#18 - A Random discussion between Joe Hage and Tiger Buford (41 mins)

Brought to you by Tiger Buford.

Hello, orthopedic comrades. Welcome to Inside Orthopedics. My name is Tiger. I'm an orthopedic industry insider and retained recruiter for early-stage orthopedic companies. Thanks for listening. This is episode number 18 titled A Random Call with Joe Hage. This is— this one's for anyone who likes to eavesdrop into a cell phone conversation. This is truly just an experiment. As a recruiter, I talk with many interesting people each week, and Joe Hage and I just met on the phone on March 10th, and we just hit the record button. Joe is the—

Hi.

Force behind the meddevicegroup.net community and the 10X Medical Device Conference in San Diego. We just hit the recording button at our first conversation ever, a real conversation, no editing. In the next 39 minutes, Joe and I discuss orthopedic buying decisions, LinkedIn, building medical device communities, digital marketing. The future of work, virtual consulting, marketing direct to patients, and more than that. If you like the random format, send me a note at tiger@tigerbuford.com. Love to hear your feedback. Don't forget to subscribe and thank Tiger Buford when you have a key addition to your team. Be safe out there.

Thank you. Okay, it's Tiger and Joe on the 10th of March and we are recording.

All right, it's actually the 11th.

Ah, that's right, it is the 11th.

That's okay.

There you go.

All right, we're live.

Here we are.

Yeah, so I use this app called Anchor to record podcasts.

I also use Anchor. I love Anchor and I haven't used it yet on the cell phone, but you can So what I do is I take this recording, I download it, and then I parse it using Camtasia or whatever to take out the ums or the silly things we wish we didn't say that won't add any value to the listener. And then I can upload it as a file to Anchor.

Yep, I do the same thing. But you can use Anchor on your phone. You can literally call another person Talk and then upload the entire thing as a podcast right on your phone without any— you can actually edit it on your phone too. Yeah, Anchor is—

I'll have to check that out.

Yeah, Anchor is— next time, you know, maybe we'll talk again and we'll Anchor each other live. Did you—

do you, um, do you have a paid Anchor account? I don't know that there is such a thing.

No, as far as I know, it's free.

Okay, then we are in violent agreement about this.

Yeah, we, uh, we definitely are like-minded, that's for sure.

I tell you, you know, every time I, you know, we're having this conversation, I was like, oh, I'll just accept this conversation. And the point of this is this happens all day long. The, like, the one time or the two or the half dozen times when I say, oh, I don't need to record this, there's always something that's like, oh God, I wish I recorded that. So it's always something good. Yeah, it's always something good.

Yeah, and so, and I've done some written interviews with company CEOs, and, and I'm— my next step is I'm going to try to talk some of these orthopedic executives into a live Q&A session, and they're— most of them are going to run the other direction because they don't want to They want to have control over the message. But I think I can find some people that will just talk about their business.

I think if you were to assure them that I'll publish nothing without your approval, does that not do enough?

I guess, but I'm going to ask hard questions. I want to ask— company executives want to talk about all the wonderful things that have happened in the last 5 years and how they're taking market share. Solving clinical needs. But in reality, they've made a ton of mistakes. You know, they've started projects and canceled them. They hired people and had to fire them. And they've, you know, had to redo their entire sales force. And that's what I want to hear. I want to hear the real stuff. And I don't think most people I know wouldn't, wouldn't go there.

Do you happen to subscribe to, to my weekly message for the medical devices group?

I don't think I do, Joe.

Oh, I think you'd know if you did. So about the last 3 or 4, maybe 4 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, I wrote an article called We Lost a Lot of Money and Boy Is My Wife Pissed.

Oh, I did read that one.

I did read that one.

No, that was excellent. I loved it because that was real.

It was very real. Trust me, ask my wife.

I love that.

The reason I wrote it was despite the way I framed it, I very much enjoy writing and speaking and presenting. My original thought was a bit too haughty to present that way, and that was somebody out there thinks, oh my God, Joe Hage, he has 350,000 people in his group. He must be a thought leader and knows all these people and gets all these opportunities. And that's not quite reality, I suppose more than the average person, but here's this guy and he fucked up big time. He had a chance to invest in lots of things. He chose this one. He was so sure of himself and he lost. And the point I kind of wanted to make was, if in fact some of that is true and I have all of these You know, perceived advantages versus the average guy making an investment. I did no better than he.

Mm-hmm.

