Transcript: Joe Brown on Aviation, Craft, and Building with Honor

Good morning, and welcome back to Late Start Show. We are here with U.S. Class of 85, philanthropist and former president and chairman of Hartzell Propeller, Mr. Joe Brown.

How are you, Mr. Brown? Oh, this is a great morning, beautiful morning. Good to see you guys.

Yeah, you too. Thanks for taking the time to do this. So, we usually start at the beginning, so we want to do that with you. Where did you grow up and what brought you to university school?

Well, I grew up in Shaker Heights, 2991 Eaton Road, which I had to memorize as a child so I could get myself home. I went to Malvern School in that neighborhood. It was absolutely magical. And it turned out that all those neighborhood kids, about half of them went to U.S., Laurel, and H.P., and about half of them stayed in the Shaker Public Schools.

So, over time, that kind of put H.P. on the map for my sisters and university school. On the map for my brother and me. And so, we were raised in Shaker, lived in Shaker our whole lives. Went to both schools.

Great. And can you kind of like recall any teachers or classes kind of from your U.S. days that really kind of had a big impact on you or has some memories that you still have? Absolutely. I mean, this is a gratitude session for me.

You know, I started in seventh grade and at the lower school, there were two teachers that really stood out. One was Peter Conway and one was David Reinthal. And they partnered in social studies. Their big contribution to my life was to treat us seriously as young adults.

And they did moot courts where we had to argue real cases. They brought in attorneys that were parents of students to serve as jurists. And these things were just full-fledged intellectual brawls, trying to win over the jury. And I was both a defense attorney and a prosecuting attorney in two different moot court cases.

And it just really, it lit me up. It made the lower school a lot more fun. And it also gave me a way of understanding what it was like to be in a high school. And I think that's what really made the upper school experience for me.

When I got to the upper school, I was a terrible student in certain subjects, terrible. And there were three teachers that just tolerated my absolute amateur performance. One was Marilyn Stoller in algebra two. Another one was Roger Yehdeed in French.

And then Phil Thornton in geometry, who was also my soccer coach. And I want to mention those guys because they took care of students who weren't their best students and kept you going. And then the guy who was my best student, he was a top player in the school. And then the guy who was my best student, he was a top player in the school.

And then the guy who was my best student, he was a top player in the school. guy that really lit me up and prepared me for college. And Rob Markey mentioned him was Rob Thomas, American Civ. And he really taught me how to write and find my narrative voice. And by the time I left his class, I was ready to go.

Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And obviously a big part of U.S. is the academics, but also the athletics. So what sports or extracurricular activities did you get involved in at U.S.?

And how did they influence your experience? I was a soccer player, you know, beginning in seventh grade all the way through senior year. And that was important to me. But really what U.S., I would say, did for me that I wanted to share with you is I went to U.S. day camp starting as a chick.

It went all the way through. And they had a woodshop program for kids that were like five years old. And it just persisted year after year. And then when I got to seventh grade, Bob Osborne, was my shop teacher.

And that guy took a real interest in me. When I got to the upper school, Ralph Howarth was a shop teacher who took a deeper interest in me. And then I don't know if you know Dan Dixon, who recently retired from university school. He's just like this unbelievably talented guy, probably the most talented guy I know.

And he gave me a job in carpentry and contracting. And all of that woodshop stuff set the stage, for what would become my career. I didn't know it, but it clearly was the foundation of going into manufacturing. So woodshop in U.S., big thing.

You know, looking back at your time as U.S. as a whole, obviously we can think of some of the kind of the funniest moments, maybe just a particular event that makes you kind of smile when you think about it. Do you really have a memory that like kind of either your high school, your middle school, kind of any of your U.S. experience that really just to this day stands out with you? Yeah. I mean, I have a ton, but I was dance committee chairman.

I took this job extremely seriously. Like I wanted the biggest dances with the greatest gate revenue and so on. So we had this dance at the upper school. You know, you probably saw those big round tables in the dining hall.

These things were massive. So we had to move all these things out for the dances. And at the end of this blockbuster dance with this live band, all these girls from HB were standing on one of these round top tables. And ultimately, it made the tabletop break loose and fall on the ground.

