Transcript of How Modern Brands Build Loyalty, Purpose, and Identity | Andy Stalman | Shekhar Natarajan Podcast

Being in a crisis loop year after year gives you a sense of creativity, of resilience, and of innovation.

Most of the problems in a company is unresolved deliberations. You know, that is my 23 years of like company, right?

The safe bet for sports in the future is not AI, it's love.

Imagine what happens if the CEO's personal audio card— I agree. And it is not like very difficult to hack something like that because you could send 5 different signals at 5 different instances.

That's very comfortable and that's very safe. But it's also a trap. Because you are not free.

Welcome to yet another episode of Tomorrow Today with Shekhar Natrajan. It's my honor to have Mr. Branding, that's how he goes by, Andy Stallman. Uh, it's, it's a true honor to have you here on the show. Uh, like, I want to understand everything about what is a brand, how do you create a brand, what is it actually like it take to build a beautiful brand? And maybe like, how do you protect that brand? Right? Like, you know, those are all the discussions I would like to have. And then your journey in life. You know, we all relate to— everyone is going through some sort of suffering or some sort of challenge in their life. And I would love to understand yours so people can relate to like, you know, to theirs. To be able to draw inspiration because you're truly an icon in the industry. It's an honor to have you here on the show, sir.

No, no, it's a big pleasure. The honor is all mine. I'm looking forward for this amazing conversation.

Absolutely. So you were born in Argentina.

Absolutely.

In Buenos Aires. And then basically, then you moved to Spain, then you were, you know, you moved to Europe. So you traveled across, you know, the world. So help me understand, how did that early days, the formative days, sort of prepare you for the role that you became?

Well, Buenos Aires, capital of the Argentine Republic, southernmost country in South America, one of the most vibrant countries in the world, also a country that lives in a crisis loop year after year. But being in a crisis loop year after year gives you a sense of creativity, of resilience, and of innovation to deal with it. It's never easy. At the same time, you can see how Argentina was prepared to be one of the best countries in the future. We have everything, ocean, we have agriculture, we have water resources, we have all the weathers, we have immense land, we have everything. And some say that God, to compensate all these blessings—

He came to Argentina.

Absolutely.

I've heard this.

You've heard that, right?

Javier Bajer.

Okay.

He's the guy I've heard it from.

Well, but still, Buenos Aires is to me one of the most vibrant cities in the world. I have never met someone that lived or visited Buenos Aires that was not thrilled and amazed by that. So Buenos Aires is a very good platform for getting ready to conquer the world. If you survive Buenos Aires and Argentina, you can deal with almost every single— Yeah, challenge in life. But Argentina and Buenos Aires are also young and it's a very young country with lots of challenges ahead regarding almost every single aspect of Yeah, of a country being built and a culture being set and a future being shared by all Argentinians and all the people that come to Argentina. So moving from Buenos Aires to Barcelona first and then to Madrid, and from Madrid leading projects in the 5 continents gave me a very good balance. So I have a young continent and an old continent. I have a young country and a very ancient country. I have the south of the world and the north of the world. I have this balance that gave me a very good sense of culture, history, future needs, and very deep differences in some aspects and very small gaps in some others.

I think having been born and raised in Argentina and then, yeah, I think establishing my company and my career in Europe gave me a very good platform to be where I am today.

Very beautiful, very beautiful. So like, what is your family like?

So I married my wife in Buenos Aires. She's Argentinian also. My older son, Felipe, that works with me. He's a guru on JC and AI. Very smart guy, industrial engineer. Ah. Super, super smart. He's been doing some onstage conferences and keynotes around the world in more than 10 countries. Yeah, very nice guy. Then I have my daughter that is 22. She's studying law and business administration. She likes music. She's a music of the '80s kind of girl. She's a crack, in Argentine, crack, like super great on playing the guitar. And then she was born in Barcelona. And then Max, my younger son, was born in Madrid. He has just turned 18, so he's studying the university right now. So 3 sons. Each of them very, very different from the other, but all connected by a common thread of values, respect, responsibility, and being good people for them and for the rest of the world. That's very important.

That's fantastic. And your parents and mom and dad and—

So the history of the family is very common for an Argentine family where most of our grandparents came from abroad. We are a country that was pretty much shaped by immigration. Of course, the main immigrants came from Spain, from Italy. But my grandparents from my father's side came from Poland and Ukraine, and my grandparents from my mother's side came from Spain and UK. So it's a very, as you can imagine, it's a little United Nations family. And, you know, two generations ahead, I have cousins living in Canada, in the US, in Spain, in Brazil, in South Africa. So we are a very global family. I was going to say company, very global family. And my father and my mother are still living in Argentina, both very hardworking people. My father finished his career as an architect, but then he became a businessman, very successful, very smart, very intelligent. He came from very low. He lived in the Patagonia, very southern Argentina, very poor family at the beginning, but then he built it by studying and by working and all that. He opened his path through life. Extremely intelligent, super smart guy. Thank God, still alive with his 88 young years.

And my mother is a very nice complement. She's extroverted, super creative. Everything she does, she does it well. She paints, she crafts, she designs, everything she does is amazing. I think they're so different that maybe that's why they get along so well. And for me, it was a gift and a blessing to receive the best of both of them that somehow helped me land in a very good way in the branding world. Because everything I learned from them, I'll tell you later how it helped me a lot to build a space in this job that is so amazing.

Very beautiful. I like it a lot. So then you moved to Lacoste.

Lacoste?

Yeah.

Yeah, I worked with Lacoste before coming to Spain. I was marketing director. For the Southern Cone, that is Spain, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay.

Was that your first job or was it like, was it job number one that you did?

No, no, no, no.

You had other things.

In Argentina, most of us, we started working as soon as we finished high school. Some even started while being in high school. So when you finish the university, when you are 22, 23 years old, maybe you have already 6, 7 years of experience. Oh, really? Yes. Yes.

Why is that?

I don't know. I think we are sons and daughters of a generation that was raised and educated on hardworking and effort and sacrifice. Most of our grandparents arrived to Argentina with almost nothing. And for them, the big ambition was to have my son the doctor, you know, to have a son or a daughter that could go to the university, get a degree. And that was like the status ambition for them. And then our parents educated us on almost the value they got from their parents. That is work hard, have values, be respectful, ethics first. Respect the seniority and so on. And it was normal to start working. We never saw it as a punishment like some Gen Z people see today, where effort is not seen as part of the reward to achieve goals. Now it's more about well-living and well-being. And I respect that, I have to say. But in our age, it was different. We work, we study at the same time, and we still have time to go out, hang out, do some sports, and enjoy life. I don't recall that stage of my life as something I didn't like, but on the contrary, I think it was part of the craft of my character for dealing with the challenges that life was preparing for me in the future.

