S06.EP13 - Branding in an Age of Autocracy: Marty Neumeier on Trust, Truth & Power

28:56And the way it did it is by using printing in a really good way. Right. So printing was the first mass production machine, the printing press, and it allowed knowledge to spread much more easily. Right. So you had books that would, I don't know, they'd be as big as a desk. You know, if when you open them up, they would be they would cover your desk. You had two guys had to carry them from one place to another. And they cost a fortune if you wanted a book. I mean, it would cost as much as a mansion to have a book. So all of a sudden you have books that, well, they're not cheap. They're not like paperbacks of today, but they're affordable for merchants.

29:36Let's say that class could afford a book. And so they did that. And then they started in Italy, they started translating them into vernacular Italian and so forth. So they're not only in Greek and Latin. So it opened it up for everybody to be able to read. And it was a good thing. And science spread. Science began because people could read each other's progress, you know, in a book, all that stuff. It took years and years, of course, to happen. But so I was very interested in that. I have been for the last five years interested in what the Renaissance did and how it applies to today. And I think it applies very well.

30:15and then I'd been working on a book for that whole time centered on Leonardo da Vinci and his efforts to get his notebooks published and his failure to get it published, get them published, which set back science and art 200 years because his notebooks were essentially lost to civilization after he died. They were never published. They just stayed in their original forms. and that's that set us back because we didn't realize how well he was combining art and science and now we want art and science back together really badly because science is running rough shot over us via technology and it's turned us into a culture of where money is the only thing that matters and art is the opposite it's the reason that life is worth living right this because of quality the quality of stuff and art and the spiritual part right is getting killed and nobody knows what to do with it but but i think that's art and science together will fix it so for folks out there marty i'm gonna plug in on you marty's not paying me to do this by the way but marty's reference book octavo which i did actually help proof and it was a stunning read so definitely get hands on that i think you've got some more coming out haven't you marty that have been published or on substack right we will see i've got two more that deal with other issues that we're dealing with.

31:39Like in the background is the things we're facing, like planetary destruction and the sort of, you know, like what we have here is Christian nationalism getting like its hands into everything. And it's not a good trend for religion. It's not a good trend for spirituality at all. So I was going to deal with those two, and I still may. But what I'm finding is because of the state of publishing and, you know, being manipulated by autocracy also. I mean, the places you can get published are getting smaller and smaller, and people are reading less because they're not getting what they want out of books.

32:18So, it's in a bad way. So, I'm on kind of a crusade to get people to read more, and you won't be surveilled if you get a book. You can read whatever you want if it's a print book. So, I'm going to predict a resurgence of print books. hey you had it first folks you had it first yeah so anyway yeah so i may do that but i'm i'm all focused on octavo and i'm i'm doing a i've got an experiment i'm running which is can one person one author publish a group of products books and audiobooks and and uh ebooks by himself at the same level of performance of a big five publisher? And what would that take and how much would that cost to do that?

33:08And so I'm taking a good stab at it. So this is where my branding experience and marketing experience come in is I'm able to kind of predict how new things might work, like doing things in a different way might work. So none of it's guaranteed. We'll see how it works. But thank you, Matt, for reading it and lending me your comments. What's fascinating is just how you pronounced it. Because how did I pronounce it? Octavo. I used to do that too, and I like it better. I like the sound of Octavo. Octavo. As an English speaker, but it's Italian, so it's Octavo. And an Octavo is just an octave. And it's the format that partable books were printed in.

33:50So this was a big change in the printing press. you needed to do mass production, you needed a different size sheet. And it's the same size we use today. So, you know, I don't know. Let me get a book. So this one here, my book Metaskills, six by nine, six by nine. Oh, here's the real book. It's going to look like this. So six by nine is the same format they use in the Renaissance. So it's basically folding a sheet of paper into eight panels, which is 16 pages. views both sides of the sheet. And that was a revolution, right? With that, using the Octavo, you could make cheaper books, affordable books.

34:32So it was so successful, they never changed the format. It just went on and on and on forever. And we're still there today with that. Molto bene. Molto bene. Si, si. If you're building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses, and a crew of brand builders who've got your back. Get on the waitlist now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show. Right, let's get back into our topic a little bit and sort of bring it back to this idea of, you know, autocracy and the pressures that brands are facing. Well, can we talk about the reverse of that?