It's really hard. And, um, you know, the conclusion that I had that, you know, I'll never do it again. People like, oh, you'll get back on. No, no, you're— I'm really never doing that again, or at least as long as Beth is alive, because there's just no way our marriage could survive another One of these things. I mean, it was bad. I mean, I'm not getting into the dirt of my relationship, but it's just like— No, no, I mean, it— bad for me is like, like a, you know, a scrape on our knee relative to what, you know, most people mean when they say, oh, it was really bad. But it was a really tense— relative to the joy that we've enjoyed together, it was a tough one. Because she's ultra conservative. And, uh, you know, it was very much, uh, I told you, and I really didn't want to do this. And we're talking about money that, you know, could have gone towards the kids' college and et cetera. I've gone on enough about that, but yeah, I much prefer the raw story than the—

The raw stuff is the best. Yep.

Because there's a lesson there.

There's a lesson. And people like to, uh, rubberneck. They like to look into behind the curtains to real situations and real companies. And you can't do that. You know, everybody's putting a facade up. Everything looks like a commercial. I mean, like, this week is the orthopedic show, you know, the giant orthopedic show, and it's just ridiculous. It's just everybody's implants and—

Are you going?

No, I've been to 27, 27 so far, and I, I know I get more work done from the office.

But tell me about your work.

Yeah, so I'm an engineer. I, I developed implant systems for 30 years for, uh, big orthopedic companies, and then I got smart and went to startups at the end of my career. And I did 3 startups in a row, fell in love with the startups. And after my last startup was acquired, I decided to kind of do what I always wanted to do, and that's recruiting. So what I do today is I move people into what I think are the better small companies in orthopedics. So I'm real— I'm a recruiter, and I place people into very small companies that I kind of choose to work with. And so that's what I do. I just get paid a commission. You know how recruiting works, I'm sure.

Typically a third of the annual of the first year or something like that?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's what I do today, and I get a chance to talk to people. You know, people— I just talked to a guy that got fired 30 minutes ago. Uh, he'd been in a company for 10 years and just got blindsided. And I talk to CEOs that are struggling with funding. I talk to— I give young companies a lot of free advice along the way about funding and who to hire when and should I do product A or B and things like that.

So what I'm going to remember is if orthopedic, then Tiger.

Yeah, that's me. Pure orthopedics, 100% orthopedics.

Do you know Howard Lux?

Yeah, sure, on Twitter, yep.

Have you ever engaged with him? I mean, talked with him?

Yeah, we talk, we direct message on Twitter sometimes, yeah.

Good guy. Yeah, he's delightful. Years and years ago when I was first beginning to write and do this kind of thing, I wrote an article called Dr. Luck Will See You Now Unless, and it was all about how he is just targeted on LinkedIn by purveyors of anything he might want to buy. Hey, Doc, would you like to try this or try that?

Uh-huh.

And then it went to, you know, how does sales work for an orthopedic surgeon or orthopedist? When, you know, it's rare that someone is inventing something so new that it's not replacing anything you presently do. So this hip might be a little better than that hip, but still you have to— there's a real thing called switching costs as you get familiar with the new this or the new that.

Mm-hmm.

So basically, what's it gonna take, Howard, to get you into this brand new hip? And his answer is, you know, there's no amount of, you know, save 10% or, you know, buy one hip, get one hip, or any of that kind of, you know, hey, you know, if I sell 20 of these hips this month, I'm going to Rio, that makes a difference for him. That it's— is this the best— outcome, and do I trust that— is there science there? Do I believe it? And then it's going to take a heck of a lot to shake me from where I am, which was a great answer. I don't know that everyone would answer that way, but it certainly sounded logical and reasonable to me, which as a marketer and a sales guy— and this is years and years ago— I was like, how does anyone really make inroads when, you know, hey, you know, I love yodels and you could tell me all about Zingers all you want and I'm still going to eat yodels. Um, you know, would I try a Zinger? Maybe. But I just love how you can peel off the chocolate from a yodel. That's my thing. So anyhow, you got the idea.

Well, Howard's unique. He's got a, he's got a He's very responsible, he's got a conscience. But I see a lot of surgeons change products based on their rep.

The rep relationship still has a lot of power.

And what— it's amazing to me how a rep will move from Stryker to Zimmer, and the surgeon will change products from Stryker to Zimmer.

They'll follow the rep.

Mm-hmm. And they'll incur that switching cost. That blows my mind all the time. And the other thing that blows my mind is surgeons like gizmos, and so they're always looking for a new shiny object.