Fantastic. Fantastic. So you said you did like 5 to 6 jobs. So what were those jobs like?

So, um, on those, uh, times I was really confused about what I wanted to be, what I wanted to become, what I wanted to do. So I was somehow discovering, exploring, experimenting. I was trying to find my path or my road, my way. And at the same time, I was building it. That's the good thing when you are old and you see backwards, you understand that everything that happened to you happened for a reason. You don't understand that at the moment, you understand it in the future. Yeah. So I worked in one of the most important media companies in South America. I was part of a very small team of 4 people that we launched the first 24-hour news channel in Spanish in the world. Wow. Yeah, that happened in Buenos Aires. Then some other networks launched, but we were the first. I worked on news cable, on business newspapers, open television. It was all about media. And it was a very interesting job. I'm talking about beginning of the '90s. It was all about satellites. Internet was about to start, not even, but almost. I also worked in Lacoste, as I mentioned, as marketing director.

So I needed to bring a very successful and valuable brand from France and the world and position it. And keep it valuable in the perception of people, and also make it part of new generation needs and ambition. Because somehow when I started, Lacoste was more seen as a brand for old people rather than for young people. So it was a big gap we needed to fill, and we did it very successfully. I had a very good experience working in one of the largest airport operators in the world, private operators in the world.

Which one is that?

It's called Aeropuertos Argentina, Argentine 2000. So in the year 1998, a conglomerate by US, Italian, and Argentine companies won a pitch to run 35 airports, first in Argentina, then in some other countries in the world. So I started in the company, we were, I don't know, 20, now there are like 2,000, I think. It's a big, big growth. It was a, I love traveling. I don't know, I can do 6 travel around the world every year.

Wow.

So it's an amazing amount of miles that I do every year. From Australia to Singapore, from Israel to UK, from Mexico to Argentina, all around Europe. So to me, traveling was always something that I really love and I admire because when you travel, you don't only change a place, you change ideas. You discover how tiny you can be in a world that looks so, so big and at the same time is so, so connected. And the more I travel and the more I know people and the more I discover cultures, the more I love humanity. Then we can go deeper into that. But coming back to Airports Argentina in 2000, due to some circumstances, I became the marketing and commercial director for all the airports. Very, very fast, like a year after entering the company. And I was 27 or 28 years old. It was a big, massive challenge. So I went to the CEO and I say, "This is too big for me." And he said, "I got your back. Just do your job. I know you are capable of doing it." So one of the first challenges was we were having like 95% of our revenue was from on-air income.

You know, planes, parking, handling, etc., etc. And they say, okay, we need to take this to 50/50 with off-air traffic. That means, you know, shops, retail, F&B, etc., etc. I say, okay, how many years do I have? One year. Very easy, right? Piece of cake. I have a fantastic—

And he has your back.

I can say, yeah, of course. I got you. Amazing. I'm going to set you, but I got your back. Yes. No, but we did it. We had a great team. We were all young, passionate. We had no—

Self-doubt.

Bias. We were all new in the business. That was very risky somehow, but on the other hand, we have a new vision, a new way of doing things. We didn't copy. We create, we innovate, we transform. People from all over the world started to say, what are these guys doing? This is very unorthodox. And we started to grow. And also at the same time, I was very keen to have my people, my team happy, motivated, engaged. In fact, funny story, one of the young professionals I hired, Danny, is now the company's CEO. Oh, wow. I have a good eye for making— So that was a great job. And there were some others. I work in a foundation helping young children educate on the weekends where the parents were like really tired and help them find different ways of getting more connected with self-esteem and trust in themselves, very small children. I work on many other companies, but yeah, I think the big jump and the leap of faith came when I left with my wife and my older son Felipe, Argentina, and moved to Barcelona.

Wow. And when was this?

This was in the year 2002, September. Yeah, you know, Argentina in 2001, we had a massive crisis. Yeah, another massive crisis. We had what was called the corralito, and the corralito mainly said that no one can use the money that was in the banks. No one. So, you know, riots, very complex times, insecurity. Why did that happen? Argentina was coming from a decade of what was called, I don't know if the word in English is convertibility, but maybe the explanation is for every peso, the Argentine peso, there was $1. So that means that the peso and the dollar had the same value for some time.

Yeah, that was '80s, right?

That was the '90s. Yes. Yeah, it was the '90s. So Argentina was amazing.

Yeah, it was growing. Oh, and everyone was like loving it.

Yeah, we all love Argentina. We were earning money. We could have savings. We could travel around the world. Argentina, yeah, it was some kind of, you know, when you're in the desert and you see water and palms and everything, but they are not there.

Mirage.

Mirage. It was some kind of a mirage. And what happened is that people wanted more dollars, the pesos were not enough, there weren't enough dollars to back that peso-dollar thing. So everything collapsed. And when everything collapsed, yeah, all the economic growth and all the stability and everything went down. But the issue was not that because we were used to economic crisis. We had hyperinflation in the past. New currency that was replacing the old currency. All those kind of crises we were very used to. Even we have dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, everything. Argentina, very interesting country.

That phase of like the '90s was like the most, I think, popular phase for the country itself. Like Maradona was out there at that time and then It was high growth and everyone was like just singing praises of Argentina. And like one fine day you wake up and it's almost bankrupt.

Yes, that's very Argentina style. There is a saying, if you travel away from Argentina for 2 weeks and you come back in 2 weeks later, everything changed. Oh, wow. If you leave Argentina like me 24 years ago and I go back 24 years later to Argentina, everything It's the same.

So they went through the cycle and then they recreated themselves.

Yeah, hopefully this time is not the same because we have a—

Good president.

A president that is doing the hard work that has to be done. And hopefully the population, society, and everybody, and especially him, can stay strong on doing the necessary changes. To become a more serious, stable, safe country in terms of investment, in terms of—

Was that not the problem of the '90s too? Like there was overinvestment that like came from—

The '90s were a decade of privatizations.

Yeah. And also there was a lot of like investments that got pumped in from North America.

Yes. We have—

They just pulled the money out.

