 I can go sit on the beach, I can go snowboard, I can do what I want, and all is gonna be good. Let me tell you folks, fake news. It never gets easier. It always gets more complicated. It always gets more expensive. And so the key in my opinion is making sure that you take responsibility for all the aspects. And that's one of the things that I have really found to be incredibly useful. And what I mean with a lot of young, pardon me, young entrepreneurs, that's one of the first things I'd look for. You know, is this somebody who understands that there is no part of the business that's not theirs? And that if it means you're working until five o'clock, or seven o'clock, or 12 o'clock, it doesn't matter if it needs to get done. You gotta do it. And if you're not prepared to do it, you're probably not gonna succeed in starting a growing business. So that's story number one. I'm gonna find story number two in a moment. Is there anything else here? No? Story number two. I was working as a consultant to rural health centers, and I hated it. Are there any doctors here? No. Excellent. As a general rule, and they're exceptions, I find doctors to be one of the most despicable human enterprises on the planet. These are people who are generally overly privileged. They've had everything handed to them. Everybody talks about how smart they are. And my experience is they're not that smart. They've learned how to do a certain thing. And I was working for a health center which will remain nameless. And every time I left, I would rush home to take a shower because I felt so slimy from working with this guy, and I never could figure out why. And one day, I said, you know, I can't do this anymore. And so I quit. Two weeks later, I read in the newspaper that he was arrested for playing with little girls in his exams, and that's when I realized, okay, I gotta get out of this thing. And so at the time, I was, I'm talking mid-70s, by the way. And so I was playing with computers at the time. I know that you people probably heard of them by now. But in those days, you know, my go-to was a Radio Shack Color Computer, and it was a big day when I moved up to a K-Pro transportable. That was heaven. So I needed to get out of the consulting business. And I went, well, I'm gonna live in Vermont. Which, in case you don't know, is small. There's only 600,000 of us in this state. And my desires were always much bigger than 600,000 people, and being in a single state. So I went, you know, if I'm gonna stay in Vermont, I better improve my computer skills and understand mail order. At the time, there were these things called catalogs. I know they still happen, but everybody throws them away and I can do it online. But in those days, there was no online. And so everybody would get these catalogs. I figured, you know, I bet you that's a good thing for me to do. So I got a job at a nonprofit called Gardens for All. It was a nonprofit started by a guy named Lyman Wood, and he installed two of his fair-haired boys to run this nonprofit. Lyman Wood, for those of you who don't know him, he owned a company called Troybilt Rototillers. He owned a company called Gardenway. He had a, Troybilt in the day had a 95 share of Rototillers. And so being a smart guy, he went, if I'm gonna sell more Rototillers, I'm not gonna get over a 95 share and need more gardeners. So he started this nonprofit to generate more interest in gardening. That was Gardens for All. And there were two guys who ran it. One was the finance guy and the president. The other was the marketing guy. And I worked for the marketing guy, the guy named Will Rapp. And after about six months, I kind of, you know, I'm getting bored here. You know, I've learned, you know, I was running this computer, how I don't have any idea. I was learning the mail-loader business, and I was about what I could learn. It wasn't going anywhere. And I was trying to figure out how to tell Will that I was gonna leave. And he said, Allen, you know, on Friday, and blah, blah, blah, you wanna come with me? And I said, sure, I think it was a car ride. Good road trip. Good opportunity to tell him I'm leaving. Before I could tell him, he said, you know, we're getting ready to split Gardens for All into two divisions, the nonprofit and the for-profit. And Jack, the president, was gonna stay with the nonprofit, run the magazine, continue to try to generate new gardeners. Will was gonna spin it off and start a company called Gardeners Supply Company that I wanna come along and run the operations and the finance. And I said, sure, because had nothing else to do. And so we started Gardeners Supply Company back in our early 80s. It was ugly. We had two people, Will and I, neither one of us had ever done a business before. We had no clue what we were doing. And every night after everybody left, Will and I would hang out and we'd shoot the shit together. And it was really Will, who's far more philosophical than I am, who, you know, would start talking, you know, Alan, we spend more time here with each other than we do with our families. And yet, we don't bring any of our values into this workplace. Again, we're talking early 80s. This is long before social venture network. This is long before Ben and Jerry's created a dual bottom line. And to me, growing up, businesses were