(upbeat rock music) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ (upbeat rock music ends) - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag."

I'm your host, Rob Sharkey.

When you go to the grocery store, you like to see food and you like to think, "Well, maybe that came from a farmer that was close by."

Not always the case, but why shouldn't it be?

Well, today we're gonna be talking with Jon Griffel from Carlinville, Illinois.

How you doing, Jon?

- Great, how about yourself?

- Where is Carlinville?

- About 50 miles north of St. Louis, and 50 miles south of Springfield.

- How far of a drive from Peoria?

- A little bit over two hours.

- [Rob] Oh yeah?

So you made a trek.

- It's not too bad.

- There's no interstate, right?

- Oh yeah, it's interstate all the way.

- 55?

- 55 and straight up.

- Okay.

- Yep.

Turn off at, I'm terrible with names, but turn off at Lincoln and come straight up.

- Yeah, there's a candy store in Lincoln.

Maybe you'll hit that on the way back.

- Yeah, not a big candy person.

- Okay.

(Rob and Jon laughing) You're a sixth-generation family farmer.

So who's all involved with your farm?

- Yeah, so whenever I was growing up, I was involved in the farm with my grandpa and my dad.

And then, my grandpa passed away about 2015, so it's me and my dad on the farm now.

And then, we have a couple other people that help us seasonally, you know, with harvest planting and occasionally with cattle.

- What all are you raising?

- Yeah, so we have corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we grow hay, and then we also have our own cow-calf beef herd.

- Okay, so do you have, like, a feed lot at the farm, or do you got some timber ground, or how's that work?

- Yeah, a combination.

So we do all the way through, we do calf all the way through to feeding 'em out.

So we have the pasture that's part of our family's original farmstead that was there since 1856.

And so we pasture back there, and then bring 'em up, and we're just in the process of doing that actually this week, bringing 'em up and separating them, and putting 'em into feed lots, and getting 'em moved around.

- So are they always on grain?

- Not always on grain.

So they'll spend the first almost year and a half, two years of life on pasture, and then they'll come in and they'll finish on grain.

- Gotcha.

- So grass fed, grain finished.

- You're married to Kristen?

- Yep.

- Where'd you meet her?

- I met her at University of Illinois in Springfield.

We were both there for a year, and then I transferred and went to Blackburn College.

So for the first five years we were together, we were at the very least an hour apart.

And then, she was eight hours apart when we were in Minnesota until we finally got engaged.

- Oh, the long distance.

- It was always a distance relationship.

- Yeah, did you do a lot of driving?

- Yeah, yeah, a lot of driving.

- Like, what year was that roughly?

- That would've been 2012 to 2015.

- Okay, so you're a lot younger.

So you didn't have the deal, like, where you were dating a gal that was far away, and then you had the long-distance phones.

You didn't have that?

- So we had texts, but we'd still do phone calls, but this was pre-FaceTime.

So now everybody, they at least get the advantage of FaceTime.

Before, it was just phone calls still.

So we were kind of right in that zone, but texting definitely helped.

- Okay.

You think that was better when you were dating?

- I think it was better for college.

So I played basketball in college, and then she was involved in different groups, and so our schedules were pretty busy anyways.

So we could always kind of touch base, but then we could set apart a day or so that it would just be us being together, not everything else and trying to live life and do everything.

We just set apart that day and not plan anything.

- So you're saying it was better when you actually didn't have to talk to your wife?

- Yes.

No.

(laughs) Gonna get me in trouble.

- I'm just trying to think of- - No.

- Kids?

- Yeah, two.

We have my son Jamie, who's gonna turn five at the end of the month, and my daughter Claire, who turned two back in June.

- Oh my gosh, young ones.

- Yep.

- Y'all are running?

- Yep, all the time.

So our 2-year-old is at the stage where she's either an absolute saint or an absolute demon, and you never know which one you're gonna get.

- Oh.

- So yeah.

- Did you always know that you wanted to come back and farm?

- No, actually whenever I was going throughout high school, I was involved in FFA, I won State Star Farmer, I got my American degree.

- [Rob] What's that?

State Star Farmer.

- State Star Farmer is like an overall award for farming activities, and keeping track of your record books, and doing things like that.

- Oh.

- So I was diversified, 'cause I had cattle and grain crops as well.