Yes. We have, by those years, there was an expression, say, carnal relations between the US and Argentina, where Argentina had a very privileged access to American economics and politics. And that helped a lot to keep this thing alive until— It collapsed. Yes, it collapsed. But yes, it was not only Maradona. Argentina was You know, music and culture and literature and design and fashion and agriculture and business. And yeah, it still is. The problem is that the noise of chaos is always louder than the noise of innovation. If you ask everyone in the technology industry about Argentina, they will say amazing coders, amazing innovation. Oh, really? Amazing. There was an article, I think it was Harvard Business Review, like 4 or 5 years ago that ranked Argentina as number 1 in coding.

Oh wow.

Yeah, by, I don't know what was the way they came to that conclusion, but it was somehow the relationship with population versus coders versus delivery versus world domination, et cetera, et cetera. Today in Madrid, we have had one of the biggest summits on retail and some of the most important retail companies in Europe and in Latin America and in North America are Argentine C-level executives that coming from Argentina, they are extremely well dealing with stable countries and stable economies. And also sometimes I say, I have just returned from giving keynotes in South America, in Norway, et cetera. And I say, look, Europe is very much concerned about our four big crises in the 21st century, you know, subprime and COVID and Russia and now Hormuz or Middle East, et cetera. So big crisis, big deal. In Argentina, we have that every hour. That's why we are so resilient and so, I don't know, I was going to say smart, but doesn't sound well. We are used to this. So we are used to facing problems and finding ways of identifying the best solutions for that. The ideal thing would be that the politicians can also apply all this creativity and this innovative thinking in solving the country's problems.

Because unfortunately, we have had lots of politicians that instead of putting all this creativity and innovation to solve Argentina's problems, they use them for their own interest. And that's where Argentina got, you know, stuck in the past.

So your role in Lacoste, like it prepared you along with this Aeropost 2000, and then you launched your own business Totem.

Yes.

So what is that? What was that about?

As I was saying, in Lacoste, I learned a lot as marketing director about the relevance and importance of looking after the brand, caring about the brand, protecting the brand, understanding that the brand is not a crocodile. It's legacy, it's values, it's positioning, it's quality, it's something aspirational, it's sports connected, but it's also lifestyle connected. In airports, 2000, I learned about how global and connected business can be, how we can really change what everybody was doing and do something different from a new perspective and from a new approach. And challenging the status quo was not the name of a book, but was a way of doing things. But the big change coming to Spain was not only that we're changing country and school for Felipe and life for Josefina and myself. And, you know, north and south, stable and not stable, future and past, et cetera, et cetera, was that I ended 15 years of working for third parties and started working for myself. So that's the big deal in terms of my job. And it's a big difference.

Oh yeah, tell me about it.

It's a big difference when you know that every single month you are getting your a salary at the end of the month because you work for someone else. That's very comfortable and that's very safe. And you have your car from the company and your mobile from the company and the health insurance for the company. But it's also a trap because you are not free. I'm not saying it's bad to work for other people. It's fantastic. But at that stage of my life, I realized that the things I understood as valuable, you know, the car, the telephone, the salary at the end of the month was not enough for what I was looking after in life. I was in a deep search for meaning, purpose, connecting from another approach to business It's not only about money. Of course, we all need money. We need to monetize. We need to be, you know, with lots of growth and earnings and we need to be very profitable. But how you become all that to me was the key. So I started the company. I started the company in Spain for the Spanish market with an Australian partner. Ken Keito, one of the top designers in the history of design, extremely smart designer and businessman.

I learned a lot from him and we started in Spain, but very rapidly I saw that Spain was not only part of the European Union, because that's very obvious, but branding and design was really transversal to every single country, to every single industry, to every single sector to every single organization, institution, company. So with my background in Lacoste and Aeropuertos and the other companies I worked with, most of them created very good relationships with people in Europe. So I started knocking on their doors. There was no BlackBerrys, no smartphones. This is 2002. The first iPhone came out 5 years later. So imagine, we were still, I don't know, using internet with dial-up. No, everything was slow. That was good also on some part, but it was very hard to get yourself known because the only way of doing that was appearing on Financial Times or Forbes. So that was hard. But after a year, we change the company from Spain to Spain and Europe, or let's say Europe. But also they started calling me from Latin America, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile.

What was this brand about, Totem?

So by that time, the company was not Totem yet because I worked with this other partner for like, I don't know, a decade and a half more or less. Fast forward into the future, internet came, social media came, technology came, omnichannel came. Everything was like a big wave hitting us, but also I was liking how I serve those waves. And we had a very interesting meeting in Melbourne with most of our partners from United Arab Emirates, India, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, myself from Europe and Latin America, et cetera, et cetera. And I share with them my vision for the future on how we needed to evolve as a company because the world was rapidly— Growing. Yeah, it was going to a place we were not ready to engage with yet. We had lots of expertise, a fantastic team, lots of talent, very strong on design, but this was something else. And I saw that the company was not paying attention enough, at least from my perspective, to this tectonic change. I was saying, we are not in an era of change, we are in a change of era. We need to rethink ourselves. And long story short, I You left Penguin.

Yeah, I organized my exit. I really learned a lot. I'm very grateful with the team, with the people, with everybody. And I left the company and I started working without a brand. But people, I mean—

They knew you.

Let's rephrase this based on what you have just said. I have a personal brand. I didn't have a corporate brand. So people were calling Andy Stahlmann. If everyone that is seeing us Google now, Google or search on Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, Andy Stahlmann, you will see Mr. Branding, bestsellers, worldwide and renowned author and authority on branding and blah, blah, blah. So people started to call me and I say, okay, what I'm going to do? So I called my my current partner and co-founder of Totem, Graham. He's British, he lives in Australia. For me, one of the most creative minds on planet Earth. I say, Graham, we've known each other for 20 years. I really admire what you do and how you do it. I think you have some respect for myself as well. Why don't we create something? And the funny thing is that we as brand experts, We thought that the company should be named Tribe. Tribe.

That's a great one.

We like Tribe.

Yeah, yeah.

So because it was talking about the people.

Yeah.

It was talking about this connection. Tribe was global, was local. Everybody understood Tribe. But there was a little problem, Houston. When we went to the registration, Tribe was taken. So no Tribe. So we went to the list, the shortlist was Tribe first, Totem second. So what about Totem? Oh, you can register Totem. And we really love Totem because in terms of branding, I'm now seeing this in retrospective, Totem is even better than Tribe because Totem is easier to understand and easier to pronounce in—

Any language.

