Using Stories for Engagement in eLearning: Elliott Masie’s Perspective

Leadership in the Learning and Development World

Hi there, welcome to the e-learning champion pod. I'm Shalini and I'm thrilled to have with us a true pioneer in learning and technology, the one and only Elliott Masie. Elliott coined the term e-learning and has been revolutionizing corporate learning for over 35 years. He is the chair of the Learning Collaborative and leads a coalition of 75 global organizations shaping the future of learning. Elliott is not only a dynamic speaker and educator, but also, hold your breath, a Tony-nominated Broadway producer, He heads Masie Innovations in Saratoga Springs, NY, driving innovation and excellence. And we are thrilled to have you with us, Elliott, a very warm welcome to you and to all our listeners.

I'd also like to introduce our other speaker for today, Doctor RK, who will be having these conversations with Elliott. Dr. RK is the CEO and Co-founder of CommLab India. He nurtured CommLab India from concept to the commercial success that it is today. And he's responsible for formulating business strategies and nurturing client relationships. RK is an entrepreneur at heart. He has well over 35 years of experience in sales, corporate training, university teaching, and e-learning. And he is passionate about learning and technology-enabled learning.

It's a great joy to have both of you here today. With that, I'm handing over the stage to you and minimizing my presence.

10:25
Thank you.

10:29
So just to repeat my question, Elliott, what exactly happens in Masie lab? What kind of research?

10.40
What we've been doing, just like you, we've been in this field for many, many, many years and we try to do two things. We don't evaluate or endorse products. Rather, what we try to look at is how does the learner, how does the employee of a company, or a student in university, how is their learning different when they're learning with technology?

11:19
To be honest, what we're doing right now is e-learning, meaning you are in India, I happen to be in Dublin, Ireland. I'm doing a fellowship with Trinity College. You see it in the background there.

11:37
So technology is letting us do something which is a bit different than obviously if you and I were just sitting having a cup of tea together and drinking. So, we've been focused a lot on how is it different, not is it good or bad, but how does it change? I'll give you an example of one of the things I'm looking at now.

12:00
What happens to curiosity when you're working with a very powerful AI or search engine? So, if I type something and it gives me many answers, does it make my curiosity go up or down? Does it focus me, or does it confuse me? And so, we're looking at that.

12:27
We're also very intrigued about, and it's the connection of why I'm in the world of e-learning and the world of Broadway, is storytelling. That's what we have in common. Any good teacher you have, it could be your teacher when you were seven years old, when you were 27, or it could be your uncle that you used to sit on the floor and listen to him tell stories when you were a child. Those are all storytellers, and I am convinced that while technology is important and it's always changing, people learn because the story is a good story that's told well. Technology can help or in many cases, technology can destroy the story. So, that's what we're looking at.

13:23
And right now I'm very intrigued about global learning. We have a good example. Let's say we have a company like KPMG, they have their offices in Dublin for Europe and they're doing a program. They have people who are in India, people who are in Mexico, people who are in France, and people who are in China.

13:51
How does global learning change, because we're influenced by who our teachers were, how we learned growing up, how we learned at university. So, I'm very intrigued in this global world. How do we build learning that works globally, not just in the language that they understand, but also in the culture of learning that is comfortable for them.

And there's an additional dimension of two cultures or more than two cultures learning together or

Even the same culture, but two ages. You put together a learner who is 22 and they never have their hand empty from their phone, OK, and then you put somebody I'm 74, and I have a phone, OK, but I actually make phone calls on it occasionally. But how do we learn together? Because I think the power of learning, particularly at work, is when we learn collaboratively. it's that culture is different. The age might be different. The language might be different. I know it's probably not appropriate to say, but I will. Even our religion as we grew up, what was the spirit of learning in our religion? For some religions, you never asked a question. And other religions, it was a big part of how you learn. So, we're influenced by all those pieces.

It resonates my early days going to Sunday School or vacation Bible school. You're absolutely right. So, do you undertake consultancy projects for individual organizations?

15:53
When you get to be a certain age, and you've had a certain degree of success, some people retire. I will never retire. But I follow the words of Ken Blanchard, a very famous author. Ken says don't retire, refire, fire yourself up. So, I don't do consulting. In fact, we made enough money that the work that I do is through our foundation. And I don't do big conferences anymore because there are many great conferences I go and speak at. A lot of what I do is try to be an influencer person.