35:14We're talking about, you know, what can branders do? exactly let's talk about value let's talk about what they have to deal with sure so there are bad behaviors that are getting worse in business and i think the first thing to do would be to resist those uh with arguments to say well this is probably not a good idea for the long term which is what branding is about so let's try to do it a different way i mean just let's be up front about what's going on so some bad behaviors are well monopolistic behaviors where you you you get bigger by lobbying the government to get favors and special deals to crush the competition.

35:51Maybe you keep the government away from your monopoly, let it run for a while, right? So you got to deal with that. Customer lock-in is one you see a lot where you try to hold your audience captive one way or another. There's a lot of ways to do that, but you just make it so hard for them to change that they don't have free will anymore to change to a competitor. So these are all secrets for not caring about customers. None of these are good for customers. So we have to sort of fight those. Manipulation through surveillance, you know, surveilling people through their computer interactions so that you can manipulate them by narrowing their choices, by narrowing their world.

36:29There's a number of ways to do it. And a lot of people are very creative about those. So try not to help that along. There's this role towards increasing self-service, which I think is really annoying. Self-service has been going since the 20s, since the Automat, the first, you know, sort of automated food service. But it's been increasing. And I remember things like the day that gasoline stations, petrol stations to you would say, hey, good news, you can pump your own gas. You don't have to wait for someone to come out. Just do it yourself. We're going to let you do it. And then it went on and on.

37:08And now we're like, anything that goes wrong, company doesn't really want to deal with it. So they shove you through a whole bunch of gates that you have to go through. They want you to be like, you know, know all your passwords and answer these questions. And you're on the phone for two hours instead of just talking to someone who should be empowered to fix your problem, which would be great for the companies because then they have information from the front lines that they can use to design their brand better. but it's just easier for them to, or they think it's easier to just shove people into, you know, you do the work.

37:42We'll let you do the work. Opaque pricing rationales. Like why is the pricing going up? Why is the pricing of Netflix going up? All I get is more commercials and now it costs more. Why is this so hard to keep them online? Why do they just suddenly, you know, something goes wrong and I have to be the one to fix it. Price gouging is happening whenever there's a crisis, like, oh, there seems to be crisis after crisis, you know, starting with COVID. Suddenly grocery store prices went up for no reason because, I don't know, they were scarcity and they decided they could blame it on COVID. But that's happening a lot now.

38:18So don't agree with that. That's not branding. Addiction by design. I mean, a lot of products now are, and probably including the iPhone, is addictive and it's on purpose. And that's not to customers' benefit. That's to the company's benefit. So in the long term, customers are not going to like this. And the reckoning has not happened, but I'm sure it will. And we can talk about that. Annoyance is something that's creeping up. Like companies just annoying you into paying more. They make the base products so annoying that you have to go up to the next level where it's less annoying. And then that level gets annoying.

38:54So Netflix is a good example there. You pay for the next level to get rid of commercials. but then the commercials start creeping back in and there's going to be another level. And they're just going to ask for more and more and more without having better service at all. It's not like the money is going into better products or better service. The idea that companies want to dominate their customers instead of giving them more freedom, more options. So that's just wrong. And the reason this is bad isn't because they're not going to be profitable. They will be profitable in the short term, but in the long term, they kill the brand and they make it possible for new companies to come along with better customer service, just customer orientation.

39:39And they're going to knock you out and you're not coming back. And then, well, it just goes on and on, right? But those are the kinds of things you have to look out for. And so what'll happen, I think, is at some point, people are just going to have, they'll have had enough. It's anytime you have a system that's not working, it'll go on for a long time not working. And so suddenly, it stops working. And you go, well, what happened? It's just like overnight, it broke. Well, no, it's been happening since you made that decision three years ago. So there's always a lag time in systems. So you do one thing and it doesn't seem to work until later it works.

40:18So if you do something bad, you may not see the consequences for a few years. If you do something good, you may not see it for a few years. And that's why people are suspicious of branding. They said, yeah, but I don't need long-term help. I need short-term help. So I'm going to go to marketing. And marketing says they do branding. well marketing doesn't have time to do branding and they don't care about branding they got all their hands full just keeping the sales going so they i've seen more and more branding people sort of say i don't like these branding people like telling me i can't do branding that they have a better idea i really don't like that i think we do it better than they do it and they'll have a rationale for that but it's obvious they don't they don't care about it they care about tactical advantage and they should.

