The greatest cities for the next one hundred years in North America will be the cities that have an authenticity where talent migrates, lack of talent has a hard time migrating, Where talent wants to go. The world changed in the last fifty years. When I got out of school, I didn't get out of school fifty years ago, but it was a while back. But when you get out of school, if I wanted to build stuff, I went to Detroit. If I had been good looking, I'd have gone to LA for Hollywood. If I could play a guitar, I'd have gone to Nashville. You went to the job, finally, I went to New York. Now it's different. Game changed. Talent goes to where it wants to be and the jobs follow. The most successful cities of the next hundred years in North America will be the cities that build the place where people wanna be because the jobs will follow the people. And welcome to Tuesdays with Morrissey, where we share insights from great thinkers. I'm excited to be joined by Mike Avalon, founder of Pegasus Avalon, a Dallas based real estate development firm responsible for the transformation of the Dallas design district and former Dallas Mayo oral candidate. Mike, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. No. Anytime a musician like Morrissey is doing a podcast, I I gotta jump in. I mean, you know, you look good for your age. I'm excited to have a conversation about your career and worldview, particularly as it relates to places and cities and a concept that we've talked about in the past around being a master craftsman. Before we do that, wanna go back to our first conversation, which was probably in twenty twenty one. The first thing you ever said to me was, Adam, there's a misconception about me that I'm entrepreneurial. I'm not. What do you mean by that? Well, first, thanks for having me, and thanks for doing the show, and thanks for the subject matter that you cover. Yeah, I think most people and it's a good thing. They want make their mark or they have, they wanna build a company. I actually, at a young age, knew what I wanted to do, which is a bit odd, you know, at fifteen, and I'm still doing it, and it's all I've ever wanted to do, which was become a master craftsman of building places, cities, buildings, where culture and commerce come together to make cities. It's fascinating me my whole life. And I worked for other people who were doing that during school and after school. And when I ran out of people to work for, I actually opened my own company, tried to build a company so I could work for my own company doing what I wanted to do. So the starting a company, owning a company wasn't necessarily I wanna be entrepreneurial. It was what I needed to do to build to in pursuit of becoming a master craftsman. So I think we want entrepreneurialism. It's the base of American mercantile growth. It's wonderful. It's just the reason which I ended up opening a company wasn't with an entrepreneurial spirit. It was in pursuit of becoming a master craftsman, which is a little different, I think. Yeah. It is. It's it's quite countercultural. You know, the joke is in, you know, if you get an MBA these days, you have to become an entrepreneur. And really and then it ends up becoming, like, there's this there are these real things. They call them pre idea camps where it's like, you have a founder, but they don't have an idea yet. So they go to these workshops to find an idea, to find something to build as opposed to an authentic expression out of a passion or an interest or a skill set. Yeah, and that can be great. You know, somebody wants to build something, so they go to a convention and there's eighty seven, franchise opportunities and you can buy some franchise and expand it. And then you're an entrepreneurial kind of format with a brand, and that's great. It's not my venue, but it's, I guess that's, it is kind of funny to have the meaning for those people is clearly to build a business, which is great. Meaning for me is building cities and specifically a city being Dallas Fort Worth. I think for a lot of people, hopefully not, but I think there can be a risk that it can fall into a little bit of an ego thing. But I am a founder of X or an identity thing and wanted to be associated with that. Many times somebody wants to come by my firm and let me build things that matter, I would happily give up the, you know, pass on that piece of the baton. You mentioned, you know, back to your childhood, this is something you wanted to do. Was there like a specific event or a series of events that exposed you to be like, wow, I really do have this fascination with kind of the intersection of real estate people and culture? Yeah, that's a great question. Was there a flashpoint, a single individual moment? No, I can't even tell you why I like it. I just like it. It's been part of my DNA. I really enjoyed the design side and the architecture and the significance of how you can take meaning and build it and how that can be catalytic to ideas that are positive. You go back to the forum in Rome, which was the heart of Rome and the Roman Empire, and the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which was the place where everybody gathered. It was mercantile, but it was as much culture and politics. I