"Coach" Carson connects Financial Independence to Strong Towns

As I said right off the beginning of this interview, I really love it when worlds collide in my own life. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of doing a podcast, and talking with people in real life.

Chad “Coach” Carson is someone in the Financial Independence world that I’ve listened to and followed for some time. He’s a very genuine guy, and his particular niche focuses on using small-scale real estate investment to build financial freedom for yourself and your family. Check out his website, YouTube channel and podcast.

We ran into each other at the Strong Towns National Gathering in May, and I knew immediately we’d have a lot to discuss. This episode is the result. Among other things, we talk about his non-profit in Clemson, SC to build a trail network, his family’s 17 month stay in Ecuador, and how we all can talk about small / incremental development. There’s just so much good content in this episode, I don’t want to give away any more.

That said, here are a few more links worth sharing:

For a taste of his content, check out Chad’s recent episode with Paula Pant on “7 Powerful Principles for Financial Freedom.”

ChooseFI House Hacking page

Incremental Development Alliance

Bigger Pockets

Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.

Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.

Intro: “Why Be Friends”

Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

Episode Transcript:

Kevin K (00:00.89)

Welcome back to the Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. One of the things that I really enjoy is when worlds collide in my life. Things that I have interest in that are in very different worlds find themselves aligned with each other. And I'm really fortunate to have a guest today that's a classic example of that. My wife and I have had a kind of a long interest in what's called the financial independence movement. And, and,

You know, a lot of that we can talk about what all that means for people. I hope we do, but, a lot of it is really just kind of creating resilience in your own life. and, one of the people in that world that I have, noticed for quite a long time and followed and with, with some interest is a guy named, Chad, Carson, otherwise known as coach Carson. And, he's, agreed to join me today. So I'm delighted to have you here, Chad. Thanks for coming.

Chad Carson (00:56.397)

Yeah, thanks for having me, Kevin. It is fun to see different interests collide on the internet. That's always a good time.

Kevin K (01:03.034)

Yeah, yeah. So we actually ran into each other at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati. And it was just kind of funny. I had seen enough of Chad's videos to kind of have an idea what he looked like. I'm looking around the room and I see this guy in the back and I'm like, that looks a little bit like Coach Carson, you know? Is that really him? And so, and lo and behold, it was, so we had a chance to just chat briefly on site. But...

For those chat for those who don't know you and I would imagine probably most of my audience doesn't know who you are And the work that you do. Why don't you talk a little bit about what you spend most of your time dealing with?

Chad Carson (01:40.013)

Yeah, I also have a lot of intersections of worlds, but for the last 21 years, my professional career has been an entrepreneur and I've been entrepreneur in the real estate investing space. So I graduated from Clemson University and I was a football player there. So that was like how I paid for school. And I was, I thought I was going to go like the route of being a medical in the medical field and applied to medical schools, but I was just so tired from playing football that I said, I'm just going to take a year or two off and just like take a break before I go into that. And then.

that gave me space to kind of explore an itch I had for being an entrepreneur. And I was lucky enough to have family members. My dad was in the rental, had rental properties growing up and I never really liked them. Actually, when I was a middle schooler, he used to take me over to a property he just bought. There was a fixer upper and he's like, hey, clean up this pile of trash, Chad, and paint this wall. And I was like, this is horrible. Like, who ever want to fix up a property or turn this nasty place around? And sure enough, when I got out of college, I was like,

That's actually pretty interesting. Let me, let me see how that goes. And so I got into that business of really the finding fixer upper properties. initially just finding them for other people. I was what's in the net world. I was called a bird dog where I would just go in. I didn't have any money. I didn't like a bird dog. I wasn't the one actually hunting the birds, but I would just point to them and people who had resources and money would buy them and I would make a little finders fee every time that happened. And, but that taught me the business. It made me a little bit of money.

I was living at home at that time and it just got me, I decided, you know what? I don't ever want to do a real job. I'm just going to keep doing this. And it grew into a business where I found the funding for those deals. I got a business partner. The two of us found other partners to put up the money or private financing. We started flipping houses, fixing them up, reselling them just to make some money. And then we got into the rental property business from there. And that's really what I, kind of the end story of my rental, my real estate business was,

planting these little seeds of buy and hold properties. I started off house hacking. I did, you know, I lived in one unit, rented the other units out. And so that's, that's been my core kind of financial career, how I made money. And, but then that has evolved into other things, which is why I met you at Strong Towns as well. So once I started, you know, got past like the business side of real estate, of, of making money and the finances, which is all interesting, also just started thinking about

Chad Carson (04:01.133)

the community and like, why is this neighborhood the way it is? Why is this neighborhood a fixer upper and this was not? And started volunteering in my community at local advocacy meetings and just doing that. And so that led to a couple of things. One is I started just being frustrated with connectivity in my town. And so in 2014, I and some other people in our town started a nonprofit trying to connect the parks and the downtowns and with a trail system.

Little did I know that most towns that did that had like a rail railway that they was abandoned and they could like take over. And so I had to like crash course over five to six years just learning about, you know, easements and right aways and the DOT and how difficult it is to work with the DOT. But we've, yeah, we could talk more about that one, but that's, that's been a passion project of mine, which is why I got interested in strong towns and local advocacy. And along the way, separate from that, I also started teaching other people.

how to do the thing that I love doing with real estate investing. And so I started a blog and a podcast and a YouTube channel and what started off as a hobby became a real thing. And people started reading it to my surprise and people started watching my YouTube videos. So I have like a little media business with that. And I have a nonprofit that I'm a board member of and a founding member of that I'm super passionate about in my local community. And then the real estate investing actually takes a lot less of my time these days, but it's still kind of the main thing.

Kevin K (05:04.442)

Mm -hmm.

Kevin K (05:27.098)

Yeah, and so you've got a super active YouTube channel with a good following and you're putting up a video, what about once a week or so?

Chad Carson (05:36.109)

Yeah, the what's I have a coach Carson YouTube channel. It's also the podcast. So my podcast has evolved into the YouTube podcast as well. So that's that's my main thing there.

Kevin K (05:45.53)

Okay. And this may be a funny thing for you. So I think probably the first time I heard you was on the choose FI podcast a long time ago. and so, I actually moderate the choose FI house hacking, Facebook page. Yeah. I've bugged those guys into creating it and I I'm a terrible moderator. I mean, I don't do anything. I don't do anything I should do with it to try to, you know, encourage more conversation, but.

Chad Carson (05:55.533)

Mm -hmm.