41:04And it's really difficult. It's a really important job. So, why not just say, this is what I do and branding people, that's what they do. And we're pals, we work together and they make it easier for us to do what we do and vice versa. So, I don't understand this, but I think I have a suspicion that the effects of autocracy and sort of the bad behavior that goes with that is influencing that because we didn't have that problem at all before. Things were going really well. So I wrote this book, Brand Flip, and I'm not sure when it was, probably before 2020, so at least five, six, seven years ago.

41:44And at that point, things were still going really well. And then it all started to change, but it only really showed up in the last couple of years. And I would say, you asked one question before that I thought was really interesting. Where was the point where it changed for me when I started to get alarmed? Yeah, what was that tipping point? Well, I mean, there's sort of like there's highlights along the road. I was alarmed when Trump got elected and my wife and I decided we were going to maybe move because we didn't see it fixing itself because it's not Trump's problem. Trump isn't the reason for Trump getting elected.

42:21It's a people, right? It's the society elected him. It was a free election. There was no hanky-panky. It was totally free. And that's what we did. So it took us six years, but we finally just moved away so we could get perspective. You know, we're still all in for America, but it really helps not to be battling the dragons at the same time you're trying to add value. So that was one. and I would say COVID, at least with Trump, could have solved the problem in two weeks by making the right decision. Instead, tried to ignore the problem. He tried to hide the evidence and then blame everybody else and then say it wasn't his problem that half a million people died or almost a million, even though a lot of them were the people who were told not to wear masks and came to his rallies and got sick and died.

43:18These are some pretty big people too. No one has ever taken responsibility. So that was not great. And then I think when Trump got elected again, that was, okay, the first one wasn't a mistake. There's something really serious going on here. That's when I really started to wake up and say, okay, there's no way you can just sit back and vote anymore if you want to save democracy you have to be active i was in um uh florence a couple weeks ago and my wife and i were walking down a street really more like an alley and a squall on the wall was this i took a picture of it i don't know if you can see it it says uh did you read that yeah so this is how democracy what does it say dresses dies dies this is how democracy dies not with a yelp or a whimper but with thunderous applause wow and then the date is the date of trump's election so some street philosopher put that there for me but i thought yeah that was it and then when i realized branding was really in trouble not just democracy is when one of the richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos, who is taking care of the Washington Post, which is a neutral magazine with political news in it, he bought it to protect it.

44:47And he promised not to touch it, especially the editorial. That's his role, right? And then, right before the election, he put his thumb on the scale and said, you can't endorse, you can't endorse the other, the opponent to Trump. We're not going to do those anymore. This is like two weeks before, no more endorsements. People quit. The magazine lost 25 % of its subscribers on the first day. They announced that, have not recovered yet. And he made this sort of announcement of why he did it, which was really ridiculous, illogical, unbelievable and then I just I blew it I just said okay so we lived with Jeff Bezos not paying taxes not paying uh sales tax getting a sort of a jump start on all the other companies that he's putting out of business because technology sometimes needs help in being born but that was a long time ago right and now he's like still killing all the other smaller companies and now he wants to kill democracy because it serves him to not have so many hurdles and rules to follow.

45:56He can make a lot more money because it's not enough to have five yachts, whatever. They're all kind of the same now. And I just thought, and then I saw him and the other oligarch standing up at Trump's inauguration. And I went, okay, that is, there's no doubt now where they stand and where we stand. so that's what got me like uh pulled me out of my stupor so i still felt like this is this will pass and we'll get over it i don't think this is going to pass i'm more in the camp of this has to run its course and i don't know how long it'll take it'll take two years or 10 years or a generation but it's going to be bad i think in the overall in the in the scheme of things in history, it's going to be good just as the Renaissance was good, how the Renaissance overturned a lot of bad stuff.

46:49I think we'll get through it, but I think it's going to take people to fight for it. And I think we're all going to have to choose sides. And that's what I'm watching for is who's choosing what side. I'm looking for companies that are choosing the right side. I'm looking for people and companies in level C where we have a whole new way of looking at business and branding that I think will probably be the norm when these students get out into the world. But we have to see. But anyway, what's happening now is not sustainable. That's the issue. Good or bad, it's still not sustainable. People don't like it.

