisticated on this than I am, but here's an example. So we were trying to imagine what is the entry experience like to this club hospitality project we're building in Austin, Texas, and these dear friends of mine who were running product have this approach where they say, okay, let's imagine the conditions. So what we're talking about specifically, you enter from the street, it's a sidewalk, you got to get from the street to the door. What's that going to be like? You're trying to do experience design. And their approach was to put on this beautiful meditative five minute song and have our little design team, our core team, uh, sit and imagine it's like what ideas come to mind when you're thinking about a rival does music plays five minutes and, uh, we had a guy who was a real finance guy on our team and I was sort of like, this is really weird. He's going to freak out. So five minute ends. We're outside. It's a beautiful day. And so Jess, our facilitator was like, okay, what ideas came to mind? Who kind of got a vision or just any thoughts? And this friend of mine and our group, uh, he, he pounds on the table. Water. I saw water. She's wonderful. She facilitates. He's like, well, what was it like? He was like, Oh, all day. Oh, I'm just running so hard. My days are so intense and I get to this place and, uh, there's water. And I can just escape the craziness of my day. So she continues. She's like, well, what was the water in? It's like, it was a stone thing and it was beautiful. And it's cold. And I put my hands in, it was cold water. And so she just keeps ripping on this thing. And so fast forward 15 minutes. It was like, what are some inspirational comps? So it was like a latrine, a fountain. Um, Jews have a tradition of hand washing before meals. So fast forward, talk to landscape design, to all these different people. We have this amazing, uh, in a copper scupper patina, copper scupper dropping chilled water into a stone basin on the arrival into this place that we're building, and there's not a sign that says exactly what it's supposed to be. We're not referencing, but it's just this subtle little notion of like, ah, at this threshold of entry, we want you to have this little moment of reset. If you want to place your hands in this chilled water thing, that could be part of your experience design. But I bring that up as an example of. Gosh, I had really never done that in my life, which is actually sort of top into some, whether it's your own meditation practices, or if you believe there's anything outside of you, collective consciousness, a particular God, the Christian tradition, um, how would you make yourself available to that kind of inspiration? I tried it once on an Excel sheet and I got nothing, but in some of these things, you can say, wow, if we were created with some little component of God's image in us, uh, we are given the invitation to steward the earth to care for some metaphorical version of the garden, uh, we're probably not just doing that by ourselves. So our minds are important, refine our minds, make your mind as sharp as possible and where you can consider opening yourself up to these outside influences to shape your inspiration and even the product for the businesses that you're building.

Tarek: Well, it strikes me based on the, the book and the story that you just told that one of the undercurrents of all of your efforts and activities is this idea of connection and how you approach connection, either through an experience like what you just described or through the storytelling that you talk about in creating pitch decks, it's as though in, in every aspect, you're trying to find what it is that's going to connect a person to another person. And, um, I'm, I'm really interested to investigate that as we go through the sort of the rest of your career here. So, so you graduate from Yale. Um, what, what did you end up getting your degree in ultimately?

Evan: Uh, in divinity said not going to do law school, went to build this data company with Peter Thiel, which is a crazy adventure.

Tarek: Yeah. Let's talk about that. You get this divinity degree and then you immediately jump into a project with Peter Thiel. How did that come about?

Evan: So I got to meet Peter at a dinner, uh, with a friend of mine who said, come meet this really interesting person before dinner, you should read these three books by Rene Girard, a very intense reading assignment before a dinner and yeah, got read into how Peter thinks about the world, why he builds companies, the kinds of companies he's building, how his sort of nonprofit and policy and political interests kind of relate to the companies that he's building. And it seemed way more interesting than working at a law firm. And, uh, I was like, all right, let's, let's try this entrepreneurship thing. And, uh, so along that thread, you know, I really had been interested in how people form connections, how people form friendships, the state of loneliness. I got my first Palm pilot in sixth grade. I put all my classmates mailing addresses in it. That's a very strange thing to do. And then over time, got a lot more interested in the work of Bob Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone. He talks a lot about Edmund Burke and Alexia de Tocqueville, whose observations about the United States, uh, I think are really important to think about some of the founding DNA of the country. It's Edmund Burke's line. It's something like when the French wanted something, they demanded it from the bureaucrats. When the British wanted something, they demanded it from the aristocrats. And when the Americans wanted something, they built it. And so you see this, what Tocqueville would call civic associationalism in the earliest of the 18th century. Americans sort of by necessity, but kind of became the culture. Fast forward. You've got Rotary, Elks, Lion, Garden Clubs, Women's Federations, hundreds of organizations that are convening millions of people. And they're not companies and they're not churches, although there are a lot of churches. They're not businesses. And they're importantly, they're not government. One of my favorite stories about this is there's about a five year period where about 10 million people arrived at Ellis Island, they are coming through. They're being checked for lice and medical, and then basically get processed to be American citizens. And you have this massive challenge of assimilating tens of thousands of people on some days per day into New York city, New Jersey, et cetera. And it's a really beautiful story. There were these private organizations founded by the Germans or the Poles and usually by country of origin. So if you were German, you landed Ellis Island, you would be sent to Hackensack or some particular city. You would pull into the city. They spoke your language. They would be Germans who had you live in their home and they would give you a job the next day. And all this happened with no coordination and with no work of the government, and we assimilated 10 million people with a place to stay in jobs. Way more than our federal government could ever pull off today. So there's this element of like Americans doing things together, inviting people into these projects, creating a civic connectedness, creating social capital, that was a big part of our story. Bob Putnam picks up chronicling this really in the 1950s, his most important book, Bowling Alone, chronicles a real erosion of civil society from the fifties through the nineties. Then you have Obama's surgeon general saying that the greatest threat facing American's healthcare is the loneliness epidemic. And so Bowling Alone was talking about literally went to bowling alley. There was a guy bowling by himself and had no friends. And you look at Rotary Elks, VFW, Lions, all these groups basically have no members anymore. Lots of factors that caused that growth of suburbia, interstate commerce, rise of television. So you basically have a guy eating a TV dinner filled with glyphosate, drinking a beer, watching Netflix after an hour long drive to his promise of a great life and a single family home in suburbia, not knowing his neighbor, who's 10 feet away, no interaction.