enjoyed the design. I enjoyed the building of it, the engineering. I enjoyed the construction. And there is a mercantile piece of infrastructure that defines society and always has, so you can either complain about it or embrace it and integrate it. And so those were my studies academically and pursuits professionally and then putting them together. So yeah, no individual flashpoint, just a passion for the final result. And you mentioned early mentorship. Like, who were some of those folks? You know, I worked in kind of around Dallas real estate for a while, so I know about some of the legends that kinda laid the foundation. Were there folks in particular that you worked with that made a big big impact on you? Yeah. After school, I applied to work for two people, a gentleman in New York named I. M. Pei. No way. And a gentleman in Philadelphia named Robert Venturi. So Venturi was one of the greatest theorists in the world, and he was building national galleys at Trafalgar Square, a renowned architect and a theorist. So I went and interviewed with both of them, got was fortunate to receive two offers and went to go work for Robert Venturi. And though you can't see it because it's behind the screen here, there's a poster he had that he signed and sent me because I was joking with him one day. Said, Will you send me something that I can hang in my door so I remember where I came from? I apprenticed for Venturi for years, loved the man as a human and as a teacher. So he was the first great mentor. After that, I went to Europe on fellowship, then went back to Boston for grad school. When I came back to Dallas, I went to work for the Perot Group. Now it's called Hillwood, but Ross Perot's family office that was starting a real estate company. So there's your second set of mentoring. And then I had a chance later on to work with two publicly traded New York Stock Exchange REITs, Cousins, which was Tom Cousins, and Car America, which was Tom Carr. So I think I have had, if you look at the things that have been lucky in your life, I have definitely been the beneficiary of incredible mentoring. And then as you said, Dallas has been a hub of real estate for fifty years. The Trammell Crow Company came out of Dallas, Lincoln Property, all of these huge nationals and internationals came out of Dallas. So I was around those people. And so I just tried to kind of find a chair in the back of the room. Know, I had a job when I was working for Mr. Perot, one of the first projects I called myself schleppy first class. I just wanna be in the room and listen. So yes, I think mentoring really, really matters. And it's not just the tactical side of how does one think, how does one do business, how does one design, how does one build, how do you conduct yourself? What is it about being in the process that enables really interesting things to happen? Because you have to have a lot of components to come together. That was the best part of mentoring. Because each of those people I mentioned had remarkable people skills, along with their work skills, were obviously off the chart. I wasn't proactive enough to be able to do it myself, but if I could give advice to like a freshman in college, because you know, later in your college career, you might get like an internship at, you know, a big company or whatever. But if I could I I I was just too late to ask and the positions were already filled, but, you know, generally the advice I would give is like, you're freshman year out of college, go find the most successful and respectful person in your immediate kinda sphere. In my sphere, it was probably a good family friend who was a multi time bank founder and then grew the banks and sold the banks named Harvey Glick out of Columbus, Ohio. But go find the most successful person in your sphere and just, you know, do whatever you can to work for them for a summer. That's what I would say. Yeah. I I I actually did that. I went to four years of engineering and five years of architecture, all in undergrad. So I overlaid them, so it took six years. So each summer progressively, I had another internship with another firm, which in a sense is cumulative. And that's what got me to the point of being able to go make those two applications after school and those two firms. So yeah, I think my life experience has been what you talked about and it worked very well. I didn't know about I. Pay, and I was amazed. So I found out about I. Pay, I was reading, there's a book about the founding of CAA, Creative Artists Agency, Mike Ovets. It was called Powerhouse. It was really one of the books for me that kind of lit my spark around like, man, I want go do something, you know, build something, whatever. And, they they build a new CAA office and I they brought in I'm pay to design. It was the first Century City office. And then I was amazed to see how many, once I found out about IMP, how many IMP buildings are in Dallas? Yeah, they were around me in Dallas, and he building, he had built the city hall, the library, a couple high rises. He was at that time building the Symphony Hall and he had finished the Pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, is obviously pretty renowned, a big building in Boston and Washington. And