The jon kiper show

Jon: Welcome to the John Kiper Show. Today I've got my guest with me, Steve. 

Steve: Hi. How's it going today, John? 

Jon: It's going good. Why don't you introduce yourself to the lovely folks at home? 

Steve: So my name is Steve Pesek. I am a new resident to the state of New Hampshire. I just bought a house over on the west side of the state in the Sunapee area. I purchased that home about six months ago, so I just moved to the area from Massachusetts, but I'm originally from Minnesota. So coming from a northern climate back and continuing to do northern climate has been pretty exciting for me. The big thing from becoming a new resident to the area is. Figuring out the politics of this this state and understanding the workings of the governor the State House of Representatives, the state senate the court system, kind of everything in general. And wow, it has been a very interesting tale that led me through social media channels to prominent voices. And I came across your campaign and thought to myself, this is an extremely different type of campaign that I've seen on a national stage when it comes to your mentality behind community first and how that can grow out from that and maybe lead this next wave of politics. 

Jon: That's what I'm hoping, that's really what I set out to do was really I looked at the Republicans and they had Project 2025. I thought, what do we have? So I was just thinking about this idea, we wanted a, I wanted a catchphrase, Make America Great Again. And I just kept thinking about it and I kept hearing this, people talking about, oh, America First and, New Hampshire First. And I thought what do I want to be first, what do I wanna put first? What should the government put absolutely first in, in its thought process? And I thought it should be community. It should be our local towns and cities, and how are they doing and what's the pulse? On the economy at the local level and then we should, dictate our policy from there out. 

Steve: Yeah, I've been digging into community first economics. It's a lot of the things that I have been seeing personally throughout the years. You and I are pretty much the same age. Yeah, we're in high school at the same time. And not in different parts of the country, but we're that same age. So we saw a lot of the same things coming from different parts of the country, and a lot of the things that you saw from being inside Johnny Boston's International, talking to guests coming off the street. Trying to order food, trying to order drinks, and living within the community has been a really big eye-opener to see it on text. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: Like you saying my interactions within this community have allowed me to have insight of what it's gonna take for us to build it back up and grow it to where it needs to get to. 

Jon: Yeah, exactly. I think that's really, what I learned from 10 years of running a restaurant was just. I learned economics in the most blunt and real way that you can, 

Steve: the true meat and potatoes version of economics. It's like how if anybody, and a lot of people have worked in restaurants and hospitality and retail for their first job, their second job, maybe their third job summer programs while traveling, different things like that. When you get into those system based organizations where it's connecting with the community. Showing hospitality and inviting somebody into a shared space where there's a lot of people with a lot of ideas, but they generally have a lot of hunger or a lot of need for cool clothes or sunglasses or hats. You just understand people and you can really vibe with them and get an understanding of where they're coming from, understand their wants and their needs, and then. Coming from hospitality, you want to direct them into saying "Hey, sounds like you would really like the Big Kahuna Burger." Yeah, or something exactly like that. And that's one of the fun things about your book that I really took to right out the jump is. One of your guests, one of your regulars that you called the Big Kahuna, had a burger named after him. That is a burger that's a little more over the top than, I like to eat big, and it's something that when I read it I was like. Holy cow. That, that, that is like a name steak. That's what you would name something after somebody on a menu and maybe give me the breakdown. Yeah. Of how that process of creating that burger for that guest and then how that came like a lightning bulb like lightning rod moment for you with community first economics. 

Jon: Yeah. So this guy used to come in and he didn't come in that often, maybe once a month or something. He came in one day and he ordered a burger, and he was like, "Hey, I don't care how much this costs, but I'm really hungry. I want a burger and I want pulled pork on it. I want a fried egg, cheddar cheese, and sriracha." And while we're making it, the guys that I was working with were like, "Man, this is pretty good. We should put it on special." And so we put it on the special and then ended up putting on the menu. We called it the Big Kahuna. And the thing about this guy was, like I said, he came in about once a month, and around Christmas he started coming in like a lot more, like two or three times a week. And I said to him, after about a month of him coming in quite a bit more, I said, "Hey man, like, why are you coming in more? You usually don't come in this much." And he said I work at Best Buy and normally they only give me 20 hours a week, but he said around Christmas they let me work overtime 'cause it's busier and I get more money, I get paid more, I get overtime. And he said they do that so that they don't have to pay me benefits because if they gave me full-time work all year round, they'd have to pay me benefits. And then he said this line where he just said, if they paid me more, I would eat here more. Yeah. It was, it just blew my mind because. It just, it was so simple, but I'm like, oh, this is the whole thing with the minimum wage and with people having high cost of living because of high rent or high mortgage. It's just eroding the economy on the basic bottom level where this guy just doesn't have money to eat burgers at my place as much as he wants to, and the economy is being limited by the greed of Best Buy and by their managing this guy's schedule in a way that sort of. Worsks is maximizing the profit, but it's really hurting his ability to not just eat at my restaurant, but participate in the community as a regular, we're, a restaurant is this third space where people are able to go and build up a community and be a regular somewhere and they know your name and they know your order and you get something on the menu, and he just was not able to participate in that. To the degree that he wanted to. 