Tarek: You have the quote in the book from Aristotle that man is a social animal. And what the problem that you're addressing is that society seems built to fight against that natural instinct.

Evan: And that plays out certainly at a spiritual level. So you can imagine like what happens when two people are physically together. When two or more gather, does the Holy Spirit show up in a certain way? So there's theological questions about that. But at a practical level, Ben Sasse chronicles this beautifully. There was a great Chicago fire and the fire really spanned two neighborhoods. And one had a dramatically higher death count than the other. There's like unpacking. Why did that happen? One had been a neighborhood where multiple generations had lived and the other one had a lot of new people come into the neighborhood and the one where people had been there for a long time, had a far lower death count. And this is how the concept of social capital becomes really relevant. So imagine the fires happening. You look up and third story loft. You're like, oh, Jim lives there. He's on oxygen. I got to go up there and get Jim out of this building. Well, two blocks away in the new neighborhood, you have no idea who the people are. You don't know who to go after. So when you think about why is the VFW, why is Rotary, why are these things valuable? They'd raise money, they do community projects, etc. Really, what they did was they created social capital for their participants. And here's a practical example of that. Let's say Dan used to come to the VFW every day at five o'clock, have a beer, see some buddies. They're talking football, talking whatever. And one day Dan stops coming. In that moment, he's not there a day, huh? Okay. The second day, Dan's not there. Well, Jim, who sees him all the time is like, we got to check on that guy. Let's go. They go to his house. They find that he fell, was still alive and saved his life because they're like, I was missing him. Think about it this way. Someone says, my wife just got diagnosed with cancer. Where do I go? Or my parent has Alzheimer's. What am I going to do? When we have those real needs in our life, usually we reach out to our close friends, people that we have this social capital bond with. So the, one of the main challenges with loneliness, in addition to being correlated to substance abuse and pornography and bad health and depression, et cetera, is that you're cutting yourself off from access to lots of resources. And I'm really interested in companies and real estate and projects that generate social capital that kind of re stitch together that network that explains so much of the American exceptional story that really eroded a lot in the last 50 years. I think COVID was a unique chapter to accelerate the pain of that loneliness where people were forcibly stuck in homes with masks on zoom was an interesting way, sort of the final. Straw that broke the camel's back such that particularly in Austin. And I think a lot of urban areas, post COVID people came back and they were like, I am done with zoom. I want to rock. I want to run. I want to swim. I want to do dinners. And so I think there's a real opportunity now, given this demand, I want to be around people. I want to get out of my one bedroom doing zoom calls all day. And that's the opportunity is to create where are they going to show up? So that's. Hotels, events, fitness, restaurants, public parks is a real opportunity. I think with that resurgent demand, and if we deliver those products and re stitch together this really important fabric, man, millions of people will flourish to what extent do belief systems play a role in loneliness?

Tarek: Because it strikes me that 200 years ago, let's say you were living in a village in France. You had somewhat of a monoculture as it related to your neighbors and your relatives and so forth. You all generally believe the same things. You shared the same traditions. You had this collaborative relationship with those around you. Fast forward, 200 years later in your small suburb, there might be 20 different theological traditions, 20 different views on politics and society and all the different things that you mentioned, how does that create an environment where people feel a little bit more insulated and lonely that they don't want to share their views because of this pervasive feeling that they are going to be rejected in some way, or it's going to create a volatile environment around them.

