Modern Wisdom - #057 - Alexander Cortes - Skills For The 21st Century

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Alexander Cortes is a trainer, writer and speaker. Expect to learn what skills Alex would give a human if he was designing them for the 21st century, why we think Gary Vaynerchuk might have been pressing on the CEO of Fyre Festival's amygdala and our strategies for reading more throughout 2019. Extra Things: Sign up to Alex's Newsletter - https://cortes.site/newsletter/ Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes (he tweets some GREAT stuff) Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. This week my guest is Alexander Cortez. He's a personal trainer, a writer and a speaker, and he's a pretty interesting guy. I didn't have an agenda going into this conversation. I just wanted to talk to him about whatever was on his mind and we ended up discussing strategies for success in the 21st century. What skills and knowledge he would give to 18-year-old human being if he was give to 18 year old human being, if he was going to design one right now and send it out into the world. Then we moved on to the Fire Festival documentary, which both of us absolutely fell in love with when we watched it. If you haven't seen it yet, I urge you to go on to Netflix and give it a watch. But we

had a look into that and derived some really interesting conclusions about how seduced society is with success and the potential for Billio McFarlane, the guy behind Fire Festival, to have Gary Vaynerchuk pressing on his amygdala throughout the entirety of his life. So if you want to find out what that means, continue listening and as always if you are new here please press subscribe, if you are regular and you haven't done already, press 5 stars, wherever you are listening, it would make me very happy indeed and it helps support the podcast. Now please welcome Alexander Cortez. Alex, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom. I'm very good. How about yourself, my man? Yeah, I'm fantastic. Thanks. It looks an awful lot nicer wherever you are. I can see there's

a reflection of some good sunlight outside, which we haven't seen in the UK for a long time. I live right in the beach in Venice, so I'm in a pretty opportune spot for weather. Oh, man. That is a jealousy-inducing to say the least. So we haven't got an agenda today. We're just going to talk about whatever's on our mind. So what have you been learning about or reading about or thinking about recently? Recently, so I got a few things I'm working on. I don't have any real structures in my day at all. I mean like I do but I don't. I basically just write an email every day and then tweet a lot and then just talk about stuff. So it's sort of like this personal brand influencer strange

position. Yeah. You can't really qualify what you do, yet people pay attention to you all the time. But I mean, the big project I'm actually working on right now that's been constructive is I developed an online website learning portal with a business partner of mine called Sovereign University to teach people how to become Sovereign individuals

within like the modern sort of digital virtual economy economy physical world as they've merged with each other You know myself. I've been working online For myself about go ahead three years and before that I'd work with other people and I've also been a personal trainer for 10 years trained people in person But I always found myself attracted to service political conflict I like I like knowing what's going on, you know, in the sense that like on a meta level, not just on a level petty politics,

but it's been passing me the last six, seven years to watch the dialogue and discourse devolve into this politicized rhetoric where everything's political and everything you say can and will be used against you. And you see people lose their jobs or what they said. You see people go under fire for every kind of comment. Everything is taken out of context,

but new, a different context. And I realized for someone like myself, where I, because I've gone through that, because I've gone through that myself, and I know what the consequences are, three years ago I wanted to be in a position where I never had to worry about back clasping any kind. I didn't want to have to worry about an online mob.

I did not want to have to worry about being doxed. I want to be immune to all that. And I realize if you work for yourself, if you're a softening individual in the sense that you are self-made, self-paid, self-employed, you own your own businesses, and especially in digital world, where things really can't be taken from you that way,

and then you have physical basis, you're very untouchable in a certain sensibility. So sovereign universities are built around that concept. But then it's also teaching people the fundamental skills they need and the mindsets to learn how to do this stuff and create high value skills and create leverage. So it's an ambitious project. That's cool. You're liberating people from the the monotony of a world where they might not be that happy at work. I was recently reading a study that said over 80% of Americans are either indifferent or actively unhappy with their

jobs. And there's only, I think, between 18 and 20% who are actively engaged with their work. Yeah, society isn't happy as a whole. I mean, I would say Western societies, and as a whole, isn't a big cultural malaise that way. Where everyone senses it, that something has gone wrong or things are not going well, whatever well means. But we all feel it. Like we all see it within the media itself where everything's in outrage every day.

But at the same time, the world is a good place. There's a button opportunity if you know how to use it, capitalize on it, identify it. But you know, I mean the job on happiness, like the nature of work has changed over the course of 50, 60 years. A job used to be something that you were. Now a job is something that you do and oftentimes temporarily. There's the whole gig economy now where how many careers are there anymore where it's a

reliable path and you just do the same thing for four years. That's almost nonexistent at this point. I don't know what that exists at all, honestly. Everything has changed. So you have to be hyper-adaptive that way. For most people, when they want a set vision of the future and this is how things are going to go, you don't have any more. Yeah, it does not exist. So you have to be perceptive, you have to be self-aware.

What do you think of the important skills then, if we're moving into this very changeable time, which I'd completely agree, that we are, and the old bastions of a job for life, just don't seem to be there. What would be the skills if someone was thinking, if you were able to design a human now, that we're gonna start at 18 years old, or 21 years old, what skills would you give them, and what values would you give them? Skillwise, I would almost approach it from a classical, classical liberal arts education, where the big skill has been lost in the modern areas,

people's ability to think, yeah, that's been the biggest one. People's ability to think people's ability to express themselves. Yeah, but how does that skill? It's a soft skill. But soft skills have hard consequences and hard capitalization within the modern economy. So if I had an 18 year old and I want to make them as capable as possible in the job market or a teenager and let's say 12, I've three things. Rhetoric, logic, ability to argue, ability to speak, ability to write. If you can communicate very effectively in any environment that you're in, you're always

going to be near the top. I've seen that so many times, so many different fields that I've worked with consultant and where the people that can talk best are the ones that get ahead. Yeah, it is. What is talking to you for your risk communication do for you? It means you pay attention to people and you can assess what their needs are and if you're creating a product or even if you're writing code or even if you're writing an article or if you're just doing customer service and you're receptive to people.

That is, I mean, I'm being very cliche, but that has been lost by a lot of people because digitization has removed human communication. We're so used to talking through text now or showing an image, but then you get people faced to face and you see how awkward they are. Trimble, yeah. Yeah, so those people that can speak on camera,

those people that can talk at length, those people where they can, those people where they can, those people where they can have a conversation with someone that they know had to listen. Just doing those three things, you can identify so many opportunities within the digital economy and even the real world economy. Social media now has become such a big market for businesses.