Steve: Yeah, I definitely have gone through those times where either working in restaurants or working elsewhere, you want to go out, you want to be out in the social fabrics of a community. But then there's times where you're like, I gotta have ramen noodles for dinner tonight. Yeah. I just can't afford to do that. And from me personally now renovating a house in Western New Hampshire and going through, and me and my partner we're having to understand like. We can't go out as much as we wanted to before because now we have X amount of new expenses. Yeah. In our life. And it's balancing that within our own budget planning as a family and understanding like, how can you take it from there? And those costs of housing, of rent, and a lot of the different things. That kind of come with living through life. You get right into, in this book yeah you straight up lay it down, like coming from the restaurants, how you go from setting this up. Then if. The Big Kahuna can't come in more to get his burger. That means that he's probably majority of the year, he's more than likely needing to save to pay rent. Yeah, but those rent costs are going up higher and higher year to year, even during COVID. When you would've thought we could've got some rent support from landlords. Yeah. And I really a lot of your messaging throughout the book of talking about a community working together and having a dollar being the blood. Yeah. Of the community. Can you just let me know how you found that way to being like $1 circulates at such like a high rate? Like blood cells going through your body. 

Jon: Yeah. I was thinking, I came up with that idea 'cause I was thinking about Amazon and Jeff Bezos and I was thinking about how, he's sucking up all of this money, right? And he has all this money and I thought, if he. Was to pay the drivers at Amazon, let's say 25 bucks an hour let's say 30, 'cause they're probably making, I bet they're probably making mid-twenties right now. Sure. So let's say to pay him 30 is that gonna make him not a billionaire? Probably not. But that's gonna give those people more money to buy stuff from Amazon. So like you think even from the perspective of a company, you would, that they would recognize that just having this basically maximum extraction. System by which they're just getting as much money out of the consumer as possible. At the end of the day, it's just, it's not even really helping them, in the way that it could. And they're just, basically, it's eroding all the infrastructure. We don't have money for our roads and, our building, school buildings and, and just this idea that if the money is down here, amongst us in the community, we're spending it and rich people, they get a tax cut. They maybe put more money in the stock market. They're not gonna go to my restaurant and buy more burgers. They're not going to go to the local, bookstore and buy more books. Like they're off in their enclaves. They don't mix with us, really generally speaking. So the money is just getting. Siphoned away and extracted in a way that's not healthy for the long-term survival of basically the entire country. And the fact that we don't have a bigger conversation about that and just this historical facts that when countries have hyper inequality like we do, when the middle class is eroded it's a breakdown in society that ends in. In bad ways, like in Rome, in France it almost happened in the US during the 1929 crash. And that's a good example of where you can go a different road, and FDR brought up the New Deal and they were able to put in these changes to help rebuild the middle class. And we rode that till basically 1980 when Reagan came in. He said, no, we're gonna move to this whole market model where we're just gonna trust that the market's gonna take care of everything. And we're gonna cut taxes for wealthy people, cut taxes for corporations, the money's gonna go trickling down to everyone else. And we know now that was BS, that was not gonna happen. It was, it sounded good on paper, in theory, but it just didn't happen. And it's 43, 44 years later. And I think we need to think about the economy in a completely different way. That's what this book is about. Reframing all of our attitudes and just even the dialogue about the economy and what's the end result and who is who is benefiting and how do we measure that? I think a good example is just, I go into in the book is GDP, as I say in the book, if someone has cancer and is spending money on their treatment, that boosts GDP. If somebody has to rebuild their house because of a hurricane, that boosts GDP. If one billionaire doubles their income, that boosts GDP. So it's not, it's a pretty blunt measurement of how the community's functioning. And I go into this in the book I, it might be near, I think it's near the end. You probably might not have gotten there yet, but, this concept that they have been pushing in some small countries, mainly in Asia. But this idea of measuring happiness there's a happiness index that they use. Gross National Happiness was founded by the King of Bhutan in the 1970s. And New Zealand has taken this up as a wellbeing index where they try to measure the wellbeing of society and then change your policy based on that. And I think that concept is just something we need to start talking about. Finding new ways to ensure that the economy and the government are working together. To ensure we have a middle class and that our communities are growing and thriving. 