yeah, he was the, as a practitioner, he was a little bit of the golden boy of the moment. And, you know, your wherewithal isn't that sophisticated to understand too much, but it seemed like a great place to start. Yeah, it's the tip of the spear of Spark for a gateway. You mentioned layering on architecture and engineering. You later added finance. Talk a little bit about that journey to bring them together to what you consider to be master craftsmanship. I'll take a step past that also because it was fairly natural to go start working on construction sites, because at the end the day, you have to build it, while you're studying the engineering, which is different than construction, while you're studying the design, which is different than engineering or construction, and then you come to the understanding, at least for me, that the practitioners, the master craftsman three hundred years ago in architecture were what we today call developers. Back then, they called it the architect, but the architect actually oversaw the engineering, the architecture, the construction, and had to go find a patron and raise money too. You did have people who were either of royalty or the clergy or big families, but mostly architects did everything. So what I practice today is probably fairly close to what an architect did three hundred years ago and less close to the hyper divisions that we have now where you don't just have an architect, you have a landscape architect, you have a lighting architect, you have an interior architect, you have a building. I like the holistic notion of it. The part that's interesting to me isn't just the layering in the finance, It's the part where how does it add to the culture of a city, of a society that grows? And the fun thing about being in America is London and Paris both pretty much started around zero AD with the Romans coming in. So those are two thousand year old cities. And we all had the pleasure of studying American history. So we know Boston and New York are the three hundred, four hundred. Dallas is a baby. I mean, you could argue that Dallas went from a town on the prairie to a city in nineteen thirty six, so it's coming up on its one hundredth anniversary. Compare that to a London that's at two thousand, and we are a baby of a city. If one does work at this point that can be constructively pivotal towards building a culture in a city and a place, that's a pretty fun thought. Yeah, it reminds me, like Tokyo is a great example of a city that's very old, but also got an opportunity to rebuild itself, and and they made something really unique and modern and special. You know, when we're talking about the concept of MasterCraftsman, Daniel Pink is a former guest of the show. I was reading the next guest after you, James Kerr's book Legacy this morning, which he references Pink, in the book Drive. He says, you know, what really motivates people are three things, mastering autonomy and purpose. And when we're talking about the concept of the master craftsman, I think that those things all play in. Being part of a process that has a longer timeframe to it, Not a two year, three year product, you'll build it, scale it and sell it but something that is of a greater longer, window of time a pretty awesome thought. Yeah, it is. There's a real power to long term thinking and thinking in decades instead of days. I remember you told me once, people will come up to you and say, Hey, I wanna do what you do. And not sure what you'd say to Dave, but at the time you told me you would share, Hey, give it twenty years and you can do it too. Yeah, that doesn't land real well. Yeah, no, no sir. Can't imagine it does. Not in our culture. We've talked about a lot of great cities. We've talked about Dallas' opportunity to be in its embassies. Like in your mind, what does make cities great? Oh, that's such a cool question. I you what, I come at it from two different angles. One angle is if you and I were talking about Manhattan, hey, Adam, have you been to Manhattan? You say, you wouldn't say, yeah, I went to Manhattan. You'd say, yeah. You know, I was in Soho and I was in Harlem and Midtown and West Village. You're naming distinct places. And that is one of the hallmarks of a mature city is you start naming places, neighborhoods. And when you talk about Dallas, we're just actually really getting to that point where we have distinctive neighborhoods, places that have their own ethos, their own culture. You mentioned one I worked on, which was the design district, which was built seventy years ago. It was light manufacturing for the aviation industry for World War II, and then it was crafts, and then it got into textiles and design. And that's what it was, and we acquired a large portion of it about twenty years ago to redevelop it. But we want to keep the ethos, the vibe of creative, it's creative thinking. So we tried to put in creative housing to break all the rules of finance. All of the restaurants we brought in, I had a no nationals policy. If you've heard of them, I wouldn't sign a lease. There's nothing wrong with Starbucks. It's great. I just wanted the local coffee shop, the local restaurant who wants to drive past eighteen Bed Baths and Beyonds to go shop at Bed Bath and