Chad Carson (06:03.597)

nice.

Chad Carson (06:09.305)

Yeah.

Kevin K (06:15.418)

It's incredible how quickly that started and zoomed over 5 ,000 members and everything else.

Chad Carson (06:21.005)

Yeah. Yeah. I became friends with Brad Barrett, who was one of the founders of choose FI and stills their hosts of their podcasts. He's become a good friend. And yeah, that was, it's kind of like strong towns for me. It was like, I was doing these things. I'm trying to save money and try to improve my financial life and really just get more autonomy. Like you, I think you were talking about some version of that earlier. I just, I just didn't want to go work for the man. That was always my motivation. I wanted to have space to read, to think, to have interesting stuff. And I just didn't want to go.

and be in somebody else's treadmill. And that's pretty much what the, to me, what the financial independence movement is about is it kind of got hung up in the retire retirement idea that you're going to retire early at 35 years old and sit on a beach with a pina colada. The opposite seems to be the truth. The truth, like a lot of my friends like Brad Barrett, Mr. Money Mustache is a big famous blog that who is in the financial independence movement. Paula Pant is another blogging podcasting friend of mine. All these people.

they, you build these resources of financial independence early, you save money, you're frugal, but you do it so that you have this abundance of time and flexibility and you can then cash that option, those options in however you want. And for me and my family, my wife is a Spanish teacher. And so foreign languages have always been sort of our, our mutual passion and living particularly Latin America and Spain. And so we took our kids to live in Ecuador for 17 months in 2017.

And our, they were three and five years old. We wanted them to become fluent early in their life. And that financial independence, having rental properties back at home, we could kind of put that on pause for a little bit and still have some income coming in that allowed us to do that personal passion project. And, and, and do it. So that, that is to me, that's, that's financial independence, advocacy and local communities is financial independence, being able to do something. This for me has been like almost like a full -time job being the

working on, on trail transportation, advocacy, and, but I don't, I don't want to get paid. I don't care if I get paid. I, in fact, I'm spending a lot of money, you know, donating a lot of money on it. And that's great. I love that because there's some entrepreneurial ventures that aren't, I don't think always best suited for, for profit. You know, there's, you make your profit over here and then you free up this time and this energy to solve problems in your community that they're honestly, there's just not many people who have the capacity to do that. So that's been a lot of fun.

Kevin K (08:42.234)

Yeah, I think we, I'm not sure how much people talk about that enough in the financial independence world that one of the great luxuries it gives you is it gives you that ability to devote time and potentially money in a philanthropic way in your own community and make a difference there. I think that's really cool. I remember reading about how you took the family abroad for over a year and that was kind of a source of inspiration for us as well. We've...

Chad Carson (08:57.005)

Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin K (09:06.97)

We've, you know, my wife and I have had this idea for, for quite some time that we would do something like that. Of course we haven't done it yet, but we've done, you know, we did, and there's still time. The kids are still young enough. They're six and eight. but, we, we did take them, in 2018, I guess it was, we took them to Europe for a month. and, we, you know, I approached it from the standpoint that I was, I was a big proponent of house hacking, but I didn't really know what anybody called it.

Chad Carson (09:13.805)

Still time.

Kevin K (09:36.09)

and so actually done it three different times in three different ways in my life, just different life stages. And, like to your point, I think one of the things that we really loved is, when we were living in Savannah, and we had, we owned a townhouse that had a carriage house in the back. and the carriage house produced a lot of rental income for us. So then when we had started having kids, my wife kind of, she wanted to quit her job.

and stay home for a while. But obviously that's a financial hit to do it for people, you know, with two of us were working professional jobs while having that income from the house hack just completely made it work. And it just enabled a lifestyle for us that we really wanted to live. And so we always felt like that was kind of a great luxury effect of that.

Chad Carson (10:27.085)

I think it's undersold. House hacking is something, if you look at the average budget, last time I looked at it in the United States, I think 30 to 40 % of most people's budget is with housing. And if you, so you can, the hack is the literal word. Like if you could figure out how to do what you did, what I've done, and either cut your housing expense in half, or maybe like in my case, I really did well and eliminated my housing expense altogether by living in a fourplex and living in unit number two and renting the other three out.

I mean, I was living positive, $100 per month as a young entrepreneur. And, you know, so my wife was able to do the same thing. She was a Spanish teacher. She wanted to stay home a little bit and I wanted to take a break too. And so it's, it's amazing when you cut those like core expenses of housing and then you add the car. And for us, it was just, you know, just being smart with the car, not doing something that's crazy, but also this is where transportation infrastructure comes in. If you can have one car instead of having two cars, I mean, what, what is that seven to 10 ,000 bucks per year or whatever the latest number is.

I mean, so you started adding up like a thousand a month for housing and five to 600 bucks for a car. I mean, you're talking a couple thousand bucks a month for an average family. That's huge. Like after tax, you know, if you're talking about before tax, that'd be 3000, maybe 4 ,000 a month. So it's a really powerful tool for a lot of people and it gives you flexibility, it gives you freedom. And so that's what's interesting to me about housing, not because...

Everybody needs to be a real estate developer investor, although they could, but just doing a little bit like that, like that can give you leverage. It can give you options. You can tell, tell people, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do this because you have your housing expense taken care of.

Kevin K (12:07.354)

Yeah, I think that for me that's where the alignment was always interesting in my own kind of long and winding career in working in the design and planning of walkable places. And there were always a lot of spin -off interests in that, different things that I thought were great for it, I think is better for you from a health standpoint. The more that you can just move your body as part of your daily routine, it's better for you. But the economic benefits.

You know, we often don't talk enough about that. I always used to tell people if you can, you don't have to get rid of your cars, but like if you can just live car light, you know, and, and so if you're a family of four, instead of having three cars, if you can have two or one and live off of that, the amount of money that you free up to do other things, it's, especially when you, when that starts to accumulate over time, it's incredible. It's, it's, it's absolutely life -changing.

Chad Carson (13:02.189)

Yeah, that's one of the basic principles of the financial independence movement is just understanding basic compounding math. The $1 ,000 a month is not $1 ,000 per month. It's that number compounded. If you could, if you can invest that money, for example, and it grows at 7%, I'm putting myself on the spot here because I don't know the exact amount that compounds, but you know, that, that number turns into 20 ,000 or a hundred thousand bucks over a 10, 20 year period. And if you start like stacking those up, that's, that's really the difference between.

having some, even if it's not financial independence, it's like some level of like autonomy where you have options with your job, where you're not living paycheck to paycheck and housing and transportation are always, from a personal finance standpoint, are always at the crux of that. And that's what I think the financial independence movement focuses on is I love also focusing on it from the advocacy standpoint and the local community standpoint. But if you just take the perspective of the individual, this is one of those things, just your housing choice, your car choice, if possible.

you can really change the trajectory of your own career, your own family's ability to have some options.