Steve: Yeah. And it's the idea of taking those best of lists, like the top 10 places in America to raise a family. Like you, you shouldn't be like having to go to publications to fight to be on a list. Like your community and your state government should be just working to make your life that magazine. Yeah. Like your life should be living and enjoying. The happiness that we have. We have the parks, we have the things we have, like New Hampshire's a beautiful state. I've had a friend in town from Minnesota for the last week and we were driving around doing skiing, late season skiing, going around and just seeing the beauty of New Hampshire. It's a gorgeous state with so many great little towns. Yeah. We were going into country stores. I bought way too many smoked meats and cheeses. Yeah. And we were getting sandwiches and we were like, if we're gonna be on the road, I want to be going into these little small communities that make New Hampshire absolutely fabulous. And seeing boots on the ground like. What does it look like to work and be here? And the, I being from Minnesota? Minnesota nice is like a mentality of people are just stuck inside of the winter so long that the first time they lock eyes with somebody, they were like, tell me your whole life story. How can I get it? Give me that right now and. You would think oh no, people out in New England are pretty buttoned up and they really don't let loose and give you that information. Quite on the contrary, I was, we were on our way skiing just the other day and we stopped at a little spot in Lebanon and we just we're getting breakfast sandwiches. The hospitality that we got there where they're like, you gotta try our house smoked turkey and all of this, it's just new Hampshire wants to build each other up and work with each other to make just absolutely great things and great places to be. It's weird that zoning and government pressure and lobbying is trying to keep that down and a lot of the different parts of the book that I've been like looking into and reading about. These are just like, to me, almost like duh moments. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: It's wow if I've been fighting and working to get through life as hard as I have, I'm guessing my neighbor's been doing the same and a friend or people I've never met before, they have to be going through these same troubles. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: But. It's not necessarily my fault or your fault. It could have been the system's fault the whole time. Yeah. And when you talked about Amazon and Bezos and these big corporations that are using the infrastructure that we're paying for out of our property taxes, but yet they're not paying the taxes back on the top end to reinvest into those, that, that seems like a very big disconnect to me. 

Jon: I think it's something people really need to think about because it's something that I think is so important because people have this idea that wealthy people, became wealthy all on their own, and that it just had no, it has no bearing that we live in a pretty good society, and this is something that we go into in the book, just this idea that. All these billionaires' wealth is built on a, a foundation that we have all communally built over the last 200 plus years. 

Steve: Oh yeah. 

Jon: And Bezos, particularly when you think about it, like his trucks drive on roads funded by taxpayer money his goods shipped through seas guarded by the U.S. Navy. Just the fact that he can sign a contract with someone, it's enforced by the U.S. government, his. Trucks are getting guarded by the police, and just, there's so many points. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the infrastructure for the internet itself was funded by. US government research and also the 

Steve: universities, 

Jon: university system. Yeah, 

Steve: exactly. 

Jon: And that goes, it's not just true for Jeff Bezos, but for especially like pharmaceutical companies or any of these big tech companies are so dependent on the US government and the infrastructure that our parents and our grandparents, funded and they act like they're not, and we need to hold 'em accountable because. They need to ensure that those investments in our infrastructure are there for our children when they're, when these billionaires are gone. And that's just, I think a really important thing for people to understand is is just this concept that the rich did not become that way on their own. Yeah.

Steve: I, I. I think about this a lot. When I was reading your book, I was been thinking about it a lot while reading and listening to your book and just diving in deeper, is that oh, my intellectual property as a member of a company, a corporation, if I'm a cog within the big system, my inputs and insights towards a common goal, a project, whatever it may be is a part of a team more, more than less. But yet. It's one person or two people, or a few people on a board, or as a head, a figurehead CEO, that's getting all the credit. But yet then they get to determine all of the wages and all of the all the way everything's laid out for all of us to live within their universe. I guess that's how business works to a sense, but at the same time. You get into it with Henry Ford and the Dodge products in your book. Yeah that's it. It's very much like Henry Ford thought hey, if I'm going to invest into my plants that are building the Model T and I'm gonna sell them at a cheap cost so all families can have them and then sell them and then give my workers a competitive wage for. That time in America was hu huge. It was a ton of money, $5 a day. Yeah. A Lincoln in a day keeps the doctor away. Whatever you need to say. What I'm saying is, though, it then took the Dodge Brothers, which are the Dodge Motor, they 

Jon: became, yeah, 

Steve: Dodge that. At that 

Jon: point they weren't, 

Steve: they were shareholders. Yeah. But in essence, they said, oh no, we, you as shareholders, you need to give us all the money. Don't give it to the people. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: And it's if government is working for the people and by the people, and yet we're not holding that same accountability towards the corporations, that seems a little counterproductive in my head. 