Beyond. So it was a no nationals policy, so and didn't have a creative, and all of sudden you had creative office, creative living, and it really picked up to a neighborhood that has a culture. So the first part of a city that's fun, that shows a mature city, that builds great cities, I think, is distinctive places for each of us. And then the other part, does it have the opportunity for, for instance, you, you're on the, well, let's talk about you, Adam. Seasons of your life, when you're out of college, where do you wanna live? And if you go into family formation, where would you wanna live to go into family formation and raise a kid? And then if the kids are gone, where would you wanna live in the next phase? So it's the seasons of your life. So it means you wanna have maybe a more urban fabric and a high energy fabric and a business fabric and maybe a suburban fabric to go with it. So it's the composition of all of the pieces. Part of what makes a great city is it has places for each of us. It also has places for each of us as individuals in seasons of our life or seasons of our need, because then you don't leave. You don't come here for business and then leave to go someplace else. Oh, it's not a good place to raise a family. It's not a good place to recreate or retire or to grow a career. You want a place that has all of the above. So that's the part where culture and commerce and city fabric all knit together. I think that is part of what makes cities that have a long shelf life. And cities, I mean, remember when you're talking about cities, you're talking about hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. And the healthiest cities had that diversity. Yeah, a couple comments there, both on districts and sustainability. I liked Danny Meyer's book Setting the Table. It's hard to believe if you go to Manhattan today that these cool neighborhoods were transitional neighborhoods, you know, in the eighties and nineties. One of his and I'm sure this is as much looking back at what he did as when he was doing it, but he looked at restaurants as neighborhood transformation projects. So you look at his Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, he wanted to create a central place that was part of a neighborhood story. And that's part of what made these districts, you know, great and part of his restaurants great. To work off of what you're saying, it's really cool. You go put in the Highline and then let everybody else adjust according to Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea Market. They all completely evolve the meat packing district from what they were to their next iteration. So sometimes it's actually not putting in the cafe, it's putting in a piece of infrastructure that is catalytic in a positive way to four other things happening. That's also really fascinating. I spent a lot of time on the community side, building large pieces of fabric, which are parks in Dallas, community pieces, because they do that. And then you're leveraging, then let Adam and Bob and Sarah all do their pieces where they are in their own way because having ten people do ten things is a heck of a lot more interesting than having one person do ten things. On the sustainability thing, think it's a really good point. I mean, one thing that I benefited from being in Texas over the last ten years is I found that you're one degree of separation from literally anybody, and the culture is such that people are willing to create and connect and, you know, help each other. I think in Dallas too specifically, there's all there's just so much legacy business and nonprofit infrastructure that it makes for a really rich environment. Like, I'm in Austin now, but still spend some time in Dallas. I have, you know, a mentee in Big Brothers Big Sisters that's eighteen, and I have, you know, friends in Dallas that are in their I don't think I have many in their eighties, but definitely, you know, sixties and seventies, which makes it a really rich experience. So I I actually grew up in Dallas. So I leave Dallas at eighteen and we had two point four million people. I come back and it's four point two million after my ten year walkabout. And I remember Mr. Perrault saying, we're gonna get to six million people. I'm like, yeah, dude, you know, right, really good. We blew past that. We are well into the eight and a half to nine million. We're gonna pass Chicago in the next ten to fifteen years as the third largest. So the point of that isn't that we're gonna be the third largest MSA. The point of it is during a sphere of a fifty year window, you're going from two million to ten million people, which effectively means everybody here is an immigrant. Nobody really grew up here. So you talk about why is it such an open society and so embracing? It's because we all just got here, which is really interesting. A lot of times when I'm giving speeches to drive that home, I do a hand raise. Everybody whose great grandparents grew up in Dallas, raise your hand. Nobody. Everybody whose grandparents, there might be one. Parents, there's a few. If you just got here or your parents got here when you were young and growing up, raise your hand. And then it puts into your head that we all just got here. So