- And you could keep records?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Okay, is that like, because you start out, like FFA, you have that Star Greenhand, which is like the freshmen.

Was yours like the sophomore?

- No, so the Star Farmer you get is the senior year, and it's like one of the top three or four awards given out.

- Oh, so you're like at the top of the top?

- Up there, then, yeah.

- Okay, you must've had really good records.

- Yeah, probably better then than I do now.

(Rob and Jon laughing) - All right, so you did that.

- Yep.

- But you weren't for sure you were coming back?

- No, that really wasn't my plan.

I went to college actually to be a high school history teacher.

- Really?

- Yeah.

I went to my first teaching class, and this was 2011, there was a teacher surplus in Illinois.

There was a time whenever they would say there'd be 100 applicants for every job open.

- For teaching?

- For teaching.

- Okay.

- Which is not the case now, but it was the case then.

- Yeah.

- And the professor, the first day I walked in, said, "Well if you ever wanna have a job or make any money, don't become a teacher."

And so I just stood up and left the class, and I went and changed my registration and went to business.

- Whoa, whoa.

I mean, did he say anything, the teacher?

- No, I don't think he expected it.

I don't know, I just got up and left.

I still had time, we were still in registration.

I was like, "Well, if I'm not gonna be here, I might as well not waste an hour," and just left and went and registered for other business classes.

- Really?

Did you walk out flipping the bird?

- No, just- - Yeah, "I'm outta here."

- Grabbed my bag and left.

- That was it?

- That was it.

- Kind of anticlimactic.

- Oh yeah, really, I mean, I don't do things for drama, but it seemed like the right thing to do, so I did it.

- So now you're a business major.

- Yep.

- So are you wanting to do with that?

- I don't know, I think that's why I became a business major.

I just kind of took whatever opportunities became available.

That's kind of how I've lived life up until this point.

I just kind of see where things will take me and what opportunities arise.

But I transferred to Blackburn College and I found out that if I took two extra classes that I could get a accounting degree, as well as a business management degree, so I did that, and got that degree.

- Are you a numbers guy?

- No, I looked at it and said, "It's only two extra classes."

- Okay.

- And once you get past 12 credit hours, they don't charge anymore if you go up to 21, so I just took extra classes.

- Oh really?

- Oh yeah.

So that was nice.

- But then you have to do extra classes.

- Well, yeah.

- Okay.

- I'm a numbers guy, like, I can't do obscure math.

Like, you know, if I have to go try and do any type of calculus or- - You can't figure out how tall a flagpole is measuring the shadow and dividing that by the curvature of the Earth?

- No.

- That's not you?

- No.

- But assets or liabilities minus, I don't know.

- Yeah.

- Something like that.

- That's the kind of math that makes sense to me.

- Yeah.

Okay.

- Yeah.

- We're on the same page.

- Yep.

- All right, so you graduate, then what?

- So then I actually moved to Minnesota for two years.

My wife was already up in Rochester, Minnesota, working at Mayo Clinic as a surgical assistant.

So I followed her up, and I knew we were not going to stay in Minnesota long term.

- [Rob] Why?

- Because she is originally from Illinois as well, we wanted her to both come back and be closer to family.

Family is important to both of us, and we didn't wanna be up there forever, and it's cold.

- It's really cold up, yeah.

- And it's cold, yeah.

- Miserable up there.

- It's either cold or it's humid.

There's like 15 days where it's not either of those.

But then, so I figured if I'm only gonna be up here for a short period of time, and I don't really know what I wanna do, I'm just going to try things that sound interesting to me.

- Yeah.

- So I did things from, I got my real estate license, got involved in real estate.

I worked at a Scheels part-time.

I worked as a- - The outdoors?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- As a salesperson, part-time.

- What were you selling?

Boats?

- I was selling- - Sell those boats.

That'd be cool.

- No, golf clubs, weights, kayaks, baseball gloves, soccer stuff.

- Last I knew, a kayak was a boat.

- Yeah, well, not the big boats I guess, but I didn't sell too many of those.

- All right, so real estate, Scheels, what else?

- Yep, and then I worked as a salesperson for a microbrewery out of the Twin Cities.

- Oh.

- They were expanding into Rochester.

- [Rob] But you were selling beer?

- Yep.

- Okay.