And it turned out that there was these two large screws sticking out of the bottom of the table and it made it spin like a top. And so we would get the girls in the middle of this thing and we were spinning it. And it was walking around the dance floor with these girls on it. It was like the greatest thing.

Well, it turns out the next day I go in there to clean up and Dan Dixon, the very Dan Dixon I just mentioned, says, Joe, what the hell did you guys do with this dance? I said, what are you talking about? He said, there's like these. gouges across this entire parquet dining room floor. Well, these screws are just cutting a track through all this parquet.

And Dan had the skill to actually figure out how to fix this. It was a really big deal. And he just kept it under the radar, fixed the floor. And so later on when I worked for him and I worked at maintenance in university schools, maintenance group, every time they would send me to do a chore in the dining hall, Dan would always say, no, not the dining hall.

The Joe Brown saved the last dance for me dining. And every freaking time the dining hall came up and I still laugh about that. That's really good. You know, after kind of U.S., you really kind of went to Middlebury.

What attracted you to Middlebury College and how did you kind of decide to go there? Well, I have to say I did the college trips that kids do. And when we pulled into Middlebury, it was love at first sight. It literally took my breath away.

I didn't think I would be able to get in. I probably shouldn't have gotten in at that time. I was probably more of a student than I was an academic. I didn't want to miss the estuvial time.

I felt like you could get on the bus with me in your own car. But you know what, I didn't have a car. I don't even know what that is where I was going. I was already an した professor and I wasn't good in that.

I was an expat academically strong in my last two years and not so strong in my first two years. Dr. Holly, who was headmaster at the time had gone to Middlebury. And I got a spontaneous interview.

