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

Alex, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom. I'm very good. How about yourself, my man?

Yeah, 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 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 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, but you can't really qualify what you do. You get people pay attention to you all the time.

But 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. See what teach people how to become sovereign individuals within a modern digital virtual economy. Physical world is merged with each other. Myself, I've been working online for myself about going on three years and before that I work with other people.

And I've also been a personal trainer, training people in person. But I always found myself attracted to service political conflict. I like knowing what's going on. I'm on a metal level, not just on level petty politics.

But it's been fasting me the last six, seven years to watch the dialogue and discourse devolve into this bliss, ice 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 when a different context.

And I read something like myself where I've gone through that myself and I know what the concepts are. Three years ago, I wanted to be in a position where I never had to worry about backlash any time. I didn't have to worry about online. I did not have to worry about being docked.

I want to be immune to all that. And I rise if you work for yourself, you're a sovereign individual in the sense that you are self-made, self-paid, self-employed, you own your own businesses. Especially in digital world where things really can't be taken from you that way. And then you have a physical basis.

You're very untouchable in a certain sensibility. So Sovereign University is 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 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 is unhappy as a whole. I mean, I take Western societies as a whole. I'm a big cultural malaise that way.

Where everyone senses it that something has gone wrong or things are not going well, whatever well means. We all feel like we all feel we all see it within like media itself where everything's an outrage every day. And you have the same time the world is a good place and there's a button opportunity if you know how to use it capitalize on it, identify it. But the job in 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 a whole gig economy now where how many careers are there anymore where it's a reliable path and you just do the same thing before years. That's almost nonexistent at this point.

I don't know if that exists at all honestly. Everything has changed. So you have to be hyper adapted that way. For most people what they want, a set vision of the future and it's nothing to go.

You don't have anymore. Again, 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 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 was going to start at 18 years old or 21 years old, what skills would you give them and what values would you give them? The skill wise I would almost approach it from a classical classical liberal arts education where the big skill has been lost in modern areas.

People think that's been the biggest one. People think people think people think people express themselves. But how is 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 wanted to make them as capable as possible in the job market or a teenager and say 12, 3 things. Redrick, Logic, 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 in fields that I've worked with consultant where the people that can talk best are the ones that get ahead. What does talking to you for your 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 you're writing an article or if you're just doing customer service and you're receptive to people. That is, I mean, I mean, I can shape it.

That has been lost by a lot of people because digitization has removed communication. We're so used to talking through text now or showing an image, but then you get people face to face and see how awkward they are. Yeah. So those people that can speak on camera, those people that can talk at length, those people where they can have a conversation with someone, they know how to listen.

Just doing those three things, you can identify so many opportunities within the digital economy and even real economy. Social media now has become such a big market for businesses and even online as well, the same thing. Basic stuff like copywriting, web copy, article writing. That's a situation where search and optimization is on a mental level.

So those three, being able to speak, write, argue, let's say for persuade, that's what I would start with with a young person. And then from there, it'd be more tangible, even say skillsets, knowing how to build a website, knowing how to take good photos, knowing just basic business-worth and tick and math. The way the marketing 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 relearn 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 apprenticeship where people get out of high school, they go to 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. That's how I would set up.

Now that's what I'd be telling them to do. I would not be telling them to go to college. You'll find yourself a college. No, 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.

That's not getting into the quality of the education, which is precipitously declined. So that's kind of like a shit show at this point. I have to say, I did five years at Newcastle University here in the UK, finished with a Masters in International Marketing. And I became incredibly disenfranchised and disenchanted with academia as I moved through that.

Me and my business partner 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 still not got rid of him. And 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 International 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.

Do you remember that? You had to have like the correct suffix to your at. EDU, I think I was. Oh, the UK.ac.au.

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 shots.

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 settle 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 at anything else other than to gesture or to remember. And I think that like having someone to practice conversing with.

It's on so bizarre that you need that. People who need it. I agree. Like that's the quality of the quality focus.