Jon: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. So I, that's just a really important story for people to understand is that corporations initially had to be providing some public good. Sure. You'd have a corporation to build a bridge or something like that. 

Steve: Yeah. Infrastructure based items. 

Jon: Yeah. And then this. The whole kind of idea of what a corporation is evolved through a series of court cases into this animal that we have today. And that was never how it was intended to be. I actually, a lot of that stuff I learned from this documentary called The Corporation which came out God, like a couple decades ago, I want to say. And it's a really important documentary. If if anyone wants to learn more about that stuff, I'd go to it for, one chapter. But there's a lot more information out there about how this. This the corporation I heard this explained one time and I thought it was good. It's, it is an artificial intelligence, a corporation that's built just to extract wealth. Sure. That's its entire job and it doesn't care, like I said, about the big kahuna and how many hours he's getting. It doesn't care about the environmental issues. It doesn't care about anything. It doesn't care about humans at all. It will fire or, hurt or destroy anything in its path. To just for this sole thing of just providing more, more profit to the shareholders. And we've got to understand that this is not how it was intended, and the Constitution was not written for the corporations as they are today. And that's, I think, a really important fact that people need to think about. So we really need to reign in corporations. We need to put them back in their correct place of being a. Asset to the community and not just a tool for extraction. 

Steve: Yeah. You were going into some detail in the book about the corporations that did invest back into their employees. Yeah. Through training and different programs. And you've talked about it with regard to schools as well. Yeah, if you, the Mississippi Miracle and things like that. If you actually invest at the bottom level and take some of that. What they said, profits and actually reinvested it into the company or reinvested it into your community or into your school, the dividends that it pays out down the road are so much higher. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: So if a corporation exists to pay, give their shareholders the most money, then the math. Seems to be working. Simply that if you were to take a small portion of that, invested it from the bottom up and actually grow it and trickle down economics for real. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: Then the payout would be huge for these corporations, but yet they don't wanna do that. 

Jon: Yeah. And that's what's so crazy. It's just, it's the beast of the corporation has evolved to this point where it's just really dangerous to society for it to exist the same way. Yeah. And I think we really just need to start pushing back and just fight back on this narrative that, corporations are people and that they have some sort of inalienable right to exist the way that humans do. And they just, they don't, they really don't. 

Steve: It's tough to I can see the true business meaning behind that. Yeah. Of oh yes. This is in essence, a corporation could be viewed as a co-op. It's oh it's a bunch of like-minded individuals working towards a common goal. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: And so it could have a corporation thing, but it's not, that's not an individual. That's an, that's a group, that's a team thinking. So you like. That group, all of the people within there already have a vote. How does that one thing now also get a vote? 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: That's a very tough pill to swallow for me, and I think you dive into it. Community first economics is consistent throughout the book where you keep coming back to it, understanding like things like housing, education, corporations, just small government, big government, whatever. You can look at community first and you can hold that flashlight to all of these different things and it keeps popping up again. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: And it's great that you. Are seeing that and putting pen to paper and word to paper to put it out there and being very hyper-specific to New Hampshire. And that's, as somebody that's new to New Hampshire it's nice to be able to let go. Oh. The problems that I thought I had living elsewhere aren't unique. Yeah. They're here also. Yeah. And it's almost a bigger problem here because it's a small state surrounded by a bunch of other small states where you don't get that collective mindset working together. Yeah. And now people can jump a border by moving quickly because. Of X, Y, Z tax or some difference social reason. And the movement of money just happens so quickly and freely through this area that you lose sight on growing the big picture. 

Jon: Yeah, I think that's one thing that I definitely hope came through in the book is just this idea that like our community, we have to think of our community as. The whole state. And this was something I learned when I was running for governor in 2024. If we block a housing development in Newmarket, the effects might be that there's more homeless people in Manchester. 

Steve: Sure. 