And even online is one of the same thing. It's basic stuff like copywriting, web copy, archerwriting. Yeah, that's essentially what search engine optimization is on a metal level. So those three are being able to speak right, argue, let's say, say for a persuade. That's why I would start with, you know, with a young person.

And then from there, it'd be more sort of like tangible, you could say skillsets like knowing how to build a website, knowing how to take good photos, knowing just basic business arithmetic and math. The way modern education is set up where you go to college and you learn all this information, and then you go to, let's say, some kind of job, and then you have to re-learn everything again. That's completely backwards. I said this the other day on Twitter where I think the next probably year to 10 years to 20 years, what you'll see is sort of this return of a apprenticeship where people get out of high school, they go work hustle jobs

or they go work paid internships and they develop these necessary skills. And then maybe they go back to school for a specific education to augment that. Yeah, that's how I would set up. And if I had a kid, now that's why I'd be telling them to do. I would not be telling them go to college. You'll find yourself a college, and that you won't.

You're going to be made to take two years of worthless GE classes. You're going to be in a room with 100 people. You're probably going to be taught by TA. You'll switch majors four times. And then that's not even getting to the quality quality of the education which has precipitously declined. So yeah, that's kind of like a shit show at this point. I have to say, so I did five years at Newcastle University here in the UK finished with the Masters in International Marketing and I became incredibly disenfranchised and disenchanted with academia as I moved through that and me and my

business partners sat next to each other in our first ever seminar and pretty much from that day we started working together and now almost 13 years later I've still not got rid of him and yeah we um I was being shown a world of business in academics, which was saying one thing. And then I was experiencing one in the real world, which essentially bore very little resemblance. And I think the time that I was doing it as well was very crucial, because this was 2006 to 2010. And that was, so I did a business management course,

then in touch on marketing masters. And there was not a single Course on social media for the entire time that I was there and that's like 2006 was when you still needed a university address to be able to sign up to Facebook Yeah, do you remember that you had to have like like a The correct suffix to your at you. I I think it was. Yeah, for the UK, dot AC, dot AU, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, we had that.

And then you think like, imagine, like you're doing a marketing course now and no one anywhere mentioned social media, you want your money back, because it's just that massive selling chat. So I think that you're right. I think that these soft skills, they're the ones that are difficult to acquire,

but they're definitely the ones that are scalable, right? And it doesn't matter what happens to the market. If you can sell and you can communicate. So I did a podcast the other day with a guy called Leon Scott from the UK. And afterwards, he commented on the fact that it was the first time that he's had a one hour conversation with someone where he was completely focused on just what was being said, the content

that we were going through, no one, obviously no one has their phone out, no one's even looking, looking at anything else other than to gesture or to remember. And I think that, like having someone to practice conversing with, it's unsol bizarre that you need that but. I mean, I agree. Like that's it. If that's a quality of like the quality of focus, I get asking that question constantly all the time. Like, how do I focus better? How do I study better? And I was a natural. Well, when I never really studied much at all, I was always this. I have a very good memory. I was not the person that was like a good study or where I was always this, I have a very good memory. I was not the person that was like a good study or where I was studies that way. I was a terrible student all through high school, adolescence, college.

I did the bare minimum to get by because I never saw the point in doing something just for the sake of doing it that way, which suited me to be there as a publication. But that quality focus now, I get to ask that question a lot by young guys, young gentlemen, and late teens, late twenties, even even lady followers. And it's always the same thing. Like, how do I focus better?

And I always tell them, focus is just doing one thing at a time. Like, that's it. It doesn't happen. There's not a complicated definite. You're doing one thing. And one thing only, you have a conversation. You're making eye contact with somebody, even if it's through a screen and you're talking. You're not looking at this, looking at that, clicking this, clicking that while trying to

care. I'm like, it's one thing. What about that? So difficult. But we live in this culture now where people pride themselves so much on multi-tasking, the ability to switch through apps and switch through devices. And their attention is constantly going to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

And I realize it trains your thinking to not be able to think. It's very fractured. And you know, as a not to deliver a sub story, but I am on the receiving end. I'm like, I feel that I am patient zero for someone who's been able to see this. So I was a later, later doctor of an iPhone. I was still holding on to the hope that Blackberry was going to be good until maybe five years ago, something like that, which is a shame because you know, I miss the buttons. I genuinely, genuinely do.

And BB pin, haven't it changed you BB pin every time you got a new handset? So what I've noticed is that I was a voracious reader when I was younger. I did a number of degrees again without a smart device that was as attention grabbing as an iPhone is now or a similar device. And my capacity for low stimulus activities, I think like reading, like deep reading, has had and is still so heavily damaged that it is, it's not even comparable. The way that I'm able to focus my attention doesn't even feel the same now and I've had to construct this hilarious series of instantiation initiatives as James Clea from Atomic Habits would implementation initiatives as James Clea would call it, where so no phone in the bedroom, phone is outside because I can't have it in here because

if I'm working there's that, if I'm at work there's a special drawer where the phone lives that goes in my desk. Like, I've got, my morning routine has very specific, like, order of things that I go through because I'm like having to create the equivalent of like a toddler's environment way. You know, you've got the little foam cups that go on the sharp edges of all of the sets of drawers and the desks and stuff. I've had to create, I've had to create myself an attention equivalent of that because I essentially am a child who can't be trusted with technology anymore. And for me to relearn this deep work, the sort of car Newport

approach to it, this single focus on to one particular topic at one time, I'm having to essentially place myself in a himmatically sealed environment where there's no danger of distraction. So I can, you know, for the guys that are listening who maybe do struggle with the focus, I can completely empathize with what they're going through and sympathize with it. It's funny because it recently the past, I guess past two years I realized I did the least amount of reading I've ever done. Which, I'm one level I got the most done I've ever gotten done. So it wasn't as if I was out of loss. But at the end of last year I raised, you know what, I probably read about three books last year like in completion. Like that was it.