- Going to bars and selling beer, and going to stores and selling beer.

- So you'd go to a bar and say, "You need to have this beer on tap"?

- Yep.

- Okay.

- Yep, and that was actually, it was very good for me at that point, 'cause I always thought I had a little bit of a sales knack to it.

But there was distributors in town that owned, they would install the taps for the bars, they would pay for 'em and give it to 'em, but then they would only have one tap that couldn't be that distributor's beer.

- Oh.

- So they'd have 15 taps, and I could only compete for one with everybody who wasn't working with that distribution company.

So it was a good sales thing, and, you know, never hurt to just, I was, you know, 23 years old, so hanging out in a bar and talking to bartenders wasn't the worst thing in the world.

- [Rob] But you were good at selling?

- Yeah.

- You were like the, you'd sell me this pen type of guy?

- No, I would say I was better with relationships.

I always kind of wanted to make a relationship with the person first, and then see if I could get the product to move too.

But it tended to work out that if I made the relationship first, the product would follow.

- Yeah.

You still sell real estate today?

- Yep.

- Do you have your face on a billboard?

- No.

- You know how they do that?

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Yep.

- You don't do it, huh?

- No.

No, I don't have my face on a billboard.

Don't do a lot in advertising, just more word of mouth.

You know, I'm back in the area I'm originally from.

- Do you work for somebody or on your own?

- Yeah, I work with Century 21.

- I've heard of them.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- They're around some places.

- Like everywhere.

- Most of them.

- Yeah.

(Jon laughing) So are you selling houses, farms, what?

- Yeah, so houses, and then not as much in the agricultural space, but houses and commercial property.

- Okay.

- I've kind of leaned in with being on our chamber of commerce also doing the commercial side, and I kind of have ties in with that.

I have people who are asking me for places for purchase or lease or whatever else that they need.

- All right, besides the farming, tell me what Our Market is.

- Yeah, so Our Market is a food cooperative.

We started, oh, I wanna say about three years ago.

- Okay.

- And we tried to do like a common stock buying, there was a lot of processes to get the organization in place.

A lot of tax, a lot of stuff I didn't understand, but there's very smart people on our board that explained it to me.

- In Carlinville?

- Yep.

- Okay.

- Yep, in Carlinville.

So we lost our local grocery store.

And the idea was is that we wanted to bring a grocery store back to our community that people could invest in, and have that opportunity to get a return on their investment, and then also be able to promote local goods.

- Gotcha.

That is great and all.

But, you know, you're gonna have a grocery store, people want, like, bananas.

- Yep.

- Well, you can't grow them easily here.

- Yep, so we are partnering with a national grocer as well, to bring in those staple items.

But our focus is really on trying to bring as many products as we can from as local as we can.

- Okay.

- You know, 50, 100, 150 miles away, bring that in.

I think it's a great opportunity for people in agriculture.

I was very fortunate, I grew up on a farm that was kind of already established.

But there are a lot of people that wanna get involved in agriculture and the costs involved with starting are so exorbitantly high that they can't.

But this gives them an opportunity to have a local market for growing fruits, vegetables, things like that, that they can, and they might not need, you know, 500 or 600 acres of farm ground.

They might need two or three that they could put greenhouses on.

- Yeah.

- So it gives them that opportunity.

- So if they wanna grow tomatoes, or rhubarb, or something like that, this would be a place not only where they can sell it, but people know that it came from Jim Bob down the street?

- Yep, and be able to have that local investment, and be able to put a face with the product.

- Okay.

What is this thing?

It looks like maybe an iPad, but it's made out of paper stuff.

- Yep, so growing up, I was a very big reader.

I would read almost nonstop.

I would read on the bus, anytime I had extra time in class, anything like that.

- Good Lord, how old are you?

- 31.

- Just wait, just wait.

- I know it's coming.

- Whew, what is with, who did this?

That's like reading an aspirin bottle.

- Well, it's supposed to be able to fit in your pocket, like coat pocket or something, so that's helpful.

- Well, you make the "Bible" small enough, you can fit it in too.

- It's true.

- That is the smallest writing I think I've ever seen in a book.

Anyway, I digress, I interrupted you.

- No, you're good.

- Yeah.

- So I went through college and got burnt out on reading.

I spent probably four years after that without touching a single book.