Jon: And so we really have to look at the whole state as one group of people trying to work together towards a common goal. And I think that's what we've lost along the way. One interesting thing that I. Did not quite realize is, New Hampshire relies heavily on property taxes to fund our public schools. Yeah. It's about 70% of the cost comes from the local property taxes. And if you look around this country, it's not as bad in a lot of places, but property taxes are generally how we fund education in the United States. And it's just a bad way to fund schools. It's a terrible way to fund schools because it means that. Places that are property poor have to raise more percentage of their income towards property taxes to pay schools, and it's just, it's regressive. It hurts poorer people, and it means that those schools aren't, are just at the end of the day, not as good. And this has been studied, this is a factual thing. In Claremont, for instance, they have been able to really, that's where they spurred this lawsuit about school funding in the early nineties, and they were able to say hey. Our kids are not going to college at the same rates as they are in these wealthier communities. It's not just like that we don't have as nice of equipment, or that we don't have, the media lab, or we don't have, the nice gym or something. It's literally hurting these kids' outcomes economically for the rest of their lives. And that's just, I think another part of the book that I think is really important for people to understand is this idea that. There's these costs to not investing in education and not investing in children in general. And the cost, 

Steve: they're huge cost. Yeah, 

Jon: they're massive. I 

Steve: think they're like tens of thousands of dollars, 

Jon: millions 

Steve: per kid. 

Jon: Yeah, millions of dollars we're losing. I think the foster care system is the one that really sticks out to me the most because there are just so many children that are worth in the foster system and end up. Homeless or in prison that it's not only are their lives just much more harder and much more difficult, much more painful. But we as a society are spending all of this money on their

Steve: wellbeing, 

Jon: on their wellbeing going forward and on prisons when we should have been spending it on helping them, before they had to be taken away from their parents. And one thing I learned during the research was like. The vast majority of children are being taken away because of neglect. And the neglect is because of because of economics, because they don't have enough money. And maybe the money that they don't have is, Mom can't go to rehab 'cause she needs to work. They're. Or whatever. 

Steve: You go in deep about, and I wanna talk about it multiple different things first before we get too deep into that. Yeah. One of the reasons I started reaching out to you, 'cause I was like, I found that you're running for governor. I was like, okay, who's this candidate? And I found your podcast, this podcast and was listening to the school education thing about Claremont while I was shopping in Claremont. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: Being over in the Sunapee region, claremont's is one of those communities where some of the bigger box stores that have some of those quirky tools and things that I need to remodel a house are found. And so I'm like driving through this town, going from furniture store to appliance store, to hardware store, and I'm like listening to, like. All about the school system. And I was like, this is wild that they fought the Supreme, they went to the Supreme Court, they won, and then they got none of the money. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: What? Nobody from the state said we probably should work with them. And dude, they're like, no, you lost and now you're not living up to your end of the fiscal bargain. Yeah. That you set. You are in charge of keeping with the state government. That's, that's 10 podcasts. You do a good job in some of your other episodes talking about that. Yeah. But the book just narrows it down. It like handles it, it talks about it, and now that's why you're running for governor. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: It's, it makes plenty of sense to me. The data's in here, the history is in here, and now it's like, how do you, how do we actually act and do things within the community first mindset? By running for public office. 

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. And to me it really comes down to a really basic equation. I, this isn't quite an equation, the problem is inequality, right? And the solution is to tax the rich and to pay for education and housing. I, amongst other things. Sure. I probably would add to that list childcare and healthcare as well. Yeah. I, but, just to keep it a little bit simpler, I've been men, mainly talking about housing and education because those other things I think more, healthcare particularly is I come up with some solutions, but that's something that's gonna have to come from the federal side,

Steve: it's too big of a puzzle. Piece. Yeah. To try for, not to say that Granters, Granite Staters can't do it. I think that based off of the people that I've met within this state, there's enough really passionate individuals in the state that wanna fight for each other. Yeah. And really try to find a way to make education and healthcare and infrastructure possible. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: The pieces are there to do it. It's just. I feel like there's been a lot of disjointed efforts over the years, in my quick crash course of trying to learn about being a Granite Stater, of how to get there. But I see the passion. Yeah. And I understand that the voices of the people are strong. It's how do we work together to do it as a team, be our own corporation of like, how do we work together for the common good? And. Build it and do it. Yeah. And not just say, we're gonna do it. Or say we lost the court case. We gotta do it. Do it. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: Yeah. It seems like nobody wants to get elected and then do the actual work. 

Jon: Yeah. To be fair, they did actually implement a statewide education property tax. Sure. For a little while, 

Steve: but then that, then the people were like, we're donor cities, and then that went away. What? You did it and then what? 6, 8, 10 years later it went away. 