That was it. And I wanted to get back to reading. So that was my, that was a, you use resolution this year or tell me so I'm gonna read a book a week like I used to. And it's been, it's interesting because now like I, I'm sorry, I've started reading, I got a bunch of books in my bed,

like right here, I read this, I just grabbed it. Yeah, I read this bunch of books in my bed right here. I read this, here's a grab it. Yeah, I read this book last week, Empire to Summer Moon. It's about Kamachi tribe in the street of the United States. It's a really fascinating phenomenal book. I read it like this awesome, awesome book, nonfiction. Yeah, I have a few others. So I'm at like five for the years or so far.

So I'm on track. Yeah, man. But the experience of reading again, where I was just, I had days like, I've had days where I just, I'm in my room the entire day just reading the whole book. Yeah. For five, six hours, like getting a whole book this, okay, done.

Onto the next one. Yeah. It's strange, it feels good. And like the process of reading, it is actually very relaxing. There's a mental nourishment to it. And when I do get back on the device now or the computer, there's a harshness to it.

And there's sort of this like this, a physical rapidity where you're just going through everything, you're spilling the feed over and over and over again, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. And you're trying to, you know, you're spying everything at once. And it's not overwhelming, this one's like, I'm so overwhelmed by it, but it feels fake. And there's this subset there, I realize there's just lack of thought to it. There's sort of this lack of deep thought, deep focus to it. Where you're like, it's just it's training you to think on such a superficial level.

And you see that with how people communicate with each other where all arguments now, all headlines, all are called to everything. It's all written in emotional sound bites. Yeah, there's very little effects, reason context. It's just written to get your attention, fire up your emotions, get your pistols off,

work in premier biases, and then move on to the next thing. And you can do that a thousand times a day. Mm-hmm. We're not built to have this level of stimulus go through as I don't think, not at all. And there was an article that I read not so long ago that said something to do with the amount of stimulus that a typical human encounter is now in a single day is the equivalent to the level

of stimulus that a paleolithic ancestors would have done in a month. And you're like, right, okay, so that's the level to which my dopamine is being hacked by devices. And you totally correct. So the listeners will know that we are evangelists of a good morning routine on this show. And mine is beautiful. It's my favorite part of the day by an absolute country mile. If I've not had to work, I run nightclubs.

If I've not had to work the night before and I've been able to go to bed at the time I want, which is 10 and get up at the time I want, which is six. My morning is beautiful. It's a smoothie, some meditation, some reading, some journaling, some gratitude, some deep work, then some rumwad, some yoga, then I'm just, I've finished that, and I'm like, that is,

if I could choose a day, I'd have an entire day that's a morning routine. And it almost feels laborious to think, I, as soon as I step out of that door, that bedroom door, I now need to enter what I feel like the real world and start playing the game of, here we go. And I like, sometimes I work myself up to checking my phone. And I think my particular device, given the industry I'm in and the way that we work, I have a lot of staff and there's a lot of group chats on WhatsApp and there's a lot of social media going on.

So maybe I have a super normal level of super normal stimulus. But yeah, there's some days where the equivalent of working up to a one rep max, I need to prep myself before I pick the phone up. My girlfriend, I tell her sometimes, now, since I'll be looking at my phone, I get, I just, because of the Twitter following I have, and then, like, the email list, and all sorts of media accounts, it's just a constant, you know, a torrent of notifications and just the barrage. Yeah, and I, yeah, I'll look at and be like, oh, like someone else wants a piece of my

time. And I think, I read an article recently, I think it might have been on Buzzfeed or maybe it was not. It was about Millennial burnout. And the article was quite insightful. And there were people of course commenting that this is bullshit, this article, Millials which is weak, but there was something very real to it's the effect that Millennial,

the writer elucidated this very clearly. Millials deal this environment of such overwhelming simulation like we just sell the time. and there's so many things grabbing our attention. And every task takes another piece of it. Every task takes another piece of it. And at the same time, we have socioeconomic pressure of trying to just survive. And people have the socioeconomic pressure. Well, they ever be able to get ahead.

And then you have, you know, you have all these factors that you're dealing with that doing simple things like getting back to somebody on the phone or having to respond to an email or having to send a package. Is it laziness or is it just that you cannot do another thing? We are so driven now towards this god of efficiency. Everything has to be efficient and optimized and fast in speed. But then we do all that, but does it make our lives better in the sense that we actually get more done?

Or are we actually just having to store these like death by thousand cuts or pinpricks? Totally, totally correct, yeah. Like is it, then you have to drop something off and you're like, I don't feel like doing this at all. I can't, yeah, I can't go to the post office.

It's too much today. It's like, I keep on thinking when you're talking about that, about RAM and a computer. And it's that you still have the same total amount of RAM, but that the number of tasks that it's trying to do at one time is now 10X, 100X, 1000X. And switching between those is just so exhausting.

I wanted to ask someone who works in the industry, similarly, yourself, where personal brand is a big deal, this for quite a while. How do you draw the line between when you're doing work and when you're being wasteful on social media? Because there's always that excuse, right? Oh, well, if I just do, if I spend another X amount of time on Twitter, maybe I'll find

something which I quote tweet or retweet or reply to and that bangs and that adds another hundred subs onto this channel or that email list. How do you, how do you try and control it? So this is going to be like a sort of contrarian sideways perspective. I don't control it, but I have a different model of how I see this. So my background is a fitness industry, that that's where I started. I've been in a Purse Tramp for 10 years. And when I got on Facebook about 2007, I was in the show of the Facebook

fitness community for a long time until the 2016, I delayed Facebook over a year ago, well over a year ago. But what I still happen for people as they try to develop their brand, like this idea of a personal brand to now that has become very preeminent, where because we are in such a search for truth and authenticity and we no longer trust institutions, and all like, we don't trust news, we don't trust government, we don't trust 30 figures. So we're looking for individuals that we can sort of have to be our digital friends and we'll trust them because it's a one-to-one interaction. So I saw people doing some fitness industry years ago before personal branding became a hot

term. And I realized that those people that had the healthiest relationship with their audience and had the healthiest relationship with these tools, these platforms, they didn't obsess over the value they delivered on a daily basis. They didn't obsess over productivity. They tried to be consistent in what they presented to the best of their abilities. And then those things that were not in alignment with the brand or in alignment with the domain that they were working in, they didn't worry about it because they had the perspective that you know what, I'm human, I am not just one thing, I am many things. So I'm just

going to show essentially my personality as it is. Yeah, and whether you connect with or not, that's upon you. So I've said this before many times, if you want to have a really good relationship with your audience, with your work, you have to be fully invested in it

on the sense that you want to be consistent in value, but you have to be detached from it in regards to the outcome that gives you. It's a difficult position to be in, right? It's very paradoxical. It's almost like a paradox that if you really want to love people, then you also have to be able to hate them in equal measure. You can't only be one. It has to be both.