Evan: It's a core challenge for the country. Are one of our mottos, e pluribus unum idea that we are like, we're talking about Ellis Island. Uh, we were for a long time, a nation that brought people of different skill sets, religions, languages, culinary traditions, et cetera. And we didn't say welcome to America. Let's all eat white bread. There was some semblance though of out of many one. So it's to say, I think New York city is a great example. You might have neighborhoods or whole boroughs, or this is a traditionally Hasidic Jewish neighborhood. This is a Russian neighborhood. There's going to be a Russian food. And then there was still a point of like, but I'm a New Yorker. And I think we have a little bit of a crisis there around this. Like, well, am I an American? What does it mean to be an American?

Tarek: That's a really profound question today.

Evan: Right. And so I think you have some people at the extended points of sort of the intersectionality movement is to say, okay, actually we're going to say, um, out of one. Many. And so how do you hold onto this tension of, should companies have affinity groups for every race and every sexuality? There's interesting arguments for that. Cause you want people to have likeness and connectedness at the point where those areas of specialty become sources of like finding difference with each other. Then there's kind of no common thread to hold onto. I think there's some resurgence in this optimistic point. I think there is this giant movement happening right now from bits to Adams, uh, questions about repatriation and manufacturing about America being back in the business of making things again. The recent Artemis launch. Uh, was a great moment, I think, for the country of like, all right, we're going to go do this again. We're going to celebrate the just unbelievable spirit that exists in this country, that we can do very hard things.

Tarek: And making things together brings people together.

Evan: Right. And what's awesome about that is some huge percentage of people that work on that may not even be U S citizens or were immigrants and came here. So it's not about a nationalist thing. It's like, wow, there's conditions in this country, the land, the resources, and importantly, the mentality and the mindset of just this, uh, frontier mentality of like, we will go, we will do hard things will be broken over and over again. I moved into this office a few years ago and friends knew I was moving in, but on my desk, when I showed up was a replica of the Sisyphus statue, the guy pushing this giant boulder up a hill. And I knew the basic story. And so I was sort of, that's a cool story. And then I was got to meet and talk with Bobby Kennedy. And I was asking him about what is it like to go from New York time magazine man of the year in the late nineties to now being the butt of jokes and he's hated and he's a facts denier. And how do you endure just all this craziness? And he said, well, the story of Sisyphus is what my source of inspiration is. And he said, you know, most people actually don't know the punchline of the story, which is that Sisyphus actually never gets the rock over the hill. Literally he never gets it done. At the end of every day, he's pushed this giant rock up the hill and it rolls over him and mangles his body. And he goes back down to the bottom of the hill and he rests. And the next morning he wakes up with great joy to get to go push it up the hill again, kind of knowing that he's not going to get it over the mountain.

Tarek: It's a great metaphor for entrepreneurship in some way, isn't it?

Evan: Hopefully you get the ball over the mountain. Maybe there's multiple balls in your life. Um, but that spirit in, we take our name of the arena hall from the Teddy Roosevelt speech of Sorbonne man in the arena. And there's the key distinction in there, which I love. So we're the man in the arena. His face is marred by blood, dust, and sweat. He's striving valiantly over and over and over again, but he's not promised victory and you contrast to that. So the guy in the arena just getting slogged and beaten up, but never actually is victorious. You contrast that life to the critic who's on the sidelines, who knows in Teddy's words, who knows neither victory nor defeat, and if you really got there and believed, okay, a life of endless defeat, but striving valiantly is actually more noble, exciting, crazy, fun, whatever. Um, then being on the sidelines because you don't have a chance of having victory.

Tarek: Yeah. It reminds me a bit of the Rudyard Kipling poem. If as well, it touches on many of those themes that, you know, it's, it's important to strive and I think it's going back to the entrepreneurship question. Um, so you start this company with Peter Thiel, walk me through what that experience was like, you know, take me through step-by-step that first company, that first journey, what did you learn?

