What are some other things about kind of the audio industry that kind of people may not necessarily know or understand or think about besides, you know, something like

that? Yeah, it's a good question because when I, you know, when I came out of Switch Media, which was right around COVID, I...

had an opportunity actually to go to Spain to work for Rakuten TV.

And unfortunately, that offer came through in March.

It was April of 2020.

And various government restrictions kind of prevented that from happening.

And in part, though, I was still lucky to do a bit of work with them in 2020 where we launched a bunch of fast channels.

Where is Mangrove Digital sitting in the AI and agentic piece? And how complex is it for you guys?

Sorry

... there's probably two real examples of that that I, I use.

One is when I worked-- So when I, when I went to work at Switch Media, um, obviously their business before I joined, a mix of professional services where they worked with a lot of broadcasters around, um, digital tech from a, an online video platform point of view, and they also had their own online video platform technology that, that they had built themselves.

And then it was really early doors of server-side ad insertion.

Um, so that was really, you know, we're talking 2016.

Um, I think you had Yo Space who was relatively established already.

Switch were doing a little bit of it for Fox Sell and SBS.

Um, do you want to just take us through a quick snapshot of what Mangrove Digital is and, and what is the, um, solution you're providing?

So you're saying that the, the, the reception of Jude the Obscure was one of the big things that made him stop writing novels?

Yes.

Though, in fact, he had been planning to publish a volume of poetry for some time, and had also planned to put together The Dinahs, this huge verse epic from around 1890.

But he was, at first, tentative, so he published Wessex Poems with a series of quirky drawings, which really are quite personal.

He wrote a very defensive preface to it, and he included a lot of those early love lyrics.

About a third of the poems were written, uh, in the 1860s, uh, as well as some more recent poems.

But after that, his career as a poet begins to take on a, a momentum, so he publishes another volume quite quickly.

... a, a really hypnotic little poem.

Tim, react to that, what you just heard Scott talk about.

Well, one of the things I really respect about Scott, and we started sharing an office right when we both started our most recent companies together, is I think Scott has a few things innately as a human that I look up to, and I think it comes across in authenticity, but I think one is he's got an incredible grasp of of humanity, but also of young people.

I think one of the things that Scott resonates, I know from my kids' friends, I told them, they were asking me what I was doing today at work.

I went to a party in New York last night.

I said, I'm doing a podcast with Jim and Scott.

And Scott's got a huge following.

Scott's got a following that all the marketers want to get to, but he's got that following because they trust him.

Could you talk about just briefly, Tim, and then Scott, how do you see the state of business leadership right now? What are you hopeful or optimistic about? What's troubling you, Tim?