We drove up there from Cleveland, ten hour drive. that i was probably sitting in a seat that might have gone to somebody else and maybe should have and it launched me into middlebury with a real sense of focus yeah and what exactly did you study at middlebury and like us were there any professors or classes that inspired you during college yeah i was a political science major i thought for a while i'd probably become an attorney um but i just like that i just like that work and you know let you cross into history and philosophy and a lot of other things i had great professors but i'll just tell you about this one professor susan gray she assigned a 10-page paper on primary source literature it had to come from the antiquities library so i read this personal journal uh moving to michigan which was the western frontier written by this young woman so i wrote this 10-page paper my first paper for her freshman year she wrote me a five-page response and what i learned immediately was they expect me to be a scholar this is not about grades i'm not a student it's not homework they're asking me to be a scholar and they're taking me seriously and susan and greg completely changed my concept of what was expected of me in college and what i wanted to put into it so that was pretty cool experience yeah and we'll get into more of your career but um just as a spoiler you spent a lot of time in the aviation industry did middlebury college in any way prepare you or give you skills do in that career yeah i mean between university school and middlebury the overall um concept of those educational models is to make you a broad thinker make you a person who is excited about entering new domains who who's not worried about knowing the answer right now because you can dig in and get the answer and so i think really for me almost everything i did in work was new i mean at first it was new to just be in manufacturing then it was new to have different roles and duties and then it was new to buy companies that we had never worked in before and now we're supposed to figure out how to make them run so this uh interest in lifelong learning and tackling new challenges and and synthesizing hard questions those are the things that came out of my education you know you thought let's kind of go to the part about kind of your career what was your first job after college what were those kind of few years after college and kind of getting to your career what did your kind of career as a whole look like yeah well my parents had a general rule that you had to have a job at 13 and it had to be in the trades some kind of trade so my sisters pumped gas my brother worked on a seismic crew he was also an all-star caddy on my dad and i worked in commercial painting and construction so when i got to college my dad somehow managed to pull off the deal of the century which was to buy this company hartzell propeller i think i was a junior he didn't have any money so he borrowed 100 of the purchase price and dan dixon and i went down to see it and dan again being the mentor he was to me said oh my god this is the greatest machine shop i've ever seen it was just it was an incredible manufacturing company and it really motivated me to think man maybe i could be part of this for a little while and help my dad so it turns out my first job out of college was going to work on the plant floor at hartzell propeller i thought i'd stay a couple years try to be useful to my dad and then move on and i never did so i started there i ended up in production control which is really about moving parts through the plant after making some of those parts and it really turned me i guess over the long term into an ops guy operations and everything i did after that was was grounded in operations you know quality products on time shortly times lower cost that's the mantra and i had a great career loved every minute of it and now aviation that you've you worked with for so long as a passion of yours did you develop that like had you already had that interest going into your career with hard sell or did you kind of develop that as you worked with in the company no that that that must have been in me at birth you know my father was a pilot he was a navy pilot um in the 50s a the uss bon harbor shard and he he was a hero figure to me um but i mean i think the first thing i ever drew was an airplane the first thing i ever built in my little wood shop in my in my basement was an airplane uh so i always had that interest and you know hartzell of course created this launch pad for a broad exposure to aviation and to be a pilot and to fly a lot to fly with my dad so you know that alignment was made in heaven for me me you know the operations side the the trade side and then the fact that it was aviation just kind of made it perfect you know did you ever kind of develop a love for flying enough to kind of get a flight license and kind of go up there yourself like throughout your career did you kind of mix the two the manufacturing side with kind of just the flying um well it turned out that my job over time um had a lot of outward facing work in sales and and essentially promoting the company and since all of our customers built airplanes they were almost all on airstrips somewhere so the job of getting your customer involved flying there and you know we had a flight department with a hanger uh we operated several aircraft that had propellers on them as you might imagine and you know i flew all over the country i'm in canada i was flying 500 hours a year and doing that for work my hobby as well so the minute work's done we all get together and go fly again and uh so work and flying were were daily connected and you and your brother jim um eventually took over the company from your father how did you balance family and business when you both ran the company together we didn't we threw everything in our lives into the same bucket we we were partners we lived in the same town we sent our kids to the same school they played on the same team we did halloween together we had every christmas together uh we were so overlapping in our venn diagram so to speak that there was no separating our family life from our work life and you know i will say that that that creates some of the greatest rewards you can have with your partner my brother was my best man in my wedding and i was his best man so we we had a great kinship but that that overlap can some really challenging times when things aren't going so well and we had some patches that we had to work through but you never get separated because everything's connected so you got to live with with each and every part of your co-existing life but i'll say man we figured it out and our home stretch was as collegial and connected and loving as you could have ever have with a brother and a partner and uh what a journey incredible you know in 2004 you and jim made this program called the world of tailwind and i think it's a great way to put it in terms of how you transform tailwind technologies to kind of expand even further than propellers what inspired that movement to kind of like a holding company with multiple aviation businesses yeah well you guys are probably too young to remember but you have maybe a sense of it you know the 33 record album the vinyl albums that are kind of coming back and people are buying them to to play music on you know you put them on the turntable i'm literally talking to you like like you know music currency of our day and they literally were wiped off the face of the earth by the compact disc Kodak was a titan company of our day and it was pretty much wiped off the face of the earth by digital cameras so we we had the sense that we were living in a time where companies based on technology could be thriving one day and dead the next like you could just have the tides turn against your technology and propellers you know have been around since the wright brothers and you had to think at some point we were going to enter a Jetson's age and you know jets were going to displace propellers so we were committed to this notion of hedging the sources and opportunities for our careers for our co-workers careers so we wanted to buy companies that diversified our propeller business and it turns out over the length of our career it was not a buggy whip business it was not Kodak we continued to grow and be strong in that business but we also ended up with all these other amazing experiences at all these other great companies so it was cool it's really fun and i want to touch on that connection to the wright brothers a little bit i believe hard cell propellers has a connection to the wright brothers um can you explain that if that is true it's definitely true um you know those guys were trying to figure out how to take this amazing thing that they that they developed you know the ability to fly and commercialize it in some way and they they got this contract for the uh essentially newly founded army air corps to build aircraft for them and the dayton wright aircraft company and they had to build out a little supply chain one of their number one failures in their own experimentation had been with propellers because they take such a an amazing amount of load and this guy named robert hartzell was a young man he wanted to be a barnstormer pilot his parents owned a lumberyard lumber business and they said you cannot be a barnstormer you have to be a barnstormer and so he started something called the hartzell propeller the hartzell walnut propeller company and he's the guy that invented the motto built on honor i might add that was in 1917 and my brother and i were at the helm of the company together when it turned 100 which was really really cool really cool and then going to that motto of built on honor i think that's such a unique motto for a company so how did you and your brother integrate honor and integrity into the culture of the company as it grew well i have to say that that part of that of ohio west central ohio is a high integrity uh place to do work and life in you know the people there a lot of them are in catholic parish towns they're very civic minded they care about their neighbors so the the ethics of our community were extremely strong so when you say to somebody at work you know town honors what we stand for they go of course it wasn't like some new idea to them what was really really powerful about that is it supersedes rules and supersedes handbooks you don't need a lot of policies if you come to work and your mission is to build on honor you're really inviting every person to bring their best selves and their best values to the job you know and a company like that quality is critical i mean it's absolutely crucial and you're depending on people who step up to the highest standards uh so To us, it was a unifying theme for everybody that worked there and it set an expectation that we would all strive to meet. And it kept life pretty simple. You know, at the end of the day, you do the right thing, period. You know, the culture here is kind of largely built on this kind of brotherhood and community kind of at U.S.