47:27Here in the U.S., we're starting to see we're on the verge of bloodshed, right? We're on the verge of, we don't even want to say the words, civil war. But other people say we're in a civil war. It's just not a hot civil war. But, you know, Trump would love to make it hot. And he's, I don't know, just watch this Saturday and see what happens when he has a parade with tanks going down the street. He's not hiding it, you know, he's not subtle. So it's time that everybody says, okay, enough is enough. You're out of here. We don't have an easy way to say there's no confidence like you guys. We don't think it's working, have a vote.

48:04Because if we did, he'd be out already. I mean, he's underwater in the polls. But the way we have it, you know, he's good for two years and he can do a lot of damage in two years. So I hate to get all political about this, but there's no way to separate business and politics. You have to take a stand. And I think branding has a huge role to play in fighting the good fight, in showing companies a better way to do things, a more sustainable way, and to position themselves for the change, when the change comes, when the Renaissance happened. Some people say it'll be a Renaissance. I think that. Some people are saying it'll be the new Romantic Age, which is much more about art, where art pushed back against industry and made it better for everybody because it sort of restored balance to people.

48:52They weren't just all work and all factory work all the time. They were also poetry and religion and art and all those things too. We need to get that back in some new form, I would say, probably. We're due for a big overhaul, a big change. And I think maybe Trump, maybe he's playing a role. Maybe he's just like, he's the guy. It could have been anybody, but we needed to tear some things down because we weren't building them up. We weren't restoring them and rejuvenating them fast enough. So all food for thought. I have no answers to any of this. So I sound like I might, but I don't. That was my next question, Marty.

49:29I'm like, what do we have to do next? Yeah, what do you have to do next? Well, I would say you have to fight against autocracy because it's not going to be good for anybody except for a few people. And business is one place to do it. Branding is another place to do it. You know, it's gotten to the point in the U.S. where you getting out into the street is the only way to do it. And we haven't done that since, I don't know, Nixon and the Vietnam War and all that stuff. But that did work. It had a huge effect. It's just that nobody wants to do that again. It's like, you know, we have lives and our lives are getting harder.

50:06But the thing is, they're just going to get harder if we don't do something. And, you know, people, I hear people that are in branding and they're not making ends meet and I'm thinking, boy, that's wrong. It was always a good place to make a really decent living. And so was design. Design got to be, I mean, I made my money in design and then I made more in branding. You know, I had to work hard. I had to succeed. I had to compete, but I could do it. And I'm not sure anyone can do it very well now. I'm worried for people. And that's not their fault. The opportunity isn't there the way it was. And it's not going to come back by itself.

50:41And so it's just not, it's not just those that's in every creative field is getting killed. Every information field used to be, you were told, I was told this in high school, that's how long this has been going on, that smart people will go into computers, they'll learn coding. And everybody said, what's that? You know, and then that continued for 20, 30 years. That advice now, anybody who's a coder is being thrown out of a job thanks to their work, right? So, you know, I would say don't dig your own grave. Don't go along with this program. Fight back. Fight for doing it the human way. Use your hands more than your keyboard.

51:23Make stuff, you know, stick out, stand out, zag when everybody zigs. all that stuff is going to be more and more important. And luckily there's backup for this. I'm not the only person saying this. So some of the people that I read and that I trust for predictions are saying, what we're going to see is the emergence of a counterculture, right? So like we had in the 60s, right? The counterculture in the 60s, as crazy as that was, actually changed things and made them better. And now I think we need that again. So the counterculture has been absorbed into the main culture. I think it became the main culture and then it became, you know, the way things go.

52:05Eventually it got corrupt because you could make money doing those things. And now there has to be a new counterculture. So here's a huge role for younger generations than the boomers and Gen X and all that to get involved in whatever the counterculture turns out to be. But it'll be a kind of a resistance. And I think it will be the new age. It will turn out to be the new age. And I'm all for it. I hate to see this happening. I just think all the idealism of my generation just got bought. You know, I mean, the computer, personal computer was created by hippies, essentially. You know, Steve Jobs and all those people and the software programmers were hippies.