Kevin K (14:07.162)

Yeah, I think I remember one time, it might have been just like a joke or something on Twitter, but it was somebody who said something the effect of, if it weren't for all the money we spend on cars, we'd be a nation of millionaires. Anyway, so you start having this interest in bike trails. So what was kind of the genesis of that? Was it more just trying to figure out other ways to get around, sort of a healthy living thing, or how did you become interested?

Chad Carson (14:20.045)

Yeah, there we go.

Chad Carson (14:36.909)

I've always been into fitness and exercise and athletics. So I think part of that was just, I walk around a lot. I just do that and to think, but I was also, I had young kids, two or three year old, and I was pushing her in a stroller. And that really gave me that sort of visceral understanding of the community's infrastructure. And in a negative way, I would try to, I live in a neighborhood that has a small neighborhood of single family houses, and I have to cross a state.

Kevin K (14:54.906)

Mm -hmm.

Chad Carson (15:03.085)

what I didn't know is a state road, but it's a state road. Almost every road in South Carolina is a state road, by the way. That's another story. But they, you cross this road and it's people, it's 35 miles per hour, but people go really fast. There's some blind spots. There's no sidewalks. And it's just, it's not, it's very unfriendly to pedestrians. And I felt that in a visceral way as a dad who's protective of his little girl. And I'm trying to play Frogger to go across the street to get to the park that's a quarter mile away.

And I was just thinking to myself, this is ridiculous. Like this is, this is insane that a neighborhood like this is in this, a beautiful park down there with this, you know, walking along a Creek and a playground that we can't get there safely on foot. How hostile is this? And so that, that spurred me to then go to the local meetings and say, all right, I'm going to volunteer. There's a local 10 year comprehensive plan. And I sat in all of these, I, you know, contributed as I could as a real estate entrepreneur, but the, this connectivity idea.

kept coming up over and over again, like Clemson University, Clemson where I live is a small college town. We have 25 ,000 college students now. We have a lot of faculty members, but it's a really tiny town. I mean, 17 ,000 was one of the last census numbers. I think it's 20 ,000 or so now. It's on a lake, it's beautiful. We have 15 ,000 acres of forest land around the community. So like you're five minutes from biking trails, walking trails, waterfalls. And it's just like this little.

nature, natural paradise with the lake as well. But it's horrible connectivity from, it's just like, it's a little, I grew up in Atlanta. It's like a microcosm of Atlanta because everything's built for getting around in a car. And so I realized that I started listening to planners talking about that. And my question as an entrepreneur was like, okay, well, who's working on this? What department's working on this? Or is anybody taking any action on this? And they were like, no.

No, it's we're going to put it in the comprehensive plan. I was like, is it? Okay. That's great. Was it in the last comprehensive plan? Yeah, it was in the last comprehensive plan too. And so I got, I got this kind of what many entrepreneurs do is when you see a problem, you start just figuring it like, how are we going to solve this? Let's go solve it. And it's sort of in a naive way. I said, I'm going to just ask them questions. And there was one professor at Clemson university who is an architectural professor actually, and his students had a kind of cross curriculum class where they had put together this idea.

Chad Carson (17:23.021)

something called the Green Crescent Trail. And the Crescent is the Crescent train line that goes between New York City and New Orleans, so the Crescent City. And so they kind of been inspired by that idea of connectivity of the railroad and that history in our town of students who went to Clipsy University used to get off the train and walk off the train down into Clipsy University. They get their barber haircut and it was a military school at that point and they'd walk on the campus. And so that kind of historical connection with the Crescent line and then green.

and the spaces around us and the connection to the land was the inspiration. And they had this story, this whole idea, they had maps and it was amazing. And I saw the little video and I got so motivated by that, that I said, like, this has to happen. Like, this is really cool. And I talked to the professor, I talked to some of the students, students rotate in and out of class a lot. So they move on to their jobs and their careers in another city. But I started meeting with people and say, we gotta do this. And some other entrepreneurs, that professor.

and we formed a nonprofit and one thing led to another, but we started getting some money for a master plan study. We started talking to landowners and I can go into all the details and all the mistakes and frustrations that we had, but we started making progress and that was 2014. So that was 10 years ago, whenever we started it.

Kevin K (18:38.874)

So I mean, yeah, I do have some questions just getting into the weeds a little bit, especially for people who have an interest in doing something similar. I guess the first question is like, you start identifying this problem. Like, who do you know how to call the very first time? Just try to get a hold of somebody at the city planning department? I mean, Clemson's a small town, so people are more accessible there. But who did you figure out who to call?

Chad Carson (19:02.029)

are the city planner was very friendly. And she she has moved on to another town, but I still kind of have connections with her on Facebook. And she she was the one who said, Yeah, this professor is working on it. And yes, connectivity is really important. Let's try she was one of those young, just optimistic planners and just had had a good head is very friendly. So she her name is Jennifer and she was she was great. She gave me some good feedback. I wish I'd heard your podcast. I wish I'd had strong towns. I wish I'd had like, when I read the walkable city by Jeff speck, I was just like,

Kevin K (19:16.922)

huh. Yeah.

Kevin K (19:25.57)

I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Chad Carson (19:30.977)

my God, there's a world of people out here trying to do this thing too. Like this is, this is great. so I, I didn't have all those resources right away, but I just sort of fumbled around, ask questions, talk to professors being in a university is kind of nice. Cause there's others professors who are urban planners. There's professors who are architecture students or architecture focuses on the community. So I just started asking questions and talking to people, but really approaching it. I think the entrepreneurial approach is you stumble along, you set a short -term goal.