I get asked that question constantly all the time. Like, how do I focus better? How do I study better? And I was a natural when I didn't really study 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 I was students 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 a second doing it that way. Which even me, it's a good experience for education. But that quality focus now, I get to ask that question a lot like young guys, young gentlemen and late teens, late twenties, 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 complicated definite. You're doing one thing. And one thing only. You're in a conversation.

You're making eye contact with somebody. Even if you're screaming and you're just you're talking. You're not looking at this looking at that clicking this clicking that will turn camera. I'm like, it's one thing.

What about that? It's difficult. We live in this culture now where people prep themselves so much on multitasking, 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 write it, 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 feel 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. I'm going to change a BB pin every time you get on your hands. 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 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 Clear from Atomic Habits would implementation initiatives as James Clear 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 it'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 where you know you've got the little phone cups that go on the sharp edges of all of the the sets of draws 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 onto one particular topic at one time.

I'm having to essentially place myself in a hemetically sealed environment where there's no danger of distraction. So I can you know for the guys that are listening to me do struggle with the focus I can completely empathize with what they're going through and sympathize with it. That's funny because it recently the past past two years I realized I did the least amount of reading I'd ever done which I'm like the most I've ever gotten done so it wasn't as if that I was at a loss. But at the end of last year I was probably read about three books last year like in completion.

Like I was it that was it and I want to get back to reading so that was a new resolution this year or something I'm going to read a book a week like I used to. And it's been interesting because now like I started reading I got books in my bed like right here. This is a graphic I read this book last week in Pirates of the Moon about Comanche tribe in the United States. It's a pretty fascinating like phenomenal book.

I read it like this awesome awesome book nonfiction. Now you have a few others. So I'm at like five years or four. So I'm on track.

But the experience of reading again where I was just you know I had days like I had days where I just am in my room the entire day just reading the whole book. You know for five to six hours like getting a whole book is okay done on the next one. Yeah. It's strange because it feels good and like the process of reading it is actually very relaxing.

There's a mental nurse went to it. Well I do get back on the device now or computer. There's a harshness to it. And there's sort of like this a particle repeating where you're just going through everything.

So you're throwing the feet over and over again. We're trying to get your thing at once. And it's not overwhelming since I'm so well by it but it feels fake. Yeah.

And there's a subject there. I rise. It's just a lack of thought to it. There's a lack of deep thought deep focus to it.

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 articles everything. It's all written in emotional sound bites. Yeah.

There's very little facts, reason, context. It's just written to get your attention, five of your emotions, get your pissed off or confirm your biases and then you move on to the next thing. And you can do that a thousand times a day. We're not built to have this level of stimulus go through us.

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 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. 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 bed at the time I won, which is 10 and get up at the time I won, which is six. My morning is beautiful.

It's smoothies, some meditation, some reading, some journaling, some gratitude, some deep work, then some rum water, some yoga. Then I'm, you know, I've finished that. And I'm like, that is if I could choose a day, I would just have an entire day this morning routine. And it almost feels laborious to think I assume that 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 mean, and the way that we work with a lot of staff and there's a lot of group chats on what's happened. There's a lot of social media going on. So maybe I have a super normal level of super normal stimulus.

But yeah, some days where I like this, 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 it's the Twitter following I have, and like email list and all social media accounts, it's just a constant, you know, torrent of notifications and just the message. I'm like, Oh, look, I'm like, Oh, someone else wants a piece of my time.

And I think I read an article recently. I think about Buzzfeed or maybe it was not. There's about millennial burnout. And the article is quite insightful.

There are people of course commenting that this is bullshit. This is our goal. Millennials are weak. But there was something very real to the effect that millennials, the writer, listening this very clearly, millennials deal this environment of such overwhelming, and so much overwhelming.

simulation like we just sell the time. And there's so many things grabbing our attention. And every task takes like another piece of it. Every task takes the piece of it.

And at the same time, we have socioeconomic pressure trying to survive. And people have a socioeconomic pressure, but they ever really get ahead. And then you have all these factors 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 suggest that you cannot do another thing?

Like we are so driven now towards this God of efficiency. Everything has to be efficient and optimized and fast and speed. But then we do all that, but does it make our lives better in the sense that we actually get more done or actually just having to store these like death by thousand cuts or pinpricks? Totally correct.