How did those ideals play out throughout your life? I mean, you kind of talked about the idea with Hartzell and how you guys are built on honor with that integrity, but kind of even going throughout your life when it comes to U.S., Middlebury, even with aviation, even to now, how do you feel like that idea of that kind of community culture really come together? You know, when I thought about that question, you gave me a little teaser on that. I thought immediately I should tell you that, you know, two of my closest lifelong friends are both U.S. guys.

One is Bill Champ, still works at university school. One is Randy. Randy Markey, distinguished graduate. We met when we were five, and we shared U.S. day camp, and for me, then, the lower school and the upper school.

And I still am in regular contact. These guys are like brothers to me. And, you know, when I got to U.S. as a seventh grader, they embraced me like I had been there the whole time. So there was something about the U.S. culture that just caused kids to recognize they're going to share their lives together.

And long after U.S. And then, of course, in our business, four U.S. guys made up our board, and they were older than us, and their coaching and counseling was absolutely a game changer in the quality of the companies and the quality of our leadership and management competency. That's Mark Burns and Rob McCreary and Brent Ballard and Dick Hollington. And, you know, those guys, they did that for brotherhood.

They just wanted to see us be friends. They just wanted to see us be successful. They wanted to honor my dad, who they really liked, and it was always personal. So, you know, I do feel that U.S. has a special ability to build connection for a lifetime among kids that go there.

Yeah. And you mentioned some of those people as being kind of mentors in your business, but I would imagine your father also had a large impact on your business career as he had a long and successful career as well. So what's one piece of advice from him that you still remember and use? Whether that's...

If it's in business or just life. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that guy was larger than life to me and a lot of other people.

Just a terrific, terrific guy. But he did say certain things. They were mantras in our family. They were mantras to me.

So it's not just one, but it's not too many. The first one was, let's go be somebody. You know, he'd walk into a room, be struggling with a problem, and he'd say, let's go be somebody. And it just put things in context.

Like, you know... Like, we're out and about. We got to get things done. He used to say that he believed in the 11th commandment, which was, thou shalt go for it.

And that was definitely a family mantra. And then when we were all jammed up, he would say, do something, even if it's wrong. And he didn't mean wrong on a moral level. He meant, let's go with the power of motion.

Let's just get cracking. We'll figure it out. But we're not going to figure it out sort of hanging around. So he was a guy that inspired you.

He inspired you to just do. And not worry about failure, not worry about whether you have it perfect. Just get going. And that really worked for me.

I have to say, maybe I respond to those things so much. But the last thing he said, and I want to say it to you guys, because I think this is actually something we should always strive to remember. He would always say, we need the best athletes on the team. And so he was a very smart guy, but he was always trolling for people who were smart and capable to join the company.

He was genius. Just a guy always searching for the talent that could make that difference. You know, we're in West Central Ohio. It's not like, you know, we're right on the edge of the cornfields of the Great Plains.

But we had some powerhouse talent in that place because he was always looking for it. And what made someone so appealing to your father or to you to hire? Like when you someone came and said, I want to work for Hartzell Propellers, what what did you look for in that person? Well, he believed a lot of people that.

I guess the phrase these days would lean in, but really, really took their education seriously. It didn't have to be Ivy League or some such thing, but people who really devoted themselves to education did well in school, took tough majors. He was a chemical engineer, so he loved guys that did engineering. But really, it was energy level, work ethic.