for people in suits who went into little offices. And they were mean to the people they work with. And it's like, why would I want to do this? And so Will and I would talk about, really, you can bring values into the business. You know, we can do things here that we would like to do personally. We can support causes and we can do things that really promote our personal values. That's pretty cool. That's a really radical idea to me. We also could treat each other like neighbors and like friends and like family. And so that to me was a major aha moment. And it all of a sudden made business acceptable today. So life went on and the business started to grow, finally. And one of the things that Will was adamant about was we were only gonna hire gardeners. If somebody was not a passionate gardener, we weren't gonna hire them. And I really thought that was a little bit short sighted. I was wrong, by the way. Over time, I learned that if you hire people that are passionate about the lifestyle of your customers, then that made communicating and building relationships with those customers much easier. The rest of the stuff had a punch in an order, I can teach you. Had to fulfill an order from a cat, from a, from shelves in the back. I can teach you to do that stuff. What I can't teach you is to be passionate about what we're doing here. I was in a company where I was the only person, the entire company, who had absolutely no interest in gardening whatsoever. To this day, I only have interest in one plant. The rest of them, I just don't care. And so it became obvious that two things. Number one, we were building a company around gardeners and the love of gardening, and yet one of the key people didn't care about it. And it was a growing problem. And the second issue was as rapidly as we grew. And we started to grow reasonably rapidly. We didn't go fast enough for two hard-nosed, aggressive people to work together. And since it was really Will's business, and since Will actually loved gardening and I didn't, it made sense for him to stay and me to move on. And I left and I started Seven Generation. That's another whole story. But what I took away from that, what I've used every single time, is when I hire, there are exceptions to everything I say. I mean, if you need somebody with a specific skill, God bless. But by and large, what I learned was, create culture first. The thing that I feel like I've done best at all the businesses is create a culture of passion and enthusiasm for what it is we're doing. At Seven Generation, we built Seven Generation, we went from three employees to probably 170 at season. And we did it at a time when Chittenden County had an unemployment rate somewhere around 2.1, 2.2, the lowest it's ever been. And everybody would say, well, how are you finding, how are you hiring people? And the answer was every day. I had three to five people who were walking in the door begging me to work at Seven Generation. Why is that? Because we were passionate about the environment, we were passionate about what we were doing, and that was contagious. At Magic Hat, this may sound silly now, but in 93, when I started Magic Hat, there were already three breweries in Vermont. And I thought, how many breweries can a state of 600,000 have? Does it really mean a fourth? Obviously, today we know the answer to that. But when we started, I felt like we needed to do something different. And so instead of being a beer company, I really had wanted to be in the music business. I tried to buy a music business in Austin, Texas. I got it 24 hours late. Yes. Sometimes the things you miss, the best things you get. And so when Magic Hat started, I knew we needed a lifestyle. We needed to be something other than a beer company. Otherwise, what separates me from Catamount, from Out of Creek, from Long Trail? Why is somebody gonna choose Magic Hat? Yeah, I know the flavor. I don't buy that. So we decided that we were gonna be about music. People going out at night, going listening to music, what do you have in your hand? You have a beer. It's perfect. So if we could build our brand around music, then we didn't have to worry about customer loyalty because if they were sharing our beer while they were having a good time, we believed that that would broaden their interest in Magic Hat, and then they'd buy us to take it home and when they sort it out to other places. It'll work. So when we hired salespeople, we did not hire anybody from the beer industry. Matter of fact, if the resume had beer industry experience on it, we put it aside. We only hired people who loved music. In those days, we sponsored music events. We sponsored all the local ones. We were the first craft sponsor for a festival. Have you ever heard of a thing called Bonnaroo? Have you? Have you? I think we had a conversation about that. Well, we were there together for that early one. And so the reason we hired people who loved music was when we went on sales call to the music venues, to the bars that have a lot of music, in order to get their attention, you had to create some sort of relationship with them. There is nothing easier than creating a relationship around something that everybody has passion and enthusiasm for, and music was it. So really, at Garden of Supply, I really learned the value of setting