So that's how I work it now. So on a daily basis, if I had the idea, it's coming to my head and things, some size, I'll share them. And then there'll be times where I'll just be in a humorous mode, you know, a snappy mode, and I'll just I'll tweet whatever I feel like. It's work for the, I realize, in reasons for people see you, and they realize you're not trying to be serious all the time. You're not trying to present yourself just one thing. You have flaws, you are a person, you're not, you're not a bot. You a person, you're not a bot, you're

not boring. If you're selling on personality that way, that's highly, highly, highly effective. And on a certain metal level, at the highest levels of any industry, the people that are most successful are the ones who have that kind of power personality. You're totally right. I mean, as a good example, example Elon Musk 40 million for I think it's about 20 million followers or 40 million followers space X like four million and he deleted he deleted Tesla's Facebook yeah, like Christiana Ronaldo 30 to 40 million rail Madrid 12 million Like people connect with people. They don't connect with brands

Yes, and you can do the mistakes that you make. Like imagine if, imagine if Rayal Madrid started tweeting stuff with typos in or accidentally putting up just random bits of content and stuff like that. Everyone would be like, what are you doing? You're supposed to be this professional, but you can get away with that when you're a person.

That's definitely an asymmetry in the delivery of, in the ability to deliver a message between personal brand and corporate brand. I use this, I use this example when I was training personal trainers, where like the term personal trainer, what's the first word in it? It's personal.

So you should be personable with the people you train and it's a two-human tummy conversation and you're trying to help them and they're teaching you something. The trainer part comes second. And I would say that because you know, for a lot of trainers where people get into these very prescriptive dogmatic mindsets as to how they're supposed to interact and what they're supposed to say. They want to fit people in the boxes and like that's not what it is. There's no prescription, there's no ultimate philosophy, there's no magic solution. It's speaking to people's individuals, you know,

you are human being, they're human being, it's personal first, and then you train them second. Yeah, so even personal branding. Are you a person who has a brand that has co-lust around you? Or are you this sort of contrived brand and you're trying to be personable through that brand? You know, the former people will take to the latter, they'll think you're boring or just,

to really just full of shit. Or associate path. Yeah, or associate path. See that online all the time where people, people will turn on their guru or their, you know, whoever they idolized after a while because they realize it's the same repetitive message and there's no real death to it. They're just basically repeating this ad hoc and fix something.

I get that with TiloPez. TiloPez for me now, I don't know what I've clicked on, but that man has pixeled me hard and I'm getting re-targeted like a bastard on every form of social media that I log on to. It's like the Tai Lopez machine now, like when I go on and a lot of his stuff like Tai, if I see another video of you telling me in front of a jet or in front of a Lamborghini or in your garage about how people need to start working online,

I'm like, man, like it just, it is lost and awful lot of that authenticity. In my opinion, I totally get what you mean there. Well, that's a good example too. I talked about this in an email last night where I called it sort of like predatory capitalism, which, so I mean, I say that, like, let me give some context. So, capitalism, as an idea, as a concept, obviously, you could say it's done great, good for the world, you know, free markets, you know, the ability to, you know, the ability to earn, you know, like everyone having, you know, the equal opportunity at least

to create earning power to, you know, to have their work valued, may not be shown so forth. But you know, like any system, like any idea, there's always negatives to anything. And I was using the term last night, predatory capitalism, I was referring to the fire festival, which you remember two years ago, was this spectacular, massive failure, the sort of peak apogy of millennial narcissism and the desire for beauty and envy and wanting to be known and wanting to be where the action is

and living for the gram, living for Instagram. I was talking about the fire festival and the guy that came up with it, Billy McFarlane, and I said, this is a guy's example, sort of a pretory capitalism in sociopathie, where he created this a great, co-idea for the festival, he wanted to live in this experience, but his actual regards for the people that signed up, he didn't regard anybody as being valuable at all because he just doesn't, he doesn't because he is legitimate sociopathic. Even after the fire festival ended

and hardly anyone got refunded and everyone lost money, he was still using that email list he had from everyone that had bought tickets. And he was saying them fake offers for other tickets, other fake offers for concert tickets, fake offers for going to be a Beyonce and Jay-Z and he's trying to get cash out of them. And like, in his act capitalism, like yes, it is. Like he's trying to get cash out of them. And like, and is that capitalism?

Like, yes, it is. Like he's trying to earn money and he has an email list. I'm like, absolutely is. But is it exploitation of people? Like 100% explain it. You see that now with, within the personal branding realm and even on like the larger realm, like you know, this sort of big food, big pharma, the opioid crisis in the United States, where this motivation for profit at any cost,

and with complete disregard for the human cost, and then the argument, well, you know, it's making money, it's creating jobs, or like, you know, someone's profit from it, like, that's great. Yeah, but for someone like Tai Lopez, like, everything gets Tai Lopez, obviously, I seem like he has helped people, like what you just said. You realize, like, you know what, like as soon as I get marked within your, whatever your social media network web is, I'm just another target for you to hopefully eventually get some cash out of. So I'm getting ads over and over again, I'm gonna keep seeing your stuff over and over and over again. Like this, Tyler Pesnerly care, maybe he does, maybe he thinks that's a good thing. I don't know. But if he does, it's not coming across, which is the issue.