You know, he could see the person who would respond to the notion, let's go be somebody and those are the people he always tried to bring into his career. And I think that's what he did. I think that's what he did. And I think that's what he did.

He was the kind of person who kind of went into his life and mentor. And there's and there's a bunch of them that went to US on my dad. So, you know, he just kindred spirits, I would say, with a lot of intellectual horsepower. That's what he was looking for.

You know, in October 2023, you sold Heartzel Aviation to our clan. How did you kind of come to the decision to sell after 37 years as really just stewards of the company? Yeah. I mean, at the base, that's a heartbreaking decision. the work and my own sense of personal identity.

I thought we would maybe be able to take that business through a family transition and maybe get another generation in there. But we experienced this thing, I would say the paradox of success is that we with the help of the board and a great team, we built a company that really got too big to make an in-house transfer. It was successful and it needed somebody who was really a professional buyer. We did not have a good succession plan inside the family.

We had to look outside. Our partnership involved people that were slightly different in age and some of them were ready to devote the rest of their life to new challenges. As a partnership, we just decided we would test the market. I didn't think it was going to sell by the way.

This was in the middle of the COVID interest rates and I didn't think anybody would finance a deal. I was wrong and in a handful of months, I was cleaning out my office wondering how did that happen? It did and in some ways, I'm teasing. I clearly understood it was a good decision for a lot of reasons and my partners just rushed the process of going to market, absolutely crushed it.

So the deal went very smoothly and it was successful and I didn't have much to do with that. I was, I was still in the operations, you know, trying to get product shipped but it was the end of a great tour. I'm happy for the team going forward as people are still running those companies, but I missed it. You know, have you had any either really really memorable flights or kind of just adventures in the air or maybe a long cross country?

Obviously, you said that you did about 500 miles, which is just crazy, right? So do you have some memorable moments in the air or just even working on the company and working on the ground? I flew a lot. So there's a bunch of them.

But when my dad died, I did describe one flight and the eulogy that meant a lot to me. And you know, he was the sponsor of my flying. He was directly responsible for me having those opportunities and we were flying up to Cleveland one day and it was terrible weather. We were going in Birk Lake front and unlike the normal course of events, he was going to fly with me.

I was going to fly in an airplane that I was using. He was going to ride in the right seat and that had often been flipped the other way. So this is really my first time to show my chops in challenging circumstances to my dad. And the second he closed the door, he went absolutely full passenger.

You would think this guy had never been in an airplane before. He wouldn't look at any of my gauges. He would look at me. He just spent the whole time looking out the window because he was signaling to me.

You got this. I'm out. Hand it. And when I landed at Birk, it was windy and gusty and rainy and terrible.

And the flight turned out pretty good. And then he leaned over to me and he gave me a little dap on the thigh and said, good hop. And I'll never forget. It was like the ultimate moment of kind of graduating into the league of my father, not as a pilot, but as somebody who shared that passion with him.

And it was his endorsement that, that meant the world to me. Well, that's amazing. I want to turn here a little bit to your philanthropy work. You co-founded the yellow house community in Vermont.

Can you tell us what yellow house is and why you helped start it? Yeah. And yeah, I don't use the word philanthropy for myself. I just like so many people that come out of university school and all the great schools in Cleveland.

You know, we were all raised with a civic mindset. You're supposed to deliver something back to the place you call home. But in the case of yellow house, I have four children, one of whom is special needs and, you know, she's going to need lifelong care. She'll be dependent on others for the extent of her life.

And we have the goal of a lot of families that have special needs children, which is to build some kind of residential experience for them. That's independent. And so we moved to Vermont to open it in the town of Middlebury because all my other kids went to Middlebury. So we figured this would be a center of gravity, for the long haul.

And we house a crew of special needs adults. We have a staff that looks after them 24-7, 365. We're in our fifth year. And I will say the great byproduct of that is not just the independent living experience, but all these kids are growing because they have to live real life together.

You know, there's no parents to sort of butt to the answer and take care of their needs. They got to figure it out. So it's been very successful. We're really proud of our daughter, really proud of that place.