You run into a wall that didn't work, turned around and go another direction. And I did a whole lot of like bumping into walls. And, and, but I think the thing we did well was like having a vision, like just having, so we, as soon as we could, we started getting a name and a pictures and maps and talking to the community. And we didn't know exactly what we were doing, but we sure were dreaming big and had a vision. And we were trying to, I think the thing I, I, and some of our other early members tapped into was just.

this emotion that community members have of wanting to make their place better. And we made that our mission. We said, our mission is to connect the places we love in our community with a safe alternative transportation network. We want to make it safe for me to push my kid in a stroller to the park. I've told that story hundreds of times. And then other people started saying, yeah, I wish I could walk to the local downtown and that's a quarter of a mile away. Or we have a lot of international students in town who live in these apartments.

and they're walking in the gutter, the ditch on the side of the road to try to get to the bus or to try to go to the grocery store because it's just not doable. And so I think there's been a variety of different people from the practical transportation side of things, from students, but then really the people we had to get on board were the local community members who actually don't really care anything about, many of them don't really care anything about practical, you know, commuting anywhere, going to the grocery store. They wanted to do it for recreation. And so we've sort of had to tap into like the recreational trail movement plus,

the actual practical use of transportation, which I was interested in, and try to connect those two and figure out how to get funding and to put all that together.

Kevin K (21:31.993)

Yeah. Yeah, there's actually, so there's a guy in Dallas named Jason Roberts who created the Better Block, which is a pretty cool deal. And he has a great TED talk that's out there all the time where he talks a lot about, especially early on, just naming, naming something, whatever it is, even if it's like you and one other person, just give it a name, create a logo, create a website. It's super easy. And then all of a sudden people think it's a real thing. Now there's a lot to that. So, so.

Chad Carson (21:57.069)

Yeah, exactly.

Kevin K (22:01.53)

Then how did you go about, you said at some point you started finding some funding. What was the nature of that funding and how did you figure out how to make that happen?

Chad Carson (22:11.277)

Yeah, we had a local county council person who saw the vision, I guess, and it was inspired by it. And he had some recreational funds from the county that year that he could allocate. And I think it was $25 ,000. He allocated that 25 to our idea to do a feasibility study. And then the city of Clemson put in 5 ,000, the town of Central put in 1 ,000. We got Southern Wesleyan University, which is, there's a university in this little town of Central next to Clemson.

They were on board and then the city, I think the Clemson University also chimed in a little bit, although we had a hard time getting Clemson University on board at first, ironically. But it's basically four entities, four local entities plus the county, all chipped in money, but mainly the county. And then we went through a process of hiring a local landscape architecture firm, I think Alta Planning ended up doing that. I guess not local, but.

Kevin K (23:01.466)

Mmm, yeah.

Chad Carson (23:04.205)

So they, they came in, that was a lot of fun just to see how their process worked. And to this day, I still look at some of their maps and some of their estimates. If they put, they put cost estimates together, they put their maps. It was a great plan, but the problem I learned was, and they told us this at the time was like, I think all the city council members and other people we were trying to pitch for this idea, they saw the numbers on that plan, which were, you know, $30 million, $40 million. And it's just, just ridiculously big number for a small town.

And understandably, they're like, yeah, this is not, we can't do this. And so we had a hard time figuring out the first little thing to do. And, you know, the Strongtown style, like what's the first little $500 thing or a hundred dollar thing we could do. And I knew that concept and we knew that concept, but it really had a hard time getting traction on that, but particularly because a lot of the segments we were trying to build on were in DOT right aways where we had to get a couple of private easements.

I'll also say that even the well -meaning people inside the city government, there's always a propensity to do bigger and more formal stuff to build something really, we don't build things like dirt trails in our town. We build nice stuff in our town. That was like the attitude I got a lot. And I said that was a really difficult thing to bump up against because they would, with good intentions say, well, let's go get this grant. Let's go do this thing. And the grant would take six months to apply for. We wouldn't get it. And then we'd miss a bunch of momentum. And then.

They were kind of used to this though. They're like, yeah, we'll just wait until the next cycle. And three years go by and nothing's happening. And that was really, really frustrating.

Kevin K (24:39.034)

Yeah, yeah. Once you get, learn a little bit about the government funding cycle, especially for transportation, it's very eye opening. So at what point did you come across the Strong Towns conversation then?

Chad Carson (24:52.429)

Yeah, I think I started listening to the podcast and I was interested in the financial angle as an investor. I just, I found it fascinating that towns were not really budgeting for their liabilities. And I compared it as a real estate investor. This is something we actually deal with all the time because we have a house that you buy from 1950. It's a single family house and you have these things called capital expenses that we all, if you're an experienced investor, you know, those are the thing that come up and bite you.

that most rookie investors underestimate the amount of repairs and maintenance they're going to have to do. But as I learned kind of the school hard knocks, these $8 ,000 heating and air bills or $10 ,000 roof or a sewer line that has to be replaced from the house to the road, those will eat up your cashflow for the next two years. And so you have to start creating sinking funds or having reserve funds to pay for those things if you ever want to have a real business, a real rental property business.

And it was fascinating to hear that cities aren't doing that. Like, wow, okay, so we have these 70 year capexes that are, you know, they're not even budgeting for it. And that the, you're building these new construction properties. And so I was just fascinated by that math and by the lack of conversation about that and lack of awareness of that in many places. And so that was interesting, but also just, I was just energized by the advocacy, the local, there's other people doing this. There's other people working on it.

The fact that you can use social media to try to garner support in your community. So for all those reasons, I was, I was on board and I think I read, happy city and walkable cities, but it was other things first. And they kind of brought me into the strong towns world as well.

Kevin K (26:32.09)

And then, have you been able to use that with any of your friends or neighbors or anything as a way to help broaden the conversation?

Chad Carson (26:41.229)

Yeah, I think I bought all the city council members, walkable city at one point. And, you know, probably, I'm probably that annoying local person who brings up, sends, I send city council members regularly, strong towns, articles and different things. And, so yeah, I'm, I'm using that resource a bunch and particularly YouTube videos I find in podcasts, I think are helpful books are great too, but I think having little snippets of content, something somebody can watch in 10 minutes can really change their perspective and a video.

As a YouTuber, I've really become a believer that YouTube videos, they use all the senses to try to influence somebody, right? You're seeing something, you can use visuals, you can show maps, you can show music if you want to. So I've really enjoyed using that as well. And I have ambitions myself to create more content. Like I create a lot of real estate oriented content, but I have a long list of ideas I would love to create videos on and shorts on. And I've...

10 different intersections that I want to go out and show how awful they are in town. And I think social media and video and what Strong Towns has done really well is just using media to leverage their voice and be able to make a change. I think that's one of the best things about the media revolution we have now. Small people with not many resources can make good enough content to do, it goes viral and makes a big difference.