If he does, it's not coming across, which is the issue. You know, like, if I can sense, if someone's trying to sell me something, and I get the sensation that they don't care, they either are being willfully neglectful of my feelings as a potential customer of theirs, or their shit and naive about what their messages that's coming across. And I don't want to be coached by either of those people. So, you know, but I mean, to go back to the Fire Festival thing, man, I've watched that twice, the Netflix documentary. I know we said on Twitter I was going to try and hack

the Hulu version, but I haven't been able to do that. And I watched it. One, two, I, yeah, yes, name pre-easter. Is there any new information, or is it just similar sort of stuff? It was really insightful. I did not expect to watch the documentary at all. I remember when I was on Twitter, two years ago

and the fire festival went down on Twitter. And I was, it was a pile on and everyone was like making fun of it and like these stupid rich kids. That cheese sandwich photo. Which, yeah. So like it was funny. And I remembered it and I couldn't tell you why actually watch the first documentary, I think I was just,

I know why, I was talking about my girlfriend, and she had no idea what the fire festival was. So she's very sure of out of the loop on social media stuff, which is great. She sounds perfect. Yes, she never actually heard of it. Like, oh, we should watch the documentary, like, you can see what it is.

She works in the tech, she actually works in tech and she has a company. But yeah, she's sort of like, she manages to see how the loop was the daily, whatever Twitter cycle. She's got the balance right. We need to get her, we need to get her to prescribe the digital, the digital reduction method. I'll ask her. But so yeah, that's why we watched the fire vessel documentary and I watched it and

it was actually quite fascinating because, you know, I just assumed it was just music festival that went down and went down playing, haha. But it started actually as this idea for an app, which was a very legitimate idea where Billy McFarlane, the guy who was the entrepreneur, he had this idea that what if you could book talent directly through like one network need you have to go through middlemen. So it was very similar actually to what Jerry Wyntrop did in the 1970s. Jerry Wyntrop for background context.

He was an American band talent manager in the 1970s and he was known for changing music industry where he signed up like a Zayn Axe under his management company. He had like Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, a very big names. And then rather than when he would go and do tours with his talent, rather than have to negotiate with like the middleman promoters in different areas across the United States, he would go directly to the theater where the show would be held. And this was a big idea back in the 1970s, and he'd negotiate whoever owned the venue. So he was taking, you know, he was still a middleman, he's like, you know, rather than have to add another step, whoever owned the venue. So he was taking, you know, he was still a middleman,

he's like, you know, rather than have to add another step, I got the talent. Let's go talk to him, we're going to perform. And that was it. So the idea for the fire festival, it was actually supposed to be promotion for an app where if you want to book, I don't know, you want to book,

you want to book, you want to book Rihanna for your birthday party, you could just open up the app, her booking fee was right there, you take you want to book Rihanna for your birthday party, you could just open up the app. Her booking fee was right there, it take you directly to her agent, you'd have to like put down the money, like deposit, and it was supposed to take steps of transaction. So the fire festival started this idea, like we'll use this to promote the app, and then the guys, building up, probably, and John Roles, the other one who was sort of the height manifold of this project, they got to the Bah Bahamas and then they just had this idea to this fly-in like the top 20 models in the world.

And you know, it's been a lot of money doing this. And let's just film ourselves partying for a bunch of days and then we'll try and make some sort of sizzle real out of it. And that became the fire festival documentary. And they never expected it to work at all, but then when it became popular and they were like, okay, we got something, let's just launch this festival. Tell me, you know, talk about getting in way over your head. So, seeing that happen and seeing like every human misstep along the way of trying to do this grand project that was like never got the ground and it was like doomed from the

start. But then you also serve the soul of the power personality where the guy Billy, despite everything breaking down every single day, the site being behind a money and like defrauding and frothing people and not paying people and just like everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. You know, it was like browns, you know, sort of, well, that way. He's still a man to make it happen because he just was so like, and this is where social path he's a good thing. He was so determined that, no, this will work.

I swear to God that everybody just kind of went along with personality. He is like, you know, Billy says it's going to work. So, I know it's not, it's failing. I haven't paid in four months, but screw it. Let's just do it anyway. It's, there's something, I'm so conflicted about him, right? And my, my appreciation of this and for the club promoters that are listening as well, they will, they'll know it's rare that we have something that's talked about

our industry and this was won and it is a club, a club promoter's worst nightmare. Like, and we've all, you know, we run weekly club nights. We've had, I've done a thousand events probably over my career and, you know, there's times we've opened a club in Newcastle where the painters were still painting the toilets while customers were going in and we were hoping because it had just opened and we were hoping no one would need the toilet for like the first 15 minutes because then that means that the painters could have finished and we've done ones where we've had to get like a generator in

because the power of being cut off because the bill hadn't been paid and stuff. And you like this is you know this is You can relate. Yeah, I can relate on a slightly deeper level I've got that that degree of anxiety, but you're totally right the Billy McFarlane character. I'm so conflicted about because There is there's something so um seductive and and Romantic and admirable about someone who has this single-minded purpose and is able to to follow something through like that. The difference is he wasn't doing it from a place of passion, he was doing it from a place where

he wanted the status and he wanted the money and he wanted all the stuff that associated with it, but because naturally, especially in this world, we're so drawn to success. Like success is this. It is the zenith on the hill of what everybody wants in this world. And here's the thing that a friend said to me a few weeks ago, and I can't get out in my head, that Billy McFarlane, his virtue and his integrity was basically non-existent throughout the whole festival. The whole project all he wanted to do was look cool on as grand of a scale as possible. And the only reason that anybody on the planet is slating him, or that the vast majority of people are slating him is because it didn't work.

Now if all of the stars had aligned and that guy, his operations director or whatever, had sucked the cock of the customs guy and got the water out and then, you know, somehow they'd managed to get some villas and maybe it hadn't been that weekend where the population doubled for like basically yacht weekend. Maybe the food had arrived and maybe the catering had worked and blah blah blah. Let's say that in a different set of random circumstances, another iteration of this particular festival, everything had come together correctly, but none of it had been due to preparation. It was just a more look upon look upon look and somehow maybe they'd peed it out like a six out of 10 seven out of 10 festival

We would be hailing this guy as the new festival creator on the planet What the difference the only difference between iteration one in the real world and iteration two that we're talking about here Is the fact that it didn't work? So we're so seduced by success at any costs that we forget. You'd be like, oh, yeah, but it doesn't matter about his virtues, man, like look, like you know, he knew it was going to be okay in the end.