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, somebody comes out with a new product that's got some fancy feature. Right now it's all robotics. Everybody loves robots all of a sudden and 3D printing. The 2 buzzwords in orthopedics are Robots and 3D printing, and everybody is playing with that stuff, even though the outcomes really don't show there's any— they're any better.

Did you hear the, uh, the podcast that I did with, uh, Nick Anderson on reimbursement?

I did not.

The subject line was $350 worth of free reimbursement advice. Go to medicaldevicesgroup.net and subscribe. I write one message per week.

Okay.

And Nick was the guy at Intermountain Health to decide what would get paid and what wouldn't. And he was talking about many things, but robots was one of them, and he said, I didn't approve any of those robots because All they did was add $60,000 to a procedure. They didn't help outcomes. They didn't make it materially better. And anyhow, so give that a read. I will, I will. It was really enlightening. So yeah, in my role as leader of the group, I have the privilege of interacting with people from all over the world. all sorts of disciplines. This call is a great example of that. And I meet interesting people, and when they have a story to tell that I think would be incremental and interesting for my subscribers, I'm too glad to feature them.

Yeah, so I want to compliment you. So you're basically moving people off of LinkedIn onto your Your own website by necessity, but yeah, creating your own community off of LinkedIn—that is brilliant.

Well, I don't know about that. It was by necessity and with me kicking and screaming.

Yeah, but one day, I mean, LinkedIn is going to change the rules on us. They already have.

They completely removed my ability to talk to my leadership.

There you go.

There you go.

So we have to look after ourselves because if you have to move your community off of these social media platforms, you're going to get pushed around. You've already done that. That's brilliant. How many subscribers do you have?

Well, that's the next question to ask because that's a question that few people do ask or get a real understanding of it. So the group is 354,000 members. How many do you think, and I tried from day one to get people to come onto my platform with a whole bunch of ways. I had to quintuple my efforts when LinkedIn shut off the faucet entirely. But take a guess, from 2012 until the middle of 2018, How many people do you think ever gave me their contact information over at medicaldevicesgroup.net?

1,000? I'm guessing low.

70,000.

Okay. That's still really good.

That's a good number, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That's great. That's 1 in 5 people in the group. Now, I also had a second one that no longer exists called Note 2.3. And that was a site designed to get a petition going to overturn the medical devices tax. And of those 70,000, 11,000 or so came from that site.

Okay.

So we have 70,000 names. How many of them do you think over all that time are still at that job with that email address, Never unsubscribed, etc., etc. How many of them do you think were you know still viable?

Probably a tenth.

A half. A half. Okay. So now my list is. Now you're looking at thirty-five thousand. It's actually thirty. So thirty thousand now. Okay. So now back in LinkedIn today, I was sending out an announcement and have no idea how many people opened it. There was no metric at all. I could tell you how many people clicked on a link that I was tracking, but I couldn't tell you how many people ever opened it or read it. Now I can. Of the 30,000 emails that I send out, what do you think is the average number of people that open it at all?

So I've got my own metrics, so I'm going to guess 20%.

I'm doing just over 20%. That's good. That's actually pretty good. Like a high watermark for me now. When I first started doing it, it was 44.5% the first week I did it. I was like, oh, this is going to be good. Now I'm down to 20% to 25%, and I plan to purge those that don't open ever. It's painful, but I will. And so now my database will be about 10,000. Now, that's better than a chopstick.

What CRM do you use?

I actually don't have a CRM yet. I'm going to move— I'm going to use the free component of HubSpot. My email provider is Drip. I love it. I've gotten quite good at the conditional logic of it. There's a lot of if-then, and I can tag people. So if you ever clicked on this, then you this path, and if you that, then that. It's really the drip marketing that you hear so much about and almost nobody does.

Yeah.

I can't tell you any of my clients who do it beyond what I have set up for them. And even I, who have been at this for quite some time, only in the last month have I really dug in and understood every trigger on every place that you can possibly enter the database, and what happens if you do this or that. And I've just basically done a quarter of the things on my list of things that I want to do. Including the automatic pruning which I haven't done yet or I wouldn't have 20,000 people who never open my email. They would already be gone because I pay for those names. I don't need to blow them out entirely. What I plan to do is to throw them into HubSpot CRM where they can live for free.

Yeah.

So while people may not choose to open them— Put them in an Excel spreadsheet if you want.