I was kind of tired of getting forced to read.

And then, I kind of made myself get back into it, and I set a goal, five years ago, to read 52 books in a year.

So a book a week.

- Oh.

That's great, if you're doing like "Cat in the Hat" stuff.

Now, this?

How long would it take you to read a book like this?

- Less than a week.

- Okay.

- So I did that, and then I've compounded on that goal, but I brought it back to 50.

So, in the last five years, I just finished, a couple days ago, my 250th book in five years.

- Okay.

- So I was doing 50 a year for all five of those years.

- What's your favorite book?

- I wouldn't say this is my favorite book, 'cause I always like fiction, the stories and stuff like that.

- Yeah.

- But nonfiction wise, I brought this 'cause this is the book that I've given away the most.

It's called "The Obstacle is the Way," because it's based on Stoic readings and talking about how- - Stoic readings?

- Yeah.

Like Marcus Aurelius, the, like, Roman- - I saw that movie.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So they do that- - "On my signal, unleash hell."

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So they do things like this, and he talks about that the obstacle is part of the way.

We always see things in like a linear fashion, like, "This is how life will go through here."

But then you hit an obstacle, and you have to accept that the obstacle has just become a part of the way, but you have to find either a way around it and continue to go or find another path.

- That's like when the Avengers stole the Infinity Stones and they started their own- - And had all the different timelines?

- Yeah.

- The 12 million different timelines?

- This is about the multiverse?

- Yeah, absolutely, it makes about as much... No, I'm just kidding.

It makes a little bit more sense than that.

- So basically you're talking about, you know, something in your life that is going to, you got beat or you're defeated, or something like that, but you're gonna be able to, I don't know, figure that out.

- Work around it, work through it, and find a path to keep making your way.

And I think it's also important, because I don't send it to people just whenever things aren't going well, but I also send it to 'em whenever things are going well.

- Why?

- Because I think it's as important to realize that obstacles will occur.

- Oh.

- You have to know that they will come.

And I think that that's a big part of it is knowing that obstacles will occur in your life, and this gives you an idea and maybe a little bit of philosophy behind being able to continue to push through whenever you do hit those.

- Preemptive?

- Yeah, preemptive.

- Yeah.

Okay.

- Yeah.

- Maybe it's got like an audiobook and I can listen to it.

- Oh, absolutely.

Yep, it has an audiobook.

- Okay.

So yeah, I couldn't read it.

Even with a magnifying glass, I couldn't read that thing.

Okay, so you're a busy guy.

Oh my gosh, really?

You do a podcast?

- Yeah.

- Whew.

- Terrible business strategy, isn't it?

- It's something.

"How We Grow," that's the name of it?

- Yep.

- What's it about?

- So it's kind of like a combination of, like, I've always been big into, like, personal growth and things like that.

- Mhmm.

- And so there wasn't something like that in the agricultural space, so I take it as an opportunity to learn about people's lives in agriculture and learn about the stories behind people.

Because I know that there's a lot of trade publications, and everything else, and podcasts that talk about commodities, and prices, and economic, you know, demands, things like that.

Like, all of the business side of it.

But I think that there's a lot of interesting stories that people don't know behind the people.

- Not really.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - That's what everybody says.

- Well, I think there is.

- "A lot of great stories in ag."

- Yeah.

- No.

- I think there is.

There's a lot of great stories of overcoming, especially when we talk about overcoming adversity.

- We'll agree- - There's a lot of it.

- Agree to disagree, I guess.

- That'll work.

(Rob laughs) - Did you know how to do any of that before the whole, I mean, because podcasts you have to figure out, you know, like the production side of it too.

Did you know any of that?

- No, not at all.

- Yeah.

- Just read about it, listened to some podcasts about it, and then just bought stuff on Amazon and figured it out.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- You listened to a podcast about doing a podcast?

- Yep.

- Ah.

Are you videotaping them?

- Yeah, so I use a software called Riverside that I usually do most of 'em right now via Zoom or via like a Zoom call.

- Yeah.

- And yeah, it records that while they're going, and records two separate links, and is uploading it as we're going.

It automatically transcribes the whole conversation, everything else, it makes it really easy.

- That way if you get glitchy on one side or the other, it's recording from their computer.

- Yep.

- I've done some interviews on it before, so it makes sense.