the culture around the passion and enthusiasm for the lifestyle. And I like to say I'm a one-trick pony. I've done that in every other business I've ever done. I always, first of all, pick the lifestyle. What's the lifestyle that this brand really wants to go after and represent and be part of that lifestyle community, and then how do I bring in people who are passionate about that lifestyle? So that's number two. I'm gonna tell you what number three is in a second. One of my favorite stories. Now, I'll give you the punchline first. Nothing you ever do is meaningless. It always helps. The key, and then when I tell young people all the time, we're, whoosh, I do this, whoosh, I do that, it doesn't matter. Just have experiences. Go do things. It doesn't matter what it is you'll learn, you'll take those with you. And where I learned that? In the mid-seventeenths, I was working for a local company. I was the business manager of a company called Associates of Rural Development, ARD. They had contracts with Africa. They did mostly environmental contracts for USAID to do projects in Africa. Well, this is before fax machines. It's even before email. And if you wanted to communicate with somebody far away, there was only one thing you, well, you could send a telegram. But if you wanted to control it, you needed what is called a telex machine. Anybody here ever use a telex machine? I don't think so. But to my point, did you see any other hand go up? There's a reason. So at ARD, the owner decided we needed a telex machine. And since I was the business manager, Alan, go figure out what telex machine was you get. I said, fine, on one condition. When they come to train, I refuse to be the one who gets trained on it. Because I knew that whoever knew how to use this machine at three o'clock in the morning was gonna get the phone calls. Can you get in here, we gotta send the telex out. My deal is, I'll pick the machine, I'll finance it, I'll get it set up, all good. But when it comes in and comes down to training, Lisa gets the training, yeah, no problem. So the training comes, that's the one day Lisa the receptionist is out. Guess who gets trained? Against every instinct I have, I learned how to use this stupid telex machine. And exactly as I said, three o'clock in the morning, the calls would come, Alan, you gotta get into the office, we gotta send this out. And I dreaded always learning how to use that telex machine. Flash forward three years. I'm now coaching my son's little 18. There's another guy, there's another father who has a kid on the little 18. And over the course of the summer, we chat, we talk, we get to know each other a little bit. It's the last game of the year. We're cleaning up the bases, we're putting the bases and the bats and the balls away. And we're all done, he says, I don't know. I have to get a telex out tomorrow morning. They're coming at nine to install the machine. And at 10 o'clock, I gotta send this telex out. And I said, well, what machine did you get? What are you talking about? I said, well, did you get this machine and he goes, well, how do you know about this? I said, well, that's a long story, but I know telex. You know telex machines? Any chance that you could come on over at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning and send this telex one? Yeah, sure, I can do that. So I went over at 10 o'clock the next morning and I sent that telex machine. I sent that telex message. And that began the most interesting 18 months of my entire life. The guy whose telex machine I used and sent out was turned out to be the most interesting person I have ever known by a factor of at least five to eight. He was a Navy fighter pilot who knocked down the first Mi in Vietnam. He used to land on aircraft carriers and 20-foot seats, which to this day boggles my mind. And then he left the Navy and he went to work selling F-14s. Those were the hot jet at the time. And he sold a package of jets to a guy who was known as the Shaw of Iran. Nobody here probably knows who the Shaw was, but at the time, everybody knew the Shaw of Iran. He was not a good dude. And the deal was, okay, Tony, I'm gonna buy your planes on one condition. You move over here for two years and you teach my pilots how to fly these planes. It goes okay. It goes over, Shaw calls them in the first day there and says, Tony, you got two years. That's not a lot of time. So if anybody gives you any trouble, you just come tell me about it and I will solve your problem immediately. Tony knew what that meant to me. Anyway, Tony was one of the most interesting people I've ever known and if it wasn't for learning how to use that stupid telex machine, I never would have had that 18 months experience. So what I've learned is some of my businesses have ended a little rocky on my end and people say, well, why do you keep doing this? You keep going back and dipping into that same well and you keep getting the same result. And I go, yeah, but it's about the experience. And without each experience, I could never have done the next. And what I've done is really built over the years from one experience to the next to the next. And so what I've learned is embrace all those experiences regardless of how they seem at the moment because they can come back and they can deliver spades. And if