52:48They were inspired by LSD and idealism and those things. And they are the ones that invented it. And they had it, they got it started in a good direction until people that just wanted money got in to finance it. And then it started to get worse and worse. And it happened so slowly that all we're seeing is these benefits. Oh, free search, free this, you know, free social media. Well, none of it was free. None of it was free. We're paying more than we're getting, paying more for it. So I don't mean to complain about it because I actually think this is going to turn out beautifully. it's going to be a miracle of a comeback when it happens but i don't know how long it's going to take i i definitely think that some of the the seedlings of counter culture are bubbling away like i don't know if you've ever explored web 3 and crypto and the the kind of that community That's a tiny, you know, sort of, but mighty community that's sort of growing with the idea of decentralizing finance and, you know, cutting out politicians and middlemen.

53:56Well, you know, there's another idea. That's a really good idea, or at least a prototype of an idea that got taken over by money. It's all about money. Yeah. And now it's pretty much shown that what cryptocurrency is, more than anything, is a criminal enterprise. This is it. This is it. And so that is not really a counterculture. That is actually part of the existing autocracy, right? This is like autocrats love it, right? Because they can use it to hide money. So no, that's not part of it. The idea was clever though, wasn't it? Like this idea where government... Super, yeah. No, I mean, really brilliant.

54:35Well, you know, yeah, as you say, I definitely have seen some of the projects I've done recently. But what was the problem that I was trying to solve? There was no problem. It just was an opportunity, but there was no problem. And nobody's, it's not helping anybody. In fact, it's depleting resources at a huge, massive scale because of the computer power it takes for a few people to take advantage of a Ponzi scheme. So, I mean, I know people - All right, let me throw another one at you then. Yeah, try another one. Yeah, let me try another one. Let's try this one. Well, it's just a bit of a personal story.

55:09So I think a lot of listeners, and I know, Marty, you know, I moved out to Wales. I bought a farm in lockdown and I've been out here and I've been doing a lot of observation around farming in this area. And, you know, particularly commercial farming versus kind of more homesteading. Right. And there's a whole interesting, I've just started to dabble in a bit of homesteading myself. And I find there's a big difference, you know, and a big different way of thinking emerging, at least that I've never come across before being a city boy around like, you know, using your hands, like you were saying, like looking after your own produce.

55:43In fact, I've got my own aim to eat a plate of food that I've grown the whole every component on it that we've grown on our land here next year. That's my aim. So, like, I don't know, maybe I'm just a tiny little pea in the pod. But, you know, there's a lot of other people that are thinking, like, get out of the controlled states that we're in and try and do something on the land, try and do something real. And there are a few of us around. So, you know, who knows? Would you agree that's sort of a start? I would agree that you're in the advance guard of the Romantic Age. I'm very romantic. Yeah.

56:18Well, you know, the romantic agent is like all about nature and poetry and, you know, love and stuff like that. Went out of style. Definitely no love of where I am. But yeah, I know what you mean. No, you're in Wales.

56:34Fascinating. I love Wales. Wales just makes me want to take a nap. I go there and it's just like, I just want to lie down and let the breeze. Anyway, it's beautiful. It's gorgeous there. So I don't blame you. Yeah. So I think you're part of the new wave and how much will that do? I just think it'll do your soul a lot of good. And with enough people thinking that way, I think it's a good antidote to this very soulless industry model that we're using now where, you know, the only thing to look forward to is we're all going to be replaced by machines and maybe some of us will move to Mars. I mean, that's not really inspiring.

57:15To most people. And so I think we have to bring back humanity. I mean, that's what my book Metaskills was about. Very few people paid attention to it back in 2013. But it just seems like that it was an opportunity we missed and we have to still, it's still there waiting for us. So we have to think about using our hands more, becoming fully human, not ignoring technology because it's been amazing. I mean, I love technology. and I love what it can do. But what it's doing is just making money for a few rich people and driving the rest of us down to the bottom of the hourglass. The hourglass is filling up with us and there's just a few people at the top and there's nobody in the middle of that hourglass.

58:02This is it. I think MetaSkills is a great example and another book to plug. Marty, we're basically plugging all your books, but what is it? If you've not read it before, I would say it's more technical than some of your other books. Like it's more heavy reading in my view, but it's definitely worth looking at. What is it? It's about five meta skills, feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning to help us reach our true potential in the creative workplace of the future. And, you know, I definitely think it's worthy of tucking into that where folks get a chance because it's worth exploring those.