somebody like me in a Dallas starts a company, the company doesn't go from one person with a one room office with ten thousand dollars in an AlphaGraphics business card to a few billion dollars in a fifteen year window because you work hard and you're smart and you're a great guy. That's not what gets it. What gets you there is because everybody else decided that they wanted to give me a chance and help. It's a very open Not all cities or cultures are like that embracing where they just pick up and said, Man, I don't have a place for you here, but let me help you get in the business. And I know you're gonna compete against me, the more the merrier. Let's grow the pie, let's go. That's pretty special. And it really comes back to the fact that largely, we all just got here. Yeah, whenever I meet somebody that's like a seventh generation Texan, I just think about how the heck their family lived here without AC. Because a lot of people come in, a lot of people even still will come in from California, be here for a few years and then they can't really handle the heat. We live a pretty conditioned life. Yeah, we very much do. When you say that, it's like, when you look at like a Dallas versus like a Boston, it talks about like a really interesting, you used to talk about a couple of things in your mayor race, heard you talk about districts, heard you talk about transportation. When I think about districts, think a little bit about walkability. You know, the city, you know, the future of American cities, you know, seem a little less walkable. I mean, I guess that's why you gotta have the district so you can walk, but talk a little bit about, you know, how the future of cities is changing as maybe walkability isn't as core, it seems. I talked a little bit about the growth of Dallas as a population, so you can take that the growth of scale in the city. Dallas is predominantly a post World War two Southern American two car city society. So we have continued largely over about a fifty to seventy year window to expand outward with the idea of colonizing Oklahoma, I guess, but we just keep on going. There's no natural barrier. So Dallas was a hub and a spoke. The hub was the central core, the spokes of the highways, and we grew in a time of highways and two cars and a white picket fence as opposed to another city that grew with a horse and carriage or a foot or on a train or on a waterway. So you have to understand the base fabric for the city to begin with. And then the second disparate piece, in the 80s, greed is good, the wolves of Wall Street, we were a consumer based society from post World War II 1960s through two thousand. Somewhere in there, we morphed into the experience economy. We as a population, as a culture have changed where thirty years ago it's, hey, come look at my new car and my new white couch, look what I bought. You know, it was about ownership. And now it's, hey, look at my Facebook, look at my photos, I just got back from a trip and here's my pictures, right? So it's experiences. So we are changing what we want from ownership, as in I wanna own my own house, to I wanna have a great lifestyle. The natural course of cities is to grow up, and then out, and then up and then out and keep on going. And so densification is part of the future of Dallas, not just Southern American cities, but American cities and global cities for a lot of different reasons, and yet you're gonna have the expansion. So you put that together, what's the future? I think you're gonna see an enormous amount of densification. Economics, ecological, transportation, the fabric of walkability. We don't have a lot of walkability because we grew up in a two car society, we being the city grew up. Now the city is picking its pockets, I'm gonna steal a word from Gerald Hines, great developer of, you know, a thirty year history from down to Houston of all places, and he called them suburban urban cores. Say urban core, but then you can have a pod of density, so let's call that a satellite, and it can grow to be so strong. In Austin, it might be the domain. It's suburban urban core. In Dallas, there would be one called Legacy. And you start to see those suburban urban cores of densification. You'll see great densification in those cores and then suburban spread out. I think there's something natural about that because some people wanna live in the middle of the rush. Some people wanna be able to just get there, walk around and leave. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see, to your point, the shift to experience based economy, especially accelerated by the social media thing, and how culture will drive development trends. You mentioned density, was thinking about, I think it's Saudi Arabia, their LINE project. Have you seen this? Yeah, they're building just like one thing. I mean, you have an interesting project coming up. I saw an announcement you're gonna be involved in that Bank of America Tower District project. Talk a little bit about that project and maybe other any other ones that I'm gonna step back. I'm gonna take a half step back. You talked about walkability. Walkability doesn't mean a sidewalk. Walkability, like you might say, what'd you do in London? Oh man, I just walked around. It's the space between the spaces, the space between the buildings that we typically talk about in cities. We don't talk, I went to this building or that building. You say, I went to this area and you walked in the street because there was a feel in the street. It's a space between these spaces that really matters. And we are all also very acutely aware of what's authentic and what's ********. Disneyland is great for Disneyland, but in real life, we really don't like it. We wanna walk down the street and see this new shiny places, cool, great restaurant. And then there's a kind of little hole in the wall next door that you go into to get your ice cream afterwards that the brick is broken and you gotta watch your step. That's cool, it's real. We understand authenticity. So as we densify these cities, the more you can keep the fabric and the mythology and the ethos of what was there and reuse it, the more beautiful it is. We talked about the High Line and we talked about the Meatpacking District. Man, there's some shiny new buildings that are knockout And there's some funky, cool, old ones that were the meat packing buildings and the meat slaughterhouses that have been redone, Chelsea Market, that are so cool. You put those together, I wanna go walk there. So it isn't just about density and sidewalks. I think the craft of a city comes to having a soul. And more specifically, a neighborhood, a place has a soul or it doesn't, and we all know it. It doesn't say it has to be arty. Wall Street in New York, the neighborhood, has a soul. It's mercantile. And you want that there when you're mercantiling. And then when you're dining or you're recreating, you want to walk into the French Quarter in New Orleans. That's got a vibe to it, right? And if you tore down all the old buildings and built new shiny ones in density, that's not good. So when I'm talking about densification, I'm absolutely not talking about tearing things down. I'm talking about a balance where someplace has a heart because at the end of the day, Adam is a person and when Adam goes out at night with his buddies or his girlfriend or his wife or his kids, he wants to feel like life is okay, he wants to feel like he belongs, He wants to feel comfortable and safe. He wants to feel that life really matters. And when you get that piece in cities, you've defined because cities actually don't exist. What exists is neighborhoods and the ties that bind. A healthcare system, a highway system, a school system, those are systems. A road system, those are the ties that bind neighborhoods. Cities don't exist. Neighborhoods exist. And then there's some collective infrastructure that holds it together. For me, I have always tried to work in those places that have a distinctive characteristic. It doesn't have to be architecture with the capital A. Sometimes the architecture with the lowercase a, that's what we gravitate to the most because it helps us feel alive. So I think where are we going with cities? The greatest cities for the next one hundred years in North America will be the cities that have an authenticity where talent migrates, lack of talent has a hard time migrating, where talent wants to go. The world changed in the last fifty years. When I got out of school, I didn't get out of school fifty years ago, but it was a while back, but when you get out of school, if I wanted to build stuff, I went to Detroit. If I had been good looking, I'd have gone to LA for Hollywood. If I could play a guitar, I'd have gone to Nashville. You went to the job, finally, I went to New York. Now it's different, game changed. Talent goes to where it wants to be and the jobs follow. The most successful cities of the next one hundred years in North America will be the cities that build the place where people wanna be because the jobs will follow the people. Austin, where you are, is maybe VK study. Michael Delford, some computer something in a dorm room at University of Texas drops out. He's a flunky, right? And he builds a global empire. You know, what a stud. But everybody you know, when I got out of school, you said, what do you define successful? Living in Austin. You just wanted to be there. So the people went there and then the jobs, then you had not just hardware, then you had software companies, then you had everything else, financial services, then you had M and A and Austin Ventures and everything that grew around it. Austin is the case study. People, talent goes to where it wants to be and the jobs follow. That is the future, whether we wanna reconcile it or not, of the American cities that will see great success over the next longer window frame. You touched on a couple of things I wanna react to. One, my definition of hospitality is something directionally, kind of what you're talking about is having a soul is their experience that remind you that life's worth living. You know, elevated experience, there's more we're doing here. Wow. This is cool and inspiring. Steven Pressfield has a book called Put Your *** Where Your Heart Wants To Be. Talks about where talent goes to where it wants to go. And the example he used said the Dalai Lama doesn't live in Terre Haute. And that's why if you wanna to your point, I still think there is