Yeah. Like is it dropping off? You're like, I don't feel like doing this. I can't go to post office.

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

I am, I wonder, I wanted to ask someone who works in industry, similar to yourself, where personal brand is a big deal is 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 reply to and that bangs and that adds another 100 subs on to the 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 the first 10 years and when I got online, when I got Facebook about 2007, I was in the Facebook fitness community for a long time until 2016. I delayed Facebook over a year ago. Well, here you go. 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 like become very preeminent where because we are in touch of search for truth and authenticity and we no longer trust institutions at all.

We don't trust news. We don't trust 30 figures. So we're looking for individuals that we can serve half the original 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 those people that have 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 their basis. They didn't obsess over productivity. They tried to be consistent and what they presented to best 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. And whether you connect with or not, that's upon you.

So I've said this before, I mean, times if you want to have a relationship with your audience with your work, you have to be fully invested in the sense that you want to be consistent 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. Like it's almost like a paradox.

Like if you really want to love people, then you also have to be able to hate them in equal measure. It 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 ask ideas, come into my head and thanks for the size. I'll share them. And then there'll be times where I'll just be in a humorous mode, you know, a snappy mood. And I'll just tweet whenever I feel like, um, it's worked for the reason.

I realize what the reasons were because people see you and 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're not, you're not boring. If you're selling on personality that way, that's highly, highly effective. And on a certain metal level at the highest levels of any industry and people that are most successful are the ones who have that kind of power personality.

I mean, as a good example, Elon Musk 40 million, I think it's about 20 million followers or 40 million followers, SpaceX, like 4 million and he deleted, he deleted Tesla's Facebook. Like Chris, you're under an aldo 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, um, imagine if rail Madrid started tweeting stuff with typos in and or like, you know, accidentally putting up just random bits of content and stuff like that. Everyone, what you do and 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 example when I was training personal trainers where like the term personal trainer was the first word in personal. So you should be personable with the people you train and it's a two human's having 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 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. That's not what it is. There's no prescription.

There's no ultimate philosophy. There's no magic solution. It's speaking of people's individuals. You know, you are human being.

They're human being personal first and then you train them second. So you're personal branding. Are you a person who has a brand that has called us around you or are you this sort of contrived brand and you're trying to be personable through that brand? The former people will take you the latter.

They'll think you're boring or just really just bullshit or sociopath. 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 realized it's the same repetitive message and there's no real death to it. They're just basically being this ad hoc. Yeah, I get that with Tai Lopez.

Like, you know, Tai Lopez for me now. I don't know what I've clicked on, but that man is pixeled me hard and I'm getting retargeted 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 Lamborghini or in your garage about how people need to start working online, I'm like, it just is lost an 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 let me give you some context. So capitalism, you know, as an idea as a concept, obviously, you can say it's done great good for the world. You know, free markets, you know, they really do.

You know, everybody to earn, you know, like everyone having the equal opportunity at least to create or empower to have the work value, merit occupation and so forth. But you know, like any system like any idea, there's always a negative thing. And I was using the term last night, predatory capitalism as a free fire festival, which she'll remember two years ago was this spectacular massive failure, this sort of like peak apogee 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 living for the grand, for Instagram. And I was talking about the fire festival and the guy that came up with it, William Farland, and I said, this is a guy's example for predatory capitalism, sociopathy, where he created this great quality of the festival.

He wanted to live in this experience, but his actual regards for 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. And even after the fire festival ended and very like, part of the one 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, fake offers for concert tickets, fake offers for going to be on TJZ. And he's trying to get cash out of them and like, is that capitalism? Like, yes, it is.

Like he's trying to earn money and he has an email list. And like absolutely is. Is it exploitation of people? Like 100% is exploited.

You see that now with within the personal branding realm, even on like a larger realm, like, you know, this sort of big food, big pharma, opioid crisis in the United States where this motivation for profit at any cost, with complete disregard for the human cost, and then the argument, well, you know, it's making money. It's creating a train jobs or like, you know, someone's profit from that. Like, that's great. Obviously, it seems like he has help people.