And you're like, right, but does the ends justify the means? And do the means, other means justifying the value, his values. That's a very good question. Like I don't have an answer. I have to think about that myself. The thing with the Hulu documentary, which I mean, I would suggest watching it since the Hulu documentary goes more into the psychology of like himself,

like he's interviewed a lot more. Right. The festival ending. And it goes more to his personal history. And like, so how he started his entrepreneur, where he was like in kindergarten, and he charged a girl like $1 for like fixing her crown. That like that was his first entrepreneurial endeavor,

where he, he, Tom, self, had to code like on this 1999 computer and hacked his school network and sent this message that I'll fix everybody's crowns for a dollar I'm not kidding. Wow. It's like a yet instinct like yeah, very young age. He's obviously quite quite brilliant that way Yeah, then later on in college it showed his sort of like entrepreneurial, you know projects You know, which someone which failed maybe New York. He wanted to you know create something important But his first project mechnesis Which it also highlighted where he created

this credit card company, which is actually fraudulent, but he made it. It was interesting though, because like you said, it shows like it's a success in the cost, and he still got ahead despite this for a very long time. But it makes me question terms on the entrepreneurial mindset that some of you will have. Some of you can still come to Valley,

like move fast and break things. Fail, fail, fail. I'm like, what are the human consequences of doing this? In his first case, he was never really truly successful, I would say. Like his first business, did he get venture capital? Yeah, he did. Did the people that bought the cards get what they were promised? No, they never did.

But he still managed to walk away with money. Okay. When the fire festival, like the whole document goes much more into the inception of it, like the nitty-gritty details. From the very beginning, it was this very doomed idea. Like every step of the way, where it wasn't just a series of like, oh, this is kind of like a problem.

It was this is a red flag, this can't get done. We're gonna have to either lie to people, rip them off, or do both. And it's okay, we need them off, or do both. Well, it's okay. We need to be solution or it did. You see these entrepreneurial cliches all the time. It's all about solutions. We got to sell the problem.

We got to sell the problem. Let's not talk about problems. Talk about solutions. He goes through this and then later on, he's being interviewed and compared to his court transcripts. He's still compulsively lying. He doesn't have any sense that he even. And he's still compulsively lying. And he doesn't have any sense that even is. He's still supposed to be lying like, well, you said this, but then you're saying this

right now. Yeah, you can see. You can see the cognitive dissonance that people have that are, which is sociopathic, whether they're caught in a lie, but they can't even acknowledge it's like, which ones the truth. Yeah, like they don't, they don't even know. Yeah. You know, but like again, what you said, like, what if he had successfully done it? I'm like, to have done that, it would have taken a more, you know, sort of like psychopathic

person that had some sense of consciousness. Like, this is the mess up in me. I was thinking about this and like, man, I wonder if I could pull this idea off like in LA. Like, I was thinking about this because it was a great idea. It was. Like, it was an amazing idea. The marketing for it was so brilliant, especially the use of the models was the biggest thing. I felt like that was overlooked.

What did it take to make that fire festival campaign success? They got the 20 most beautiful women in the world, the biggest following. They had them post an orange tile. And then just because people wanted proximity to beautiful women, they want to be where beautiful women were. It's a beautiful woman. It's a woman that everyone wants to be. And it's a woman that every man wishes you could have.

Like that is so desired. And some level of beauty is purely authentic because we can't truly fake it. We can try it. We can't fake it. So like certain models are sort of like this unknowing agent for truth in a certain way, then they may have no depth at all, they have nothing to them,

but because they're beautiful, well, at least I know that's real. So that's so correct. People sign up for it, like there are people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there with the hopes that they're gonna be able to be next to somebody who's a 10, and they can take a photo with her and say,

look at me and who I am worth. And I'm important now. Like my existence has been validated. Yeah. Yeah, how do you pull that off? I'm like my God, but like, could it be pulled off? I think it honestly could, except now everyone's gonna be self aware.

It's like, oh, it's just a fire festival. Yeah. That's it. Well, you can pull that switch once and anytime, which sucks, actually, because had that have worked, because there's influencer market into big industry at the moment as it is. But had that have worked, you would have had this hyper influencer

marketing. There would have been a new market that would have opened up. And you know, like Kendall Jenner's doing her own things, but you know, like those kind, that echelon of influencer would be, you know, would there be the new opening of a particular casino that was in association with them? And, you know, yes, yes. Man, the whole documentary just completely blew my mind. And us say having been having watched a number of failed festivals much smaller but watched a number of failed festivals over the years I It's it takes a very special level of Boneheadedness and single-mindedness to even believe that you can create a festival on an island like

to even believe that you can create a festival on an island. Like, try to make the perfect example and they say in Miami, like you have Ultra Music Festival, which is one of the biggest best festivals on the planet, best line up, and even that is a logistical nightmare. And these guys were wanting to do it somewhere with like no bio waste disposal, no running water, no air conditioning. You're like, I can't work out if it's a love of the idea that drew them through the obstacles or an ignorance to the obstacles in terms of Billy. And Jar Rule as well, like Jar Rule doesn't get enough stick in the Netflix documentary. It's like, once it's all gone down, you'll remember this scene and they're in the conference

room and it's got like, it must be from like Google, like Google Hangout and they've got all the little faces across the bottom of the screen. And Jarl Rural's in there going like, no, listen guys, like, you know, everybody has set back, man. And then, he uses some inane, pithy example, and you like, listen, Jarl Ruehmey, honestly, you just need to go back to making music because you are shite at business, and you're just getting in the way of people who had a potentially

profitable app. Yeah, I remember that. He's like, what was the example? He's like, nobody died, no one's in jail, so we're all fine. I'm like, there are times that are as appropriate and there are times that's not appropriate. I felt bad for the guys that designed the software for this app, which is probably your app, I looks, but and they're all out of a job and never got paid. And now the thing that the project they worked on that might have been totally viable,

but done in a smaller scale, that's just all gone and lost. Yeah, especially considering that that was the project. It was a good idea. It's like someone saying, let's launch this particular car. And then one guy on the board decides to open up like an ice cream store that happens to have like a class A drugs in the ice cream to promote the car. And then the car gets scrapped and you you're like, fuck, save me. But yeah, the guys who make that happen,

again, coming from a club promote perspective, it's difficult to book talent. You know, we're fortunate in the UK that Voodoo events, the company that I own, we have good connections and existing relationships with these big bookers, people like Big Bang and other large booking agencies know who we are and we have a contact in there, we'll get preferable rates. But if you

were a new fledgling festival or club night or even like a 16 year old dad who wants to run a birthday party or something like that, trying to book big talent is a nightmare. So there was 100, 100% a gap in the market for that. Digitalized version of the guy from the 70s that you said, one stop shot, like an eBay for the best talent on the planet. Like if you could book and imagine the downstream effects of that, like you would have an awful lot more festivals talent on the planet. If you could book and imagine the downstream effects of that, you would have an awful lot more festivals and startups in terms of events going on. How many

more times would Blink 1.8 to get booked if people knew how easy it was to book Blink 1.8 to? They'd be getting deposits all the time. Oh, I'm constantly. That's okay. I know know I've been thinking of that. That was just a very legitimately good idea. I've had some proximate there in team history being a Los Angeles and working in Hollywood. And that's just, it's this very constant old nightmare of, okay, let's try to get a hold of this person.