Evan: So it was a pretty unorthodox startup. We had credit cards and great offices and no immediate capital need. And it was, gosh, I learned so much from that. We thought a lot about, you know, who the customer is really understanding sort of the customer discovery process. I think all great companies really should begin with just this obsession over who the customer is. You're going to find your early crazy customer base, and then you're going to run out of those customers. And then that question of, in Jeff Moore's concept of crossing the chasm, going from your crazy early adapters to then the, the generalist mass adoption is really important to be able to cross that. We had that in a sort of the first real company that I incepted and co-founded with my friend, Will Davis. We were building this company to basically displace or take over the U S postal service. And we learned intensely there that, uh, when you're getting feedback from people, you got to be very careful about feedback from your friends because they will most certainly lie to you. Then the next ring out is random internet user. They may lie to you. Can't really rely on their feedback until they swipe a credit card and give you their money. Basically the feedback means nothing. So you just really have to calibrate that. So be careful in this echo chamber of your friends because, uh, they love you and they may not be being honest with you. So I think that's just like getting directly into the feedback as soon as possible. I see this a lot on the capital market side of raising capital. I'm a big believer in pitch decks, wrote this book about pitch decks. And a lot of people say, well, I don't need a pitch deck right now because I'm not raising money. And I really encourage people to build a pitch deck early because they'll say something like, well, I don't have a team yet. Well, actually let's build a team slide and you're not listing real names of real people, but like, will you have a CTO? Will you have a head of marketing? Who will your outside advisors be? Uh, and then it's like, all right, we need a marketing customer acquisition slide. They're like, well, we haven't started doing that yet. Well, what eventually would go on that slide? So the sooner you can kind of put yourself into getting intense, direct feedback from customers or for investors, Oh, it's just unleashing so many important learnings back to you. You'll have to calibrate it. Some people may have crazy ideas that don't actually land, but the sooner you can get into the buzzsaw of just brutal direct feedback from customers and investors, gosh, that is just fuel to feed that learning loop.

Tarek: This is the book, Get Backed. I was reading it. I texted this book out to about four or five people as I was reading it saying, go out, buy this book, read it cover to cover, it is fantastic. What I love so much about it. And, you know, I'm, I'm also an entrepreneur built companies, uh, have seen maybe a thousand different pitch decks and it, it always strikes me how. Consistently ugly they are and how little the focus is on storytelling. And what you're describing now, it reminds me of, um, you know, I do a little bit of work in the film industry and it's almost like trying to create the movie without having the script or without even having the log line. And you should think about what the story is for your business. And you, you mentioned this and even in one section of the book, you actually use theater as an example, the act one, act two, act three. Here you are, you're making the introduction. You're identifying what the problem is and you're ultimately arriving at a resolution and how is that communicated? How effective is the story? And through the storytelling, how deeply are you connecting not only with your customer, but the prospective investor that's going to be shelling out cash to, to support that ambition. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Evan: So the concept that we're exploring here is, uh, eventually what you really need to do is raise money. And that's the goal. And I think a lot of founders get so excited about their business and the financial model that they pursue this as sort of a rational explanation on why this is going to be a high internal rate of return investment. And first learning for me was Mike Maples was an investor in the second company Outbox and we ended up getting shut down by the federal government. It's a crazy story. We had 3 million in cash left. We called Mike, we said, we're just going to pro route of the money back. We can't do anything. He said, no, no, no. Keep the money and build something else. I'm like, what? He said, let me tell you this story. So Mike had taken a company public, made some money, moved to Silicon Valley. And it's 2005 there's flush with cash. He's trying to find someone to invest in. So he invests in this guy named Evan and the company was this podcasting platform. He wires 250 grand. Two weeks later, Apple comes out with its podcast platform on iTunes, which really just decimates the product. So the guy calls, Evan calls Mike and says, Hey, I'm just going to send the money back, we've got to shut down. Mike's kind of embarrassed. And he's like, are you working on anything else? Like, can you please just build something? Evan goes to explain something that Mike didn't understand at all. And he's like, just keep the money. That thing that Evan Williams explained was Twitter. And so Mike's learning from that was at the early stage stuff. At some point you read real CAC, real LTV, real margin. You got to really understand the business at the earlier stage stuff. You're kind of asking yourself a few questions like, do I believe in the category of the business? Do I specifically around the founder and the founding team? Do I trust them? Do I like them? And is this a story that I want to be invited into? So trust and likability is a lot about saying less and being more curious about the other person. I'll see a lot of founders come in all nervous. I can't wait to unload on you every fact I have about this business and take a moment and just sort of say, Hey, part of what I'm trying to do here is build trust and rapport because probably the business that I've laid out on my pitch deck is not the business I'm going to build. Like you'll have some dramatic changes along the way. So the investor is not actually really investing in this particular plan. They're investing in you as a person. And so are you someone that they're going to have high trust with? Do you know how to pivot? Do you know how to receive feedback? Cause like we are about to head out to a really difficult journey. That's kind of stage one. I think stage two is this question around story and why people are excited to join your company, why people, whether they're as an employee or as an investor, I think deep in our heart there's kind of a playbook of the hero's journey. And so they're the story archetypes that inform and come from our old tradition that existed forever before the internet and computers. And the mastercraft there, I think is how do I tell a story about a hero on a quest to do something valiant and important, and in this case that may make a lot of money and then there's a struggle. There's a moment that the hero has taken a step back and the person receiving my story is invited to have this unique role to sort of pick the hero back up and help him or her continue on that journey. So institutional investors is more of a buy box procedural underwriting approach, but on the angel side and smaller check side, they're kind of underwriting, Hey, is this a business I think is going to work? They're kind of also underwriting, is this a story that I find interesting? Do I want to tell my friends when I'm playing golf about this story? Is this something that's like fun to tell my spouse and kids about? So pull forward that story element, invites investors and employees to sort of say, that is a story that I want to be a character in that story of.

