Hello everyone. My name is Dane Carlson. I'm the host and the publisher of the econ dev show. 

I thought that before we began the podcast and earnest, I should tell you a little bit about myself.  

 During the day, I'm the director of economic development for Galveston County, Texas Galveston County. As you probably know, is the  coastal region of greater Houston.

 We have the Gulf of Mexico on the South Galveston Bay on the East and Houston and NASA on the North. I'm originally from central California. And for about a decade before being recruited to Texas, I live just outside of Yosemite national park.

 I was a professional blogger. I worked in the small business startup and entrepreneurial space from about 2001 to 2015.  And there I helped entrepreneurs from all over the world. Start a business. I connected ideas, capital and execution.  I was blogging and about economic development probably before you knew what a blog was.

And even before they were called blogs.  After I sold my blog network in 2015, I sort of retired at the age of 39 and wanted to do something  local.  We'd moved to my wife's small hometown, and it was a nice place to live, but not a very nice place to do business because it was situated directly on the route to a major tourist Mecca.

But very underdeveloped. I thought I could help  I jumped into the chamber and economic development world there. I also started attending OU EDI  to learn more about professional economic development.

In my time in that small community, I helped hundreds of local entrepreneurs and small businesses pivot from serving the local community  to serving the 500,000 cars full of cash that drove through town and stopped at the two stop signs. Every year,  my efforts started to make a difference and won awards,  but a massive perspective shift is a very hard sell on small town politics that,  and because it was California, everything kept burning up.

You see the problem with living in the mountains of California is that everything burns.  And boy did we have forest fires regularly?  So in 2018, I decided to save my family, the stress of being so polarizing in a small town and move someplace where economic development wasn't a bad word and where everything didn't burn.

 In fact, while we were in the process of moving our house was under an evacuation order for a forest fire. So I ended up running economic development for Galveston County. I'm probably the only department level director of pure economic development at the County level in Texas,  because you see in Texas economic development has done almost entirely at the city  and state level.

And so we're pretty unique.  In this role, I do mostly attraction marketing and recruitment work for our cities.  I've recruited a number of large industrial projects including two of the top five economic development projects in 20, 19 and 2020  with investment topic more than a billion dollars.

Anyway,  that's a little bit about me. I hope that you'll continue listening.  Thank you very much. I'll talk to you soon.