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. It was a handful of years later. And one thing that's just a fact that people brought up to me is they're like a couple of these cities that were championing or didn't want to pay into the statewide education, property tax, were Portsmouth and Lebanon, big Democrat cities that are overwhelmingly run by Democrats. So you're getting to this point where you have odd bedfellows and the teams are a little bit. Hard to even discern because some of the Democrats are clearly not in favor of funding education, at least not that way. They haven't proposed another way. And the whole concept of donor towns and cities is to me a little bit it's unfair because at the end of the day, whatever tax you have, if it's an income tax, a place with more wealth or higher incomes is gonna pay, is gonna contribute more. If it's a sales tax. You're gonna collect more in areas where there are stores, you're, there's, it's just, there's always gonna be an unequal, formula for raising taxes. Particularly if, in my mind, you want to tax wealthy people to help poor people, which I thought was a Democrat, a held Democratic belief that we will, the Republicans cut taxes for rich people and corporations to help rich people. The Democrats. I think should do the opposite tax rich people and corporations to help poor people. And it's one funny thing about New Hampshire is I'm finding that is not universally accepted as a Democrat 

Steve: platform. 

Jon: Platform. Yeah. 

Steve: I think. Our mentality of what we learned growing up, of what was a Republican and what was a Democrat or an independent or another third party or whatever, is lost now in the new age of politics. You need to vote for what you believe in for yourself, and there's been too many. Too many elections around the nation where people say this is a Democratic stronghold. I can just run out as a Democrat and I'm gonna get the win and I can push my whatever policies through." It's happening in the federal government left and right all over right now. Yeah. And so like just voting party down a ticket, like on your ballot. It can't work. It doesn't work anymore. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: You have to do the research. You have to learn about the candidates. You have to read the books that they put out to understand if this person is passionate enough to write a book about it, they probably have a little bit of belief behind it. And then, as constituents, you need to hold the elected officials responsible for the works that they set out for. And I think that's a big thing for me's I started talking to you, and I think one of the first questions I asked you was like, why do you think people don't buy into what you're selling? And you were like, I didn't know they, you weren't buying in. And I was like, what? I didn't mean it that way. I just meant like, how as an outsider give me the, gimme the negative reason so that I can understand what the positives are. Yeah. It's it's a back and forth with it. It's how do you. How are you trying to project your campaign? How are you trying to get it out? You wrote a book about it? Yeah. Like, where does that lead you? And then that allows for discourse, that allows for open communication, that allows you to talk to all of the people, whether you were doing it while writing the book mentally. Yeah. While working at Johnny Boston's International, running it, or actually being on the campaign trail, going around the state and listening. Yeah. And talking to people. And I appreciate that as somebody that. Has a similar background, same age, coming from the same socioeconomic kind of structures of life. It seems like I saw what you were doing. I was like, I need to read the book, I need to do it, I need to find out. What about, this isn't the first book you've even written before, right?

Jon: No, it's not. I, the first book I wrote was a children's book. I put that out in 2012. My friend Sam Paulini illustrated that. It was called Dream Detectives: Something Funny About the Cake. We sold probably, I don't know, maybe two or 300 copies.

Jon: Cool. It's out of print right now. Keeping children's books in print is very hard 'cause it's so expensive. Yeah. Although it's probably cheaper now than it was in 2012. And then after that I published a book of poetry, which. WMUR was kind enough to do a story about 

Steve: Cool, 

Jon: That was just comical poetry. It was not, it was the intention was really just to show people that poetry can be as stupid as you want it to be, and it doesn't have to come from someone with a degree in in writing or something. Sure that anyone can do it. That was the idea. And then I wrote a true crime book called A Ghost in the Darkness, the True Story of the Vicki Bader Murder. Oh, wow. Which was a, yeah, which was a murder that happened in my neighborhood when I was growing up. And. It was annoying. It was stupid because I finished that book in 2013 and then basically opened my restaurant like right after, so I never did like a full on, I just never really marketed that book very well.

Steve: Yeah. I feel like in the true crime heyday that is currently, that grew outta COVID, when people had all the unlimited time to go deep dive into true crime you were eight eight years early. There's seven, seven years early on 

Jon: it. I know. Yeah, totally. I was, and then I was so busy with the restaurant, I just didn't have that much time to, to push it, sure. But it's so I knew the process of putting out a book, and it was so funny 'cause I had. I've got these two college kids that will work with me. When I first started the campaign one of 'em still with me, one of 'em, one of 'em moved on to a different campaign. But I floated this idea, I think this was back like in September or October. I said, "Hey, I think I'm gonna write a book about this community first economics idea." And they were so funny 'cause they were like, "Dude, you don't have time to write a book. Like, how are you gonna do this?" And I'm like, i've written a couple books, and you just gotta knuckle down and do it. Sure. And I had all this research from when I'd ran for governor the first time, and basically this book. And and I also started writing it after the last election, and I fi, and I had something together, but I didn't really like it because it was half the story of the campaign and then half my policy ideas, and I was like, this is two different books. So I pretty much had the framework already done, and then I just I had to update a bunch of the information because by the time. 2026 came around. Some of the stats I'd been referencing in 2023 were actually no longer 

Steve: relevant. 