Tarek: Hmm. How did you, uh, end up in Texas and what was the Genesis behind Arena Hall?

Evan: I moved to Texas with my co-founder of Outbox. He was from Texas. I had been in San Francisco before. We needed a place to put the company. We needed some real estate operations. And so it's sort of like lower cost of execution in Austin. That was the initial excuse to move to Austin in 2011. The first nine years or so up until COVID great quality of life, lots of sunlight, sports, recreation, food. Great for families. We had to raise all of our equity from the coasts. A lot of the recruiting we were trying to do was from the coasts and a lot of the big topics in the world that I found interesting, most events and speakers and organizations remained in LA, San Francisco, New York, London, uh, COVID really changed everything, which was sort of the conditions for this new project. Arena Hall. Uh, COVID itself was a time when LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York began their pathways of self-immolation. They made a lot of unforced errors on the masking in schools, on how to deal with homelessness, on how to deal with home affordability, on how to slow business growth during the time of COVID restrictions. So there were just major unforced errors that these cities committed. That was part of why people needed to leave. Austin was already in a great place and made a lot of great decisions to just become this obvious destination. We lost a few to Miami, a few to Nashville, but 75% plus of the people involved as LPs, GPs, founders, thinkers chose Austin as their home. It started in COVID and then future waves, the New York mayoral election, uh, the Palisades fires, more things are happening that are sending people here. I think the inflection point that we're starting to see in Austin's really exciting, which is for a long time, Austin was a place that people came to when they were fleeing something else. So they show up, they maybe buy boots and guns and gold and enjoy the low taxes. What we're starting to see is this community people showing up in Austin because something very special is happening here right now. So they are leaving from something, but they're really coming to something. So to think through what's happening in Austin right now, it's really become as the anchor of the central Texas triangle across Dallas, Houston, San Antonio pathway to 30 million residents pathway to interconnectivity across those cities between high-speed rail and boring, eventually Dallas popping to Houston for lunch feels like a hot minute what's landing in that ecosystem. The real spirit we see is this shift from bits to atoms around the concept of advanced manufacturing. So think about the whole Elon platform of Starlink, Neuralink, boring gigafactory. Everyone was like, Oh, we can't even handle any more Elon amazingness. And then three weeks ago announces the Terra fab, which will put 1 million square feet for one of the design components of the fab and the next building they'll build, which will be in-house chip design, manufacturer, and lithography will be 100 million square feet. I think it's about the size of 15 us Pentagons. Some definition, definitely largest structure in the United States that will absolutely land in Texas. So what we're seeing in this repatriation of manufacturing, a restoration of sort of the American industrial complex. What are these companies asking? Why do they choose Texas? Many are saying we need a world-class place where engineers want to live and have a great quality of life. We also need access to low cost, lightly regulated, great utilities of. Water and power and access to either political participation or like regulatory forbearance. So you have all these people already spitting out a SpaceX in LA. You want to go take down 20 acres to build automated construction equipment, like zero chance you're going to be able to access that land. So we see happening in Austin right now is tons of engineers living East Austin. They are 10 to 20 minute drive from huge swaths of land. So three multi-billion dollar nuclear energy companies have moved with sort of nuclear fission reactor sites already planned for central Texas, American housing corporation spun out of SpaceX to build this low cost, beautiful, modular housing concept. All of the Elon stuff is wild. Prototown is a thousand acres in Lockhart. It's a mix of Burning Man meets MIT. There you have drones, desal, off-grid air conditioning. So that combination of a place where engineers want to live and raise their family and be around really smart people and access to land with the political coverage for it has just set off this explosion of what's going to happen in central Texas. So the opportunity I think is with all these amazing investors, founders, builders, thinkers moving here. What is the community that we want to stitch together and how do we accelerate everyone's work to make these projects more successful and happen more quickly? So arena hall started as a project at a historic mansion by university of Texas. We invited several venture capital firms to co-office together. When I'd been at a hedge fund in Manhattan, when I'd been on Sand Hill road, I've seen how cities create these dense ecosystems. You have people officing together. They're going to the same coffee shops, the same bars, these little two, three minute touch points happening on a daily basis really has a way of creating trust, great connectivity, great access to information. And it's sort of this massive accelerant. Now, how do you explain what Palo Alto was able to do across the investors, the big corporates, the startup scene, the government funding of Siri, there's just a whole ecosystem sociology of why that ecosystem creates such fruit. And Austin, what I saw was amazing people moving here, great companies, but no real focus of energy, no building where a lot of VCs office together, no main clubhouse where a lot of founders are going to be when Walter Isaacson would eat in an interview, Elon about the book, like where would he do that? Where's that community going to be? So out of that observation, a lot of these people said, we want to spend more time together. We want to meet other people like this that are building. Uh, we said, all right, what if we take our little prototype of kind of the shared office concept and build it out at a much higher scale? So we have a building of just off of South Congress and the vision is to recruit thousands, hundreds, and then thousands of people who really embody this builder mentality. A feature of the connective tissue we need to build an Austin right now is the nature of the built environment. Innovation means that if 10 years ago, someone was building a mostly AI focused startup company, they need an office and they need engineers and they can just work. If you are building a nuclear fission reactor site, you need policymakers, elected officials, land use people, developers, utilities, like you need a full stack. So in that sense, I think fruit that we'd hope to see out of arena hall is in individual members and guests lives. They'd have five or 10 new people in their life that are materially part of their work and their life. And then we'd be able to look at specific projects and say, but for that talk, I heard that person I met, the phone call that was made, my desal company, my nuclear company, my submarine company, uh, would not have accelerated like it did.