In any language.

Yeah.

Tribe in Spanish is difficult. Tribe, hmm, hard. My bad when I suggested Tribe as the first pick. Totem is even better. And Totem was also very strong in a sense of a new era of branding. We call it Totem branding, the new phase of branding. And why is that? Because—

What does it do? Like what is Totem product-wise?

So Totem is a branding company, privately owned. We're not part of any network, so we are very independent in everything, and that is very uncommon and good. We have been working in—

So you have the brand IP? You have the brand IP or you basically like consult on the brand?

No, no, no. We do end-to-end projects from country brands to city brands to hotel brands to airline brands to fast-moving consumer goods to technology. To, I don't know, agriculture institutions.

So when you say like we do end-to-end brand, like what does it entail?

So depending on the needs, we have a known and trusted methodology we created. It's a very creative name, it's Totem Methodology, all together. It's a methodology based on 4 T's. So basically what we do It starts with questions because 99% of companies know the answer to what do you do? They know the answer to how do you do it? They know the answer of when do you do it or where do you do it? But it gets tricky when you ask them why you do it and even more complicated when you ask someone How are you going to get compensated? No, who you are, who your brand is. So most of the brands can answer, we do this, we do it like this, we do it for this, et cetera. The why, hmm, hard to answer. And the who you are, almost none know the proper answer. So if you don't start With the who. With knowing who you are, how are you going to build the brand? A brand is associated with identity, personality, purpose, values, value proposition, promise, talent, leadership, impact. It's not about product or experiences or services only. That's the how.

It's not the who, right? So we help companies if they are being born to establish the brand name, who they are. And then of course, the name, the visual brand and the sensory brand, because the brand is not only what you see, but mainly what you feel. So how do you listen to the brand? How do you smell the brand? How do you touch the brand? How do you taste the brand? And also there is a sixth sense today that is the technology. So how does the brand include technology? And nowadays many companies are calling us to say, how do we integrate AI into technology? And we say, look, AI and branding are a mirror of who you are. Is it? It is.

Because what like I find like the character of a brand, what they say and what they do is very different.

Yes, absolutely.

So—

Not all of them, most of them, but not all of them. Yeah. So consistency matters a lot.

Yeah. And also like, there's also a problem with how do you communicate externally versus internally?

That's another big problem.

Yeah. And how you communicate, like, you know, like vertically in the company too, like top to bottom, bottom to top. Yeah, I think there are so many conflicts that I inherently see within a brand. And I come from large brands. I used to work for Coke. I worked for PepsiCo. I worked for Walt Disney Company, Walmart, and then American Eagle Outfitters, all very different. Yes. Very different.

Yes.

The one that I— every one of those, I liked one attribute of the brand that made them very special.

Yes.

They had 4 other things that they had on their sort of their value statement that like never was aligned to who they are.

Yes.

Like there was always a drift in their character, so to say.

What you're saying is absolutely true. That's what's happening in the big majority of organizations. All of them?

Yes.

Yeah. So part of our job as brand experts or branding experts is to identify those pain points. If there is no consistency, there is a pain. If you are saying something internally and something externally, there is a pain. If C-level is hearing to a music and the team is hearing to another music, there is a pain. It's very hard, even though we are in the 21st century, for most of the leaders to find the space and the humbleness to admit this. Yeah.

Do they, like, do they want to even admit that is a question.

Look, many CEOs are working for a bonus.

Yeah.

So the main goal for them is to get as much revenue and as much profit as possible, not as much engagement or as much commitment or as better relations or as an improved culture. So that's a pain because the CEO knows that he's going to be there 3, 4, 5 years and then he's gone and he gets his billion, billions, sorry, his millions. But he, he's like Attila. You know, Attila, when he's gone, there's nothing left behind. Yeah. So good leaders, admired leaders, they work for results, but not at any cost. They need to be clear on how they live the culture. The values are not a list of words on a wall. Yeah, they are solving dilemmas, they're answering questions, and they are making an impact. Today, the Gen Z people, they don't want to go to work only for a salary. They're looking for purpose. They are looking for meaning. And if leaders do not understand this, they're not going to get young people abroad. Some will say, "I don't need them now. I have AI." Oh, good luck with that. There is a very good example. 80% of brand leaders, they say that 80% of their customers receive an excellent service.

And when you go to their clients or customers and you ask how many of them are receiving an excellent service, the answer is less than 10. It's around 8%. So you have a gap. Perception was from 8 to 80.

Yeah.

Yeah. But the perception problem is for them. Yeah. Because the client, let's say, is not always right, but most of the times is right. And the perception of the client is the reality of the brand. Yeah, exactly. And if 8% are saying we don't receive— sorry, 8% say we're receiving extra, that means 82% are not receiving it.

Yeah.

Going back to AI and branding, I think that when you see into the eyes of your brand, you see the soul of your brand. Some brands are soulless.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a big problem. So brands and AI are a mirror of your organization. What does this mean? If you have a very bad brand, and you include AI.

Yeah, it's gonna like show the digital mirror to you.

Absolutely. Yeah. If you are a fantastic brand and you include AI, you can be more fantastic. Yeah. The echo that AI can bring is going to be the result of who you already are. We were just discussing some time before this podcast, the AI needs to know you.

Yeah.

Yes, to help you do better things in a better way, in a consistent way, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is when you are 10,000 employees, how do you scale that? Yes, because maybe you have 10,000 answers.

Yeah.

Because no one invested on aligning the team behind a DNA, a culture, values, purpose, et cetera. So it's a waste of money.

Yeah. One of the companies that I admire the most when it comes to this value statement of like, you know, and that's not the company that I work for, but I know why they are super successful is Amazon. So Amazon, basically the way they constructed everything is it's a yin and a yang. In the same value statement they have, and they tie back to the moral dilemma of how to solve the question when in doubt. So that anchors how they always decide. Everyone goes through that 10 things. There's a famous one where basically you could argue and basically you could like, you know, have disagreements, but once you have left the room, you cannot like disobey, like in the sense like you're all marching to the same tune. So it sort of brings that notion of unity, which sometimes can be basically like, you know, smoking your own exhaust and playing that against the whole aspect of contradiction.

Absolutely.

Like in the same, like, so you are, you're contradicting yourself, but you're aligning and then you're walking out as a united team, right? So there is the yin and the yang of how they do, uh, was beautiful. It was like, I think like Bezos did like an amazing job on that. Um, and I, I love that company, the way they kind of like Whether it's right or wrong, it's for Amazon, and that's why I think Amazon is probably successful. But some may disagree with it, which is okay.