- Oh yeah.

It's really nice and really handy.

- [Rob] And then, you gotta edit all that.

- Yeah, so it'll actually automatically take out pauses and stuff as you go, and then you edit, you know, wherever else you wanna go on it.

- I don't wanna get inside baseball, but how do you take out pauses on a video?

- It does it itself, so it takes out the pauses.

It senses the pauses in the audio, and then takes it out in the video corresponding.

- See this is what Arnold Schwarzenegger was warning us against in those videos or those movies, remember the, yeah, the ones with Skynet and all that?

- Have you seen the self-propelled tractors and things, and this is what he's warning us about?

- Yeah, the tractors are driving off satellites.

You're talking about a computer thinking about stuff.

- Yeah, you don't think that, well, that tractor's not really thinking I guess, but it will in the future.

- No, but the computer's thinking... (sighs) We gotta stop talking, because, honestly, what I've learned is nobody cares about podcasts, and here you are doing 'em.

- Of course, I do it for myself.

- What?

- I don't look at any viewership number, listening numbers, anything like that.

I do it because I wanna have good conversations with interesting people.

- Yeah, nobody listens to mine either.

- Eh.

(Rob laughing) Hey, you know.

- All right, what I was gonna say is you're a very busy person with your farming and your podcasting.

But, yet, you spend a lot of time helping out others and getting involved in stuff.

Why?

Why do that?

- Well, I got very involved in our community.

A couple years ago, there was a kind of strong anti-Illinois sentiment.

We were losing people as a state.

People were leaving, we were, you know, losing more and more every year.

And I was seeing a lot of people, in especially rural communities, my age leave, because there wasn't opportunities there or there wasn't as many opportunities as there are in other cities.

- Mhmm.

- And so I can't move my farm.

I can't move my farm to Tennessee, or Kentucky, or to Missouri.

I can't move and go.

I'm here, so if I'm here, I'm gonna be a part of making it better.

- Mhmm.

- So what I did is I just became involved, anything that I could become involved with to make it a better community, I did.

- Chamber of commerce, you are the president?

- Yep.

So we brought back our chamber of commerce, it had almost kind of died during Covid.

We got down to 12 members, which were people that were only, only reason they were members still is that they were auto-renewing their credit card essentially.

- Yeah, they forgot about it.

- So they were members.

So we had 12 starting 2 1/2 years ago, or two years ago.

And then, we came in, the chamber was in debt, like I said, had 12 members, was offering nothing essentially.

- In debt?

- Yeah.

- [Rob] How do you get in debt?

- They continued, throughout Covid, to pay the rental on a building.

- Oh.

- And just kept accruing those, as well as paying, you know, all the domain names for websites and everything like that, but not doing anything.

So we walked in and they had almost 80% of our first year's budget worth of debt.

- Oh.

- So we went out, and our community has been fantastic, and our board has been fantastic, 'cause we went out and we were able to talk with people.

And, at the end of the first year, we ended up with 67 members.

- Okay.

- So then we- - Wow, that's quite a jump.

- Yeah, so we went from 12 to 67, and we paid off that debt.

- It's like selling beer.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I wish I could've been that good at selling beer.

(Rob laughs) But it went from 12 to 67, and we still held, like, networking events, and we brought in speakers, and did things like that throughout the year, really kind of bootstrapping them though.

- Okay.

- And then, we brought back our annual awards banquet and we were able to recognize members of our community.

And then, we are gonna wrap up this year in a couple weeks, and we went from 67 to 95.

- Oh, wow.

- So we've still continued to grow.

- [Rob] How big is Carlinville?

- 57.

54, 5,700 people.

- So not that big.

- Not that big.

- Not that many businesses.

But boy, you must be getting all of them.

- We've got almost all of them.

And then, we've got a lot of buy-in from community members and churches that are non-profit members, and things like that.

So we've really tried this year to focus in educating our businesses and connecting them.

So we really looked at, in Carlinville, there was 52 weeks out of the year, there were events occurring on 42 out of the 52 weeks of the year.

So we said, "We really don't need another event.

We're not gonna put all of our effort into running a one-weekend event.

Like, there's enough going on."

So what we did instead is focus on how do we connect the community, because we have not a great communication between different community groups, and different businesses, and the schools in the city.