16:31
Now we think of influencers as 21-year-olds, but you have a certain influence when like both of us, we've been around long enough that people think what we say is maybe right. It may not be, but we look like it is right. but it gives you an opportunity to ask very pointed questions. I'll give you an example. I don't take full credit for it, but if you look at some of the AI tools that we have been tracking and you look at Anthropic Quad, if anybody's ever gone in there, at the end of every statement it asks you, are you OK with this or do you have more questions?

I love that. I love that because, as an expert, whenever somebody asks me a question, I don't want to end with an exclamation mark. And that's the way in which you create a pivot table. I end with a question. So what else do you want to know about pivot tables?

17:34
So some of what I think I can do as an influencer is to ask questions that push people to think about things a little differently. And the world is changing so rapidly right now, with AI, with politics, with changes in the economies, I feel I can make an influence in a few places. As I said, you don't retire, you refire.

18:05
Refire. That's nice. I think I should also keep that in mind. Thank you very much, Elliott. There's one question which I would like to start off with about leadership, which is the theme of today's conversation.

So how do you define leadership in L&D and how do you see it different or similar to other leadership positions in an organization?

18:36
It's a very current topic for me, OK. And I'm not wanting to be political or partisan, but, last week, many of the learning and development people in United States organizations, were dealing with employees who were very worried about a new president and new policies around diversity and inclusion.

What did that mean for them, for their jobs and the like? I think the role of the leader is to be able to ask and to manage, a direction and an efficiency and a purpose to what we do.
So in the L&D space, leaders for me have always been involved in serving really 3 purposes.

19:31
One, is help the employees have the skills to succeed in their jobs. Secondly, help the employees develop, to be able to do their next job or more jobs. And the third is to map changes in the organization and the jobs to see how our employees are ready to do those jobs.

19:56
It takes patience. It takes empathy. It takes, I think, science. I think we need to understand the science of organizations. You certainly know the science of building effective programs. And then it has one more piece. It needs courage. Because L&D leaders, to be honest, I don't mean to put you down, but we're very important. Like the people in charge of fixing the elevators in our buildings, meaning if they're not there, stuff stops. They don't have a lot of power, but they have a lot of capacity to make better. So, most of our L&D leaders don't have big budgets. They get their money from the businesses. They don't have big power, but they are so important in building the organization and like. And now I think they are even more important in coping with the changes that happen, which means it's totally important. Maybe I'll even jump ahead to a question you were thinking of asking me.

If the learning development leaders aren't learners, they aren't going to succeed. So, you have to be willing to be a learner. I have a friend who is a major CEO of a corporation and then they left there and now they're actually in another corporation aspect of human resources and learning. They put themselves on a 5 hour a week AI power course. So, every week they spend 5 hours just in AI trying to learn it and understand it, whether to accept it or to reject it or to do like. So, we have to be learners.

21:44
And sometimes it's so busy you don’t, I remember meeting somebody who was building e-learning. I was actually in Bangalore for a meeting. And this person was very excited about their project. And I asked her a question. I said, this is great. When was the last time you took an e-learning class? And she put her hand over her eyes. It's been about four years because there was no time in how her job was done for her to actually be a learner. So, to be honest, she needed to take one to get a little bit better. So, it takes that level of courage there too.

22:30
So first thing is be able to keep employees up to date on skills and knowledge, then be able to predict what they would require in future and also provide for that training, and be able to monitor or be on top of the change curve and see how the company is adapting to it. And the last one, as you very clearly and emphatically said, is that we need to be learners, and we need to probably lead by example.

23:13
And RK, can I add one more? We need to understand business. I've had the honor of helping start up and being an adjunct teacher at a program at Wharton and University of Pennsylvania for mid-career to get them the equivalent of a PhD in learning and much of an MBA in business. Because you have to understand business. You have to even be able to talk the numbers of business.

23:49
And I find it interesting. I always talk to new MBA students about where they're going to work. And they all want to work at Goldman Sachs or venture companies and make a billion dollars. And I said, OK, well, after you do that and you're only 28, what will you do next? I said, you want to think about becoming a director of talent or of learning.