Like what you just said, you realize, like, you know what, like, it seems like it 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 going to keep seeing yourself over and over again.

Like, does Tyler Pizzarelli care? Maybe he does. Maybe he thinks that's a good thing. I don't know.

If he does, if he does, it's not going to cross, which is the issue. But, 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 share. Or their shit and naive about what their message is that's coming across. And I don't want to be coached by either of those people.

So, you know, I mean, to go back to the five 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. I want to, yes, they pretty much there. Is there any new information or just sort of stuff?

It was rain, I didn't 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 everyone was like making fun of it and these stupid rich kids. That she signed that she signed which photo.

Which, yeah, so it was funny. And I remembered it and I couldn't tell you why I actually watched 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 how the loop on social media stuff was great. She sounds perfect. Yeah, she's perfect. I know we should watch documentary like, you know, you can see what it is.

She works in the text. She actually works in tech and she has company. But, yeah, she served like she managed to serve, say, all the loop was the daily, whatever Twitter. 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 yeah, that's why we got to the fire festival documentary and I watched it.

And it was actually quite fascinating because, yeah, I just assumed it was a music vessel that went down and went down playing. But it started actually as this idea for an app, which was a very legitimate idea where William Farley was the entrepreneur. He had this idea that what if you could book talent directly through like one networking in the middleman. So it was very similar actually to Jerry Wine Tropp did in 1970s.

Jerry Wine Tropp 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 zillion acts under his management company. He had like the Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, 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 for the United States, he would go directly to the theater where the show would be held. And this was a big idea back then in 1970s and he'd negotiate whoever on 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 for a good 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, you want to book, you want to book Rihanna for your birthday party, you can just open up the app.

And then for her booking fee was right there. You take you directly to her agent. You have like put down the money, like, you know, deposit and it was supposed to take steps transaction. So the fire festival started this idea like we'll use this from the app.

And then the guys, the guy's like, Farley and John Rolle was the other one who was sort of a height man for this project. They got to the Bahamas and then they just had this idea to just fly in like the top 20 models in the world. And you know, spend a lot of money giving this and let's just film ourselves partying for a bunch of days and then we'll try and make like some sort of sizzle reel 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. So I mean, you know, talk about getting in way over your head. So seeing that happen and seeing like every human misstep along the way, just trying to do this grand project that was like never got the ground.

It was like doomed from the start. But then you also serve the soul of power personality with a guy Billy, despite everything breaking down every single day, citing behind money and like, you Friday and Friday people and not paying people and just like everything that could go wrong to go wrong. It was like Browns, you know, sort of a lot that way. He still managed to make it happen because he just was so like, this is a research path.

He's a good thing. He was so determined that knows will work. Everybody just kind of went along with personality. He's like, you know, Billy says it's going to work.

So I know it's not failing. You haven't paid in four months, but screw it. Let's just do it anyway. It's something I'm so conflicted about him, right?

And my appreciation of this and for the club promote is listening as well. They will. They'll know it's rare that we have something that's talked about our industry and this was one and it is a club promote is worth nightmare. Like, and we've all, you know, we run weekly good nights.

We've had I've done a thousand events probably over my career. And you know, this 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 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 painted. And you're like, OK, like this is, yeah, no, this is you can relate.

Yeah, I can relate on a slightly deeper level. I've got that that degree of anxiety. But you totally right, the Billy McFarlane character I'm so conflicted about because there is something so seductive and romantic and admirable about someone who has this single minded purpose and is able to to follow something through like that. The differences, he wasn't doing it from a place of passion.

He was doing it from place where he wanted the status and he wanted the money and he wanted all the stuff that's associated with it. But because naturally, especially in this world, we're so drawn to success, like success is this 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 of my head that Billy McFarlane, his virtue and his integrity was basically nonexistent throughout the whole festival. The whole project, all he wanted to do was look cool on his ground 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, whatever, it sucked the carker for 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 week and maybe the food 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. 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, well, yeah, it doesn't matter about his virtues, man.

Look, 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. I don't have an answer.