you're gonna have the experience, you might as well enjoy it. Why fight it? Because you're gonna do it anyway. So those are my three stories. I have a bunch of other things that I can talk about but what I'm kind of curious about is does this thing work? It's the first time I've ever done this. Does the idea of telling stories to drive points is that a positive or negative? And then more importantly, does anybody have anything they wanna ask about? Because I'm much more interested in question and answers than sitting here and hearing myself speak. So just for fun. And I just, so those of you who thought that the idea of telling those things through stories raise your hand if you thought it was a good idea. Oh really? Is everybody lying to me? No, no, no. All right, any questions? I have a couple more things I can use to fill time but yeah, Mr. Cohn. Hi, your exits. What is that pattern? Is there, are they always the same? It's always the same. I get kicked out. But what about a Uber? What actually happened? What do you mean? If I'm not there, I'm not there. What happens? I'm trying to save myself that step. Yeah, yeah. It's back to my first lesson of taking responsibility. In each case, I was not, and I always, it was always this, money has never been more. I've always done these, not to make money because I love painting and I love drawing and I love coming up with ideas and I love bringing people together, creating a culture and moving that culture forward and creation, that's what I love. Money has never been terribly important to me, which I consider to be a weakness, by the way, because it hasn't served me well. And in each case, it was back money. In the seven generation I had brought in a partner who brought in all the money, it's the reason I brought him in. I knew we needed money, he could bring in the money and he then created the board. I didn't pay enough attention to what was going on. I was busy running the business. Jeff, his job was run the board and we went from zero to, I don't know, $12 million in two and a half years. So I was kind of busy running this thing and I was not paying attention to what the board was here and seeing and that was my downfall there. I believe, now again, Jeff, he might have been totally different, but that's my thing now. Magic Hat, I took on, I knew we were growing growth is, first of all, growth is expensive. This concept that when you're growing a business, the growth of the business will support the growth of the business, not fake news. It never works that way. And if you're in manufacturing, it's double-do, it's really bad. And so at Magic Hat, we grew 30% every year. So regardless of how big we got, we kept growing 30%, which meant we constantly needed new equipment, more sales people, new territories, all expensive. And I had a financial partner who I was coming to the end of his capacity. So I took in a second financial partner. So now there were three voting members, two of them and me. And I was okay knowing that at least there needed to be two votes on a decision. When we then acquired another business, this is a long story, so we then acquired a business on the West Coast. And we had a letter of intent from a bank to finance it, but that letter of intent was done three weeks before the banks collapsed in 2008. And so three weeks later, the banks said, we went, okay, we'll take that money now. And they said, well, we suggest you take a look at the little time, the power of that letter of understanding. And in there, you will see that we have no obligation to give it to you or we're not going to. And so we really struggled. The financial partner was a hedge fund. When I started with them, they were a $3 billion hedge fund. So whatever we needed, they just wanted to give me all the money. Whatever you need here. But after the banks collapsed, they were a $200 million hedge fund. And they no longer had the ability to fund us. And because our balance sheet was all turned around, because the bank did blah, blah, blah, they decided they had to sell their share. And they sold to the one company I asked them not to. Once again, there was a little piece of responsibility that I didn't take. There was a guy who was our contact with the hedge fund. And I knew that he wanted to sell us to the one company I asked them not to. I went and found my own buyer. I beat his offer. I knew what his offer was gonna be. I brought in a buyer that I loved that, but I dealt with this guy, never went to the owner. And I should have, because the guy who sold us down the river made over $10 million for delivering us to this private equity company, which was far, far, far, far, far, far more than I made out of it. And so it's always about not taking full responsibility. And it's usually around money because I'm usually, all I care about is do I have enough money to do what I wanna do more? And as long as I have enough money to do what I wanna do, I'm good. Answer your question. Does that add any value? Yeah? So money, so you don't believe in organic growth, something I'm trying to do, unfortunately. Put that again, when I need money, a lot of people tell me to know when investors, but if you need money, you gotta invest for banks, banks are harder to get. So, any advice there? So did everybody hear the question? Okay. The