Kevin K (28:02.49)

Yeah, I'm always amazed that I'll stumble on some sort of YouTube channel that I didn't even know existed that was related to like urban planning or whatever. And I'll check it out and they have like 600 ,000 subscribers or something. It's just like, wow, where's that? Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, some of the folks out there, like not just bikes and others who have like literally millions of subscribers and produce really beautiful, incredible content on a regular basis. So yeah, you're right. It's, it's cool. I think I'm.

Chad Carson (28:14.093)

Exactly. There's a big audience. Big audience. Isn't that amazing? Yeah.

Chad Carson (28:28.621)

Exactly.

Kevin K (28:31.514)

find myself increasingly behind the times on some of that stuff. Yeah.

Chad Carson (28:33.997)

You got a podcast that this is great. This is the medium people are listening to.

Kevin K (28:40.218)

I actually, the funny thing is I actually created a couple of videos probably almost 20 years ago at this point that related more specifically to like street design. And it was really fun to do, but it was so early on and I, you know, I, the technology wasn't quite as good or as inexpensive yet. So I actually hired like a marketing firm to create them for me. And it was, it was really fun. And, and I actually got, they got a ton of views and I was excited for that, but it was just having a hard time justifying.

you know, paying that amount of money to keep doing those sorts of things.

Chad Carson (29:09.933)

Yeah. Well, if you want to experiment and do a couple of pilot projects, I've got my editors on the call and ready. I've got a graphic designer. So let's collab and we'll make a couple of cool videos and test them out on Coach Carson.

Kevin K (29:20.858)

I would love to do that. Yeah, I'd love to do that. Like you, I have a longer list than I'll ever be able to get to of things like that. So one thing I'm curious about, so it was, you said it was Ecuador where you and your family went for 17 months. Is that right? So how did that experience of living in a foreign country, how did that kind of shape your idea about how to get around a place? I would imagine, I mean, I'm going to make an assumption. It could be totally wrong here, but the assumption you're probably living in an older,

Chad Carson (29:35.213)

Correct, yes it was.

Kevin K (29:50.17)

city where you were walking around most of the time.

Chad Carson (29:53.069)

Yes, we lived in Cuenca, Ecuador. So Cuenca is a third biggest city in Ecuador. And Ecuador, by the way, is just an amazing country. To me, it's a lot like Costa Rica was probably 30 years ago, 40 years ago, in that it has, from an ecological standpoint, it's just amazing. It's got rainforest in the, it's got the Amazon basin rainforest on one side of the country. It's got highland mountains. So we lived in, Cuenca is in the highlands, it's 8 ,000 feet up.

8200 feet or so is the kind of the base of this place and you have mountains around that. And then you have the coast and of course the Galapagos Islands, which have a lot of history with biology. I was a biology major, so I just loved going to the Galapagos and getting to study that. So it's just amazing place. People are really amazing. I love the food there and a lot of, you know, so many fruits and local foods, but from a walkability standpoint, we, we chose, I kind of learned how important walkability was to me when we started choosing where we wanted to live.

And we, we look for parks, we look for the downtown and then we found residential areas near those places. It's the top of the list. Like there's a lot of other criteria. Of course we wanted to be safe. We wanted to have other things, but walkability has been and still is like the top of my list. And the cool thing about going to another country is you can see there's different approaches to, how they built their cities. This was a colonial city. So we had like the kind of the Spanish square in the middle and it's a public, it's amazing.

Spanish squares are amazing public spaces because people use them. There's benches around, there's trees, there's the church on one side, there's the civics building on the other side. They're playing, you know, in the 1700s or 1500s, it depends when. So that was kind of the center of town. We were kind of off that kind of old colonial town, but relatively close. And the whole town was built around parks, was built around that center, but it was also...

you know, I think resources are an issue. It's not like they had more resources than an American city. But most people, the thing that struck me was a lot of the people like my Spanish teacher who I met with every week, he rode a bus from the suburbs into town every single day. He walked around a lot. And people didn't do this because it was just something they wanted to do. let me let me be a walk in a walkable town. This is the entire system of transportation was built around people who couldn't afford a car.

Chad Carson (32:16.493)

And so it was out of reach for most people, even like he was a teacher, he taught me on the side and he taught English at an elementary school. So he was like lower middle class, but for him to get a loan to get a car or to have enough money was just completely out of reach. So there's this whole system of both public transportation officially from the city buses. There's also just people walking and on paths that are kind of necessary to get around, but there's also an informal.

transportation system that if anybody's traveled in Latin America, you'll see how this works. It's like people standing on the side of the road and when they go by, you just kind of raise your finger up and somebody eventually might pick you up. And so we did that several times where we missed the bus and this like delivery truck came by and said, you need a ride in? And we talked to him in Spanish and we'd sit in the back of the delivery truck and offer them some money and go to town. So like, there's just this enormous kind of organic system of.

of transportation that was fascinating to see, but walkability was just kind of implied. Like everybody knew you, all right, yeah, you have to make it walkable because it's just for survival and people have to be able to do this.

Kevin K (33:24.346)

How did your kids react to being in that environment?

Chad Carson (33:29.165)

they were three and five at the time. So I think they were a little too young to like be fully aware of what they were getting into, but it was beautiful to see them sort of integrate themselves. And they had about seven or eight words of Spanish when we started. And as a three -year -old, you don't have that many, that many words anyway. So it was okay. But then by about seven, eight months in, I had a head start. I had learned Spanish. I wasn't great at it. My wife was very fluent, but I was way ahead of them. But by seven, eight months in,

We were sitting around the dinner table talking Spanish and they were correcting me saying, Papa, no se dice eso. And they would kind of wag their finger at me, Spanish Ecuadorian style and, and correct my Spanish, which was amazing. So the language they just really took to, they made friends locally. but then also, you know, they just kind of get used to, to being there that we, at first, we first started walking around the complaint and why not? I don't want to walk around. But by the end it was just, just what we did. You just, you walk everywhere. And I think that's sort of stuck with them a little bit.

Kevin K (34:28.89)

Yeah, I've often talked in presentations that, especially people my age and sort of our general generation, that it really was a formative thing for when a lot of us like traveled overseas. And if you got to spend any length of time living in a foreign country and just kind of experiencing what it's like, because most of the world, frankly, you are living in a place where...

still the backbone of getting around is walking. We're a little unique in that regard in the United States. And I always tell people American cities used to all be that way too. We used to all be walking cities until about the 1920s or so. But it's definitely like it really gets, it really affects your thinking and your perspective on a lot of things, especially like a unique chance like you had to live somewhere for a really extended period of time.

What was the adjustment like coming home?