I already have done that. I already have done that, but I haven't purged them yet. I want to give them like one, hey, do you really want to, you know, that kind of thing. I just haven't gotten around to that yet.

Got it, got it.

Interesting.

So, you know, oh my God, 350,000. Well, actually more like 10. Now, to have people, to have 10,000 people read you every week is like, wow, I get it. It's good. But it's not the, oh my God, you're that guy, that people have assigned to me. And the reason I even give myself that is because when— I didn't start the group. It was started by a man named Chris Taylor back in 2008.

Right.

And when I discovered him, he had 51,000 people in the group, and I remember how I felt about him. I'm going to write him and I sure hope I don't mess up because this is my one chance to influence a guy with a lot of influence. That's how I felt. So I've given myself permission to believe that there's somebody out there like I was who was even more in awe of, oh my God, 350,000. That's way in excess of a quarter million people. You must— well, it's not exactly that. I don't know if you have only a half hour, but we're We're 5 minutes shy of that half hour.

No, no, I got a little more time. But yeah, it's called microfame. So in all these little niches in the internet, there's people that have a voice and have a community. And it's— I love microfame. So what I've seen in the last couple years, and you could probably attest to this, is the world is changing so fast. So there's There's people that spend their time in the physical world and percentage of their time in the online world. It used to be 95% in the physical world. You'd see your buddies for lunch and at work, and then at home you go home and maybe read some stuff online. With this new generation coming up, it's literally flipping. And I think it's closer to 50/50 now. You know, you go to the airport or anywhere, everybody has their head down on their phone and they're online.

And I think 50% is light.

Could be, could be light. So, and I was just telling somebody this, you know, you're like, I'm a recruiter. And so I try to help people find jobs. And So if you're— and people think their resume or their friends are going to help them find a job. No, it's LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn has become the dominant way to find a job. And there's nuances. You have to have the exact right words in your LinkedIn profile. You have to have the right picture. You have to have the right headline. You— if you don't have the right stuff, you are totally invisible to the world. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day that had— I forgot what they were, but they were missing a word in their profile. And when a CEO or hiring manager searched for spine and robotics and, you know, a certain city, and they didn't have the word robotics in their profile, they literally were invisible. They would never come up in the search. So anyway, the whole world is going online. That's the way we're going to— and I think if you take it a step farther, Joe, that the internet is going to do everything in the future. So if in 10 years, people will— everybody will be a knowledge worker for the most part. And you'll wake up in the morning and you log in. And you say, all right, I think I'm going to take on a new project. And you'll just literally see what's out there. And you'll say, okay, I'll do that project. It's a month and I'll make this much money. I'll do that. And so these virtual teams are going to come together and solve problems and then just ban. So everybody's going to be like an Uber driver where you, you turn your meter on, you turn your app on. And when you want to work, and then you— the internet tells you what to do, basically, or you can choose. And then you turn it off when you don't want to work. I think that's where everything's going. Driving to a building in 10 years is going to seem ridiculous. Driving to a building to work side by side with all these people in cubicles is just going to seem silly.

I wonder what it will do to commercial real estate.

Right. Well, there's already storefronts in downtowns are shuttering like crazy because of Amazon.

Yeah, retail is one thing. I'm just talking about corporate headquarters kind of thing. No, you're right. Actually, you know, where I'm moving next is I'm just— I'm in beta, but I'm going to see how many people I can move to a Slack channel for the group.

Oh, cool.

You're familiar with Slack then?

Oh yeah, it's really useful. Every new company should start off with Slack now.

So my theory is this, and I can talk about some of it from deep experience, and that is back in the halcyon days of 2012, When the later majority got the message that you really have to do social media, people came on and joined the medical devices group, thousands a week.

Wow.

And they heard that they were supposed to, you know, leave comments and that's how you, you know, get noticed and such. So I believe what happened is a lot of people got that message, they left a comment, And nobody called.

Nobody had the guts to do it.

They were like, oh, this is crap. I don't have time for this nonsense. And they abandoned it. So now conversation has come to a crawl. I mean, there are little pockets, and there might be a little flare-up when something controversial or terribly provocative happens. But otherwise, you know, 3 comments here, 2 comments there. The group, even if LinkedIn hadn't raped and pillaged the functionality out of it, it would still be struggling today. I believe that.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, taking that a step further, why did people get involved? Well, they thought that there would be some halo to their brand, that people would check them out and they would get business. Well, it happened for me, but I was at it a lot, and it was part of the brand that I built for myself. For most people, that wasn't it. They thought they might get a little bit of a bump. But what still is very much on trend is using the internet for information. I need something, I'll get what I need. Well, Slack is incredibly utilitarian. I use it with my group all the time. Hey, I need, you know, can you finish this brochure? Where's that image? I put it in your folder, thanks. You know, it's supplemented— supplanted email for my group. I don't want them to email me. I'd rather them just drop it into Slack.