Tarek: So in some way, arena hall reminds me of kind of getting back into that rotary club, sort of lions club motif of building that community that you were talking about earlier. Expound on that a little bit for me.

Evan: Yeah. Maybe it's kind of a VFW with skinny jeans. I haven't thought about it that way yet. Uh, we don't, it's not only skinny jeans, suits, there's some dresses, there's all kinds of things, but, um, yeah, so we have four design principles that shape what we're building at arena hall, build, belong, discover, and renew. And just to take through those briefly. So we have a lot of builders and we believe that by being a part of the arena community, you will find opportunities to be a part of other people's projects. So are you an expert in tax or regulation or what are quick phone calls you'd love to take to be helpful to other people? And we really think that through the network, you would find material support for what you're working on. You're looking for a new job. You're trying to hire, you want a referral to a podcast, all those practical things. We built an operating system to source those needs and find people in the community that want to be helpful, belong. We know a lot about why people commit suicide because often they record the final moments or write it out. And the most common thing said is that I was no longer needed. We hope that our members and potential members aren't at risk of suicide, though some of them literally could be, but this sense of like, am I needed and do I belong here? And particularly in a club of a lot of people doing interesting things, you can be at risk of feeling like the dumbest or poorest person in the room. And so we're working hard to create a place where everyone who shows up, including guests, feel like I'm supposed to be here. Discover, we have tons of talks on AI and UFOs and consciousness and nuclear energy, and it's a place where we can have off the record conversations and briefings about the most cutting edge stuff happening in the world. The last piece is Renew. Many people that are active builders, uh, we are grinding and there's probably a lot of really unhealthy things going on in our lives. Uh, we might not be sleeping well, we may have PTSD to process our marriages could be on the brink, our relationship with our kids could be off. And so we just want to create space to sort of say like, Hey, like, how are you doing? Like, I'm not here to make you do therapy, but we'd love to create space for that. So those are the design elements we want to create. And inviting people in, uh, yes, people can become members. They can bring guests. We create lots of programming across those four design principles. The real product that we're innovating on that I'm most excited about is what we call community as a service. So play this out. I'm sure you get invited to cool things or you host cool things. So imagine you're in real rarefied air with a bunch of founders in a room, some dinner party or cocktail party, 40 people in the room. I think about most events as failed bid ask marketplaces. Let me explain. So you go to this awesome room and maybe there's name tags, maybe not. So you walk around the room and if you're a social person, you walk up to someone else and you're like, you know, Hey, what are you involved in or whatever? And you're kind of like fumbling through conversation and maybe it's kind of like delightful and you learned something kind of interesting. The reality is that everyone in that room has one thing or multiple things in their life right now that if we knew what that was that they needed help with, almost certainly someone else in the room could help with that. So when I say events are failed experiments and bid ask marketplaces, everyone has a bid, everyone has an ask, but we haven't created social mechanisms to do that naturally. A lot of YPO and those kinds of groups will have these systems where it's like you've been matched, you want to accept your mentee or whatever. I think once people feel like it's a digital thing, it just loses all authenticity. So we've talked about it as the mullet approach. It's AI on the back end and human on the front end. So imagine coming into a 30 person lunch with Bill McRaven. So we did this a few weeks ago. You're coming into this lunch. We've spent enough time with you to know you're trying to get new customers. You're trying to find podcast guests. You're looking for the extended sprinter van for your 49 children. We know a little bit about you and you're coming into that event. What if we sent you a text message 30 minutes at a time? It's actually from me. AI enabled human delivered. And it said, Hey, so excited. You're coming to lunch today. Let me tell you about three people that are going to be there. Here's one line on them. And here's like one line that you might ask them about based on what you're working on. So you come into this event, you kind of have some sense of who else is in the room. It was not only AI that spin out all these bot notifications. There's a human that said, I think that person, I think they'd really have a good time talking. Maybe it's about work stuff, which we really want to be helpful with on the life stuff. A lot of people have really hard things in their lives. You know, uh, someone's kid just got diagnosed with autism. Their parent is dying of dementia. Their spouse has health issues. And what's really exciting is that. I don't have to introduce you to the world's top therapist of kids with autism. If I connect you to one other parent who has a kid with autism, they may not even have the answer for you, but just to have that five minute sidebar chat or one hour coffee with that person. So that at the end of the day, even if you don't get the right book, the right school, the right therapist to just have that sense, like you are not alone with this problem that you're working on creates massive fruit in people's lives. So we call that community as a service. We think it's going to be nearly impossible to deliver. So table stakes, I'm learning. I'm new to this real estate thing, table stakes, parking and bathrooms. So you have great valet, clean bathrooms, no line of bathrooms, next level, hot, great coffee, fast, healthy, seed oil, free food, delivered family style, conference rooms that you can actually book, clean landscape, clean interiors. You got to do all that. And like a lot of clubs do that. Then you got to get the right people in the room. That's I think where a lot of clubs and organizations stop. I was like, Oh, maybe I have some interesting speakers, et cetera. To me, all that is just the necessary, but not sufficient condition to do something really powerful. And that extra thing we think about is just bringing this level of intentional hospitality to say, who are you, what's going on in your life right now and who in this room right now, who across our broader set of friends and allies would be up for and the right person for a 30 minute call.