Chad Carson (35:28.045)

depression. And I'm literally mean that literally it's it was my wife and I both had a really hard time. I think the kids did okay. Our older daughter had a hard time in school, just which of things natural, you know, when you go through a big 17 months living somewhere else. Our younger daughter was in kindergarten. So everybody was new to kindergarten. She did okay. But, you know, my wife and I had transportation and walk lack of walkability was really the big deal because there was a lot of great things coming back. I was also

believe it or not, I had a lot of Ecuadorian friends who said, are you sure you want to go back to the United States? Because it seemed like every month there was another school shooting. And that's a political topic. I'm not going to get into the details of it. But it's a reality that a lot of other countries don't have. And they were worried for us going back to the United States, which I find very humorous given that we had the same thing for people in the United States. Are you sure you want to go to Ecuador? Are you sure you want to go there? And that was the same question they were asking as we came back. So that was an adjustment. But really the...

The fact that we had to drive so much was again, was just a shocker to your kind of system. And we, but we, I was determined and my wife was determined to only have, we sold one of our cars when we left and our other car we put in storage with family. And we kept this one car for about two years after we got back and I bought an e -bike. And so we, my wife and I, we sort of kind of an adjustable side, it was in between my size and my wife's size. So neither one of us like was perfect for us, but we.

I use the heck out of that e -bike. And if somebody wanted to have a meeting with me, I was like, well, here's the two places I can meet in town where I knew I had a fairly safe route to get to. And I would meet them at those places. So it really like being in another environment where I walked all the time, inspired me to try to do that when I got back. And I had to use biking because walking was not possible to get all over town just from a distance standpoint. And so having a bike and having an e -bike in particular.

It would make it in the hot summer, you know, South Carolina summer when it's 90 degrees and humid, I could still go, you know, two miles away and be there, not really sweat. And that was great. Like it was so inspiring. So going back to like the green Crescent trail movement, it sort of took a pause. I was still involved with it, but when I got back, I was really gung ho about that and excited about it again. And so that just experience of going somewhere else and seeing that it's possible to do this and seeing what it feels like and knowing that people will really.

Chad Carson (37:49.165)

get a lot out of this and are gonna, it's gonna be awesome when we can get it. Sort of motivated me to get back into that. And we, we've since made, I didn't finish that story, but we've since made a lot of progress. We have this, just this year in this past year, 2023 opened up about a mile and a half of multi -use path and the city of Clemson and then another mile or mile and a half inside Clemson University. So there's a trail that connects two city parks, Clemson Elementary School to the university.

Kevin K (38:12.378)

Great.

Chad Carson (38:18.829)

And then the university has a botanical gardens, which is one of the key kind of park locations in town. So it's connected to that. So we've connected like three or four of our strategic locations and people being able to see that it's on the ground and it's possible and asking questions like, Hey, can we get more of this? And so it's been really nice to have some validation after so many years. And then we have a lot of momentum now, all the city council members that I've talked to are.

very much on board. The city of Clemson now has dedicated funding every year, $250 ,000 for the Green Crescent Trail. They have raised, they did, we should talk about from a strong town standpoint, they actually bonded some money to build another trail as well, another portion of the trail, along with a couple of the park infrastructure. So it's, I mean, they're spending money and they're investing in it, which is awesome. And we're also working with a couple of the local smaller towns, which is a different dynamic.

Kevin K (39:03.642)

interesting.

Chad Carson (39:15.053)

They're 5 ,000 person towns with lower budgets, but we've got another half a mile on the ground in one of those towns. And we're working with the third town to do just a natural surface trail to start. We're starting to learn our lesson. We're working, as we speak, we're working on, one of the city council members is working on getting easements from a couple of property owners. One's a church, one's a historic foundation. And so we're kind of, we're getting our order of operations where we get the land secured and then we.

I think we're just going to try to see what's the lowest cost trail we get on the ground and build a trailhead and just get people using this and connect, you know, smaller locations we can, a quarter mile, half a mile, and just get it on the ground and then let people experience it. And they're going to say, well, we want more of this. And so then we can say, yeah, yeah, we do want more of this. What's, what's the next step? And that's the, luckily we've learned a little bit, but I'm really excited about how it's coming together. And we have a, we have a 30 plus mile kind of map.

that we've kept updated. We're showing what the towns will look like when they're connected, what all the routes we're trying to connect are. And then we have like an implementation plan of here are the two or three locations in town that we really think are the low -hanging fruit where we can make progress and get easements and raise money. And so that's all that all was spurred personally for me along by living in places that were walkable that I could see the potential for it.

Kevin K (40:38.202)

That's amazing. And I mean, I think you're totally right that I have the same experience from a professional standpoint, but I've seen it time and time again when you have trail networks, when you have even like we have the streetcar system we have here in Kansas City. Oftentimes the most challenging thing is just getting a little bit of it going. And then once people can see it and feel it, touch it, ride it, whatever, then they tend to want more. So I think...

that's definitely the right path. And so you found then that just even in those cases, just getting sort of like a gravel trail down is a better place to start than than waiting for the paved surface.

Chad Carson (41:19.021)

I think so. If I had to do ever again, I'm not sure we had had that surface, but if we could have had anybody give us a quarter mile, even within a park, I would have just said, let's do that. Or let's do the, let's just do a crosswalk. Let's just, let's do a tactical urbanism. And we talked about that. I just, I don't think we pressed it enough. I think we got talked out of that kind of stuff by well -meaning people, often planners or people who are like, Hey, we're supportive of this. Let's do this, but let's do it bigger. Let's not do a little.

crosswalk and I think that's a mistake. I think it's the you lose momentum you you get you know that that person changes jobs somebody city council people rotate off and if you don't get some tangible quick process progress on the ground through either temporary or otherwise you're you're gonna lose momentum and it's just it's kind of amazing we didn't lose the whole get off track because we went five or six years without anything.

on the ground and we had a lot of supporters and we had a lot of maps and we had a lot of meetings, but it got really frustrating not having the actual stuff on the ground. So that was something I would, if we did it over again, it would have found a way to do that.

Kevin K (42:23.354)

Yeah. So has this been then like a gateway drug for you to the broader strong towns movement or are you gearing up to start thinking about zoning and all that sort of stuff yet?

Chad Carson (42:30.453)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually went on the planning commission. I didn't mention that I was on my local planning commission after during that same time. So yeah, I got involved and I've always been involved in housing. And so I think housing is affordable housing is something that I find even I find it some ways more approachable because I understand housing so well and the finance financial world. So I've been more interested in transportation, but seeing how that connects to housing and how important they are.

