So when did – I have questions about some early stuff, I think, but we can talk about when did your love for the Bard enter into your soul?

Yeah, I got into Shakespeare in college and was really – I felt – I was really moved by the stories in college.

And, you know, before that, Shakespeare, the only frame of reference I had was kind of what everyone thinks of, right, which is these old Elizabethan costumes and people standing on stage speaking in, like, a language that's totally not understandable despite the fact that it's English.

And, you know, it was just one of those things where I didn't really get it.

I didn't quite understand it.

And then in college I had a really great professor who – totally made it live and real and present.

And I realized very quickly, you know, over those couple of years and into my early professional years that, you know, the work of Shakespeare in his time was the same as a lot of the contemporary stuff today, right? It wasn't this stuffy old highbrow, Um, high art.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah, with Dracula, you know, we had been talking for quite a long time about Halloween and the spooky season.

It's obviously so much, you know, people love it.

People just get into it.

And, you know, we had layered some Halloween stuff into the Shakespeare shows over the years, but it seemed like there was a natural desire for something bigger and something larger in scale.

And the starting point for us really was like, when you think about spooky season, when you think about Halloween, when you think about horror and all of these different genres of scary movie, what do you want out of that? And then how can we smash all of those things together inside the shell of the story of Dracula, which lends itself really well in a Scottish play kind of way, right? Like you have a singular titular character who's a little psychotic.

a little charismatic um and you know really can carry the bulk of the story and i think that that's that's what drove us towards uh towards dracula um and absolutely like the drunk actor um has free reign to weave in um basically every spooky scary freaky thing that you can imagine um you know there are moments in the show uh without giving too much away where the you know the royalty for the night, the count and countess are allowed to influence the events of the evening.

fx version of scrooge because that'll ruin your life

Are you seeing that split show up in your stores and does it change how you your approach to what you do?

Yeah, we're seeing it.

I would say the K economy is very real.

If you've been invested in the stock market and own real estate on your home, the last 10 or 15 years have been fantastic.

Conversely, if you're not invested in the market and maybe don't own a home or a lot of assets, You know, you haven't participated in this run-up that we've seen.

And so that does create a challenge.

Obviously, wage inflation is up, but it's still a struggle, I think, to keep up for a lot of folks.

What dealership or maybe customer pain points do you foresee AI being best positioned to solve over the next few years? And where's maybe the clearest ROI?

And is this something we should be concerned

about? I would say yes, absolutely.

That's not to say it will happen.

But if you're not worried about it and we aren't concerned about it and not ready to respond or indeed act preemptively, then that's a really foolish position to be in.

So, yeah, you mentioned Germany there.

Germany went from being extremely high, very, very similar levels of support as in Ireland.

And over the course of 12 to 18 months, it collapsed all the way from in the high 70s, supporting existing levels of spending on ODA down to 50%, which is equivalent to the UK at the time.

And so how can we use worldview as a tool to kind of, I suppose, maybe either counter it, engage with this, decide how best to move forward with this, really, because it's becoming a bigger issue, particularly for members.

[guitar playing] I got-

All right.

So one of the things that makes this interesting is, um, Bruce Springsteen never makes the same album twice, let alone back to back.

He had gotten completely overwhelmed with celebrity, um, disillusioned, uh, I think, with the thought of how famous and wealthy he was, and admittedly had gone into a, uh, fairly, fairly serious depression.

He had recently married, and, uh, he, I believe, had moved out to California, um, and was living out there some during this.

So one of the things he wanted to do was he did not want this to be a typical E Street record.

And so Born in the USA is as overblown as anything he's ever done.

[singing]