Tarek: What does success look like and how do you anticipate members of Arena Hall interacting with the services? Is it every single night kind of thing? Is it a once a week thing? What, what can you explain there?

Evan: Yeah. So first line of success we think about is producing 21 plus percent IRR on the investment. So we are stewards of capital. We raise capital for this. We are running it aggressively with all responsibility of running a business. Producing, you know, 20s IRR is a sign that our goals as an organization have been met. One thing we think about is imagine a two by two matrix. And one level is a design or luxury. And the other is purpose. In our touring of a lot of clubs and hospitality projects, we kind of found a bimodal distribution. You have lots that are really high design, but really low purpose. So any five-star hotel sort of says, never lift a finger. We'll bring you champagne, great sheets, whatever. Like you stay at an Amman hotel. Like if your spouse just died, they have no idea. They don't care. There's no purpose other than luxury to you being there. But we found a lot on the high purpose side is something kind of happens. This might be faith-based retreat center. It might be a plant medicine retreat center, yoga retreat center in Costa Rica. Something happens in those where it's like, uh, but it's kind of missional, so it shouldn't be very nice. It means like the food might not be good. The sheets might not be good. I don't really care about that stuff. Here's what I care about. Hospitality is thinking about someone before they arrive. That to do excellently takes incredible technology and incredible people, which means that we think this upper right quadrant of high design, high purpose is actually a pretty open category. Some people say, Oh, is it, are you trying to make a difference? Is this like a missional project? I'm actually very skeptical about the social enterprise movement, the B corporation movement. And here's an element that happens in social enterprise. So if you're Tom shoes and you decide with every shoe purchase to give away a free pair of shoes or where we park or free pair of glasses, that is a direct increase in your expense. It is literally a direct trade off with the margin that you're producing on the bottom line. We believe that when we actually deliver on the purpose and the claims we want to make for our members lives about, are they accelerating their building? Do they feel a place of belonging? Are they nudged in the direction of renewal and are they discovering new things? If we do those things, any one of those things in a year from now, do they renew their membership? Do they refer other people to join? We think when we deliver on the purpose, it is actually the perfect. Vector that drives their renewal, increases their willingness to pay and increases their likelihood of referring other people. So in that sense, we hope to chart out this category of high design, high purpose, and then find a model where delivering on things that feel soft or missional or impactful is directly linked to the business model.

Tarek: What is the application process like for somebody that wants to join?

Evan: Yeah.

Tarek: And how would they find out about it?