I think about that myself. The thing with the Hulu documentary, which I would suggest watching it since the Hulu documentary goes more into the psychology of himself. He's interviewed a lot more the festival ending. And it goes more to his personal history and how he started to have a winner where he was in kindergarten and he charged a girl like $1 for fixing her crown.

That was his first entrepreneurial endeavor where he tossed out how to code on this 1999 computer and hacked his school network and sent out this message that I'll fix everybody's crowns for $1. I'm not kidding. He's like, yeah, very young. He's obviously quite growing that way.

Then later on in college, I showed his entrepreneurial projects, which is something which failed. Maybe between York, he wanted to create something important. But his first project, Nick Nises, which he also highlighted where he created this credit company, which is actually fraudulent, but he made it. It was interesting, though, because you said it's so exciting, it's a success and he cost and he still got ahead despite this for a very long time.

It makes me question to this entrepreneurial mindset that people have such as Silicon Valley, where like move fast and break things fail fail fail. I'm like, what are the human consequences of doing this? In this first case, he was never really truly successful, I would say. 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 integrity details. From the very beginning, it was a very doomed idea. Like every step of the way, it wasn't just a series of like, oh, this is kind of a problem. This is a red flag, this can't get done.

We're going to have to either light up people, rip them off, or do both. Well, it's okay, you'll be needing to be solution oriented. You see these entrepreneurial cliches all the time, it's all about solutions. We got some problem, we got some problem.

That's not talking about problems, it's not going to be solutions. He goes through this and then later on he's being interviewed versus his court transcripts. And he's still compulsively lying, and he doesn't have any sense that he even is. He's still supposed to be lying.

Like, well, you said this, but you're saying this right now. You can see the cognitive dissonance that people have to argue with social pathic where they're caught in a lie, but they can't even acknowledge it. Which one's the truth? Yeah, they don't even know.

You said like what he had successfully done it. Like to have done that, it would have taken a more psychopathic person that had some sense of consciousness. Like, this is the best thing. I was thinking about this.

I was 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 amazing idea that the marketing for it was so brilliant, especially the use of the models was the biggest thing. I feel like that was overlooked.

What did it take to make that fire festival campaign a success? They got the 20 most people in the world with the big fallings. They had the post in Orange Tile. And then just because people wanted proximity to beautiful women, they wanted to be where beautiful women were.

It's a woman that everyone wants to be and it's a woman that every man wishes he could have. Like, that is so desired. And instead of the beauty is purely authentic because we can't truly fake it, we can't fake it. It's like, for models, they're sort of like this unknowing agent for truth in a certain way.

They may have no depth at all. They have nothing to them. But because they're beautiful, at least I know that's real. So people signed up for it and people spent hundreds of dollars to be there with the hopes that they're going to 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'm with. And I'm important now. Like my existence has been validated. How do you pull that off?

Like, my God. But could it be pulled off? I think it honestly could. Except now everyone's going to be self-aware.

It's like, oh, this is a fire festival? Yeah. Well, you can pull that switch once. And any time, which sucks actually, because had that have worked, because there's influence marketing is a 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 like Kendall Jan is doing her own things, but those kind of echelon of influencer would be the new opening of a particular casino that was in association with them. And you know, I hold documentary just completely blew my mind. And like I 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, try to make the perfect example. And they say in Miami, like, yeah, I'm going to a music festival, which is one of the biggest best festivals on the planet, best lineups. And even that is a logistical nightmare.

And these guys were wanting to do it somewhere with like no by a 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 Joe rule as well, like Joe rule doesn't get enough stick in the Netflix documentary. 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 Joe rules in there going like, no, listen guys, like, you know, everybody has setbacks man. And then I use it some in name, pithy example. And you're like, listen, Joe rule my honestly, like, you just need to go back to making music because you are shy to 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 like we're all fine.

Like, there are times as appropriate and there are times that's not appropriate. I felt bad for the guys that designed like the software for this app, which is probably an app. It looks like and they're all out of a job and never got paid. And now they're the thing that they project they work on that might have been totally viable, have done a smaller scale.