We cannot agree on everything.

We don't have to agree on anything. But some of them have a very loose statement of the values. Collaborate, think global but act local. These are platitude words, right? What the heck am I supposed to do? Think global and act local. How does that translate to me? It's never actionable. It's not behavioral. And then you have the parental problem. The CEO has a set of values. The next level has only 90% of that value system that has come down to them. And the next generation has 90%. And by the time you get to the guys who are actually doing the day-to-day It's like 40, 50%. Yeah, absolutely. There's going to be chaos and misalignment. Yes. And that shows up in every interaction. Absolutely. That you have.

And that brings me back to why Totem, because Totem is not only a company, it's also a concept we developed. Yeah. Because if you go back, I don't know, 16,000 years in history.

16,000.

16,000 years.

Oh, wow. How did you go there?

I know I found it in Wikipedia. I'm glad you didn't say like ChatGPT.

No, no, no, no.

Oh yeah.

Because ChatGPT can make up facts and like—

Absolutely.

It's very confident.

Yeah. And hallucinate a lot. And hallucinate a lot. So there is proof that 16,000 years ago, people gathered around totems. Ah. Yes. With carbon-14, we know that these totems existed maybe before that, but we have certainty that 16,000 years ago there were totems. So people, let's say, I don't know, a family, a tribe, a group were gathering around, around the totem. So why? Because the totem gave them, I don't know, security and safety and a sense of belonging and many other stuff. Fast forward 16,000 years up to today, we find in some brands modern totems. So we gather around them because we are connected through that totem, but through values, through causes, through culture, through principles, through philosophy. So it's not about gender or origin or income or age. It's about beliefs and commitments. And what you say is absolutely spot on because when you build a brand, it's not about the logotype. It's all the contact points into the team, and into the outside world, not only customers or users or clients, also suppliers, also shareholders, also media, also government. I mean, there is no limit where the brand connects. That's why it's so important that everybody knows who they are, what they represent, and how to implement it.

In fact, I have been working the last 2 years in a new word that will be the evolution of branding.

What is that?

You want to know it? Yeah. Yeah. So the new word, it's a new word that changes branding by adding an O after D. BrandO? BrandOing.

BrandOing?

BrandOing. So what is it? The brand?

The brandOing?

Yeah, it's the brand is what they do, not what they say. And maybe we need to change semantics so that people can understand better what branding is. So what it's worth today, it's worth, well, I don't know, 10 grams is better. 10 grams of doing is better than 100 grams of saying. So brand doing is key because if the brand do not do, it's just a mirage.

Yeah.

It's just an idea. It's not something tangible. Why are you mentioning Amazon right now? Because Amazon has this consistency globally and locally about what they represent, what they solve, what they deliver. I can mention other brands, but the important thing is that there is not a big group of brands that can be totem brands, brands that really lead the new stage and the new era.

So I feel like also, like some of these things are exercised without proper thought and judgment. Like, good example, collaboration. You would find it everywhere. Like, you know, people use collaboration or teamwork or some like version of it, right? There is always, they always talk about it. But people tend to forget that we as humans are competitive.

Yes.

It's adversarial. So collaboration has to be designed into the process. It is not like something you stick on the wallpaper. It's a thing that you live. It's a design of how you conduct yourself. And people loosely think collaboration is like sugarcoating or watching each other's back and it's all the things. And then you put that word out there and people think that that's what it means. But in essence, most of the problems in a company is unresolved deliberations. That is my 23 years of company, right? So it's like everyone has an opinion, everyone deliberates, and it is unresolved. The unresolved deliberations leave an organization in a paralyzed mode. When you know that you can get away with unresolved deliberation, you're creating a bureaucratic organization, which is going to be super lethargic. When you're super lethargic, you get into this loop of not doing much and not deliberate, or you know you deliberate, but you can punt the decision to the further future. I think it's just weird, like some of these things that like how they work and like why companies behave the way they behave. And I also like the fact that you mentioned how you have to connect all the different parts of the ecosystem.

So a lot of people ask me, when we conceptualize this word called Angelic Intelligence. What was it all about and why did we come up with it and why I was talking about it and why I was talking about it abhauksha, right? People didn't even know why the heck I was talking about it. So the idea behind that was very simple. There are beautiful human beings, but that beauty gets exhibited like in an episode, in an event, like a sliver. Everyone is beautiful, but they sort of do that in spurts at times. That's probably karma, that is probably some sort of energy draw, some sort of whatever people feel. I feel like I want to help you. I see the other guy who's exactly like you. I don't want to help this guy, but I feel like helping this guy. I don't know why that happens, but it happens, right? So, but I connected with you and I'm going to help you. And if I can bring that— and who does that across all of the different virtues? Well, an angel does it, right? The angel is a superhuman. Like, we have always thought about angels as being superhumans which look over your shoulder and they are kind of like guiding you, the guiding angels, right?

And what is basically technology's role in our life? To be that super angel that guides you. It's like a tandem bike. Hey, I'm going to fall off. Get back on the bike. I know when to brake. I know when to slow down. I know when to accelerate.

Yes.

So Angelic was this superhuman which would guide along or align along with the humans. Yes. that way you never go astray. And then I can amplify that beauty of the human in everything that I'm doing. And technology could be an accelerant, an exponential accelerant to nudge humans in the right direction. So that's the whole concept of Angelic. And it came to me as a draw. I just gathered that from somewhere. I don't know where and how and why, and I still I don't have an answer to it, but I suddenly started talking about it because kind of my life's journey is that. And then I said, I'm going to start talking about alignment in AI, that alignment is a big problem. It's going to be a big problem. And I wanted everyone to know about it because they never thought alignment is going to be a problem. They thought the world will align itself because it's nature. Nature doesn't align itself. Aligns itself when there is a catastrophic event, or it actually imposes a catastrophic event to align itself. And catastrophe is not the way you align. We are not designed to do that. We as humans shouldn't want a catastrophic disaster to align us back to who we are as people.

So I started talking about it, and I started talking about it everywhere. And people were asking me, why are you talking, and why are you spending all the marketing dollars? I'm like, that's the brand. I'm building a brand. You know, there's nothing called— like, you know, there's something called artificial intelligence, but there's nothing called angelic intelligence. It doesn't even register in people's head. And I have to register that in everyone's head. What does it mean? What does it do? Why does it exist?