Evan: We're still building that out right now. So we're in our earliest stages of, we've had about 5,000 people sort of across and part of the arena hall community over our last few years in our different prototype modes. We've gone to a very first set of those to say, we know you, we love and believe that you're about what we're about with this builder mentality, inviting those people in next round is they refer people. And then probably this fall, we'll open the formal application process. So we'll have a membership committee kind of review people. And in that sense, there's some similar characteristics we want to see in everybody. There's kind of a soft, you know, no asshole rule, kind, generous people. They have a builder mentality. They're happy to take a call, help someone else out. They love to host. They love to bring people through. So in that sense, we like people to have similar characteristics. That you walk up to someone at the bar and kind of expect to have a friendly, short conversation. We also are really interested in the diversity of the mix of people. Uh, this plays out at a few levels. So we are, our, our books are pretty full of 40 something year old builders. Uh, so we think about there's definitely an older generation in Austin who are the stewards and builders of the city. Many of them, we need to learn from them. Many of them are still involved in making important projects happen. There is the sort of sub 40 group. That group is, uh, I think the thirties are pretty strong in Austin. I think our twenties is a category that we still need to build out creating infrastructure for world-class founders to say, I want to be in Austin and I'm 25 years old. That's probably a sector we need to really improve in. Most are staying in LA San Francisco or New York right now. So we think about age is one. We then also think about vocation. So to build this, uh, Avengers squad of, if you're trying to accelerate your business, launch your nonprofit, build a center at UT, who are the people in the community that we need? So splice that two ways you think about industry. So you'd have space, national security, defense, hospitality, healthcare, real estate. So by industry, and you also think about function. So you'd have the full stack of the limited partners that have all the capital to begin with the general partners of venture private equity. They're making the investments. The operators are actually building the companies. Then you have the whole set of service providers, designers, lawyers, then importantly, a whole different set. That's outside of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. That would be all the thought leaders. So podcasters, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, Chris Williamson, you'd have the intellectual leaders at UT itself. Amazing faculty base over there, multiple think tanks in Austin that are thinking about bringing about the policy and political conditions to make this kind of innovation possible. Elected officials would be a part of that. So we're trying to build this matrix, every vertical that we think is exciting for Austin, every functional expertise, and as much as we can build that across a whole set of people who come in warm and excited to connect. And bringing their expertise to the community.

Tarek: Do you expect that this is only going to be open to people that live in and around the Austin area, or would it be open also to people coming in from out of town?

Evan: So we do have a non-resident membership. Uh, we have multiple people part of that program right now. Often those are people, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio that are in Austin regularly. We'd love to be a landing pad when those people are coming here to work with the government or work with businesses or visit investments. So we'd love to have kind of a Texas feel and sort of be that clubhouse. If you're a builder working on something important across Texas, we'd love for Arena Hall to be part of that story.

Tarek: And do you anticipate franchising this out into other cities? It's got to be on the horizon.

Evan: We have, we bid off a lot. Real estate development in Austin is very difficult. It's a fun challenge, but it is very intense. We're also biting off something very significant with this community as a service program. A real risk would be launching other markets before that's really dialed in. So what we've committed to, how we've capitalized, what we've said is like, we want to build a world-class community in Austin, land it in this epic physical building on South Congress. If that's crushing and rocking, we'll take a beat and say, Hey, do we think there's demand? There is some playbook here where a Austin, Nashville, Miami, LA, DC interconnected network of this community would be sort of a one plus one equals three environment. So how's began to kind of build that infrastructure. So we would think about it, but we've swallowed a lot right now, promise investors to produce, you know, 20 plus percent IRR on this asset. And that is a, it's more than I can swallow right now.

Tarek: I could talk to you for three hours. I'm going to close with a, with one question. We're going to have to have you back after arena hall opens up by the way. Um, but someone told me early on in my career that your vocation should support your mission. What is your mission, Evan?

Evan: My mission is global human flourishing for every last living man, woman and child at the end of the earth. Human flourishing, I think is a really beautiful concept. There are lots of competing ideas around how do we know if a person or a community is doing well. We made some missteps in that where we'd say some things like, uh, do we collect most of our rainwater runoff to go into the aquifer? Do we have this amount of carbon emission? Do we have this amount of health of the soil? Those are all great and important things. This notion of human flourishing, uh, is a specific scientific sociological concept built out by the center for human flourishing, Tyler Vanderwill, Arthur Brooks at Harvard, and they mean some very specific things about that. Of course, it means being free from violence. Of course, it means living in a society where you can own your property. You have the freedom to speak and to assemble. Those are sort of table stakes. It really ties into our earlier conversation of, is this person deeply rooted with close friendships? Are there two or three people in their life in whom they can confide? And for many people, do they have regular practice and access to some spiritual realm? If you're not engaging in an active pursuit of a spiritual life and deeply embedded with a handful of close friends, we know you're not flourishing. So I want people to continue to pursue clean air, clean water, good economic development indicators. These are two ones, which are at the end of the day, do you feel like there's something greater in the world than you and that you on your own mission are not a solo man in the arena and there's people that will pick you up when you fall down, if I can move those indicators forward a little bit for a few hundred people in Austin or a few million people in the world, it'll be kind of a well done, good and faithful servant moment for me.

Tarek: Evan Baer. Thank you for joining us on Y'all Street.

Evan: Appreciate you.

Outro: How do y'all drink this? Y'all Street, that's the Y'all Street right there. Yeah, it's top of the line for me.