How do we get a hold of this person? All right, well, contact this person first and sweet talk them. Maybe talk to this person second, and then you got sweet talk, maybe pay them. And then maybe they'll pass on a message like a third person. And then maybe that third person might have like some direct line of access to the talent who maybe we'll get back to them, who maybe we'll call you. But only if you talk like it, like it's just this.

This need to align so well, right? Yeah. And so I mean, so much of it comes down to almost just luck. Where it's like, okay, hopefully, I'm hoping this works out, hoping this works out. Yeah, I wonder if that will happen at some point, since it seems like, especially for talent, people that are up and coming, they're trying to sort of like become known, be seen, develop like their own, develop their presence that way. Yeah, for like lower level, middle level, axe,

that could be very revitalizing for their career in a certain level. Because I wonder how much of, I wanna say success. It makes you question how much of a success is not just from a town's lack of hustle, but from just this poor management. Accessibility. Yeah, because it's a very come thing to Hollywood too.

If you have a bad manager, a bad agent, you might have missed you opportunities all the time and you have no idea. Yeah, I get that. I didn't know that most of the people didn't get refunded. Is that the case? There are some people got there. I think that there were like the people that lower level tickets, they got their money back. But there were like, so one of the things that came out was like the rich, the rich, like, the wristband. Yeah. That was RSI D payment. No, that was refunded

actually. Since they, he's still like, he got sued for it's been like, like, $25 million. Yeah. So I don't like that. Some of that money was not refunded at all. Um, yeah. I mean, even that wristband was a cash grab because they had to pay off other stuff from other loans he'd taken out. So yeah, it's, that was was apparently, there's that guy on the Netflix documentary who says that there was a woman who rang him aggressively saying that he hadn't loaded up his wristband yet. It would appear that the tickets were maybe like three to five thousand pounds and then they were being suggested to put almost that amount again, wrist're in the wristband, so they could do jet ski higher and alcohol this and all the rest of it.

So what happened? Because he didn't have festival insurance. No. What is the situation moving forward with getting that money out? But I mean, he's in jail, which is, I mean, like, do not pass go, do not collect 200 pounds.

Like, that is, jail is the, like no one's getting debt out of you in jail, which is, I mean, like, do not pass go, do not collect 200 pounds. Like, that is, jail is the, like, no one's getting dead out of you in jail. I'm going to presume that they will have gone through, they'll have done his forensic accounts and they'll have gone through every asset he has with a fine tooth comb. And once you've sold off, like, a couple of bottles of Sir Rock and probably some shiphairs of LeBoutons, like, what's left? Yeah, well, that was, so I mean, I did a bit of research, but essentially, nobody got paid. Like, almost nobody got paid.

Like a lot of people, a lot of people, like the Hany workers, no one got their money back. It's a me for the reason being that when they, even before the festival ever was like an idea and they were just on the island filming, he basically ran a Ponzi scheme of just debt where he got capital of one person, our short-term loans. And then the next round of funding would pay off the first round and the next round would pay off the second round. So when everything was accounted for with forensic analysis, there was no money anywhere because

it didn't exist. He got $500,000 spent all of it and then got a loan of $500,000. Telling the other guy don't where you'll get the money back eventually, he went towards something. So there was nothing to even what's term looking for. There was nothing to liquidate. Yeah, I don't think this was nothing. So it kind of just evaporates into thin air because there'll be some things that they won't have been able to get on credit. So they'll have had to have paid deposits, for instance, for some of the artists. They literally won't have been able to book them without that. And there's certain things that will have needed to

have been paid up front, the Instagram models, and the guys who made the video and people like that, like there's especially the early stuff. So I guess the early people get paid and then there's just it's like this this black hole vacuum that's just sucked up Everybody's money from both sides. So you've sucked up money from one side and time or resources from the Contribute this side. I Think the only ones that seem to have gotten paid like for sure were this the models that that was it Okay, yeah, like that that was really it everybody else Like they were getting paid. Yeah, or they're getting paid for actually like they never got back with the we're owed at all You know, I mean he and he burned through money. It just ends saying right himself because he was

You know, like you bought a fricking Bugatti for you know a million dollars the alcohol bill His dining out bill his his paying for everything, while known was actually game paid. So yeah, that's an important situation. But I mean, it was interesting too that you can see how like debt, you can just keep this allocating it somewhere else over and over again to stay ahead of it. But you'll eventually, it will catch up to you. Yeah. Like you can't keep going back to the same investors and still trying to fund raise from your own customers. Yeah, obviously it runs out.

There's a thing that's been going through my head. Some Harris in his book, Waking Up, talks about an individual, I think it was in the States in the 70s or the 80s, who began partway through his life to have this compulsion for aggression, really severe compulsion for aggression. And I think he went upon to a bell tower and started shooting random people, wrote a note saying that something needs to be looked at about myself, then killed himself and potentially even killed his family as well. And when they did an autopsy on him, they decided to conduct a thorough one on his brain and they found that there was a tumour which was affecting his amygdala, which I think is what mediates aggression

in people. And it was literally like someone pressing the aggression button in your brain. So this guy's free will essentially had been taken away from him. And I wonder if Billy McFarlane has an entrepreneurial equivalent of this. Like he's got this like hustle button. The hustle is just, it's like Gary V is standing on his neck like the entire time just going like grind hustle grind hustle like the whole day. I can believe it. I can believe it. I mean, I've met, yeah, I've

had some experience in the text base. I mean, I've met people like that where they're just, they have to constantly be creating selling something. And it is, it is the essence of their being and they can't not be doing that. And they can't really tell you why they need to. It's just a compulsion for them. They just do. Yeah, it's weird, right? Because if we're in an industry yourself and me, we are self-employed, our value is derived from how hard we work and how much we do get on that hustle. But I've, there's limits to it. There's, there's like, I have a safety, a safety catch in place where if it was three days before festival and someone had made a website detailing the fact that I had hurricane Katrina storm tents outside or whatever it was as and there was no water and I'm asking the ops director to suck off the man who does the customs thing and I'm just like I would have that would have been a point at which I mean long before there But I would have had to pull the plug, but there is a lack of that the hustle buttons get me depressed so hard