24:12
And they look at me like I'm crazy, like you ought to start a shoeshine store, and I said, no, you don't understand it. It's very easy for technology to do a lot of the pieces of the financial side that you think you're really smart at. The people-side of things is going to require a lot of understanding of business and the data and of psychology and of people. And yes, we'll use technology as part of that. So, I actually wish we could make learning or talent a bigger part of what was on the mind of businesspeople. But until we do, we need to make business more on the mind of our learning people.

25:00
Yes, yeah, wonderful. That actually resonates with what I experienced because I came from a line function of sales and marketing. When I started my career, it was in training and development. And we used to use transparencies and OHP, right? I'm sure you remember those days writing with, you know. So, they tend to get too involved in the jargon of learning when they speak with stakeholders. That's a very important fact.

25:48
I want to ask you a related question here when you gave me the example of that elevator person who may not have a lot of power, but he does have a power of stalling things, of stopping things. He may be a small cog in the whole system, but a very critical cog if I pass this. So, you have given an analogy like that with L&D. I always wondered. And when Alekha told me that I was going to speak with you, I wanted to ask you this question.

There are so many other support functions, staff functions, so to speak. You have finance, you have HR, you have IT. I wonder why learning has to do so much of selling within the organization, when probably it is the most important thing.

26:51
Well, let me use my courage to answer this. Our role model, sadly, is school, right? We use the terms of school. So, we say, oh, We hired Brijesh. He's been in IT. Maybe someday he would be a leader in our company. So, what do we think about? We think about sending him to a class or a program. Now, from my experience, those are all good and they're a part of the puzzle. But if you talk to Brijesh and he says to his wife, I'm going to go to this class, this Academy and I'm taking this class, and she says, is there’s an exam? And they bring the mindset of school. But let's imagine that Brijesh has a cousin in England, OK, And the same thing happened. His cousin was in IT, and they say we're now going to give you a set of experiences to get you to be ready to be a leader in 12 months. And it will include following one of our leaders for a while. It will include a project that you need to do. And yes, and there will be some training that you need to do. And here are two books you might want to read. And here's somebody who recently retired, but they're going to be your mentor. I guarantee you that his cousin will do better than he will, OK? Because the model that we have is of learning rather than education. There’s an interesting activity you or your customers could do at some point is go to the cafeteria where people are having tea, which we wish we were having right now, and find 5 of them randomly and ask each person, how did you learn to do your job well? Not how did you learn to do your job? How did you learn to do your job well?

So RK, do you want to know that many of them are not going to say they went to the class, they're going to say I had a good manager.

29:20
They maybe even say, in the church that I went to, there was a course in leadership that I took when I was 20. And I'm thinking about that.

29:30
Or they may say, this is a funny one, I had a really bad manager, but I watched what they did and I'm not doing that at all. Or I made a mistake because part of how we learn is when we make mistakes. So, I think it's really important for us, we slow down because we try to run schools rather than try to engage to create a learning culture, which includes good courses, good e-learning, and good books. But it also has to include experiences.

If we had enough money, simulations for them to do. If we had even an opportunity to go and see how it's done in another company or in another part of the business, that's how we go. The best way of saying it is we all know people who've had children, OK? All of them have learned their language and to control going to the bathroom. None of those required PowerPoints. It was done organically. It was done with the parents and relatives and brothers and sisters. It was done experientially in that sense. And I think we forget how we as humans learn. We do learn in a more organic way through our experiences.

31:03
So, you mean to say that because we come with this kind of mindset, the stakeholders don't really take us seriously?

31:20
I've been in many meeting rooms all around the world, and I asked the question, what's the best learning experience you've had since joining this company?

They rarely talk. They might talk about a teacher. They might say, oh gosh, Roseanne was wonderful, or Doctor Schwartz was amazing. But they rarely say I took that class, and I'm not insulted. They don't often say I took an e-learning program, but it's the blend of those.

31:58
And so I think our problem is as long as we're creating academies or courses alone, they're in the administrative task, the way a headmaster would be running that Academy. But they're not necessarily the person in charge of growing their people.

32:20
Correct.

32:21
And I know that's provocative, but you've got to balance. You have to do both.

32:25
And yeah, actually listening to we even now say it's classroom training. So immediately those memories of sitting in a classroom. So that's very interesting, Elliott. It's very, very thoughtful.

32:43
OK, well, let me give you a global example. I was one of the first people to go as an American and teach a class in Vietnam, OK. And it was around the early stages of technology. And I was so used to, as I've done in America and I've done in different cities in India, I go in and say, are there any questions?