What's its purpose?

So, uh, but sometimes you get mistaken for it. How do you address that?

Well, positioning a brand takes time. You have to be patient. First of all. Yes. I think the approach is very interesting because it has this human layer that is coming throughout technology and not The other way around. I think that's a very smart approach. I think the name helps understand better what we do not see, but help us navigate not only turbulent times, and that applies to technology, applies to brands, applies to AI, applies to our souls, our nature, as you were saying. And I think It's really interesting how the idea you had is becoming more and more tangible the more and more you talk about it and how it resonates. The thing that it's going to cost you more is not marketing budget, is going to help people reconnect with their essence because now the hype is AI. The hype is technology, the hype is productivity, the hype is automatization, the hype is efficiency. Love is not the hype, it should be. Beauty is not the hype, it should be. Human beings are not hype and we should be. So the challenge is, hey, hello, hello, knock, knock.

I'm there.

Yes. Let me change the conversation for a bit. Yeah. Talk about Angelical and you will say, what? What is this guy talking about?

Yeah.

But you see this pin over here? Yes. This is the World Cup trophy of 2022 of Argentina. So I was invited, this was December 2022. March 2023, I was invited to one of the most important AI conferences for the sports business. You know, institutions, clubs, athletes, everybody was there and myself. I was one of the keynote speakers. So everybody was talking about AI. You know the name of my keynote, which was The Only Safe Bet for Sports in the Future is Not AI, It's Love. And everybody was like, what? So I shared my keynote and one of the VPs of FIFA approached me and said, I just love what you said because that's absolutely true. Technology changes, technology evolves, technology is always there for us, but the only thing that transcends time and space is love, the virtue. So if you ask someone in Bangladesh or in Argentina about Messi, they will say, we love Messi. You ask that same people, you love technology? No, we use it, we need it, but we don't love it. Eventually, maybe in the future, maybe I'll have a digital wife, right? So I think that we need voices like yours and we need brands like the one you are developing in terms of reconnecting with our human conscious.

Yeah.

Who we are, why are we here, what are we doing, and reminding ourselves that the pure essence of robots and technology is to ease our duties and give us free time to invest, I don't know, playing golf or reading or studying or creating new questions. But today it seems that we have become slaves of technology and not all the way around.

Yeah.

So lots of challenges. Lots of challenges. And while we are navigating turbulent and fascinating times, most of companies have not learned yet how to align its people behind its culture, values, leadership, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

So how can you talk about superintelligence in an organization that still don't know how to answer the phone or reply to a DM on Instagram? Explain me that. Yeah.

So that's essentially like, you know, that's the battle I'm fighting right now, right? Like, so sometimes I feel like, you know, like most ideas, like probably it's ahead of its time. Because people are trying to scratch the efficiency curve. But like, but I feel like, you know, when you try to scratch too much, it's a drug that you take and you don't know the balance after that. You just get addicted to it. You know, like you like the fact that you just made a little bit of money and you've made a lot more money. And then no CEO is ever going to have the courage to go and tell anyone in the stock market or anywhere in the street saying that I'm going to make a little bit less money this year than what I made last year, and then please reward me for that because it's human right. Yeah, right. They're never going to say that. So I think it's because every year you're expected to do a little better. Right. So now coming to the topic of AI and brand, you know, You know, I can connect so much with you. I think we can sit and talk here for like 6 hours.

So there was a study done, Andy, recently, a very interesting study. They took Molepoke and basically they posted about like 10,600-odd Twitter posts generated by 189 humans. So the bots did it and then it posted. And then 3 things came out of it. The first thing was the agent assumes the tone of the user over a period of time. It begins to mimic the tone. Like you say socialize with the S, it'll know it's socialized with an S, right? So it begins to mimic you. The agent also is very happy to provide information without any guardrails to any external person. So 36% leakage, it's freely giving the data. And the third thing that was very important, which I thought was like, you know, I had like, my brain doesn't work as fast as most people. So it took me a while to understand like why that would happen. Then I sort of got the answer. It said trust travels in the opposite direction of basically intelligence. And like, I was like, why does that happen? So what happens is if you create a super knowledgeable system, the super knowledgeable system becomes the most vulnerable point of your ecosystem.

Like a president is more valuable, and hence you have a lot of bodyguards because you want to protect the guy.

Absolutely.

Hindi. So imagine you're training all these models And you have put all of the corpus of the knowledge, either external or internal, and then you have like, you know, forget the safeguards. You cannot safeguard something like this because it's reasoning and it gives out like, you know, information randomly and there's no guardrails. And people say there's guardrails, there's not really guardrails, like, you know, and they're using filters and the models are evolving, you know, like patching doesn't work. Yeah, it's all like, it's, you know, there's so much shit that like people just like surface People talk about AI as though they know AI, but they know nothing about AI. So then you have this problem. So how do you protect this most important? Imagine what happens if the CFO's personal model got hacked. Imagine what happens if the CEO's personal model got hacked. And it is not very difficult to hack something like that because you could send 5 different signals at 5 different instances and then collect all of it and create that holistic knowledge, right? So that's the challenge we have. And how do you protect a brand in the world of AI?

Oh, that's a very, it's a very difficult answer.

It is like, and it is the most consequential answer because like I give this example, Coca-Cola takes 30 cents to make a can of Coke. Why does it charge $3 to buy that same thing? Like you spend $3 to buy a can of Coke.

Yes.

It only puts like, you know, it's 30 cents to put like the syrup and the water in the can. The difference is the brand they created.

Absolutely.

Right? So now if that brand is on assault, like how do I make money?

No, that's a very good question. It's a very good thinking. Of course, all companies are looking ways of protecting privacy. Even the secrecy around the Coca-Cola formula has been one of the biggest mysteries of humankind.

Yeah.

But that's a challenge and many companies are already working on AI models that are, let's say, homemade in order not to have leaks into the LLMs or other models that are from out outside world that could be jeopardizing their most important and vulnerable secrets. But today, the way of protecting brands is to have a brand whose value is strong enough to survive a reputation crisis, sorry, or a privacy crisis or a robbery crisis. In Spain, like a month ago, we saw the first ranking of 2026 of most valuable brands. And for the first time since it was created, Zara, the fashion brand that was created in Galicia here in Spain, was more valuable than Nike. Yeah.

I love Zara, by the way.