What lessons do you have you learned from your daughter through some of those challenges that I'm sure you've faced? But what lessons have you learned from her that you don't think you would have in a different case? My daughter's special needs make her dependent, but she was also blessed with the most profound empathy and social IQ. Absolutely off the charts.

And so, you know, she meets the world with this joyful spirit, this loving spirit, and she makes her neighborhood better. She makes her friend group better. She makes them very better. And the thing I've learned from her and man, I just try to build on this in my own life is meet the world with a happy heart and you will make the world a little better just by that.

And that's what she does. She makes me laugh all the time. She gives me a youthful spirit. She loves the party.

She loves rock and roll. So, you know, she's just a joyful soul and it's infectious. You know, in addition to the in addition to yellow house, you and Jim made a big gift to create a home for the center for the edge to create a home for the center for the education of boys at US. What really motivated you to support that cause and have you kind of stayed involved with university school now, whether it's visiting the campus or kind of just talking with students like us?

Well, that that gift, at least from my perspective, was a testimony to Art Burns, Rob McCurry, Brent Ballard, Dick Collington that I think every one of those guys has been board president of University School and they they've all served on the board and they all serve Cleveland civically. I mean, these guys are just powerhouse men and do good. So that was her. That was our way of trying to say thank you for the fact that they put us on the list of people to help make.

They helped our companies for, you know, a decade or more. And so that was that my brother stayed involved. He's on the board of University School. Now, you know, I'm tended to be more focused on middle grade partly because I live here and had three kids go there.

But from the standpoint of a different University School, I'm still very close to a number of my classmates. And we do join together on some local Cleveland activities, including the life at golf tournament, which is, you know, aimed at educating youth about depression and the risk of suicide. And that's because we lost one of our class of 85 friends way too young. And so we we stick together on that.

And as you look back on your career, a little reflection exercise here, you know, I mean, you've basically done it all. You've had a very successful career. You've had children. And that I've grown up.

But how do you define success at this point in your life? You know, probably in my 40s, if I was honest, I would have said the form achieve and deliver. And I think give back was on that list as well. But I didn't have as much time to do that.

So I would say that the script now is sort of give back support mode, you know, find people and things that you can get back to support and promote. And it's a very personal time for me. And it's less about what I do. And it's more about who I'm with and who I can help if I can be of help.

And I'm so blessed. It's absurd. And I hope you guys feel that way in your own life, you know, all through it. And especially when you get to what I call the wisdom phase.

But I just had a lot of good things in my life. And it gives me a lot of opportunities to take on missions and be part of things. It's fantastic. You know, kind of following that.

Is there anything you would do? Differently if you were starting your career today? Oh my God, no. If I did one thing differently, I changed the whole vector.

If I'm reincarnated, I want this every time. It's been incredible. It's unfair. It's so good.

And that idea of gratitude. How do you continue? Because I'm sure it wasn't smooth sailing the entire career that you had with Hartzell. But how did you manage to kind of stay grateful for what you have?

And how do you think people in general can just be more grateful and reflect on what they have, not what they don't have? Yeah, I don't know. I always loved the exercise in trying to take something from its current state to a more excellent state. And it really wasn't about money.

It wasn't about recognition. It was about the endeavor. The work of understanding complex things and trying to figure out how to tune them up to better form. It was so rewarding that I was literally grateful all the time for just the opportunities to go find the next challenge, work on it with great people.

And what I found along the way is that is how most people are wired. If you can do something that you feel is purposeful with a strong group of peers, most people feel a lot of gratitude in their life. And so if they can't find it at work, they got to find it at church or a club or coaching their kids or whatever it might be. But I think in the end, the thing that drives gratitude is connecting to something that gives you a sense of purpose.

And then it's just automatic. You know, kind of speaking of the future, are there any kind of big project or ideas that you still kind of really hope to pursue now that Heart Souls with the new owner and that you're in kind of, as you said, that wisdom stage of life? Yeah. You know, we got to figure out how to get Yellow House to survive our death, you know, because at some point our child's going to be dependent on an organization that we're not there for.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And we just need to get her there to support directly. It's got to be in the hands of others and it's got to outlast us and it's got to last as long as her life. That's a big challenge.

You know, that's a 40, 50 year plan. Well, no, it might be a 60 year plan. So that's a big project. And we also have to learn to make that place work as they age, you know, because they're all young and do cool stuff.