Right. It categorizes things nicely.

So MDG on Slack is going to be that. I'm looking for a highly utilitarian way that people can basically, for $10 a month, have A virtual team at their ready, at their disposal. I have about a dozen people who will be designated as experts. I have the regulatory guy, I have the reimbursement guy, etc. And so you can just jump on at any time and say, hey Nick, I have a question, can you look at this? And get real-time feedback. I think that's a A big idea.

It is a big idea.

It'll take some time, a lot of time.

It'll take some time. You may be a little ahead of yourself. So the challenge that we're both seeing is the medical device world is so far behind times, right? So, you know, I mean, it's— there's— I mean, like in orthopedics, I know orthopedics, and, you know, it's still— hospitals are still using faxes.

Mm-hmm.

You know, most of the sales training is done face-to-face now with, you know, the sales guys showing something to a surgeon. There's still brochures and it's just unbelievable. And the surgeons are thirsty for connectivity and the companies don't know how to do it. So the surgeon sits at home at night and they're communicating with their alumni, they're looking up recipes, they're doing everything online, and then they go to the hospital and it's like 1975 again.

Mm-hmm.

And it's— and the medical device world is— so I see this in marketing. I see the— probably the most obvious deficiency Is marketing product managers that are hired into medical device companies and orthopedics. All they do is they create print media about—

And get ready for the next trade show.

And get ready for the next trade show. Print media about features. Hey, my feature's better than your feature. It is unbelievable how far behind they are.

They made a living this way. I know it well.

Yeah, I bet you do. There's nobody that's actually targeting patients effectively right now. It's amazing. It blows me away. There's so many products that are—

Actually, that one is a lot harder.

Okay.

For me, I've chosen to specialize in B2B, and when it starts going to let's tell the world about this device, I typically either defer or try to send them to someone else because, in my view, all of that patient excitement is undone with a simple, you know, like, don't mistake your Google search with my medical degree.

Hmm.

It's great that you think you need a biomed hip, But let me explain what happens with this Diffuse Synthes hip. And what average patient is going to be like, yeah, well, I read— No, they're going to be like, okay, doctor. So to me, especially as it relates to devices, perhaps not direct, durable stuff that comes home with you where you're making a decision, that you can make Decide on your own or something like that. But if it's anything at the hospital, I can't imagine any scenario— I've had this conversation more than once— where a hospital is going to differentiate itself as being the only hospital that blank, and that blank is your product. Now maybe you can say we're the only hospital in Tulsa that has a da Vinci robotic Surgical system, and that might be like, ooh, what's that about? But how many people have that? And even then, how many hospitals would use their budget on saying, our differentiator versus everyone in the marketplace is we have a Da Vinci?

Right.

I think we're talking about percentages of percentages.

It's small. Yeah, I've seen billboards in cities Hey, come to St. Francis Hospital because we've got the Da Vinci. But there's Da Vinci in every city now.

And so beyond that, I mean, I'm hard-pressed to think of what other device to throw in there besides, you know, you might make a claim about echocardiograms at St. John's something, you might. But again, we're looking for the exception here. Companies who think, I've got to let patients know about our device, are, in my view, completely wasting their money.

Yeah.

It might be one thing to tell— ask your doctor about Lycra or whatever, you know, Lyrica or, you know, Zoloft or whatever, but direct-to-patient device that you would have someone else use on you when you're being operated on, It's just there's too many contingencies in there, I think, for that to be meaningful.

Right, right. Good point. Really good point. So one of the companies I work with is called Trice Medical. You never heard of them. They're in Philly. It's a startup. But they've got— if you have a knee or ankle, shoulder problem, you know, and you go see your doctor, He's gonna do a physical exam, then he's gonna send you to an MRI.

Well, this company is getting rid of the MRI.

They've got an in-the-office tool.