Great brand, great brand, smart people, talented organization. And then I went from seeing the brand value of Zara to see the company value of Inditex, that is the company that is the owner of Zara. So pretty much the brand value of Zara contributed almost 34% to the company value of Inditex, that is valued in €150,000,000,000.

Wow.

So this means that 30-something, almost 40 billion are coming from the brand value of Zara, not the company, the brand value. So, you mentioned before, we need to register brands. Of course, you need to register. IP protection is super important. I have been advisory director to the board of directors of INTA, that is the International Trademark Association. That is an institution that is becoming 150 years old in a year or so that it has a presence in almost every single country in the world and protecting the brand is mandatory, but the registration of the brand is not enough right now. We have been discussing, okay, what happens with IP on the moon or in outer space or what happened with IP protection on AI.

Yeah. Because you're training all these, like, you know, even in the large language, even in the open source models that people train and host, the guardrails are not on par with what the frontier models are. So you're trading off the cost to basically cheaper models. Now they're more unprotected than the ones basically that the frontier models are, which is what we found out. And hence we were training our own models that way. They have better bright lines and other So it's interesting, but I wanted to touch on that like topic that you just brought up, right? Inditex and Zara. So now help me understand what you were, where you were going with that.

So the importance of protecting the brand is not only protecting the value of the brand, but also the value of the company. So everything is interconnected. If you So if you analyze the, I don't know, 50 most valuable companies in the world, usually they own some of the most valuable brands in the world. There are studies that says that normally for the S&P 500 companies that are in that index, around 35 and 40% of the company value is the brand value.

So we don't know that, by the way.

Yes.

They don't know that, yeah.

So when a CEO or a CFO says to me, oh, that's very expensive. And I say that's a very wrong quote because we cannot understand branding in terms of cheap or expensive, but in terms of valuable or not valuable. Because if someone costs you $1 million, but gets you $1 billion, is that expensive or it's really cheap? If something costs you $100,000 but gives you nothing, that's less valuable than this. So we are trying to change the mindset and the perception of why branding matters. At the same time, we are dealing with sustainability, diversity, AI, internet, new kind of customers, social change, cultural change, diplomatic change. Everything's changing and you are telling the CEO, oh, you have zero alignment.

Yeah.

85% of employees worldwide are not engaged with the company and the brand they work for. That's massive destruction from within. Yeah. What are you doing?

Yeah.

They need employee engagement. They need the alignment. Absolutely. But the alignment is not going to be born from an egg. It needs to start from the head of the company. Yeah. And tribes are formed that way. They need the leader to be the brand responsible, the brand director, the brand guardian. That's not a CMO or something like that. That's the president or the CEO that is looking after the brand and the value it represents, not only in terms of money, revenue, or balance sheet, in terms of engagement, in terms of commitment, in terms of delivery, in terms of creating value, not only economic value.

If you, so, uh, I would be curious to know this, uh, question's answer. And you may already have it. If you sort of stripped away all the tech company and the hype out of the index, right? And then like just purely place the brands and looked at the curve of the brands, has the brand value gone up or gone down in the last 10 years?

No, it went absolutely up. In fact, The brand ChatGPT grew 285% on brand value year to year.

So no, if you take out those technology companies, like let's take like, you know, like a Nike or a—

Most of them grew, some of them they don't. Nike is undergoing a very difficult time, but mainly because of bad decisions, but they are still on track and on race to recover. But look at the value of Walmart these days or Visa or Coca-Cola. Technology is the hype, but it has always been for the past quarter of a century. Yeah.

In those, I would want to see if there is a correlation of the ones which grew to the consistency of the leader being in charge for a longer period of time.

Well, of course it's key to understand leadership, but I believe that leadership should not be personalized. I mean, the times of the Jeff Bezos that is not the CEO anymore, or the former CEO of Apple, the guy that invented or created Apple, or the times of the Richard Branson, I think those days, were amazing, but the good thing is when leadership is not personalized. Because when a new leader arrives into an organization, it incarnates the culture, the purpose, and the value that the brand has. It doesn't adapt the organization to him, but he adapts to the culture. And that's something that I always bring the same example. Who is the president of Switzerland? No one knows. Switzerland is an excellent machine of stability and creating value since ever. So leadership, look what happened to Disney. A bad leadership brought Disney into a very bad level of confidence and results in the last years. They needed to go back to some other leaders and say, "Came back, please. We apologize and came back." The less the leader shines and the more the leader make the team shines, the better the company, the results, and the value will perform.

Well, so why do you see a difference now where whether you take a ChatGPT or an Anthropic or like a Google or like, you know, like a Cisco or whoever it is, the C, that the leader is actually the message and the messenger.

Because when you start building a brand, you need a human voice.

So there's a difference. So like, it's the, like, you know, so you've got to map it to the evolutionary stage of your brand.

Absolutely. So you need a Sam Altman whose voice is more heard than OpenAI's voice. What is OpenAI? It's Sam Altman. You need Dario Amodei or his sister, we listen more to them than to Anthropic. What is Anthropic? Or the same happens with other models. Some models we don't know who is behind. Meta wanted to buy Manus, then some say, "No, you cannot buy it." Now Groq or our friend Elon bought Cursor and we knew I forgot the name of the guys from Cursor now that was bought by Elon. Elon is another big example of why leadership matters at some stages of the companies, right? But my pick will be that when a company is established, the leader should not shine brighter than the brand itself. I know it's difficult, I know it's hard because people want to listen to people, not to brands. It's much more interesting, but that's the big deal here.

So on the S-curve, right? At the bottom of the curve, it's like founder-led.

Mm-hmm.

And then basically it is the company-led or the brand-led.

Yes.

And what happens at the top of the curve?

Once the brand is there, you don't really care. I mean, you care as a shareholder or an investor or a stakeholder who's there because you wanna know who's running the company. But in terms of users, users or clients or customers, you just want the brand to deliver its promise. A great brand is a great promise fulfilled, accomplished. So who delivers the brand? Everybody.

Yeah.

In the 20th century, the employees were the brand ambassadors. In the 21st century, they're not the brand ambassadors, they're the brand.

Yeah. So, but like, you know, so on the S-curve, which is like the reason why I asked you, so you got to the the steady state of the company. Like, you know, it's not growing anymore. Like, you know, if you leave it there, it's going to die. So you need to basically bring the S-curve back to the bottom of the curve. That way it keeps innovating and starts doing the same. This is what like Jobs did, like, excellent. He kept like, whenever like, you know, Apple got to the top of the curve, he said like, you know, I'm going to pull it down and basically I'm going to like bring it back as a different product line. And so, so that I, I think like, you know, a company also needs to recognize like what stage of your journey you are and then how the market dynamics is playing and what is the role of the brand and the leader, the symbiotic relationship.