And there are usually questions. I said, “are there any questions?” It was not a single question. And I was stunned because I was supposed to be there for three hours, and this was only 45 minutes into it and there were no questions. So, I said let's take a break. And I went outside, and I asked the person who brought me all the way from New York, why are there no questions? In our culture it would be insulting to ask you a question.

Absolutely like Indians.

33:34
Well, I was being nice. I was in Vietnam, so I didn't, but you knew what I was doing there. So I said, OK, we're going to do something interesting.

33:44
So I put together little pieces of paper, and I gave it around and said, now get together with two other people in groups of three and write down three things that it would be important for us to talk about. And then we're going to compete to who has the best ones. When we came back RK, the energy went way up, and people jumped up and said it took about two times. And I have a question.

34:13
OK, but I had to change the culture because as long as, oh, and by the way, I had my jacket, I took my jacket off because I had to change the culture a little bit because in their culture, as you know in India, that university student is good at writing down the notes and following along and nodding and maybe a brave one will ask question or go see the faculty member. But the culture wasn't a collaboration culture. It was a lecture culture. And so, I needed to break that, and they were worried that I was breaking it and then they kept asking me to come back. So, I only went back one more time. But it's an interesting example.

Actually, a similar kind of thing happens even in the Middle East. If you had any experience, it could be very similar. So probably the colonial legacy of just listening to a learned person. We were all ruled by the British and they wanted to make administrators, clerks, out of the locals. Don't ask questions, just do it. And by heart it. You don't need to understand.

35:32
And some of it is how we create the format. I had the honor of working with Doctor Kim. He was head of the World Bank for many years. Before that, he was president at Dartmouth. And he found that when he showed up, he was president of the World Bank. People wanted to hear what he said, but they generally didn't know how to interact with him. So, before a big meeting, he would get about 10 people together. And they would sit in a circle, and they would have some tea. And he would say, tell me what's going on in your country. And by the time they got into the room, they were ready to interact differently. So, some of it is our culture and some of it is what we're comfortable with and how we respect our experts.

But I got to tell you, when I'm with an expert, the best moment is when their lecture ends. And if I had my way, they should have your group make it into an e-learning and send it to me. OK? Because the best moment is when that's over and now, we have a conversation. Now I can ask. This is the big piece.

36:44
I can go from talking about content to content and context, and context is the story behind the story.
You know, why is it done that way? Somebody asked me one time, Why do you use the AT key in a spreadsheet? It's all the way up at the top. And I say, you know, it was interesting.

My friend Bob Frankston invented VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. And in the old days, the ACT key wasn't at the top. It was a control thing to get to it. But there's often a back story behind why something is, why it works that way. And that often doesn't come from the lecture. It comes from the interactions and the conversation and the projects that people do with that.

37:41
So, it's very, very interesting. And I could quickly understand because I have been doing classroom training for many years before e-learning. So, I know how important it is to calm them down, make them open up, start talking. That's when the maximum learning takes place, and it remains permanent or relatively permanent. How do we bring this kind of interaction or collaboration into e-learning, which is essentially self-paced?

38:21
Well, I go back to that word that I used earlier on in our conversation, which is storytelling.

OK, I like to tell people we've got an online set of stories that are going to help you do your job. Oh really?

38:38
So I don't say I have 4 modules, or I have three parts. I say I have some stories about the power that comes from XY or Z, OK, Because I think what happens a little bit in the learning is people see it as an obstacle course. They see it as a ladder to climb. And so, that's why I guess I'm saying something publicly here. Very often we give people video. The learner wants to run it at 1 1/2 speed. Not 1 or 2, OK, they still want to get to the end of the ladder there. I think it's really important to focus on the story in there as well, because that's what you remember, that's what you take away. And I sometimes think we don't deal with the story.

I'll give you a wonderful example how it failed for me because I'm in the world of theatre. I was very excited when somebody sent me a free coupon to watch Steven Spielberg do a master class in directing. Steven Spielberg, oh my gosh, this was wonderful. And it was 10 sessions RK. So, I was very excited. So, I clicked on the first one and I sat there, and I was taking a few notes, and I watched the first one. Pretty good.

And then I watched the second module about 8 minutes, and then I stopped. I never went back.