That's just all gone 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, class A drugs in the ice cream to promote the car. And then the car gets scrapped and you're like, fuck's age mate. But yeah, the guys who make that happen, you know, again, coming from a good promotional 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're a new fledgling festival or club night or even like a 16 year old's dad who wants 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, once in a 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 and startups in terms of events going on. The artist, you know, how many more times would Blink 1.82 get booked if people knew how easy it was to book Blink 1.82? Like, you know, they'd be getting deposited all the time. Oh, constantly, constantly.

That's kind of, I'm thinking about that. That was just a very legitimately good idea. I've had some proximity to their industry being in Los Angeles and working in Hollywood. And that's just, it's a very constant old nightmare of, okay, let's try to get a hold of this person.

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

Who maybe will call you. But only if you talk like it's just the stars need to align so well, right? Yeah, I mean, so much like I'm almost just luck. Like, okay, hopefully, I'm hoping this works out.

I'm hoping this works out. I wonder if that will happen at some point since it seems like, especially for talent, let's say people are up and coming. They're trying to sort of like become known, be seen, develop like their own, you know, develop your presence that way. Yeah, for like lower level middle acts, that can be very revitalizing for their career at a certain level because I wonder how much of, I want to say success.

It makes you question how much success is not just from like a talent's lack of hustle, but just like this poor management. Yeah, that's a very common thing to hold with too. Like if you have a bad manager, you know, bad agent, you might have missed 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 people at lower level tickets, they got their money back.

But like some of the things that came out was like the wristband. The RSI day payment. No, that was refunded actually. He's still like, he got sued for just going to go like $25 million.

So I don't like that. Some of that money was never funded at all. I mean, even that wristband was a cash grab because they had to pay off other stuff from other ones he'd taken out. Yeah, because that was apparently there's that guy on the Netflix documentary that says that there was a woman who rang him aggressively saying that he hadn't loaded up his wristband yet.

And it would appear that the tickets were maybe like £3,000 to £5,000 and then they were being suggested to put almost that amount again. Yeah. The wristband so they could do jet ski, hire and alcohol, this and all the rest of it. So what happened?

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

Do not collect £200. 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 sarock and probably some shipheads of LeBoutons, like what's left?

Yeah. Well, that was, I mean, after watching the second I said, I did a bit of research. Essentially, like nobody got paid. Like, I mean, like, almost nobody got paid like a lot of people, a lot of people, like the Haney workers, no one got their money back.

The reason being that when they even before the festival ever was like an idea and they were just on island filming, he basically ran a Ponzi scheme of just debt where he got capital for one person, you know, or short from 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 like when everything was accounted for with the risk 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, you know, telling the other guy, don't worry, you'll get the money back eventually like it's going towards something.

So there was nothing to, you know, even how it's turning forward. There's something liquidate. So it kind of just evaporates in a thin air because there'll be some things that they won't have been able to get on credit. So they'll have 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, especially the early stuff. So I guess the early people get paid and then there's just, it's like 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 contributors side.

I think the only ones that seem to have gotten paid, like for sure, were the models. That was it. Okay. Yeah, like that was really everybody else.

Like they were getting paid or their game pays for actually like they never got back what they ever wrote at all. I mean, he burnt some money to send the same rate himself because he was, you know, like he bought a frickin Bugatti for a million dollars. The alcohol bill, he's dying out bail. His paying for everything while no one was actually getting paid.

So yeah, that's a important situation. I mean, there's interesting to you 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 eventually it will catch up to you. Yeah.

You can't keep going back to the same investors and still trying to fund rates from your own customers. Yeah, it basically runs out. There's a thing that's been going through my head. Sam Harris in his book, Waking Up, talks about an individual, I think it was in the States in the 70s of the 80s who began partway through his life to have this compulsion for aggression, really severe compulsion for aggression.

And I think he went up on to a bell tower and started shooting random people wrote a note saying that something needed 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 tumor, 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 MacFarlane has a entrepreneurial equivalent of this. Like he's just got this like hustle button. The hustle is just it's like Gary V is standing on his neck. And I'm just going like grind puzzle, grind puzzle like the whole day.