But sometimes it's hard because it is very hard. If you analyze Alphabet 2 years ago or 3 years ago, everybody would've said, oh, oh, Alphabet is in big trouble. Because no one is going to search on Google anymore. Everybody's going to search on LLM models. Gemini is going to disappear. Sorry, Google is going to disappear. That was what the forecasters were saying 3 years ago. And look how Alphabet through Gemini and AI turned over without the need of going back and up again. Keep going. They create a new S from the top of the S. Absolutely.

That's what I was saying.

Yes.

So when you get to the top of the curve, like, you know, you need to know when to start innovating again and like what kind of leadership you need.

In this case, I don't think the initiative came from within, but the market, the market, sorry, put the pressure on Alphabet to say, hey, look what's happening, even though they were already skin on the game with AI because they were developing Bard that didn't work properly. They bought Gemini, et cetera, et cetera. But sometimes the pressure is not coming from inside, it's coming from the outside. The same happened with Zara and the market. Zara was probably the last fashion brand that started selling online. Now it's the number one shop of the whole network. Yes. Wow.

So listen, I think we can keep talking for a while. And I want to actually do another session with you because I think you're super interesting.

Thank you.

And it was fantastic. So let's do some rapid fire and then we'll go back to the closing. The most overrated brand in the world right now? Oh, SpaceX.

Oh, yeah. Oh my God. Oh, that's, that's a very, it's a very difficult question. I need to think about it. Let's go to the next one.

I'll think about it. Okay. The most underrated brand in the world right now. The underrated brand.

Um, Ryanair, maybe.

Ryanair. Cheap airlines.

I think it's, it's, it's, it's a fantastic case study that most of people are yelling at. They don't understand the extraordinary strategy behind Ryanair, the delivery, the, I don't know, it's amazing. I mean, people are wanting to fly from Madrid to Lisbon paying $14 and they want champagne on board. They don't understand the concept. They don't understand the brand. But Ryanair is not the on-time machine, it's the cash machine. It's amazing.

Very beautiful. Apple in one word.

Uh, slaves.

Huh?

Slaves. Slaves. Yes. Once you enter the Apple ecosystem, you cannot leave. It's amazing. Very smart.

Nike in one word.

Um, they didn't do it. They didn't do it.

Marketing in one word.

Brand with a voice.

Biggest lie in the brand strategy?

We are customer-centric. No one believes that.

No one believes that. I don't believe it either. What most CMOs still don't understand? Again, what most CMOs don't understand?

The importance of branding. Absolutely.

The best brand campaign of the last 10 years.

I think it should be around HSBC, Mastercard, and I think Adidas Impossible is Nothing. I think it was absolutely great.

AI's effect on branding, positive or negative?

Technology is here to stay and we need to figure it out, find the positive because we can't ignore it. It's positive. Absolutely.

Yeah. The platform that will be irrelevant in 5 years?

Um, probably 80% of current social networks. Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Wow. Yeah.

One thing LinkedIn gets right that all other platforms get wrong.

A very good positioning. Strong positioning. Very strong positioning on professionals because the network is not fantastic. Let's say it's absolutely average. But when you mention a social network for jobs or professionals or good networking, what is top of mind is LinkedIn. They've done a very good position and work on that.

Buenos Aires or Barcelona?

You know, when I moved to Spain, they say, oh, now you have a divided heart. Do you have a divided heart? Half Buenos Aires, half Argentina, half Spain? And I answer, I don't have a divided heart. No, I have two hearts. One for Spain, one for Argentina. No, I love both cities. They were really important in my life. Yeah.

Brand of yourself you wouldn't change if you could? Hmm.

What would you say about that?

Mr. Branding.

Mr. Branding. We keep it like that.

Um, complete the sentence. The most powerful thing any brand can do.

Love.

Love.

For sure.

What does that mean?

How could you be like so soft with a brand? No, no, no. How can you say that? Yeah, love is soft. You are talking about angels and Angelical and you are telling me that love is soft? Come on. Love is the most powerful emotion in life.

Yes.

And has ever been there. And it's the thing that makes us happy, that gives us inspiration, that connects us. When we love something or when we love someone, everything gets a meaning.

I wanted to get your reaction because I get the same reaction on the other side.

Okay.

When I say Angelic.

Keep pushing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, um, so what are your— like, you know, you must have gone through a lot of highs and lows in your life. So what is that, like, suffering or pain or something that you had to overcome that created who you are as a person?

Um, One expert said after analyzing lives of thousands and thousands of people that throughout your life, you will have around 4 or 5 moments that are really going to break you. The important thing, I believe, I am almost old, or as my daughter says, vintage, not old. We are all going to receive very bad news or very bad moments in life. It's not about you fall, but how you stand up after the fall, how you recover from that. And I think that life has more wonderful moments than bad moments, even though the bad moments are really— Gut-wrenching. They are very difficult and they are very sad and sometimes they are painful until you cannot deal with them physically. But I believe God has a plan for us. And when a problem strikes, you have to find out why is that happening and what can you learn from it and keep going. There is always a tomorrow until there's no tomorrow. And when that comes or when that happens, you don't need to worry.

Who's that guy who said like 4 or 5?

I don't remember the name, but he said that that's the average of pains. And there was another guy that said he interviewed thousands of people in the hospital when they are almost terminal, in the last days of their life. And he asked all of them, "What do you regret?" Is there anything you regret in life? 95% of the people he interviewed said spending more time with my family, sharing more time with my friends, being more loyal to what I feel and think, and love more. So at the end of the day, if you connect this to Angelical, everything makes sense and the circle You know, it's always bringing us to the same essence. And the big message for me in terms of branding is everything change, everything changes, branding transcends. Good branding, not branding.

Because I want to get hold of the guy who actually said like 4 to 5 on average, because I feel like I had like 50. How did you count the 4 away?

You're breaking this stuff. East East. I'll find the name. I'll share it with you.

It was fun actually talking to you. I really enjoyed it. Me too. It was a fascinating meeting and I look forward to actually like spending more time with you.

Me too. Thank you so much for the invitation. It was great actually.

I loved it. It was very good.