He had wonderful stories, but we put him in a package that wasn't exciting. We diluted his story in a way that I felt like he was reading the slides rather than telling the story.

There wasn't somebody like right now I'm hoping I'm doing a good job, but part of why I'm doing a good job is you're asking me questions that are provocative and are interesting and flow from what we were doing.

41:02
So, I think it's really important that we go back to honoring the story, and as we had more technology, we will get more of our stories online.

41:13
Claude and some of the other ones, I think we're seeing a little bit of open AI. They're actually making that when you do a search.

41:22
In the old days, we got 14 or 45 bullets we could look at on our Google search. Now, increasingly the learner doesn't want it. They want a summary of everything. The other day I started something. My wife thought it was really sort of interesting.

41:39
AI summarizes all my e-mail that came the night before and wow, I got about 45 minutes back from that, and so I think it's interesting that we'll have to figure out how we use the power of technology with the power of good teaching and good building of learning experiences there.

42:05
Right, right.

42:20
This is a very interesting thing. So, when I listen to you about storytelling, it looks like a totally different instructional approach? The very structure, format, everything seemed to be different. Did I understand it correctly?

42:40
It is a little bit. Remember, the other thing I do in life is Broadway. But I'm a big fan of Bollywood. OK, you go to a Bollywood show and there are certain things that are predictable, OK? No matter what happens, they'll be dancing in at the end. They're symbolic things. I keep wanting to be able to walk on top of a moving train, but I haven't figured out how to do that. But then, what makes one Bollywood better than another is the story and the acting that goes on there. I'm saying, we have to accept there's certain things that are always going to be there. I like to think about them as the science of learning rather than the structure of learning, OK?

43:30
Which means two people could build the same e-learning program very, very differently. I know that every Broadway show that I am part of starts differently. It has different music. It has a different pace. It has a different tempo. Now they all last about the first act, one hour and 10 minutes. It's a lot about how often people have to go to the bathroom and they want to sell some drinks in the middle. And I understand all of that.

44:05
But in e-learning, we ought to accept the science of learning. We need clear objectives, we need clear outcomes, we need to challenge or interact or engage. And it's hard to engage digitally. We need to deal with the fact that many people will get confused before they get to be competent. So how do we deal with confusion?

44:31
But if we follow that science, we can build each one differently. You know, it's the same way. Let's say I'm a cook, a wonderful cook. Not only do I want to make different meals, but I don't want them all looking the same. I will tell you that's a big difference with restaurants. They know how to bring you different foods. I fell in love when I was in Bangalore, I fell in love with Dosa. Sadly, many of the Indian restaurants in the United States don't do dosa on their menu. But when they see me coming in, they know how to make it and they go, there's the dosa man. It's an interesting element of how you have the visual elements be different in a meal. If every dish looks exactly the same, I'm not as motivated.

45:34
And so I think we have to do a better job of constructing it to look different. This is a big challenge for all of us in the educational technology business. Our learners are impatient. They want things to be over quickly. So here I am producing a Broadway show that lasts 2 hours and 12 minutes with an intermission. The average young person wants to have a TikTok level story that's over in 2 minutes and 45 seconds. OK, now I can't do that, but I have to listen to that. So, some of our shows are getting a little shorter than that. I also have to think about, am I teaching them for immediate understanding or for beginning understanding? What's the role of practice?

46:31
I get excited about a course or a program. I have to come back to three or four times, digital, the way we would with your classroom, which I think was a good thing. As a classroom teacher, let me end on this because I can pick up tomorrow in a different way on that most of our e-learning is beginning and done.

46:52
how do we maybe bring them back because they'll understand it differently.

46:57
And then the last part, and this is a big one. How do we keep a sense of humor about it?

47:03
Our best teachers were really smart, and they knew how to teach with a smile. They got us engaged. But a slide doesn't have humor very often. So, you gotta figure out how do we add humanity to that.

47:25
That's very interesting, humor. I think every effective teacher who we remember throughout our life, they were very humorous, witty and made us laugh. But it has a cultural angle to it because you said about global learning. Yeah, that we have to be a little cautious there.

This is the culture one. And this is particularly true if you're teaching leadership. The best things you can teach are the things that fail, politically very hard to do. My colleague Tom Peters wrote a book called In Search of Excellence. Almost all the companies in search of excellent went bankrupt eventually.