I can believe it. I can believe it. I mean, I've met, I've had some experience in the text space. I've met people like that where they're just, they have to constantly be creating selling something.

And 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 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 there's limits to it.

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 like 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 that, but I would have had to pull the plug. But there is a lack of that, the puzzle button is getting 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 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 the paradoxical things human nature.

Like everyone loves success. We also hate that people are successful. But the idea of us being a human engine of movements where like you never stop ever. Everyone on some level like a spires that, if they had the motivation to do that or if they could only be that way, how much more would they get done?

I mean, we also live in a culture where we worship work. I rise, that's so ingrained from like sort of the 1940s, 30s, like sort of the greatest generation where it's a cultural sentiment that's sort of taken over, sort of a question of the world. And I try to trace why it is, I think it started in the 30s, 40s during the Great Depression, during the Stock Market Crash where you had, you know, the world economy had completely, you know, sort of this collapse on itself. Everyone was second off be depressed.

And the only way to survive, you know, this was over 80 years ago, 20 years ago, was that you had to work. You had to work, otherwise you were getting nothing. So like I've really, I believe like, I had a pinpoint like where was the inception of hustle and grind culture. It was then, it was then, and that followed, that followed the automation revolution of the industrial era where now you can get so much work done through automation, you can leverage productivity.

So you have this leveraging 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 you'll post World War II, like at least the United States boom. And then like, you know, how do you rebuild Europe? We're going to have to work to rebuild the rubble literally.

And the generation of people were there raised with that mindset and then still that. And then they actually do create a prosperity, you know, 60s, 80s, 90s, you know, 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 in return. And the more you worked, the higher you would rise. But then, you know, then we get to the thing is that we get to the air technology, like the 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 to stay in the same place. So the red queen effect for those people, you know, that that's not the most. Yeah, it's red queen trap. So now your hard work 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 work too? Then you're just like a God work. Yes. No, it's not.

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 go back to the very beginning of the conversation, when you don't have a job for life 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 a, or 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 kind of the way that the business is worked like a family or like a, like, er, er, as to a kingdom almost. So, Bob really gets it, even if he's a complete tit and the younger brother would be a much better choice, but he's the older ones, 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 of self-driving cars. Like, this is what is it? Between two and four million workers, I think? Oh, no, one million workers in America are what they call professional drivers.

Like, that is a huge displacement of labor. Yeah. Well, that's, I think, like Uber's ultimate plan, I think, with everyone driving cars, it's just the data. They have this massive, massive, massive database now of driving patterns and vehicles.

Yeah, you know, self-driving cars, I think about the US economy. Like, how much time does it give to you? It's lost when people hang to drive. Once you have cars that can drive themselves, okay, well, now you have more time to work one, but you free up human capital, like, again, so like, even, you know, desire for efficiency.

You have a bad thing? Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, it's interesting that all these things create this confluence effect. Yeah, I think the seniority factor arises from when workers are just like artisanal.

It's like artisan work where, for most of human history, you couldn't really mass produce anything. Like, if you did, you just had a bunch of people working on all at once, and the people were the best, and the people that have been working the longest. Like, that was probably up until 1800. That was most things before mechanization really took over.

Something that implies a craft. Yeah, like, yeah, like, everything was craftsmanship, literally everything. You know, how much, you know, what could you reproduce that was just, you know, in 20 minutes you could get done? There's nothing.

Yeah, but then we get to the industrial era, you know, the era of machines, and the machines digitizing computers, and now you can produce things within minutes within seconds. You can punch in, you know, like, you have 3D printing, you know, like, it's still in dependency, but you can type in a code and it just made it for you. And you don't have to do anything. Yes.

Yeah, even coding itself is starting to change with the App and Machine Learning. Yeah, coding, yeah, the idea, like, everyone learned a code. It's a ha ha ha kind of thing. But even for the language of coding now, they're getting simpler where you don't even need to be able to code.

You don'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, Squarespace for websites, but for coding, like, Dragon Drop coding. Well, learn to code is not going to 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'd love to have you back on.

I'm sure that a lot of the listeners are going to want you back on as well. Yeah, man. Have a good day. It's been sweet.

Thank you. Okay.