question was, when you need money, how do you get it? Close enough? Yeah. I've never had difficulty getting the money, but I've done some deals, I've been sorry I didn't. One of the things that I've learned that I always talk around, everybody looks at me like I'm from Mars, I can control a business much better with debt than equity. You know, I see a ton of entrepreneurs who say, you know, I want to do debt because I don't want to lose any of my equity. That's music to my ears. And I was taught this by my ex-investor who cost me a lot of money to learn this. I can put conditions on that debt that allow me to control every significant decision that you're gonna make. I can tie up your ability to sell equity at a price below what's acceptable to me. I can tie up your ability to raise more money through either equity or through debt. I can hold you to your financial projections which very few entrepreneurs ever hit, quite frankly. We're always far more optimistic and private equity people, they know that. Okay, you think you can do that? Sure, I'll give you the money then if you hit those numbers, we're good. But if you don't hit that number, I want to claw back some of my equity or I want to claw back some of my debt. I want to put you in default. And with debt, you can put people in default. And the moment a business is in default and I can make you go into default any time I want. And the moment you're in default, I now run your business. And so there are three, in my opinion, three levels of investors. You have banks, if you have a solid business that doesn't need the money, the banks are your best option. But if you need money, the bank's probably not gonna give it to you unless you're collateralized. Then you've got private equity. Private equity, by and large, uses debt to invest in businesses, usually convertible so that if you win, they can convert and take the upside. But if you don't win, at least I'm getting paid my big along the way. And then the third, which in my opinion is the best if you can get it, is what I'm gonna call a family fund, where the family has a lot of money, they don't have, they wanna make money, don't get me wrong, everybody with money wants to make money, but they don't live on every dime and they tend to be much easier to deal with. So those are your three options. And you're gonna take it up, if you need money, you're gonna take it ahead. Where do you want to hit? And that's why, to the degree, you can put off raising money as long as you can. The other piece is that if you do it in private equity, they need a 25% IRR, 25% internal rate of return. So they need to have a 25% annual return on their investment. They don't need it every year, but when they're done, they need the total investment to have paid them back 25% a year. If you're a business that's throwing off cash greater than 25% a year and you're using that money to make money, God bless. But I see so many businesses take private equity money when they're growing organically and private equity doesn't do organic. They wanna see how they get out in three to five years because if you're on a 25% IRR, once you're in for three years, I need to double my money. And you get to a point where it's just too expensive to stay in, so they've gotta get out. And does that answer your question? But money is always available if you're willing to do what they want. And as long as your business can use the money judiciously, it's fine. But you completely advise against trying to just grow organically? No, no, you ask me if I like growing organically. No, I don't. I don't because I don't believe it's a sustainable way to be in business. I think we just had this conversation. You know, the world's going around and around and you don't keep changing. You know, the imagery I have is if you're standing still, you're just getting slapped constantly from the rotating world. And there's only one way to avoid that and that's to change. And if you're gonna change, there's only two directions you can go. You can go up or you can go down. And so since you can't stay where you were, you've gotta go in one direction and growing in my mind is much more fun than shrinking. So that's the direction I've chosen. But that doesn't mean that for other people, organic isn't a better. I have, what are the things I've learned? Is I have some talents. And I say that because they're not skills because skills are things one learns. Talents are things that one happens to just innately have. I have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. I can take a phone call. The biggest disaster in the world going on in the business. I can stay on the phone for 20 minutes an hour. I can solve the problem or work the problem through. Hang up the phone and I'm done. I go right back to what I was doing. I have the ability to get up every day and overcome every obstacle that gets in my way without even thinking about it. I've learned over time that these are remarkable attributes to have for what I do because if I didn't have those, I couldn't do it. But I didn't learn those skills. I don't know where they came from. They're just part of who I am. Yo. Yo. So you're the, thank you. Hi, how are you? Hi, I'm good. I'm Shayna. Hi Shayna, nice to meet you. Say hi to the camera. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. So your life path seems really spontaneous. Yes. But, and yet, you just mentioned not growing organically. So you must have like some wild systems in place in order to sort of like be able to like appear somewhere and then like throw it and then leave it and move on and do that again. Can you describe some of those systems or just your response to whatever I'm saying? Did everybody hear the question? Would you, I don't know that I can even repeat it. Talk to them, tell them what you asked. Hi. I was just mentioning how he seems to just sort of like grow spontaneously and then open up these worlds of systems and create organization in order to not have the organic growth even though maybe there's something with you on the completion that may be for your life path. Like, I don't know what that is for you but just to be able to keep being spontaneous. I feel like I'm pretty spontaneous in the way that I run my business. But I see people who are like whizzes with their systems and I just, I don't really know where that balance is for me, that's what I've seen. I got the question and I got the answer. Thank you. Is the right answer or not? I don't know. So a couple of things come to mind. Number one, in my experience there, again, I can divide almost everybody into two traits, pick a trait and you can usually divide people. My wife is what I call an expense person. When she starts getting tight on money, she immediately goes to cut her expenses. It's just her nature. She's tight, she can't spend money, she has to cut back expenses. Me, I'm the opposite. When I'm getting tight, the first thing I do is how do I generate more revenue? So part of your question is, again, it's my nature. I don't know why but to me, growing revenue is relatively easy, I know how to do that and if the choice is expense or revenue, I'd much rather revenue. So it's where my joy is because I like the expanse of growing. The second part of my answer would be, I could have answered this better 20 years ago when I had memory. Do I have a good answer to, I really like that. Systems, something about systems? Thank you, excellent. So one of my greatest talents in my opinion is I always try to hire people smarter than me in areas and my job is to set out the vision, create the boundaries and keep everybody focused on the goals. But I am by nature a very non-linear, very non-structured person. So my job as founder is to create chaos because in that chaos, there is brilliance. But in order for it to work, I always surrounded myself with people who like to create order out of chaos. And they're the ones who created the systems. What I did was I allowed the space for them to do that because I was willing to delegate. Once I trusted that somebody knew what they were doing better than me and once we agreed on where we wanted to go, I would let them have their journey rather than try to run their journey for them because they were much better at it than I was. And I stayed focused on how do I keep creating more chaos because again, in the chaos is where the growth ideas come from. Does that make any sense to you? It does, yeah, thank you. Just wanna share it, there you go. Exactly. Anybody else have anything they wanna ask about? Yeah, I do. First of all, I love your stories. You know, they all had my message. But the last one about the fire pilot and the salesperson, you said it was the most interesting 18 months of your life, right? Why? I think I missed what it was that you did, or what. One of my failures that I don't generally talk about, but it was a great failure. And in the failure, I learned a lot. Tony, been an arms dealer. Selling legal arms to people you shouldn't be buying. And he had an investor who made a lot of money from Tony selling legal arms. This is before he sold the F-14s to Iran. And that investor said, okay, what do you wanna do next? Cause now he's done with Iran. He's not gonna go back to selling. He's out of the loop of selling legal arms. And so Tony, the investor said, I'll buy. What do you wanna do? So, does anybody here know where Hanksville or Montes? Well, I used to live in Hanksville. Yeah, but with my boss. Exactly. And Tony lived on the top of a mountain in Hanksville. The office was here, his house was here. 40 yards away. There were days we couldn't walk from the house, from the office to the house because of the wind. So that was Tony. We started a yacht timeshare company where we were gonna buy and sell timeshare on ocean-going sailing yachts all over the world. And we created a partnership. Do you know anything about sailing? Did anybody know what Ted Hood is? It was. Ted Hood won the America's Cup. He was a very well-known sailor in the day. And he created, do you know what a roll of furling sail is? He created the roll of furling, it's a roll of furling sail. And Ben has it on his mane. It is the greatest thing ever. So the roll of furling sail is, instead of wrapping everything up manually, you press a button and it goes. And it furls up. And so he had a little boat company and he was designing and selling boats. Ocean-going sailing boats. And so he was our partner. So it was in the summer and he would do all the big boat shows. He would do Miami, he would do Annapolis. He would do all the big boat shows. And we would go