Kevin K (42:37.43)

cool.

Chad Carson (42:59.085)

I'm really geared up as well to try to help shape opinion on that, talk to people about it, preach about it, whatever we have to do. Yeah. But, and also maybe I was really inspired at this latest Strong Towns gathering by some of the alternative ways to build affordable housing. For me, the ADUs and cottages, that's always been vernacular for me in the real estate investing world. And that's from a purely kind of...

you know, just financial independence movement. That's it makes a ton of sense. But to see that that's maybe a potential solution on a larger scale, I think is really exciting. And then I'm excited also, it's not something I've kind of written plans for it. And I think I could get into some of the small scale development. I never called it that I didn't think about what we're doing as development, fixing up a property that needed $50 ,000 in work and turning it around or.

turning, you know, subplating a lot and building an extra unit on there. It was just something we did, but it's been kind of cool to see it a whole other world of people seeing it from a little bit different perspective of this is adding housing supply to the market and seeing that real estate investors, as I call them, is like, there's a role for us, a really important role for affordable housing, for providing rentals, for building more rentals. And so yeah, I'm excited about that. And I think I'm...

I'm more in, I think, the finance, financing role these days. Like I have done on the ground, I've managed all my properties myself. I've managed remodeled projects. I'm a little less interested in that at this point because I've done all that. But I like partnering with people who do that. And so we've, my business partner and I have financed some deals with other people, kind of been the mentor on the ground. Here's how, all right, we need to do this. Let's get this done. And I think some of the planning, the properties and acquiring the properties and then.

working with people on the ground who we can partner to kind of execute them. That's something that I'm interested in doing more of.

Kevin K (44:53.146)

That's terrific. Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really tried hard to broaden is the understanding of what a developer actually is. And unfortunately, there's this idea that a developer, somebody is a guy who has a fancy suit that drives a $100 ,000 car and builds six story buildings and everything else or $50 million projects. But the reality is, just like you said, if you build a house,

If you renovate a house, you're a developer. You may not think of it that way, but if you are doing anything that really contributes to the built environment, no matter at what scale you're a developer, and that's, I mean, historically, that is much more aligned with how our cities were built than the way we think about it today.

Chad Carson (45:39.885)

I got a question for you. This has been on my mind. What is what is the worst connotation being a real estate investor or being a real estate developer when you when you walk into when you walk into a room of local citizens? Because I don't know for me developer is like not a positive word. Like I gotta get I gotta get my head around this. I like developers. I'm fine with developers. But man, like in my town right now, developers are like the evil empire like you might as well be might as well be Darth Vader walking into a room because they've just there's been a lot of

building pressure for the big buildings for the, you know, 700 unit apartment buildings for students. And so we small developers, I call it my, I wrote a book called the small and mighty investor. My heart, my heart is with the investor who has two properties, five properties, 10 properties. We might as well not even be, you know, in the room. So I feel like we have a marketing problem, an imaging problem that maybe there's a new name. Maybe it's not, I don't know, but like, I just, I'm curious what your take is on that.

Kevin K (46:29.305)

Yes.

Kevin K (46:36.698)

Well, I mean, you're totally right. And some of the black hat stuff has been well -earned. My good friend John Anderson, who is one of the founders of the Incremental Development Alliance, he used to always talk about how he was teaching people the dark arts of development. And we always made, we had a lot of fun with all that. But there's definitely been a lot of work to try to rebrand what development is and what a developer is and to try to.

Chad Carson (46:52.557)

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Kevin K (47:06.458)

you know, almost think about it more. There is a field called community development. I, I hesitate to call people community developers because there actually is like, there's, there's like whole federal programs that are tied to that term and everything else. And their community development block grants and stuff like that. But, but in a sense, that's kind of what it is. my, my friend, Monty Anderson, who was also very big in the incremental development world. he, he likes to talk about.

people as farmers. And he really likes to encourage that language, you know, that if for people who want to do small scale development and really work in a community in your place, the idea is thinking about it like a farm and, you know, first of all, to find your farm, whatever that is, that location that you care about, that you want to live in and invest in, you know, literally for like the rest of your life, because you want to have a positive transformative effect on it. And then,

The analogy, like a farmer, a farmer knows every blade of grass on their farm. They know where all the really productive areas are and the not productive areas are. They know what's going to work in different sections of their fields. And ultimately, that type of developer where you're just working in a community at a smaller scale, that's kind of the analogy.

Chad Carson (48:23.725)

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I think the word small is important. Keeping small versus big. And then I think one of the problems a lot of people have is that the bigger developers don't have skin in the game. They don't have skin in the game in the local community. Even a big developer, if they live there and they had to bump into people in the grocery store and have to see and talk to those people, that's a natural human pressure that we've always had when you live in a tribe or live in a community.

Kevin K (48:36.666)

Mm -hmm.

Chad Carson (48:53.197)

where you couldn't just make an action or make a decision without thinking about how that affects your neighbor and your community. And you might make a decision that makes less profit so that you're not ashamed of being there. And that's something when you're sitting at a desk in New York City, you don't have to make that decision. It's just a number on a piece of paper. And I find that annoying, I find it lame. And it's always bothered me like in the real estate investing sphere too, that the big hedge funds, the big...

go big 10X. That's kind of been like the aspiration for a lot of people in the financial world. It's like, once you grow up out of the single family houses and the duplexes, then you'll move up to like the real investing. And one of my mentors was a guy named John Schaub and he's in Sarasota, Florida and he's owned single family houses for 50 years. Like that's what he thinks is the best from a selfish standpoint. And it's also from the community standpoint, his tenants benefit. He's had tenants who stay for 10, 20 years. They get to live in a nice community.

So I don't know, I think I resonate a lot with that idea. But yeah, imaging and how do we frame that and how do we tell those stories is such an important part of the process.

Kevin K (50:02.17)

Yeah, I mean, I think we put a, we definitely put a big emphasis on the term small developer or incremental developer. And there's probably better ways to talk about that. we have a, we have a local sort of meetup group that my friend, Abby Newsham, who also has a great podcast on the strong towns network that she organizes. That's just, small developers of Kansas city. and, we have, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 people that come every week to a meeting where we kind of, it's almost like a, like a support group.

in a lot of ways. But you know, as you know, as you allude to, there's such a vast gulf, like two different worlds in real estate development. There's the people who work at the hedge fund level, and they literally are doing projects anywhere in the world. And they're working with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars at a time to build projects everywhere. And then there's the people who work in communities, and they're probably getting their loans from a community bank.