48:10
I know that also, right?

48:12
But so he learned in the end that the best stories he had were about why that company failed as well as why the company succeeded. And I think in the learning world, the learner wants to know, what could go wrong? How do I recover from that? And culturally, you've got to make sure it fits. You don't want to get fired or insult somebody.

48:42
So let me move on to my last question earlier.

49:03
But the last question is this is a very revealing thing to me that we come with this cool kind of culture, very structured thing with assessments and exams and pass marks and grades and we continue with that. And that seemed to be one of the biggest bottlenecks of why L&D doesn't really sit at the management table, so to speak, like finance or IT.

And when I read the news, when I see the trends, everybody seemed to say that after some time everything will be self-learning. There'll be no universities, no classrooms. If you have listened to Elon Musk, he says you don't need any college degree. You can learn everything on the Internet and free.
So with this kind of future, how do you think we can break this mindset?

50:09
Well, I'm not sure I share his prediction. I'm here in my virtual background at Trinity College, an amazing school, amazing university, and for most European students, no fee because of their model. But what makes it amazing? It's the right blend. So, you go to their MBA program, some of the programs are done in a classroom, some of the programs are done like we're doing, virtually, some of them are done through e-learning, some of them are done through project based and the like.

50:46
Do I think technology will make learning more personal, and will it make it perhaps more scalable?
Yes.

50:58
I do, though, believe that technology will not replace what the human element is. And so, we have to figure out. I love playing with Lego blocks, where you have the blocks, and we've got to figure out how to fit together the technology and the person.

51:17
So I had a conversation with somebody at Gemini, one of the other AI things and I said, sometimes your answer should be, you should call Jennifer McCollum in New York at the Catalyst organization.

51:33
She would have a perspective view. Sometimes the answer isn't a text-based thing, but connecting you to a human being, or in some cases, here's this, give me your response to that and let me connect you to five other people that are studying it at the same time. I believe that work is ultimately a collaborative experience. Yes, just sit alone and do that. You can't learn to work collaboratively if you don't learn to learn collaboratively. And so, it's that mixture. And so we have to do as people who create good learning like you do, you have to have an eye towards the blend of the technology and the human, and realize it's different for different people at different moments. My greatest fear is that people get bored and stop learning. And I don't want that because the world is changing too fast. I want them to learn.

52:39
But you know, we found out during the pandemic in many countries where people went home and maybe if they had enough money, they were on Teams or Zoom all day. We never thought about the role of their parents in that.

It happened so quickly. We didn't have time to build a new model of what a what that would be. I think we need a new model of what it will be for your lifelong learning and also for all the things you need to get ready on that new system that's rolling out on Wednesday and blend the two. So that's why I'm refiring.

53:25
Any last piece of advice or counsel for our listeners who are L&D professionals across the world?

53:36
Because you're across the world, let me give you an across the world thought. Respect the culture that you're in, respect the culture. There's a lot to learn from that. I know that when I do a program, my colleagues in Germany are way more structured in how they wanted than my colleagues in Brazil who want to argue with me about everything along the way. But that's OK because you start there.

54:03
That's where you start. And respect the fact that we need to make sure that technology is a tool rather than the definition of what we're doing. The other day, somebody sent me a report and in the midst of the report, they were quoting me four times. I wasn't even insulted they didn't mention my name, but I realized they had just gone to ChatGPT and done a report during. So, we need to become more transparent about where's our content coming from and what's it about. Finally, we need to become experimental. When people get hired to go to orientation, the welcome thing, that's a forgettable experience for many.

54:57
Absolutely, but what if we experimented and just said, hello, here's where you get paid, here's how you log on, here's your food. And in three weeks, come back and let's talk about the culture of our organization. In three weeks, you're going to have a totally better orientation than if you do it day one, where all they want to know is when do I get paid and how do I log on and who do I eat lunch with.

55:25
Right, I think we have to experiment and engage our youngest learners and our most senior employees in this process. So, I'm excited about learning. I'm so honoured to be part of this conversation with you and your colleagues and customers around the world.

55:43
So thank you very much and it has been my pleasure and actually really my privilege. I never thought that I will be speaking with you real time, ever. I always read the newsletter, and I always remember that I got our first customer from your newsletter. We owe that to you.

56:03
And I'm honoured.