And someday they're going to be old people. And I'm really interested in the state of education in this country. think it's doing a very good job notwithstanding the excellence of a place like university school but you know we're not producing the the best well the best kids when it comes to education we gotta we gotta go through some kind of really important education reform um but we're gonna lose ground and this country is too important to let that happen why do you think um maybe that is happening and what do you think kids can do even if their school isn't providing them the best education to give themselves their own kind of education in order to be the best when they come out of school well it's a very complicated question and some of it's the politics in education and some of it's you know the broadening of access and education has made it hard to to know what a fair standard is kids come in with different levels of preparation it has nothing to do with whether they're a great intellectual athlete it just is a function of how much training they've had so we're trying to meet this the need to meet the needs of the students and we're trying to meet the needs of the students and this is a very important part of this and so we're trying to get this to a much broader dynamic and educate with more variation in the student body at all levels but i also think you know there's a breakdown in the ethics in society and so we don't even know how to declare what standards we're chasing anymore for for an educated life what does that really mean so i think we have to get back to basics i think schools will do well if they And you guys live in a time where almost none of that is present in the public domain. It's hashtags, it's Instagram, it's shallow, it's binary thinking, it's political warfare. It's not deep cognition.

It's not ethics-based cognition. And so we have to get back to that. And, you know, I would say to you guys, your challenges are immense in your generation. It has nothing to do with you.

It's what's going on around you. You live in a time where public institutions, in my mind, are shallow and broken. You live in a time where hard-to-identify public leaders we would all universally admire. That wasn't true even 25 years ago.

So you're the restoration generation, in my mind. And you guys have to, unfortunately, you have the job of being deeper thinkers and sort of overcome the trends of our time. And the other question. And I think you have a great opportunity, which is that you yourselves and your peers are showing up into a world in which the person who comes early, stays late, and works hard will appear to be a franchise player very quickly.

You, in this world, will be rock stars if you throw yourself out to work, if you throw yourself at your opportunities. And so you have a lot on your plate, but I'm very optimistic about your success quotients. And speaking of those opportunities that you talked about, what do you think some of the biggest opportunities for us are? Because I feel like a lot of times we're bombarded with all the negativities of the difficulties of what we're going into, what we're entering into.

But what are some of the opportunities that you see that we can kind of capitalize on from your perspective? You know, I don't know if you've ever gone into a room where there's a natural tension in the situation. You know that there's going to be some friction and conflict. And there's that person in the room.

It just has a demeanor of leaderly bearing because they're thoughtful. They care what other people think. And the room kind of settles down and gravitates to that model. That person who just says, you know, we can talk about this.

We can all get through this. That kind of leaderly competence, we need a lot more of. But the people who possess it can, I think, over time, you know, supercharge the civic duties we all used to be raised in. And supercharge the cohesion of teams they serve on.

So it sounds grand and also too general, but I think the opportunity is for your generation to produce the kind of thoughtful leader that starts reconnecting people at the fundamental level while we do the hard things in life, like jobs and help municipalities thrive and fix education. But it's going to come down to personal character, personal quality. And so you guys are tuning your own personal code right now. And when you take that into the world, it can make a big difference.

And I encourage you guys to see the world as a place you need to meet the code, your own code. You know, one of the things we always love to ask in every single one of our episodes is what is your why? What motivates you to really get out in the morning and keep going after all these years and really have a passion in everything you do? Well, I have to say right now, my life is just.

Filled with delight in what's going on in my kids' lives. Cannot wait to wake up and be a cheerleader for what's happening for them. You know, I'm off the road. I used to travel a lot.

And so you're definitely waking up for the story of their lives. I'm waking up for the story of my new grandchild's life. My daughter had her first child, our first grandchild. But really, I'm waking up to pay it back and pay it.

Forward. I just I just so many good things have happened in my life. I have an incredible life. Our marriage is good.

I got time to deliver on all that. And that's what I'm working on. Just trying to pay it back. Well, Mr.

Brown, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great having you on the show today. And thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and experiences with us and to our listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll hope you'll join us next Wednesday for the next episode of late start show.

Thank you, Mr. Brown. Thank you.