Chad Carson (50:31.853)

Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin K (50:59.002)

you know, a locally owned or a regionally owned community bank. And they are your neighbors and they are people you're going to run into. So you're right, it's a huge difference.

Chad Carson (51:10.669)

Night and day. My only banker has been a guy who lives locally, goes to church locally. He runs on our trail now. He's like, I love this green crescent trail and he's running on it. So it's a, that's the one of my favorite parts about the real estate investing business, but also how it spurs off into the trails and the housing advocacy and working on your local planning commission, all the relationships you build and how organic that is and how mixed up that is. Like it's a really fun part of it.

Kevin K (51:34.906)

Yeah. Well, it's an interesting drug that once you catch on to all this stuff, you find yourself going in a lot of different rabbit holes.

Chad Carson (51:40.717)

Yeah, yeah, I'm all in. Yeah, I'm in the rabbit hole for it, there's no doubt.

Kevin K (51:46.266)

So how else can people in my world, how can we help you or what questions do you have that I can answer or others can answer in our world? What sort of things are you would like to know about the world of city building and design?

Chad Carson (52:04.845)

That's a great question. I never thought about that. I think design, I'm really interested in maps and just like design is an amateur and I find it really, I've been fascinated with just studying how cities are built. So I don't know if it's like, I'll just tell you what I'm learning, what I'm studying. Like all the Strongtown books have been great, but I think the thing that is,

good about all that is like taking the design world, the development world, and translating it into a language that's understandable for laymen, for people who are just a layperson who's on the ground. I think that's been the brilliant part about a lot of your work, about what I've seen Jeff Speck do and other people is, yes, I know planners and city council, but a lot of city council members are the lay people. They're not professionals. So that's kind of what I've been trying to do in my own world of real estate investing as well. I feel if I have any kind of signature,

Kevin K (52:53.946)

Sure.

Chad Carson (53:01.357)

is taking this complicated idea of math and finance and negotiation and evaluating neighborhoods and trying to simplify it and translate it into a common vernacular, something that's easy to understand, telling stories. And I think that's the trick with all of this as well, is like translating it, because ultimately, getting a lot of people on board doing this and maybe the mixing of these two worlds we're talking about today. I mean, I think, I...

publisher of my books, bigger pockets, for example, they're the big real estate investing website. There's 2 million members of bigger pockets. They have the, you know, top five investing podcasts in the in the country world, whatever, I don't know, and they have another two or three podcasts, like there's a lot of people who are interested in it from that angle. And I found just because I've been talking about it on my own, that there's a lot of those people who are interested in architecture design, but they just don't see themselves in that yet.

And I would love to help bridge those worlds in whatever way we can. That's part of my interest in coming on this podcast too. It's just, I think, I think there's a lot of one of the beautiful parts about this kind of local small developer movement is that it is not only like there's a selfish motivation behind it, which is fine. Like I'm good with that. That's capitalism, right? That's that's people, people have to have a engine, a personal motivation to do this. They can make money. They can turn this into a business. but then there's also, this is a really,

Kevin K (54:19.034)

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Chad Carson (54:28.653)

people have an interest in their own communities and designing them. And they're curious about why it is that you can't cross this street the same way I was. And so I think like, go back to your question, I think just continuing to open up the hood to show like, here's how cities are built. Here's why this intersection is the way it is. I found that to be fascinating because it's something I took for granted before. It was just an assumption I made. And a lot of these things happen in like a back room somewhere.

And so like bringing that to light and showing like, no, here's why over the last 60 years cities are built this way and here's how we can do it differently. I find that enormously interesting and optimistic and fun to be able to learn that.

Kevin K (55:10.618)

Yeah, and my experience has certainly been that the people who are the most persistent, and often it takes way longer than you think anything should take to get done, but those people who are persistent and really have a passion for whatever it is in their community, that they're ultimately the ones who get things done. And it frustrates all of us how long things can take, but it all starts by somebody giving a damn to begin with. It's funny.

We talk about other people in our world, but like Pete from Mr. Money Mustache, he's moving to cul -de -sac, which is a pedestrian -only community in Tempe, Arizona, which was designed by my friend Dan Parolick's firm Opticoast Design out of Berkeley, California. It's a total small world.

Chad Carson (55:52.525)

Yeah. Okay. Small world. Yeah. I went out, I went out and visited them. Yeah. He lived there for the winter and I went and visited him in February. So we all, we all hung out and cul -de -sac and rode e -bikes and I think he missed, I think he missed his Colorado mountains a little bit too. So I think he's going to be back and forth between, you know, visiting both, but yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a, there's a ton of crossover between all these worlds.

Kevin K (56:03.77)

Nice.

Kevin K (56:14.906)

There is. Yeah, it's a funny thing. And the e -bike thing is a whole other topic we could get on some other time. I've also become an enormous fan. I think for, especially for American cities, they're an incredible, they're just a game changer for getting around. One last thing I'll just leave you with, since I know you're interested in maps and design, but if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, especially with your experience in Ecuador, you should look up the laws of the Indies, which was basically the...

Chad Carson (56:22.605)

Yes.

Kevin K (56:44.122)

the Spanish laws for how they built cities and towns all over South Central and part of North America when they settled the area. And it's fascinating as hell. But those places, like you stated, were specifically laid out and documented in this sort of group of essentially like design laws. It's really interesting. Chad, last question for you.

I can't remember this, were you on any of the great national championship teams at Clemson?

Chad Carson (57:18.669)

No, I tell people I set the stage for all of that, but I was not that good. So I went there in 98 through 2002. We played in a couple bowl games. We were in the top 10, top 20, something like that. But yeah, I had fun playing football, but I was not a national champion. And I got out of there without having any serious injuries. You can judge whether I had any head injuries. Perhaps there were a few screws loose after that. But yeah, overall, it paid for my school, and I'm very grateful for it.

Kevin K (57:39.81)

Okay.

Kevin K (57:48.57)

That's really cool. All right, well, I want to thank you so much for doing this. This has been a lot of fun. And it was really great to run into you. And hope we can find a way to continue the conversation.

Chad Carson (57:58.285)

Yeah, I look forward to staying in touch and I have my reading to do now. So thank you for the, thank you for the recommendations. And this has been a lot of fun. Thanks. Thanks Kevin.

Kevin K (58:02.714)

No problem. All right. Thanks, Chad. Take care.

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