to pitch buying shares in our ocean-going timeshare business. And he always kept his biggest boat out of the show, you know, a couple blocks away. And if he had a fish, he would take him down to see the 120 footer instead of the measly 65 footer. Those were our offices. So we would live on these 120 foot magnificent sailing vessels. He was also a fighter pilot. And so whenever we went anyplace, we would charter a plane. And a little single-engine plane. Tony couldn't care less about flying this little thing. So he taught me how to fly. Because I had nothing else to do. And what was really interesting to me is if you fly, there are two kinds of licenses. There's one called IFR and VFR visual and insert. And everybody learns to fly VFR visually. And then if you really want to step up your license and if you really want to fly in the northeast in the winter, you better learn how to use your instruments. And there's another whole course on how to fly by your instruments. Well, I didn't notice Tony flew by instruments. So I just learned how to fly by instruments. Which was fascinating because after we got done, I started taking real lessons. And the pilot, the teacher kept trying to get me to do visual and I can't do visual. You know, I learned how to do it. Anyway, so it was a period of 18 months where we were flying all over the place, meeting with really interesting people, staying on these gorgeous yachts with this incredible fantasy. If you lived in Anksville, Vermont, every winter, every weekend of every winter, we would all get together and talk about how do we get the hell out of here? We need to buy an island in the Caribbean. And here we were with our own island in the Caribbean. So those are just parts of it. He was a fascinating character and never would have happened without the tell-ups. How did it end? Badly. I didn't know that. Actually, fascinating, it's a great question. This is part of the story. So Tony never did a drug in his life. Didn't even know what they were. You know, he grew up in the military. And he went to West Point or whatever naval people go to. You know, he was top of his class flying. Had no idea what drugs were. When the business... Telling about you. Huh? Pardon me. Telling about you, right. So as the business was going down, you know, he started talking about, you know, I could take my plane, I could go down to Jamaica, I could fill it up with pot and I could bring it back here and I could bail this thing out, I could tell him. That's the stupidest idea I ever heard. Trust me, it's a bad idea. You don't know what you're doing. And it's crazy. He didn't listen to me. He decided to fly in a plane full of fresh cut, highly aromatic weed from Jamaica. And he had to stop the gas along the way and the people who filled up the gas smelled it. And I'm sitting home watching the 11 o'clock news and my ex-wife goes, isn't that Tony? Yeah, and you know, to this day, Tony had another quirk. In many ways, like our current president, he was incapable of telling the truth. I, you know, it was fascinating to me. He'd be sitting talking to old friends and I'd hear him tell stories. I go, Tony, that never happened. He goes, yeah, what's your point? So I had to tell him. He said it was a good story. So you never exactly knew what Tony was thinking or doing. And it just was the whole experience. And just, to this day, I have always believed that he got caught in tension. That he didn't know what else to do. He had always been successful in his life. He was now broke. He had this massive mortgage on this ridiculous place that he had built. My belief is that it was his way out of responsibility and I'll never know when that's true enough. I think we've come to the end unless anybody has a question. I'm happy to hang up if you have any questions. Thanks for coming. Oh yes, oh, then they get back, hold it. What's next? It's a very timely question. You probably know some of this, but for the rest of you, I've got my finger in a bunch of different things and they're not really satisfying. You know, I like doing something, doing my thing. And on the way over here, I stopped to do an interview with DEV because Russ made it. And he asked that same question. And I struggled for a minute and then it came to me. Before I went to work for Boston Beer, I was on a path. I was trying to find my way into the death industry. My belief is that the next big booming industry is the death industry. And my belief is that my peeps are not gonna approach death like all the generations before them. They haven't approached anything else the same as it was before them. We're gonna wanna find our own way to do death. I don't know if you read the article in Seven Days, Seven Days, about composting dead bodies. There are so many better ways of dealing with death and we're about to experience the largest group of dead bodies that has ever faced the planet. And so I'm kind of fascinated with what could I do? I like working with tailwinds. And clearly the death industry has a tailwind. So as of this afternoon, I put death industry back on my plate to see if I can find a way of getting into that world. Folks, thanks again for coming. If you have anything else, I'm happy to hang for a bit. I hope there was some value. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.