That he's just able to plow on through and again, that's why people that's why people seem to be so seduced by it like Like people are aghast, but almost in awe as well. Like a lot of the statuses and tweets I've seen about it, there's a lot of awe in there of this guy. Well, again, this is one of those paradoxical things in human nature, like everyone loves success. We also hate that people are successful. But the idea of this being a human engine of movement

where like you never stop ever. Everyone on some level like aspires to that. If they had the motivation to do that or if they could only be that way, you know, how much more would they get done? But I mean, we also live in a culture where we worship work. You know, that I rise. That's that's so ingrained from like sort of the 1940s the 1930s, sort of the greatest generation where it's this cultural sentiment that service taken over sort of the Western world.

I try to trace why it is. I think it started in the 40s during the Great Depression, during the Stock Market crash where you had, the World Economy had completely, service collapsed on itself. Everyone was economically depressed. And the only way to survive, this was over 80 years ago, 20, 90 years ago, was that you had to work.

You had to work otherwise, you are getting nothing. So I really believe, if I had a pinpoint, where's the inception of hustle and grind culture? It was then, it was then, and that fall, that had followed the automation revolution of the industrial air where now you can get so much work done through automation. You could leverage productivity. So you have this leveraging of productivity and then you have this crash and then you have

the instinctual and the predication of desire where you have to work. Otherwise, you're not going to survive. And that carries over to World War II and then the post-World War II, like at least the United States boom. And then how do you rebuild Europe? We're going to have to work to rebuild the rubble literally. Have this generation of people where they are raised with that mindset, and they instill that.

And then they actually do create an air prosperity. It's in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s overall, relatively speaking, where if you worked and you could get the job and you just, you put in the hours, you would get something to return. And the more you work, the higher you would rise. But then, yeah, then we get the thing is that we get to the, like, the Arab technology late 1990s, 2000s. And now with the advent of AI and the advent of digital media and the advent of social platforms, you could be working hard and you're running faster and faster, just to stay in the Avenue Social Platforms, you could be working hard and you're running faster and faster to stay in the same place. The Red Queen effect for those people who know the event and the models.

Yeah, it's the Red Queen trap. So now your hard work really doesn't mean much because someone could be working less than you, but their work leverages way more than yours does. But at the same time, what if you work really hard and it's all leveraged to work too? Then you're just like a god of work. Yes. No one stops you ever. Yeah, you are right. It's an artifact of this quite noble approach to work, right?

When you know that but now that we don't, you know, going back to the very beginning of the conversation when you don't have a job for life anymore, where choosing anymore, where choosing what is almost more important than choosing how, whereas in the past, I think how by any means would have probably, are you a hard worker? Yes. When you work in a factory, when you're not a knowledge worker, essentially, when IQ is of a IQ, I'm going to get in trouble if I say that. When your intellectual capacity is less important, a lot of the promotion will be based on seniority. Like, well, Bob's been here 50 years

and John's been here 45, so Bob gets the promotion, even if John's maybe a tiny little bit more competent, because that's the way that the businesses work, like a family or like as to a kingdom almost, like the eldest brother gets it, even if he's a complete tit, and the younger brother would be a much better choice, but he's the older one, so he gets it. And you have that noble approach to work. But now you no longer have the same lineage moving forward where you can know that you're going to be staying in the same place. Like, you know, it's a perfect example, self-driving cars.

Like, there's what is it between two and four million workers, I think, oh, no, one million workers in America are what they call professional drivers. They like, that is a huge displacement of labor. Yeah. Well, that's, I think, like Uber's ultimate plan, I think, with everyone driving the cars, it's just the data. They have this massive, massive, massive, massive database now, of driving patterns and vehicles. Yeah, with self-driving cars, I can think about the US economy, like, how much time gets a lot, how much productivity gets lost from people heading to drive.

Much of you have cars that can drive themselves. Well, now you have more time to work, one, but you free a human capital, like again, so even that desire for efficiency. But is that a bad thing? I don't think so, but it's interesting that all these things, they create this confluence effect. I think the seniority factor arises from when work was artisanal, like artisanal work,

where for most of human history, you couldn't really mass produce anything. Like if you did, you just had to have a bunch of people working on all at once. And the people were the best, had been the people that had been working the longest. Like that was, probably up up until 1800 that was most things Before mechanization to really took over something that applies a craft

Yeah, like yeah, well like everything was craftsmanship on some level it literally everything Yeah, how much you know what could you reproduce that was just you know in 20 minutes you could get done There's nothing you know, but then we get to the industrial air and now we get the air machines There's nothing. But then we get to the industrial air, now we get the air machines, and the machines digitize in the computers. And now you can produce things within minutes within seconds. You can punch in, like you had 3D printing,

like it still has an impency, but you can type in a code and it just made it for you. And you don't have to do anything. Yes. It's the idea. Yeah, even coding itself is starting to change with the app machine learning. Yeah, coding, the idea like everyone learned a code, it's a ha ha ha kind of thing, but

even the language of coding now they're getting simpler where you don't even need to be able to code. You'll be like, you won't have to code. You'll just type in what you'd like to have coded in the AI will code it for you. It'll be like square space for websites, but for coding. Like drag and drop coding. Well, learn to code is not going to go down very well there, is it? It'll be like square space for websites, but for coding. Like drag and drop coding. Well, learn to code is not gonna go down very well there, is it?

Look, Alex, man, today has been awesome. I've really enjoyed it. It's been an awesome catch-up. I would love to have you back on. I'm sure that a lot of the listeners are gonna want you back on as well. Yeah, play. Man, have a good day.

It's been sweet. Thank you. Like air. Have a good day, it's been sweet. Thank you. Thank you.