Jon: Relevant. And some of them had changed, actually. It was quite interesting. Sure. And I'd never done a book like this, so it was it was definitely hard. But if anyone's wondering and this is my recommendation if you are wanting to write a book, what I do and the way I wrote the the true crime story and the way that I got this one onto paper was, I do voice to text. 

Steve: Sure. 

Jon: And I'll sometimes literally just go to trails down the road and I'll walk through the woods for hours and just do voice to text. And then, and that, and then that gives you the whole framework, and then you can from there, work backwards into actually turning it into a book. And honestly, the hardest part. The writing of the book was hard, but honestly one of the hardest parts is actually just for having the patience to format it properly to get it to upload to the various websites where you can sell it, because the PDF has to be right and the cover has to be right with the spine width and all this stuff. 

Steve: Sure. 

Jon: And to make sure the ISBN matches the inside and all this crap. And so it was funny 'cause that was one, that's just this one thing that, I think probably has stopped a lot of people that try to publish books. They 

Steve: or they have the book and they just ran into hurdles and they're, and the, just all of the logistics of it just crippled them. 

Jon: Yeah, and this actually happened to me earlier. I have this other children's book called Robot King that I wrote and this girl illustrated it and we ran into this problem where, this is gonna sound so stupid, but it just is like one of these technical issues where. The files were so big, the way that she had made them, rendered them. It was like the, my, my computer like couldn't process the the images with the text. And it was like just, I couldn't even put them together 'cause it was just like killing my computer. And and it was just, and we had ended up putting that project on hold for a couple other reasons too. But it just, you can run into these technical issues where if you've never done it before, and sometimes it literally, like one thing that took me like. Three hours was to get the page numbers to start, so that one page one is chapter one, as opposed to at the beginning. And you know when you see that in the book, the Roman numerals, and you think, oh, that's, that, that's no big deal. And it's really not. But it, I'm like using, my word processing software, and I'm like trying to figure out, it was just driving me insane. And finally, three hours later I figured it out. And it's just that kind of thing. Like you have to, we're writing a book or anything, I would say you have to. There, there gets these annoying points where you just have to be like, I'm not stopping until this is completed. 

Steve: I think there's, that's all projects. Yeah, totally. 

Jon: You 

Steve: run into things and the thing that I'm remodeling a house, I have to remind myself I'm not a professional home remodeler. 

Jon: Yeah, 

Steve: you're not an author. Like for your research every 

Jon: day. I'm not a re and I'm not a research. Exactly. I'm winging it, one thing that I put at the beginning of the book intentionally was I plan, I would like to put an updated book out every year or every couple years and keep the information fresh. 

Steve: Yeah. 

Jon: Because that also means I can sell a new book every year. But but also because I was literally like, just, I know that there's probably something in here that's wrong, you know what I mean? Or framed incorrectly or someone will say, "Hey, I'm actually a historian of this genre and you framed it slightly differently," and I know that information's gonna come out, and then I'll just. Fix it or update it or, maybe we try an idea in the book and it doesn't work. Or maybe an idea that I, is tried somewhere else and we find out, okay, that doesn't work. And so I really want this to be a living document that maybe someone else adds another chapter. Go, oh, you forgot about like one thing I didn't talk about. I wish I, I wanted to, but then I wouldn't try to fit it in, was. Agriculture. 

Steve: Okay. I was gonna ask, yeah, what part of the book probably got cut that you wanted to get into? 

Jon: I had, yeah, I wanted to talk about agriculture for sure, and then the, and just like farming and, yeah, and that sort of thing. Yeah. And that's maybe a future chapter. The other thing that I cut out was I initially had this ending that was all about AI and about AI and the community and how those two things are gonna really be at odds with each other in a lot of ways, especially just like long-term employment. And it was disjointed when I read the whole thing. It seemed like its own book, or maybe someone that read the book was like, this seems like a, this last chapter seems like a Substack article and not a chapter in this book. Sure. So that's just kind of part of the process. You, you have to cut away certain portions of it, but I would like to write another book, to be honest, about AI. Just what I think we should do to control it, what we should do to ensure that people still have jobs, and to ensure that it's not, we don't have killer robots, but that's another book. And so I wanted to keep this one to being like, focused on the essentials of the economy. I don't get into politics at all in this book. 