58:37In effect, I guess, like one thing I took away from it is like, these are the things the robots can't do, right? Like these are the things that we need to harness and work on as individuals. And I definitely got a lot out of it. So I mean, I think if we follow those guidelines of being more human, the helpful machines will drop into the background. That's what they'll be. They'll be productivity aids and they'll be making streamlining life instead of taking over our jobs as creative people, which is the least of our problems. the biggest problem is just totally stripping all power away from people.

59:11And so that a few can live like kings on Mars. And I wish they would just go now. I mean, the problem would be solved. Well, on that bombshell, I think we'll have to go to a conclusion. I guess the final question, and you may have sort of hinted at this already, but it's like, you know, Where do we go to find out Marty's latest thinking on some of these topics and other things? Is it Substack, like you mentioned? Like, where do you go? Yeah, Substack is, so Substack, I'm doing two things on my Substack website. One is free, and I'm serializing my book about Leonardo da Vinci as a detective. He's a detective in this.

59:54It's fiction. It's a thriller. But it's based on a lot of research about him. And there's not a lot known about what he was like and how he thought and all that. But I was able to piece it together in a way that made sense to me as a creative person. I think I'm not far off on a lot of my assumptions. I also give him dialogue, which there's no recorded dialogue of him. So, you know, it's fiction, but it's really a fun read. And you get lots of ideas about creativity, design, critical thinking. He's a detective. He has to go, you know, be really smart about this. And he combines art and science in his solving of this problem.

1:00:36He uses design thinking before anyone even knew what it was. And he was using it before anybody knew what it was. So that's free. You can read it episode by episode. It's almost three quarters of the way through now. So you can binge and catch up. Just sign up for Substack and get it. It's called The Scarlet Files. Now, in the same place is another part, which is for makers. It's for creative people in the business, professionals who want to know more about what Leonardo was saying, what the meaning of it is, what I'm doing with the book, if they care about the new things I'm trying in book marketing.

1:01:15So, a lot of my thinking generally about creativity is behind the scenes and that cost. You have to pay for that. A low, low, low$5 a month. And you can just have one. You could take one month and read them all. You know, or you can keep up with the new ones. But I'm having fun exploring a lot of fresh topics that are just like, you know, happening right now. So that's there. And I got a lot of, I recognize a lot of friendly faces there from branding who are eagerly reading and commenting and everything. So that's a place where you can comment. You can comment on both. but we can have a discussion back there.

1:01:56So that's that. Now, then Level C is the other good place. And Level C is in, it's under repair in a sense, not repair, but it's being remodeled into something much bigger. So you can still see what we're doing. You can see what classes there are available. And all that's going to start up again in the fall with some changes to the classes, some improvements, some more options, and we're going to have a whole new level to deal with. that Andy's been preparing. And it's the reason we can fit in with a business school in Austria, where we will have, Andy tried to call it the Neumeier School of Business.

1:02:34And I said, no, it's not about me. I don't want to do that. But it's a big enough deal that they're going to make space for it. They're going to rent space in Vienna. And all of this may reflect back, It may be something that our professional students can get involved in, like either as teachers, but probably more like certificates from the school or maybe they get credits. We're all working all that out. But Andy's been on it. I mean, he's really amazing. So I would say subscribe to Level C just to know what's going on. And then if you want archives of all my branding things, books, thoughts from the past, it's not active.

1:03:17It's just a repository for all the little articles and stuff that are still valid. martinewmeyer.com. So that's the three things. Okay. Well, thanks so much for carving out some time for us today. Jacob, anything final from you, sir? I've just been listening in. It's a fascinating conversation, and I'm sure all our listeners have not heard something like this before anywhere else. So thank you, Marty, for sharing your thoughts. I think we're all in uncharted territory here, so I'm eager to hear everybody's thoughts, and you guys are great. And we might do another check-in in a while and see how things have changed.

1:03:50Let's do that. You're changing fast. And I would say the best advice for people is don't align yourself with the past. Whatever is going on now is probably going to change. Don't sign up for all the stuff I read to you that bad brands are doing because you will be left out in the cold when things change. You'll have a reputation of being old school when you don't want to be. So be part of the solution. And I think it'll work out for you in the long term, just like branding. All right. Well, thanks so much, Marty, and all the very best. Send our regards to Andy and hopefully catch up. Yeah. Thanks, guys.

1:04:25Thanks, Jacob. Thanks, Matt.