They literally stick a camera, the surgeon sticks a camera in your knee, does a complete tour of your joint live right in front of the patient, shows them what the problem is, and then you discuss treatment options. Also has an ultrasound component, and you're just literally looking at an iPad. And that— things like that, you could market to, you know, if you—

anybody over between 40 and 60 years old in Sioux City, Iowa that Googles, you know, my knee hurts, you know, what's wrong with my knee, you could have targeted ads to that patient.

You could. It'd be interesting to see what those numbers work out to be.

And then here's the hard part for companies. Here's the really hard part.

The patient goes, okay, that's, you know, in Sioux City, Iowa, there's a doctor that's got this fancy camera. They go, hey, I want to use that. So then you have to lead them to the surgeon somehow.

And the companies don't want to tell each other who their customers are. That's the big problem.

That's the blind spot.

They're protective of their customer list.

I see that all the time. I've been telling companies for years, just— they have a find a surgeon tab on their website.

You know, where do you live?

Right.

But they make you— they make you send an email to the company and then they forward that to some customer. I would— I wish somebody would just publish it live. Here's all 500 of our surgeons that we work with in the United States. You can sort it and search it all day long. I think that would be awesome.

Somebody will. Somebody will. They'll have to convince management, but somebody will.

Yeah, no transparency. The first company that does that will, I think, be the first company that's like we talked earlier, that's real.

You know, that's open and I'd love to introduce you to my network. I don't know if coming out to San Diego is remotely in your consideration set for our annual meeting.

Well, maybe. I don't travel as much as I used to. I used to live in Southern California. It's beautiful out there.

I don't know if you have anyone to visit and crash with.

Oh, I got lots of people out there I can visit. Yeah, we lived in Laguna Beach and Dana Point.

Nick is giving a 3-hour workshop on reimbursement, and Mike is going to do a 3-hour workshop on medical device sales. I'll send you the agenda. If it's in your consideration set, I'd love to include you.

Yeah, yeah, please do, Joe. So, you know, before we wrap up, and I got Probably jump off. So tell me your business model, kind of, you know, it sounds like you have a team around you, and tell me what you do and kind of how you do it.

I have 3 revenue streams. One is I'm a consultant for medical device companies who need help with their marketing. Easy to understand.

Yep.

2, I lead this great big group, and every once in a while somebody will pay me for exposure.

Okay.

3, I have an annual conference. I sell tickets. That's it. So none of the 3 of them can keep me in the house. All of them together can help keep me in the house.

That's neat. That's neat. I'll send you my marketing article if you haven't read it yet. It's kind of how marketing is changing in orthopedics. You'll already know this stuff, but I'm basically calling out marketing people for not getting on board with digital marketing these days.

I feel I made a new friend today. Thank you for that.

All right. Yeah, good stuff, Joe. Send me the audio clip. This will be fun to listen to.

I certainly will. And before we go, though, the question that I had at the beginning of our call is, do you as a As a routine answer to a LinkedIn exchange, say, hey, just put time on my calendar, let's talk instead of email. How often do you do that?

It's pretty rare.

It's only people that are very interesting to me. Yeah, I don't do it very often. I really don't because—

Thank you for putting me in the very interesting category.

You are.

Let me ask you, among those, how many of them take you up on it?

Oh, very, very few. Probably—

Would you say more than 1 in 10?

Less than 1 in 10.

1 in 5?

Yeah.

1 in 20 rather?

Yeah, probably 1 in 20. Yep.

Okay. I wondered if it was much different. That's pretty much the ratio I get of a response, but I thought, wow, a phone response would be much better than an email response. I wonder— because when you presented it the way that you did, I was like, Huh, why not? Because if you hadn't, I would have been like, you know, even my response to you, I was like, I don't think we're going to need a whole half hour, thinking like, okay, I'll meet this guy, I have no idea what he wants to say, and, you know, that'll be it, we'll go on our way. But we had a quick, you know, connection that would not have happened with an email. So thank you for that initiative, and I think I might give it a try myself.

Good, good, good. Yeah, I have to be careful because I'm a recruiter. Invariably, people want to talk to me and they're always looking for a job.

I know, I hear you. We all regard our time, which is why I was kind of hedging by saying, yeah, don't plan on a whole half hour, we're probably just going to need 15. But there was time when we found that we made a good connection. Tiger, thank you. I look forward to doing some more.

Yeah, I think we both got something and we'll talk again, I'm sure, Joe. And I subscribed while we were going. Look at that.

There you go. Thank you, Tiger.

All right, thanks, Joe. Have a good day.

Bye now.

Bye-bye.