So what we actually did is we just unveiled an app a couple weeks ago that has all of the community calendars in one place, it has all of our chamber members, has their map, have their businesses, their sales, everything like that there.

- Oh, that's thinking ahead.

- Yeah, so it's been really good.

- Also, involved with the Illinois Farm Bureau Young Leaders.

What do you do there?

- Yeah, so I represent District 15, that's Macoupin, Madison, Bond, Calhoun, Greene, and Jersey Counties, all kind of along the Mississippi River there.

And, yeah, help host and network among state events for people under the age of 35 in Illinois Farm Bureau.

- I mean, that's at least 12, that's probably 20 meetings a year.

- It's a decent number of meetings.

Yeah.

- Yeah, okay.

- And then bringing in speakers for the district for young leaders and stuff like that.

I'm gonna be having one in a couple months bringing in somebody to talk about business diversification on the farm.

- Oh, okay.

- My wife said I can't ask any Farm Bureau questions.

(Jon chuckling) - That's up to you.

- I'm the one that has to go home with my lovely wife.

- Hey, you already put me on the spot earlier.

So this might be your chance to get in trouble.

- I know, but it's my show.

(laughs) What is the Farmers and Ranchers in Action?

- Yeah, so it's a national group that is connecting farmers and farm organizations with businesses that have climate goals.

So like your McDonald's, your big corporations like that have climate-friendly goals, and we're trying to find partnerships within agriculture as to how do we get to achieve those.

- Okay.

- So I serve as, like, a farmer ambassador.

So I'm able to meet with those people and just give them a farmer's perspective.

- [Rob] You meet with McDonald's?

- So I was at a national conference a couple years ago where like the, probably, it wasn't CEO, but vice president or president of some division for- - Ronald?

- No.

- No?

- No, it wasn't him.

I know, I would've been really excited.

- Yeah, that'd been really cool.

- That've been really good.

- Okay, kind of creeps me out.

- The Hamburglar, maybe, but we'll see.

(Rob laughs) - Do they actually listen?

- Yeah, so I think the biggest interesting thing was, at that point, you had a lot of companies that were buying carbon credits but had no idea what carbon credits were.

- Mhmm.

- So actually getting to talk with farmers and seeing, like, have an idea of what that was.

But then also I was able to serve on a panel at that point too, and talk, and they talked about the different things that we face in agriculture.

And they were kind of shocked, I think, by the market standards, and the things like that, that we deal with on a daily basis.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- Okay, I mean, that's what you always want.

but I always figured it's kind of lip service, right?

"Oh, we're just gonna go meet with some farmers, pat 'em on the back and say, 'Go produce my beef.'"

- Yeah, no, but they sat down and they listened, and they actually had, like, good discussions and a lot of questions about it too.

- Mhmm.

Are you on social media?

- Yeah.

- Where you at?

- So I'm on Facebook, Jon Griffel or Griffel Farms, and then also "How We Grow" podcast.

- Oh yeah.

- And then, on Instagram, the same.

- Two Fs, one L in Griffel.

- Yep.

- Not sure I agree with that.

- I'll tell you what, the interesting thing is that there is somebody on the other side of town with the same last name, and we are like sixth cousins.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- And I've never met anyone else with the same last name, but I'm just barely related to someone five miles away with the same last name.

- Do you like them?

- Don't know 'em that well.

So I'll say sure.

They're farmers too, so what's not to like, right?

- Well, I mean, I guess if you don't know 'em that well, maybe it's because you met 'em and you thought maybe, "I don't like you."

- No, just different circles.

(Rob and Jon laughing) - All right, people do put a lot of work into podcasts, so "How We Grow" podcast.

Yeah, I'm gonna go check it out, I think people should too, because you're a very smart guy, you're a great representative for agriculture, so I'm glad you're not just doing that, the podcast, but you're also out there helping your community, which not everybody does.

And it takes a certain personality to do it, so thank you for that.

- Yeah, no problem.

- All right, Jon Griffel from Carlinville, Illinois.

That's the town that does not have a road that goes straight through it.

You gotta what?

Drive around a park or something?

- No, around a square.

So that's the square where we'll have Christmas in Carlinville and- - What's the difference between a park and a square?

- You gotta drive around it.

A park just.

- Jon, thank you very much.

- Okay.

- Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

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