something. If you wanna be in a specific place, get yourself in the room. Your comments about Michael Dell, one of the things I think about is just how people and probably more specifically master craftsman make cities, you know, because we build the, you know, economic infrastructure or otherwise to, you know, bring the people together. I wanna land the plane back on, you know, the concept of the master craftsman because they at the end of the day, it is these master craftsman. They specialize in their craft that create the economic opportunity that invite talent in. You know, why do you think the concept of the master craftsman is so important now, especially, you know, with careers and society changing? Yeah, I don't think being a master craftsman is the holy grail. I want somebody to go build twenty five Starbucks stores. It's just not me. It has no meaning. We need somebody to stamp out the commodity things that we all need in a mercantile growth, trade, manufacture, intellectual property society. Personally, I wanna help be part of the group of people that build the places that you go to on Friday night when it's not be like Mike as in be Mike Michael Jordan, it's be like Mike as in be yourself, whoever you are, where you can walk in and you can be like me with a bad haircut and black clothing and it's okay. You just, I'm okay on me and I feel okay here and whoever I'm with. That is a more integral piece of a city. I think it helps build the soul of a city. I find that in so if you asked me when I was fifteen, I would say, I wanna become a master craftsman of places and cities and buildings. And if you ask me all these here later, I will say the exact same thing. I want to become a master craftsman, and it's really hard. I'm not there yet. I wanna get there. Part of it is you're almost ashamed of building things because they don't accomplish enough because you don't have the skills, but you've gotta work to get there so you do them anyways. The integral piece and I taught the subjects for a while up east at some colleges of integration. It's one thing to be great at math. It's another thing to be great at the stars. And it's another thing to be Albert Einstein and be able to integrate pieces together for Isaac Newton. It isn't I wanted the Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. It's the fact that they took pieces that were disparate and they put them together to further us. They moved the world. I'm just trying to help build the city, but I really enjoy it. And I do find it meaningful. I do find it important. I think at some certain point we have to fight to succeed as a city, but I think we could do it the right way. There's a wrong way and a right way, and I think we can do it for the all of us. And I do believe that the long form of society as a successful unit is about the all of us, And that means integrating everything, culture, finance, people, left handed people, right handed people, tall people, short people, pick your language. It is the melting pot of America that I believe in, that I love, and it's good. Now, if you cross the line, you're out. There's right and wrong. It's not a blind benevolence, But there is a part where you build places that can be catalytic for America to become who it should be and for you and I to lead the lives that we want to live both as Americans, in this case as Texans, both of us, but also individuals. Mike, you've been so gracious with your time today. What's the best way for people to keep up with you and the work you do? I think I mentioned this, it's kind of funny. I really don't you know, my wife's dog has more friends on Facebook than I do, so I have to be careful about what I say because her thirty thousand dog friends topped mine. But, I don't do a lot of social. I really just wanna build things in Dallas Fort Worth. So I just kinda trying to keep quiet and do it. I I would probably be advised to be better at the self promotion and have a better, you know, storefront. But hopefully, if I do my job well, I'll be building places that you wanna go to when you're in Dallas or the people in Dallas wanna go to because it makes them glad they're in Dallas. Well, thanks. We'll have links to some of your projects past and upcoming in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. And we do keep our website isn't like the promote for the company. It's a bunch of photos. It kinda tells the story short form, but Pegasus Avalon is the website. And thank you again. I think I mentioned it, but there's a lot of podcasts right now that advocate us and them, whatever the us and whatever the them are. And yours is advocating, here's a great thought, here's great leadership, here's people doing things. I call that constructive. Thanks, Mike. Thank you for doing what you do. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks again. Thank you for listening to Tuesdays and More. See, that conversation was with Mike Avalon, Dallas based developer and founder of Pegasus Avalon. What I enjoyed about the episode was talking about Mike's concept of being a master craftsman and the ingredients for a great city and the future of cities. If you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, and we'll see you here soon. Thanks.