Steve: Yeah. No, I didn't. I didn't pick up on it at all. 

Jon: Aside from Reagan and trickle down economics, I've been critical of that. This isn't supposed to be for Democrats or Republicans. It's supposed to be for everybody. And I hope that people that are Republicans or independents or libertarians or whatever will read it because I'm trying to have open this conversation up and just say, look guys I've talked to Republicans in my restaurant, and at the end of the day, and this is a core part of the book we all really have the same problems. Yeah. We disagree on the solutions. Everyone's going through the same stuff. Most people are struggling with property taxes. Their kids can't find houses. Everyone wishes they got paid more, I think, generally. So 

Steve: they can buy Big Kahuna Burgers. Yeah, 

Jon: they buy more burgers at my restaurant. And we argue about the differences and we, I think, so our discourse has gotten so toxic because of social media where, we end up. Beginning with a conversation begins with what we disagree on. Let's talk about the first thing we disagree on, and it's okay, let's just start talking about some things that we agree on and then talk about some solutions. And this is kinda what I was trying to offer, is just really more than anything is like getting this conversation started of people thinking about who pays taxes, how much do they pay, how does that impact my life? And what can we do differently going forward to ensure that our children. And the coming generations of New Hampshire residents and US residents have a better life than we do, whereas right now it's going the other way. The stats are going the other way. We're like gonna be the first generation that didn't do as well as our parents financially. It's, it's a pretty consistent stat. I also heard a very scary stat the other day that globally. IQ is going down by a measurable effect, but that's probably another podcast. 

Steve: Yeah. I think based off of me diving into the book and learning about your campaign and learning about just New Hampshire in general, there's unlimited podcasts and there's unlimited conversations that we need to continue to have daily, weekly, yeah, monthly to grow this, to get it bigger, to make. Make changes at the community level first, and then where can it grow from there? 

Jon: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm trying to push. I think in some ways I almost regret calling it Community First Economics. Not that I I just am, I'm sometimes afraid people are gonna get turned off by, turned by the idea about economics that it's 'cause it's not complicated stuff. 

Steve: No. I don't read a lot. And so to listen and read this and the subject matter, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is all, I can comprehend this very easily. 

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I think, not that I regret calling it that, but sometimes I wish I, I maybe should have used that as a subtitle. I don't know. I think it won't be an issue, but I just don't want people to think that this is like complicated economic stuff. It's not, it's actually the whole point is the opposite that economists have just, dryly looking at numbers and making these grand assessments about how things are going is not super helpful. When they say, oh inflation's down 2%, it's eggs are still $7, or, unemployment rate is only down, is only up, 3%, it's like for those 3% of the people that's a huge problem. Yeah. 

Steve: Yeah. 

Jon: And I, and that's another goal is to, is of the book, was to make economics more something people could think about in a way that wasn't so abstract. It wasn't just about numbers, but was about like, lived experience and what's happening on the ground level. 

Steve: Yeah. That's awesome. I think we should probably let people know where they can get the book easiest in New Hampshire. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Steve: Where would you recommend people finding it? So 

Jon: you can get it at. Any independent bookstore should be able to get it. They can order it in. I know that there will be copies at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter. The Bookery in Manchester is ordering copies, so they're available there. You can get it on our website, communityfirsteconomics.com. And basically, anywhere good books are sold, you will find Community First Economics. Even though I trashed Jeff Bezos in this is for sale on Amazon, if that's a place you go to buy books. I was, I found out when I was doing the research about that part of it that like 90% of softcover books in the United States are sold on Amazon. 

Steve: Oh yeah. 

Jon: It's crazy. So I didn't want to do it, but I was like, geez, I guess I have to. 

Steve: It's what the beast is. I remember when I was in college. That's when Amazon was getting going and you were getting textbooks off of Amazon that you, your, some professors for some reason had a beef with the bookstore on campus. So you had to oh really? Wow. Go online and get their books, so 

Jon: funny, 

Steve: from Amazon and other retailers because they didn't want to sell them on the on campus bookstore. And that's wild. But 

Jon: yeah, 

Steve: look what it turned into. 

Jon: Totally. That's it. Thank you so much. Yeah, man. It's been really fun. 

Steve: It's super fun. I'd love to continue to talk about your campaign and your book and how you're gonna help New Hampshire grow and develop and see where things go from here. It's been great. Thanks, man. Cheers.